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Diversity on the doorstep
Field trips for Patty Shelly’s religion classes expand student horizons within an hour of campus
by Melanie Zuercher
Among the building blocks that make up Bethel’s General Education curriculum is a requirement in “cross-cultural learning” (CCL) which, according to the catalog, is “designed to prepare students for working and living in a diverse and global community by exposing them to a cross-cultural experience in a culture significantly different from their own.” Students can and do choose to meet the requirement by living in another culture, through a semester or a whole school year abroad, as well as by enrolling in an interterm travel course that might take them to London and Northern Ireland, Mexico, Israel/Palestine, Eastern Europe, Costa Rica or Germany.
But Bethel faculty have also worked hard to create and facilitate campus-based courses that meet the CCL requirements, both for practical reasons and because, as Professor of Bible and Religion Patty Shelly ‘76 indicates in the following interview, the south central Kansas community of which Bethel College is a part offers a surprisingly rich variety of cultural experiences. Every two years, Patty leads the off-campus Jerusalem Seminar but far more often, she teaches two on-campus courses – Judaism, Christianity and Islam and Eastern Religions – and incorporates into them a number of field trips.
Context: What motivated you to make direct cross-cultural experiences part of your courses?
PS: Because of the CCL requirement in the General Education curriculum, I began adapting courses to meet the requirement, knowing that would increase their appeal to students. But once I began organizing my courses this way, I realized I wouldn’t do it any other way, even if it wasn’t required.
In an ideal world, we would have every single student at Bethel study abroad for a semester, but the reality of finances or family or job responsibilities means this just is not possible for everyone. Sometimes even a three- or four-week interterm isn’t possible.
I have built 12-15 hours of immersion field trips into my courses. This doesn’t count travel time, nor does having speakers on campus meet the requirement. I want the students to be in the environment or the milieu – on the turf – of another culture or religion.
Interestingly enough, I often see students taking more than one course that meets a CCL requirement. For example, many of the students who have gone on the Jerusalem Seminar trip then take Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It would be very interesting to track how many students have taken more than one CCL course during their time at Bethel.
Context: What has surprised or pleased or encouraged you most in your experience of leading these trips?
PS: I try to arrange 12-15 contact hours of experience for each course, so I come up with 16-18 total hours and the students choose from that to accumulate the required number of points. The downside is this is very labor-intensive. Even though a student might be spending only 12 hours, plus travel time, I’m spending all 16 or 18 hours.
On the flip side, I’ve never been on a field trip where I said afterward, “That was a waste of time.” It is always rewarding for me personally and professionally to see the effect the experiences have on the students. They’re at very different places on how open or ready they are for this kind of contact, ranging from full embrace of the experience to a deer-in-the-headlights reaction.
I don’t always know what’s going to happen when we get there – some places I’ve never been to. For example, this past fall I taught Eastern Religions for the first time since I began teaching at Bethel in 1985. I had no courses on this in graduate school so it was something I was maybe the least prepared by my training to teach.
I had no idea before this of the extensive contacts that exist in Wichita. I’ve heard that for its size [population about 350,000], Wichita has the greatest religious diversity in the Midwest. Inter-Faith Ministries in Wichita lists eight different religious groups. There are two synagogues, three mosques, a Hindu temple, four Buddhist temples and a center for Native American spirituality plus the full range of Christian churches, including Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, all within less than an hour’s drive of campus. There is all this religious diversity on our doorstep if we have the eyes to see it.
Context: What are your goals for these experiences for students? How do you feel they’re met?
PS: One of my four goals is to connect classroom learning with experience. To go to the temple two or three times, to observe the ceremonies and to be able to ask questions helps students begin to understand how people can live with a worldview completely different from theirs.
Second, I want students to develop more comfort and ease with, and interest in, interacting with “the other.”
Third, I want to heighten students’ awareness of the religious diversity around them. I don’t do field trips in Basic Issues of Faith and Life, for a number of reasons, but I always ask what kind of cross-cultural exposure they’ve had. A lot of times it’s very little, but saying you lived in south central Kansas your whole life is no longer an excuse!
