Using the Mississippi River Watershed Module in Religion, Nature, & the Environment

Travis Proctor, Wittenberg University

Course Description

This course provides an in-depth exploration of the complex interactions between religion and "nature," including nature-based religions and spirituality, religious understanding of nature, the role of nature in religious practice, and the impact of religious traditions on the treatment of the environment. The course considers these issues alongside many topics of contemporary import, including global warming, conservation, indigenous rights, human-animal relations, and environmental justice.

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Relationship of the Mississippi River Watershed Module to Your Course

My course is 14 weeks long. The module was implemented in Week 10, and finished in Week 14. Prior to the module, I introduced students to the various ways that religion has been intertwined with natural environments - e.g., the effect of religious ideas on worldviews surrounding animals and the natural environment, or historical environmental crises and their impacts on religious belief and practice. The module material was the focus of the final unit of the course, where we used religion as a way to analyze the role of stakeholders in "wicked" environmental problems. I had students complete the common activities (creating a stakeholder map, conducting a townhall meeting based on roles) and assigned complementary readings before and after those activities designed to help them think about how religion might play a role in informing those various roles and stakeholders that they were performing or analyzing. At the end of the class, I asked them to reevaluate their stakeholder map and/or the townhall roles, proposing ways that they might integrate religion into either of those activities so that participants could better understand how religion might inform various stakeholders in the situation.

Integrating the Module into Your Course

I integrated it as a final four-week unit in what's a 14-week class. So, the class in general looks at how religions and history shaped how people felt or thought about or practiced with regard to either nature of the environment and animals, but also how the natural world and the environment or animals have shaped religious thought and practice.

So I implemented the unit as a way to think about in a really practical way how those things take shape today, how does religion shape how people say might be stakeholders or how does it shape how people are thinking about their local environments and maybe the challenges they're facing.

So I had them do the common exercise of the stakeholder mapping as well as the town hall exercise, and then supplemented that with readings relating the natural world or animals to religion, as well as other issues like social justice, race or ethnicity, gender. So, to get them thinking about how religion plays a role and how religion affects the various other things that might be playing a role in environmental challenges and views of nature and practices surrounding nature.

Then the final thing I asked them to do that would be specific to my class is then at the end reflect on that common exercise, either the town hall meeting or the stakeholder mapping and reflect on how might they change what they did or how they designed either the stakeholder map or their role in the town hall meeting, taking into account what we've learned about religion. So, would they create new stakeholders perhaps that had a very religious perspective?

So we talked quite a bit in class, for example, about Native American communities in America and their struggles to secure access to sacred land, especially those that are off Native American reservations. So, would that perhaps be a stakeholder we might want to think about, our native communities and their rights and their challenges that they faced, especially when regards to sacred land? Or might it be we think about say local citizens who have thoughts about local landscapes, might there be religious views that are influencing them? Maybe certain kinds of Christianity or other religious views that shape how they feel about nature. So, I wanted to get them thinking about how religion played a role in that type of stakeholding.

What Worked Well

There are a lot of things that worked well. I think it provided a really concrete touchstone to the class. Something that, especially as we got to the end, I wanted to have students return to and think about what are the practical consequences of this? So, a lot of our readings are looking at either the history or what might seem to be very abstract ideas, like how have Christian traditions thought about the natural world? Well, that could be really abstract, and even if you give them the history or the text that might be important for that, it might be hard to connect that to why does this really matter for today.

So for me, especially once we introduced the module and once they had had some time to do stakeholder mapping or the town hall meeting, then when we returned to thinking about religious dynamics, it gave them something kind of concrete to think about. So okay, we just did this reading about say Christianity and its views on environmental ethics, can you see how that might play out in a stakeholder meeting let's say, if somebody say has this perspective informed by Christianity, for example?

So it gave something kind of concrete to think about when we thought about those more abstract things, but then also, again, gave them something to return to that was related to them. So especially once they had that stakeholder map, it's kind of like they had produced something related to the class, and it gave them a kind of personal I want to say outlet or hook maybe to get into the class and think about how they might revise that or rethink that based on what they've produced already.

So, I think that worked really well. I think it's something that ... that class has always been maybe a challenge to get students to think about the practical consequences of it, 'cause it can be very abstract, and so this gave me a chance to really make it more practical and more concrete.

Challenges and How They Were Addressed

The challenges is maybe just fitting everything in, I think, this being the first time I taught with it. For example, I figured out that students really liked the town hall meeting and they wanted to do that more, and maybe felt like we didn't have enough time for it. So, just finding that balance between how do we spend enough time on the common exercises to make sure they get that, but also have enough time for doing the readings and other things that we used to connect it to religion.

So, I think that was one of the major things that was a challenge there at the end is just making sure we had enough time for everything. But overall, I thought otherwise I think it was adaptable enough that I was able to fit it into things I've already done as well as new things that I introduced to the class, so I thought it worked pretty well overall.

Student Response to the Module and Activities

I thought they responded really well. I thought they really tackled the challenge of the stakeholder mapping and really put a lot of effort into that, but also the town hall meeting, I thought they did a really good job with the town hall meeting. It was a good chance for me to step back and let them do the work for a little bit for the town hall meeting especially, and I thought they really responded well. Again, I think it really helped them understand some of the consequences or implications of what we'd been covering, and so I think for them, it really gave them something concrete to really hang on to.

I think one challenge with that class, especially if students haven't done a lot of religious studies work before that, and I usually have a lot of students that are coming say from the environmental sciences, and so doing religious history, and again, this more abstract kind of historical thinking can be really challenging. So, I thought I saw the light bulb turn on for a lot of students whenever they were able to apply this to something that seemed a little bit more familiar, talking about nutrient pollution in the watershed, for example, gave them something familiar to think with, but then helped them then integrate what we've been doing in class.