Anyone whose teaching and research interests include adolescence and emerging adulthood might encounter undergraduates bringing their questions about life into their courses. Many emerging adults are asking: “What does it mean to be me?” “What does it mean to be me within the place I came from?” “How do I make sense of myself right here, right now?” “What should I do next?” These questions of theirs lead the way.
Emerging adults want to know how the world works, especially how it works for them. By the time they step into my 300-level Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (PRS) course each spring, they have formed working theories of how these concepts show up in everyday life. Our class tackles the incredibly nuanced ways that religion and spirituality manifest, for better or for worse, within human development and communities.
We begin by exploring the origins of the psychology of religion and spirituality (PRS), as well as the theories and the different methodologies that can be used to study religion and spirituality. As we move on through each section of the course, many of my students notice that they’ve been left out, that the people and communities they care about remain absent. Much of PRS has prioritized WEIRD populations (Demmrich, 2024; Newsom, 2021). As an instructor, I sound like a broken record: “We just don’t have as much information when it comes to folks in the global majority.” Or another version: “We just don’t have as much information when it comes to faith communities outside of Abrahamic religions.” Students nod. To equip students to form connections between existing literature and understudied groups, I supplement our readings as much as I can with videos and guest speakers, and all the data that I can glean from the lovely folks at the Pew Research Center. I want to scaffold their ability to extrapolate what we do know to imagine how those concepts might remain the same or shift within different populations, in different places. With this goal in mind, students complete a research review project.
This assignment introduces students to the wild, wonderful world of peer review. (Fear not – my students are not reviewing your manuscript under review – they critique already published articles.) After topic selection, students track down two research articles. Here, the extant gaps in the literature become even more prominent. Each semester, at least one student selects a topic for which they cannot find any literature. They’ve looked everywhere. They’ve met with the librarian. After class or during office hours, we brainstorm alternatives, using what literature does exist to get as close as possible to their interests.
As their projects commence, more questions arise. Why does the childhood religious and spiritual development literature seem to emphasize cognitive development with religiously and culturally homogeneous samples? Why don’t studies account for within-group theological differences? Some observe that this deep dive indirectly shifts their perspective on what it means to be (or not to be) religious and/or spiritual. They acquire more language to articulate well-researched and deeply studied conclusions. At the end, students present synthesized findings, recommend scholarly next steps, and discuss plans for incorporating the information they learned into their own lives and career paths.
If you teach a course that centers on any aspect of the human experience, please consider these questions:
1) Which populations are most prominently featured within the topics, anecdotes, and examples within the readings, resources, and media?
2) How will you equip students to discuss and consider the experiences and narratives of understudied groups?
3) If assigned readings include primary literature, are you integrating the highly cited articles with work by lesser-known scholars, particularly those who are early career or underrepresented in your field?
4) What real-world problems can be confronted and resolved by harnessing the research and skills that your class covers? What actionable strategies can students use today?
Whether you are teaching a course that focuses on a specific dimension of the human experience (like Religion and Spirituality) or one that offers a broad survey of human development (Child Development), I encourage you to create opportunities where students are invited to consider similar questions. The questions we encourage our students to ask may amplify the questions that they arrive in our classes already asking. There will always be topics that we are hesitant, for whatever reason, to navigate – in and out of class. However, I believe those topics offer our students the chance, in real time, to develop the scientific thinking, perspective taking, and socio-educational competence necessary to confidently dig deep, even in momentary discomfort.
References cited:
Demmrich, S. (2024). Studying religiosity beyond (Western) christianity: an empirical-psychological perspective and its implications. Journal of Empirical Theology, 38(1), 54-73.
Newson, M. (2021). Go wild, not weird. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 6(1-2).
