Week 1: Workshop Reflection

 I ran my first workshop on Tuesday, 5/17. It was an extension from my World Religions honors project on religion and gender that I adapted to a worldbuilding context. One of the main topics that I explored for my honors project was how religions change over time, so I figured it would be interesting to apply this to a fictional religion. 

For my workshop, I gave a presentation about two of the main topics I had researched for my project, which were gender in Judaism and the conflict over gender identity between the native people of Indonesia and the Islamic government there. Since both of these examples demonstrate how religion grapples with modern concepts, I then asked the students how religion had changed in their lives. Although the discussion was initially very limited, Zach suggested that I have the students talk to each other and then share out, which was more more effective, and a good lesson I learned on teaching.

The previous day, Rennie had the students create their own religions by thinking of the core concepts and a creation myth, both of which explore what the religion was initially like. I decided that I wanted my end goal for this workshop to be the students thinking about how their own fictional religions would change over time, so I had the students take time to write a small paragraph on how some aspect of their religion adapted to a changing culture. While they were doing this, I walked around and talked to each of them about what they were doing and made suggestions.

What I learned overall from this workshop is that presentations can be helpful, but it is much more engaging to teach students through discussion rather than lecture. The students seemed much more interested when I had them talk to each other and had a lot of great ideas to share out, so I took that experience into consideration for all the future things I led during the intensive.

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