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.
