Some Thoughts on Experiential Learning

Hong Fa Temple (弘法寺) in Shenzhen

This summer, I have been teaching a World Religions course at CUHK-Shenzhen, and the culminating assignment has students go to religious sites and write a paper analyzing what they encountered at the site, drawing on theoretical approaches we have been using in the course. Mostly, this winds up being a critical mixture of Ninian Smart's dimensional analysis of worldviews, Bruce Lincoln's four domains approach to understanding religions, and Tomoko Masuzawa's historical-critical historiography of "world religions" discourse.

This assignment is the highlight of the course for me. While I provide students with a list of sites around Shenzhen, Guangdong, and Hong Kong, I allow students to choose their own sites if they’d like. So, through their eyes, I get to learn not just about the sites I have preselected for them but also about temples in Fujian and Sichuan provinces and mosques in Beijing and Jakarta. 

Prayer Hall of the Niu Jie Mosque (牛街清真寺) in Beijing

In addition to being my favorite assignment, it's a real highlight for students. As one student mentioned in an email: “It was fun to take what we learned in class and use it to understand real-world religion. It made everything we learned feel alive and relevant.” Another student wrote about visiting a Buddhist temple with her mother to offer thanks to the Buddha for the daughter's good gaokao (university entrance exam) score, something the mother had prayed for a year ago. Somehow, it seems fitting that a university assignment would send the student to that temple with her mother, now as a cultural informant. 

One thing students are frequently surprised by is the amount of religious hybridity one finds at temples identified as Buddhist or Daoist or otherwise related to what scholars call Chinese popular religion. (Previously, we had explored this inclusive local pluralism in class discussion.) When students discover elements in temples that otherwise defy their presuppositions about what religions are like, it is a real insight on the students' part. 

Wong Tai Sin Temple (黄大仙祠) in Hong Kong

A key reason why I think experiential learning is so valuable is because it interrupts the familiar track of education being about distributing and receiving facts. When there’s so much that’s new to students about religious or philosophical traditions, it’s all too easy (for students, and sometimes professors) to fall into and follow that track. What’s more difficult but much more valuable is learning how to learn for oneself. Of course, I don’t always succeed at inculcating this sensibility in my courses, but I think experiential learning assignments are just about the best way to provoke this sort of self-directed inquiry on the part of students. And this site analysis project appears to be particularly successful at that goal.

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion (edited by Robert Vinten) -- published today

Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion was published today. My chapter is "Wittgenstein, Naturalism and Interpreting Religious Phenomena." In it, I explore in what senses Wittgenstein might be taken to support as well as to oppose naturalist approaches to interpreting religious phenomena. First, I provide a short overview of some passages from Wittgenstein’s writings—especially the “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”—relevant to the issue of the naturalness of religious phenomena. Second, I venture some possibilities regarding what naturalism might mean in connection with Wittgenstein. Lastly, I explore the bearing of Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion for the interpretation of religious phenomena. Ultimately, I argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion depict a way of thinking about the naturalness of religious phenomena, and that naturalistic depiction is part of the clarificatory work of philosophy. Wittgenstein reminds himself and his readers that religiosity is not something mysterious, per se; it is a core possibility within human life, one which can anchor meaningful living.

My work on this chapter drew significantly from insights I gained while studying the "Remarks on Frazer" at the same time I was teaching Philosophy of Religion at CUHK-Shenzhen. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on one way in which I found Wittgenstein's insights to be helpful for thinking about the "radical differences" (to borrow an expression from Mikel Burley) that may appear when it comes to religiosities across cultures.

A reductive naturalist approach to studying religion may encourage conceptions of religiosity that distort the phenomena supposedly being investigated. Some relevant examples that challenge the interpretive adequacy of reductive naturalism emerge from a project I assign to students in my Philosophy of Religion course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; in this assignment, students are tasked with interviewing some of their classmates about matters relating to beliefs and practices that are associated with religions. One characteristic example is as follows: just before taking the university entrance exam (the gaokao), a high school student in China visits a local Buddhist temple, lights incense and bows marking the four directions, and then kneels before an image of the Buddha in prayer. The student performs these actions not necessarily because she believes certain truth claims about the Buddha’s powerful abilities and will to act in the world to benefit those who show devotion with a good exam score, but a significant number of students may perform these or similar acts anyway. As one interviewee put it: ‘it can’t hurt’. In fact, those same students do believe that years of very hard work studying for the university entrance exam will ensure the best possible score; and that is surely why so many students work countless hours preparing for the exam. If asked, the students who visit the local temple would likely claim not to be Buddhists and perhaps would identify as atheists. Even so, a significant minority of university students who disavow belief in supernatural beings might still believe in karma or that biological death is not the end of personal identity or that ancestors still exist in some sense beyond their deaths. 
What this suggests to me is that the spiritual or religious imagination of university students in China – amongst other places – is far more vibrant and diverse than labels such as ‘Marxist atheist’ would seem to suggest.  (119f)

I'm grateful for conversations with Rob Vinten and Guy Axtell regarding earlier drafts of the chapter and for questions and comments on the original conference paper. Now that the book is published, I can read the other chapters, many of which I also first heard at the conference. 

Reference:

Carroll, Thomas D. 2023. “Wittgenstein, Naturalism, and Interpreting Religious Phenomena,” in Robert Vinten (ed.) Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion, Bloomsbury Publishers.