by Aixin Aydin
The undergraduate course History of Religion in the US attracts students from across the university, spanning departments and specializations. During the summer, the course is taught online asynchronously, a marked difference between semester-length offerings that allow time for cultural engagement with course content by visiting museums or events on campus. Rather than attempting to bring the students to the museum, the Shared Museum assignment engages learners in creating and curating the museum itself.
The Shared Museum is hosted on a shared file. Students upload a photo of their exhibit and paste a short essay describing the exhibit and connecting it to course lectures and texts. Students are encouraged to put their exhibit thematically within the museum. Several different assignments lead to posting the final work within the Shared Museum, like one assignment focusing on reinforcing themes of material religion. Students must find an object in their life, take a picture of said object, and write a short description and interpretation of the way it fits into US religious history. What makes the object religious or sacred? How did it arrive to the US? What does this object teach us about religion and/or US history and/or cultural diversity? Another assignment that leads to the Shared Museum asks students to develop a creative project, and then analyze what they have themselves created. This assignment helps students connect the course themes to their own lives, think critically about their own work, and engage in creativity as they design their project.
The Shared Museum assignment meets several pedagogical goals for an online course:
- The assignment encourages students to collaborate and interact with the experiences of others, breaking down some of the isolation of online and asynchronous learning. Further, such collaboration respects students’ work and extracurricular commitments during the summer, when many need to earn money to support themselves or develop their career goals.
- The assignment has students develop a project along class themes and then make connections between those themes. By deciding how exhibits should be grouped, students learn about and practice methods of organizing religious history. This also exposes students to content that is not covered in the class otherwise.
- No matter their degree or next steps into the world, students learn to recognize the influence of religious symbols and objects as found in their own lives. Building skills that help students notice different ways in which religion influences the world they inhabit helps them understand (and potentially change!) their community–whether that’s their neighborhood block, their workplace, their own kinship network, or systems of power.
Last year, my students looked at objects such as a family rosary, a Voodoo altar, a traditional tea set, and a folk art angel. Students exhibited a choreographed dance, pottery, music, poetry, a comic, and a bread relating to a familial religious tradition.
Beyond overcoming logistical constraints, a Shared Museum gives students the tools to demonstrate expertise in their own lives. Museums can cause alienation, as viewers must interact with objects that represent narratives that do not relate to themselves (or perhaps even more alienating, when artifacts relating to their cultures and experiences are stolen or treated irreverently in museum spaces). Creating a Shared Museum allows students to produce meaning and belonging. What students create – the objects that populate their world – have merit and deserve observation, care, and analysis.
Aixin Aydin is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas. She studies immigration, sexual violence, and religion. Her dissertation looks at spaces of immigration detention within the US, from ships containing immigrant bodies to Angel Island to private prison complexes. Her academic work and advocacy focuses on finding creative strategies for ending gender-based violence.
