A survey comparing attitudes toward nonhuman animals at mainline Protestant and evangelical churches in Durham, North Carolina. A policy proposal for habitat preservation in the Sanjiangyuan region of Tibet. Interviews of Mongolian monks about their person concepts of the Buddhist concept of emptiness. A comparison of visitor reactions to a classical Chinese Buddhist garden and a Japanese-style Buddhist garden in Suzhou China. Analysis of environmental attitudes in the Qur’an and the Hadith paired with ethnography of sustainability practices of middle- and lower-income households in Lahore, Pakistan. A proposal for a Women’s and Gender Center at Duke Kunshan University. Designing a class activity using photography as a contemplative practice. These are just a few of the projects that my students proposed and completed in my classes. My objective in teaching is to provide students tools to employ in their own inquiry and to offer them practice employing them in their own lives. When I succeed, the students teach me about how they integrate different perspectives in their own lives.

 

Project-Based Learning

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In my syllabi, I include a semester-long project that allows students to tailor the course to their interests. The project asks students to conduct research through involvement in their community using participant-observation, interviews, or other active research methods. In my “Religion and Science” course, a seminar of eleven students at Duke University, students chose a topic that involved original research by the third week. Then, every three weeks, the students successively submitted each of the four sections of a term paper: (1) background research, (2) methods, (3) results, and (4) analysis/conclusions. When each new section was submitted, we dedicated a class period (75 minutes) to discussing the current stage of their research projects, so students could learn from each other’s experiences and feedback. I graded and provided feedback for each section of the papers, so the students knew my expectations. At the end of the semester, the students revised or rewrote their papers as necessary with feedback from classmate peer-reviews.

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To demonstrate how to conduct original research, we started the course with a variety of activities, including such outings as a visit to the campus wellness center for mindfulness training, a visit to the Duke Cancer Center to meet a clinical chaplain, and a conversation with a Divinity School theologian. These activities stimulated ideas for the semester project. For example, we visited the Japanese tea house and gardens at Duke Gardens with a horticulturalist as our tour guide. Once back in class, we applied class materials on Japanese Buddhism and relationships with nature to analyze the field activity and how these ideas intersect with American horticulture in a campus garden. This in-class discussion and analysis modeled how students might analyze their own projects.

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Diversity

 

My approach involves teaching students to understand and compare different lived realities, making my courses open to students of different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and abilities. For example, in my “Religion and Leadership” course, I tailored the class of students who were all Muslim by collaborating with the Duke Islamic Studies Center and Duke Muslim Students Association to revise course content and offer several guest speakers in the course, earning a nomination for a teaching award. In “Buddhism and Sexuality,” we directly explored issues of various forms of sexuality and created a safe environment where students of various sexual orientations respectfully discussed various sexualities and ethical traditions.

 

Mentoring

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Just as in my classroom, I encourage active inquiry and student initiative in my mentoring. At Duke Kunshan University, I mentored three student assistants in multi-species ethnography as part of the Summer Research Scholars Program intended for students to develop original “signature work.” In Taiwan, I hired a geography master’s student from National Taiwan University as a research assistant. I train student assistants to do participant-observation, conduct interviews, and take field notes. Whether through one-on-one mentoring or student-led projects, my aim is for students to learn by doing, applying what they learn in books to their own lived reality.