After completing three degrees in religious studies (BA, MTS, PHD), this year I find myself teaching in a philosophy department. In the particular case of UC Colorado Springs (UCCS), there is no formal religious studies program on campus, and the philosophy department is the place where the study of religion has found a proverbial home. After visiting campus for the first time a few weeks ago (see my earlier blog post) and meeting some of the philosophy faculty, I have to say I didn’t feel out of place at all. After all, the dividing line between these two disciplines is largely arbitrary, and can be traced to particular social and cultural histories in European and North American academies. Especially after attending Harvard Divinity School, which some forget is technically a seminary, I came to appreciate how many subjects philosophers and theologians have in common, and how religious studies as an academic discipline overlaps with both while also retaining some space of its own. At dinner with my colleagues, I was amazed at how many people told me about their love for teaching al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (the name I prefer to the Latin transliteration, Avicenna, but that’s a different blog post).

I developed a course called Islamic Philosophy for UCCS this semester, and will be teaching another course called Modern Islamic Philosophy in the fall. So far, the syllabus each course (one in progress and one under development) is not that different from a course I took at Harvard called…wait for it…”Islamic Philosophy and Theology.” Reading al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Mulla Sadra, Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Muhammad `Abdu, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Said Qutb, and so forth in one department vs. another is not that different, especially at the undergraduate level. True, most of my students at UCCS have taken philosophy courses before, and have more familiarity with Aristotle than you would expect from the typical 21 year old in the United States, but almost none of them have read anything from Islamic intellectual history before, so that previous knowledge only serves them when the authors we cover in class address the Greek “classical” writers. The rest of the time, I have to explain everything else the same way I would when teaching this material in a religious studies department.

In terms of scholarship, my training and specialization is in studying texts, analyzing them in order to produce new insights — either because no one else has looked at the texts in question for a very long time, or because I seek to make an intervention in the current scholarly discourse surrounding the subjects that these texts address. So, studying Indian divination techniques known as “the science of the breath” (Persian: `ilm-i dam), brings up these challenging questions - how do we draw the boundaries between science, religion, and magic? How do those boundaries shift from one historical or cultural context to another? What happens when we take boundaries generated in a particular context and apply them to another without adjusting for different political and religious sensibilities? What role does colonization and Orientalism play in the way that knowledge from non-European cultures has been received, interpreted, and marginalized - especially over the past 300 years? These are all questions that I know I can pursue in cooperation with this band of philosophers with whom I now find myself joined.

In truth, after spending five years immersed in a religious studies program, it has been a breath (ha!) of fresh air to change gears. I’m reminded of my undergraduate institution, Macalester College (Go Scots!), where the Departments of Religious Studies and Philosophy shared the same floor in Old Main, and I was known to bother professors from either department if they left the door open…inviting me to stop by and ask questions. In addition to religious studies, I also majored in classics, and read some of these ancient philosophers in the original Greek.

This is all to say that in my experience, a scholar of religion teaching in a philosophy department is no “stranger in a strange land” situation. Instead, I think it is a real opportunity for growth. I get to talk to people who have spent a lot of time analyzing texts, but also considering other approaches to knowledge (embodiment and visual/material culture especially). We sit, we think, we ask questions. We want to know more, understand more, question more. Sounds like “love of wisdom” (philo-sophia) to me.

This past fall I started a new part-time teaching gig, teaching world religions and Islamic philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado - Colorado Springs. The trick was that the semester started in August, while I was not going to move back to Colorado until October…sooooo, I started teaching online. I have taught online before, but that was in 2009, and I was curious to see different the experience would be.

Currently on my third online course at UCCS, I can say definitively that I am enjoying the experience, in large part because the students are very engaged. Just like traditional “brick and mortar” classes, there is always the possibility of a few students who are not very active in class and do not prepare. But the vast majority are clearly doing the work, and even going beyond the participation expectations that I have set for the course. As someone who continues to work at establishing a daily writing practice, sometimes I am amazed at how many words per day I produce through participating on discussion threads and correspondence with my students. Beyond typing constantly, I am also learning to take advantage of all of the wonderful audio/video features so that students hear my voice, see my face, and generally appreciate that they are working with a real life person on the other end of the screen. And still…it is just so different from standing in front of a lecture hall or sitting at a table in a seminar. Being in person, I pay attention to students’ body language, facial expressions, as well their questions and comments. Teaching online, there is a serious disembodiment factor that I think still merits quite a bit of attention.

I recently had the opportunity to visit UCCS for the first time to participate in the department’s external review process (see awesome mountain lion statue below!), and I was struck by how excited I was to tell my students that they could meet me in person. A colleague in the department lent me his office, so instead of meeting students over Skype or talking over the phone, I got to be present with them IRL, as the kids say. In these conversations, it struck me how much laughter there was in the room - using humor judiciously is a major part of my teaching style, and it is one of the things that I miss the most about being in a physical classroom. But perhaps there are other ways to approach this issue.

The first would be stop trying to make online teaching somehow equivalent to traditional teaching. So much of the technological innovations around audio and video are designed to make it easier to connect teachers and students in a way that mimics being together in person. These are wonderful adaptations, and I will continue to learn how to use them more effectively, but I also think that it is important to acknowledge that online education is a different realm. Especially for courses that are asynchronous, meaning that there is not a “live” connection where I am sitting at my computer at the same time as my students, there are incredible benefits in terms of flexible scheduling and increased access. When my schedule is disrupted by things like a child home sick from school, or an interminable trip to the DMV, I’m not that stressed because I know that I can log on and respond to my students at any time of day or night, and they can too.

I put in the effort to provide extensive feedback on assignments so that students know that I take their work seriously. I would do this in a traditional course, but with teaching online, this feedback is even more important because there are no other ways for me to connect with my students. There is no equivalent to a friendly wave when our paths cross on campus. There is no opportunity for chitchat about last night’s basketball game. Instead, I find that all of my interaction is very business oriented, dealing with course content, fielding questions about assignments, and doing all. that. grading.

Something I would like to learn more about is how this all feels from the student side. Given how busy undergraduates are, juggling school, multiple jobs, family commitments, and life’s daily grind - what do they think about online vs. traditional courses? Especially at schools where there is a mixture of the two, and there are often students taking both types of courses simultaneously. This is a question I’m going to pursue with my students this semester, and hopefully have some type of meaningful data to write about in May when the semester is over.

Perhaps the longer I teach exclusively online, the more normalized this will all become. I do have to admit, I don’t miss struggling to get ready for work, worrying if I have my power point saved to the right USB drive, finding parking in the morning, and finishing teaching only to remember that I didn’t have time to eat breakfast, and now I have to splurge at the campus food court to buy lunch when I’m trying to stick to a tight budget (grad student habits never die). Maybe I will start holding occasional class sessions on Second Life, so I can really see my students (albeit in the form of their digital avatars), or I will double-down on platforms like Web-Ex to do more live video conferencing. But maybe I will just accept that this is a different kettle of fish, and find a different way to tell all of the jokes I have built up over the years.