For the past few years, most of my teaching has consisted of survey courses, specifically World Religions and World Mythology. I enjoy these courses. I enjoy working with students on what is usually the first time they are studying these subjects in an academic setting, and I get to walk with them as they begin to critically analyze religious traditions and other myth-making elements. That said, it is also very fulfilling when I have the opportunity to teach more specialized courses. For example, last year I taught an Islamic Philosophy course, which gave me the chance to teach thinkers like al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Suhrawardi. I also had the chance to work with students on more in-depth research papers, which I think is one of the most fulfilling aspects of teaching at the undergraduate level.
So far in 2021, it looks like I will get to teach Sufism, Qur’an, as well as a course on Yoga -- or is it yoga? This is one of many questions we will discuss during the course! I have taught units on each of these subjects at different times in the past few years, but this will be the first time teaching entire semester-length courses. So…lots to prep! But also, lots of excitement. When I’m teaching survey courses, I often feel that I’m just scratching the surface. In my World Religions course we have a unit on Islam, and our textbook mentions Sufism, but that’s nowhere near the amount of detail that I can go into without referring to notes. My dissertation involved a careful examination of Sufism as a discrete category and field of academic study, but how often to I get to flex those proverbial muscles?
This is actually the case for most of us teaching at the college level. We cover GenEd courses, which are necessarily at the introductory level. There is very little overlap with our dissertations, or with the research we develop upon completing graduate school. However, teaching survey courses is important work for many reasons.
First, more students will take an intro course than an advanced seminar. This means that the intro course is actually where we get to make the most significant interventions. If I teach one hundred students about the history of religion as a category (that is flows out of the European enlightenment, that is has a strong bias towards Protestantism, Euro-centrism, etc.), this actually does more in terms of promoting critical thinking on a societal level than my sitting down with ten students and doing a close reading of Rumi’s classic piece of Persian mystical poetry, the Masnavi. I have to be satisfied with spending part of one day in class (just part of one day, not even a whole day!) on a subject I could talk about for a whole year.
Second, in terms of how departments “earn” their funding: the more students you teach, the more the deans and other administrative folks approve of what you are doing. This is known as “credit hour production” (if you do a search for this term online, you will come up with lots of links to the institutional research offices at various campuses). This is because when you teach a large course, you “produce” more credit hours of instruction than when you teach a smaller course. That some students might sleep through lectures – and that this is quite difficult to do in a small seminar – is glossed over. On paper, the more students sign up for a course, the more education we are performing/producing. We can decry the rise of neoliberalism in higher education, but this is a nuts-and-bolts reality that governs how administrations hand out limited pieces of the financial pie at each institution. This is especially the case now as colleges and universities around the country look at pandemic-related drops in enrollment.
Thirdly, your students can point you in new directions! In a survey course, you are often the first person to introduce a particular concept or piece of content to students. You never know what that will spark. Someone might decide to travel to a place you mention in class, they might change their major, or they might make other life choices…all on the basis of what you assign in class, how you design (and execute!) your lectures, and much you do to excite them about the subject matter. Your intro students are learning this material for the first time, and that fresh perspective can yield amazingly innovative questions (and if new questions don’t excite you, then I’m not sure that academia is going to be your desired flavor of chai). Once during my grad school days, I was TA’ing our department’s survey course on Islam. We were discussing Qur’anic recitation, and a student asked me if there were theological connotations to the type of recitation style that a person performed, or even preferred. I was stumped. This is a field within Qur’anic Studies that I read about quite a bit, but I had never come across anything that fit with the student’s question. I forwarded the question to a listserve with at least 700 Islamic Studies scholars. My question turned into a thread with almost twenty posts and gave me ideas about a possible research project. All from teaching an intro course!
For all of these reasons, survey courses are critical, and I will always teach them. And when the opportunity presents itself to do something more focused, I will teach that as well. Doing both makes for a more fulfilling overall teaching experience and greatly informs my scholarship.