Last-minute preparations, as usual

As crazy as it sounds, I basically started prepping this course yesterday. Monday, the day after tomorrow, it will meet for the first time. I suck. Not only have I not ordered the books, I still haven't even made a final decision as to what books to order. I am putting together the syllabus, but I'm only on week three. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the putative ADD that's kept me from focusing effectively over the winter break. More likely, it's fear of failure. Or most likely, it's probably a combination of concentration issues and nervousness about making a mess of things that's led me to procrastinate so much.

Whatever. The point of this diary isn't to vent about stress and frustration, though that can be a valuable process. Rather, I want to use it to observe and document the process of designing and teaching a new course on a very new kind of subject material. In fact, I hope to be able to publish something about teaching in the not-too-distant future, so I plan (though, I have to admit, with a certain amount of resigned, pessimistic skepticism on my part) to maintain this diary with great conscientiousness so as to be able to mine it as a source for writing about the experience.

The key question right now, of course, is what I should have my students read. The major component of the course -- as a Pericles platform -- is service learning, something I'm quite new to. So that's going to take a lot of logistical work and arranging, a lot of decisions about how much time the students ought to put in and what the nature of their work ought to be, and (what I probably am most reluctant to do) a lot of awkward phone calls to non-English-speaking monks and so forth who probably won't understand what I'm asking them for, but the basic idea is pretty clear in my mind.

But, about the reading choices: the reason why this is always an interesting point in course design, though, one where it's worthwhile to stop and reflect on the underlying purposes of what I'm doing, is because we tend never to want to think about the question of why we have students read anything at all, especially in a field where we are typically so dead-set against old-fashioned "knowledge-transfer" models of pedagogy. We're not asking them to read because they should be memorizing what they read. More likely, we want them to read because reading can be an active, learning-filled process that provokes thought and sparks questioning. I fear, however, that many of my colleagues want students to read because they know they are supposed to make students work hard, so they pile on the homework -- and then, to enforce those requirements, they develop quizzes and assignments to make sure students are actually doing all that work. This is a model that I badly want to avoid, but what am I actually putting in its place?

I think part of what's valuable about reading in a classroom setting is that it has a strong inherent potential for reflectivity. So, having people read about a particular theme, even if they are not supposed to be, say, carefully remembering the details, or even writing about the exact text they've been engaging with, can be useful if you want to get people started thinking about that theme. Sounds like an obvious point, but I think that pedagogically, it brings up a number of complex issues. For example: I want to have my students read a short story from Jhumpa Lahiri's unbelievable collection, Interpreter of Maladies, the one called "This Blessed House." It's a story about two Indian newlyweds living in (I think) Connecticutt in a recently-purchased house. The wife begins discovering various pieces of odd Christian kitsch hidden away on the property, and finds them charming, while the husband finds them ugly. He reacts with irritation and uncomprehension to his new wife's infatuation with these objects. I think this is a great way to begin the course because it switches up the usual subject-object relation that people reflexively tend to assume -- i.e., when we think about religious diversity in the U.S., we tend, automatically, to think about it as members of a majority who are considering the significance of the influx of supposedly alien and exotic forms of religious life. This story reflects on the perspective of modern-day, middle-class, secular-minded, more or less conventional American Hindus who discover Christian artifacts and react to them as exotica.

But simply pushing toward reflection is not enough. You have to know what to do with that reflective state. In the case of the Lahiri story, "This Blessed House" is not really about religion -- it's about marriage, as I think about half of Lahiri's stories really are -- and I wonder what to do with that when I have students read it. It's not sufficient just to say, wow, put that in your pipe and smoke it. It's interesting, but interesting is never enough. (That ought to be a motto for me -- "interesting is not enough" -- except that mottoes ought to be positive, not negative, and I still haven't figured out what really is enough.) I think the relevant questions in "Blessed House" might be:

• What might the author's own attitude towards the Christian artifacts be? What role do they play in the story?
  
• Explain the reactions that the two main characters, Twinkle and Sanjeev, have towards the Christian artifacts.
• What actually happens, emotionally, at the end of the story?
  

I want to use, for similar reasons, some of Li-Young Lee's poems at the beginning of the semester as well. I had been hoping to find a good Muslim source that would do similar things, but so far I haven't succeeded (I thought Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage would do it, but her way of talking about religion seems so superficial and so saturated with anti-imperial grievances that it just didn't seem appropriate -- too alienating for first-time readers). There are two possible other texts that I haven't been able to get hold of yet:

• Saleemah Abdul-Ghafar, ed., Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (link)
• Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise (though I don't think this one is really about the immigrant experience) (link)

Okay. Moving on -- here's a fairly comprehensive list of texts that I'm planning to use as part of an extensive course reader (as much as possible online).


Things I'm planning on using, but am not yet sure when or how:
Christian and Denton, Soul Searching
Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth
Eck, A New Religious America
Olson (ed.), Theory and Method in the Study of Religion (no luck here, at least not yet)
McCutcheon (ed.), The Insider/Outsider Problem
Paden, Religious Worlds (Kessler has an excerpt; see below)
Haddad (ed.), The Muslims of America (esp. Voll article, "Islamic Issues for Muslims in the United States")
Haddad, Islamic Values in the United States

First week:
Lahiri, "This Blessed House"
Lee, selections (poetry)
Eck, "Neighboring Faiths"
Theory:
Yearley, "New Religious Virtues"
Paden, "Comparative Perspectives"
Proudfoot, "Explanation"
Boyer, "Why Is Religion Natural?" (http://snurl.com/boyer_article)
Autobiography:
Lame Deer
Sel. from Living Islam Out Loud, t.b.d.
Various sels. from Insider-Outsider Problem ("Body Ritual among the Nacirema", similar?), t.b.d.
Wallendorf and Arnould, "Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day"
A sense of place:
Ketchell, "These Hills Will Give You Great Treasure"
An article from Gods of the City, t.b.d.
American religiousness:
Bellah, "Civil Religion in America"
Gleason, "The Melting Pot"
Getting into the field:
Levy and Hollan, "Person-Centered Interviewing"