The World History Center is pleased to announce it has received funding from the Provost's Year of Discourse and Dialogue to create an educational video about “Pedagogy in an Age of Religious Nationalism: Confronting Intergenerational Collective Memory of Violence and Displacement.” The video will feature six Pitt scholars from multiple disciplines, who will share their experiences moderating difficult dialogues and cultivating useful discourse amongst students with differing viewpoints. This video builds on a roundtable event of the same title that the World History Center and the Global Studies Center hosted in January of 2024. The video will be produced by the University Center for Teaching and Learning and will be made available publicly in late May, 2024. Write to whc@pitt.edu if you could like to be notified when the video is published!
During the past century, the world has experienced nearly incessant violence and persecution in which religion is a significant factor. Tens of millions of people have been forced to migrate because they are minority populations of states that define belonging by ancestry and faith. Today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar are living in Bangladeshi refugee camps. The partitions of Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, and Protestant and Catholic Ireland still reverberate through collective memory and geopolitics.
Students may arrive in classrooms with these events seared into their personal and collective memories. Intergenerational trauma and rage may make it challenging for them to question what they have learned about injury and responsibility. They may be asked to engage in discourse with classmates and teachers whom they identify with the preparators of unspeakable acts. These things necessitate instructors to have the skills to moderate this discourse and help students have compassion, listen to understand, understand their own biases, and seek a common good. This project offers an opportunity for scholars whose teaching touches on these often-anguishing histories to share strategies for fostering generative and constructive classroom experiences. The video's purpose is not only to acknowledge various discourses about religious nationalism in history, but also to help instructors successfully moderate these discussions in their own classrooms.
The video will align with the priorities of the Year of Discourse and Dialogue by fostering understanding, practice, and demonstration of discourse and dialogue. The video will teach educators how to engage students in productive conversation around exceptionally charged topics related to religious nationalism. To foster discourse and dialogue about sensitive issues that may arise in a classroom, instructors must be skilled in moderating conversation and in modeling and supporting students to exhibit compassion, to listen for the purpose of understanding others with diverse perspectives, to reflect upon their own biases, and to seek a common good.