Fourth, encounters with other religions inevitably lead to reflection on one’s own personal religious background and experience, and I think this is important for the students.
Before I taught Eastern Religions, I had never been to a Buddhist or Hindu religious ceremony. I had been inside temples but had not attended worship events. Teaching the class expanded my own knowledge and experience base.
Context: What are some stories from the trips that stand out for you over the years?
PS: In January 2002, I taught an on-campus course in Islam instead of leading the Jerusalem Seminar, which was canceled because it came so soon after Sept. 11, 2001. The class made a special trip to Topeka to visit the Muslim community there, which includes a larger number of African Americans than in Wichita. The imam at the Topeka center, an African American, talked about hearing Malcolm X speak when he – the imam – was 18 and how that led to his conversion to Islam. I found that very moving, and the students learned that “Islam isn’t just about Arabs.”
In spring 2006, Kirsten Zerger ’73 and Sandy Nathan invited us to join their family Passover Seder meal and hosted the students in my class at Kauffman House, where KIPCOR has its offices. The students were so impressed by the beautifully set tables and the real china, and the hospitality that represented. They commented on how meaningful it was to take part in the ancient ritual and relate it to the present day.
I have been taking students to the Pascha [Easter] celebration at St. George’s Orthodox church in Wichita for 20 years – the first time was in 1987. The service starts around 11 p.m. and involves about two-and-a-half hours of standing, but I’ve been impressed by how many students have wanted to go again, or even three times.
Last fall, we had another very moving experience of hearing a Vietnamese woman tell us about her experiences with Buddhism and also talk about what it was like to flee Vietnam [in the early ’80s], floating in the Gulf of Thailand, being robbed twice by pirates. She finally immigrated to the United States and now teaches at Wichita State University.
I also frequently take students to the mosque in [east] Wichita for Friday prayers. We are always so warmly and hospitably received. The students never fail to comment on that. In 2002, when I was teaching the interterm course on Islam, I arranged for us to meet with a veiled Muslim woman. She wore a face veil and gloves – we could only see her eyes – but she agreed to meet with us and talk about her choices. She was studying anthropology at WSU at the time and she is married with two children, a dynamic and assertive woman. She told us about how her understanding of the teachings of Islam and modesty had caused her to wear the veil. Her husband told her it was up to her but also how honored he was to be married to a veiled woman. It was a very counterintuitive but powerful encounter for our group.
Context: What kinds of things have both you and the students learned?
PS: I have learned to be very direct when helping students prepare for the encounters. Once a student showed up to go to the Pascha service in jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt, which I said just wouldn’t do. She asked if she had time to change, so I allowed that. She thanked me several times during the evening, and I learned that I can’t assume too much when I’m taking students into a wholly new environment.
The students are unfailingly fascinated by the connections between what they read for class and experience. You can read about Muslims praying five times a day but it’s different when you are watching them stand and kneel. To be in the mosque hearing the call to prayer makes it so much richer. To sit in a Passover meal is so much different from reading about it in an introduction to Judaism.
Students are always fascinated to discover the religious diversity in south central Kansas. They are always touched and impressed by the hospitality and the generosity of the people in different religious communities, such as the Buddhist group that serves a meal to everyone after the service. They are always fascinated and somewhat discomforted by the newness of the experience. Even when they were uncomfortable, they usually say that they learned a lot, and that it was meaningful to learn.
It may seem an obvious truism that students learn more on field trips and encounters than they do through other teaching methods, but I’m reminded over and over how important it is. Every time I arrange field trips, it further solidifies my belief that I could not teach these courses without that component.
[Note: Bethel currently has 26 courses in the curriculum that meet the General Education Cross-Cultural Learning requirement. Some campus-based examples include Community Nursing for senior nursing majors; Social Cognition, a psychology course that includes intensive study of Hindu culture; Mennonite History when taken by non-Mennonite students; Communication and Culture; and Social Development and Social Justice.]