Uncomfortable pedagogy: experiential learning as an anthropological encounter in the Asia-Pacific

ABSTRACT

This paper features a discussion of how educators can channel anthropological practices towards the enhancement of experiential learning (EL) teaching methods, particularly on the topic of religion across the Asia-Pacific. I argue that our capacity to achieve curricular objectives through EL calls for an attentiveness to the affinity between the empirical challenges confronted by ethnographers, who work to create rapport between researcher and subject, and classroom teachers who seek to cultivate a conducive learning environment beyond the classroom walls. I show the pedagogical implications of the ways anthropologists have operationalized their discipline’s “critical turn” by highlighting two experiential domains: (1) through activities of “uncomfortable” stereotype self-inventory and (2) through a dialogic pedagogy that pursues meaningful learning outcomes through the “struggle” to recognize inter-cultural and religious agency among students.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiential learning
• anthropology
• ethnography
• religious literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The South-East Asia in Context Summer Program was run at the National University of Singapore where I was a faculty member from 2005 to 2014. As program coordinator, I oversaw a cohort ranging from 20 to 50 students per year from partner universities in the USA, Australia, Europe, East Asia and South-East Asia.

2. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a vibrant discussion on what reflexivity is and how it should actually be practiced in the pursuit of ethnographic insight. On one end of the spectrum, reflexivity is understood as a critical awareness of the epistemological conditions under which the research was conducted, by whom, and what impact the author’s personal experience might have on the work that is produced. On the other end of the spectrum, reflexivity has been taken to imply a radically introspective approach to ethnographic data, one premised upon, and resulting in, a navel-gazing “auto-ethnography.” In this paper, I argue that pedagogical benefit can be derived by utilizing elements from both ideas of reflexivity.

3. Student journal reflection pieces were part of assessment requirements for the SEAiC program and were not solicited for the specific purpose of this article. The names of students have been either changed or omitted entirely. Parts of the data also appear in Bautista (2014).

4. Lassiter (2005) identifies a number of important anthropological works which were representative of an ethic of dialogism as part and parcel of the ethnographic process including: Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1998), Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (1989), Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980) and Briggs’s Never in Anger (1970).

5. The overall impact of these pedagogical strategies can be more fully evaluated by considering the corresponding responses of the Indonesian students in the pesantren. It is beyond the scope of this paper, however, to provide a full account of this since there was no opportunity to involve the pesantren students in both the pre-trip sessions and the post-trip de-briefing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julius Bautista

Julius Bautista is an associate professor at the Center for South-East Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He received his PhD in South-East Asian Studies (anthropology and cultural history focus) at the Australian National University and has subsequently published on religious practice in Asia, with a focus on Christian iconography, religious rituals and the relationship between religion and the state. He is author of Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu (Ateneo, 2010), editor of The Spirit of Things: Materiality and Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia (Cornell SEAP, 2012) and co-editor (with Francis Lim) of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (Routledge, 2009).