How Do we Keep it Real? Authentic Assessment and Religious Studies

“Authentic” religious studies?

Not long ago, John Larmer wrote a post for Edutopia about Project-Based Learning and  “authentic assessment.” To be authentic, a project must be “in the real world, connected directly to the lives of students and real issues in their communities.” What does this mean for teachers of religious studies who would like to teach “authentically”?   I clearly understand that I’ve made an equivocation, but doing so prompts a pedagogical inquiry that questions the adequacy of “authentic assessment” discourse for religious studies.

The discussion of “authentic assessment” is more prominent in high schools than in higher education, but it’s gaining particular prominence among so-called STEM teachers. Jon Mueller gives an excellent overview of authentic assessment for this context. The approach holds that learners, i.e. students, best demonstrate their mastery of a topic by performance, and, that teaching is therefore focused on supporting the needs of learners. These assessments during the course have some relationship with the real world. The assessments would have students tackle problems experienced by professionals in the field, participate in a scenario or simulation, or use tools, tasks or processes from the workplace.

What do Religious Studies Learners Need?

What are the needs of learners in religious studies? A general answer to this question would be a gift to religious studies, which as a discipline still seems in search of a raison d’etre in higher education. I can temporarily escape that challenge by appealing to the specificities courses like introductory Sanskrit and advanced hermeneutics seminars; there, the needs of learners are to be capable of reproducing the specializations of their professors. But what about the less specialized courses, such as introduction to world religions or the philosophy of religion? What problems, scenarios or workplace problems arise from these topics?

Perhaps RS is not Authentic!

One reply may be that these sorts of courses are simply not authentic. Supporting evidence may be that non-authentic assessments are precisely those which are relied upon by many religious studies courses, both introductory and advanced: essay compositions and research presentations.

According to Larmer’s post, “(b)eyond their teacher and maybe their classmates, there’s no public audience for students’ work, no one actually uses what they create, and the work they do is not what people do in the real world.” In my experience, much of religious studies teaching involves just these sorts of assessments with arguably few tangible, real-life outcomes. Steven Ramey notes, however, that majoring in Classics, Philosophy and Religion may help a student score better on the LSAT; but this outcome is too distant from any actual course to be evaluated by an authentic assessment rubric. Can it be that the problems, scenarios and workplaces of religious studies are limited to writing and research?

Would this mean that these fields are not related to the purported “real world” problems and occupations? Perhaps authentic assessment is not suited to topics such as religious studies and philosophy. If so, it would share an affinity with adaptive instructional software such as Knewton, who provides online learning software for several university math programs. According to this interview of David Kuntz of Knewton, “For a freshman philosophy course that is focused around teaching students how to think on their feet, come up with counter examples rapidly, and interact with other students in an engaging and intelligent way, our approach may not work as well.” Even if this is correct, there seems to an all-too-narrow vocation for religious studies within the higher education syllabus.

Is there a Sufficient Reason for RS?

Another, more skeptical response would be that its myopic to declare that every field of inquiry must have an immediate, professional application. Philosophers of religion are familiar with the “principle of sufficient reason,” which, very briefly put, posits that there must be a rational explanation for everything; there must be a reason or cause. The principle provides either an opportunity or a trap in debates over the existence of God. An argument against God can invoke the principle to demand an explanation for evils, whereas an argument for God invokes the same principle to insist that the world’s origins must lie with a being from outside it.

Something similar is at work in the current zeitgeist of Western consumerism, where “authenticity” is closely connected to the obsession with “natural” in advertising. Consider processed cheese food for example, Kraft has recast its “slices” as a food with natural origins, which are authentic because their ingredients have origins traceable to farms. Kraft wishes that consumers believe that the sufficient reason for their slices’ existence is “the family farm.” Whenever the term “authenticity” is used, a quest for origins is always close by, working in the background. Authenticity discourse is a discourse of normalization. Those slices become “authentic” if their reason for existence is traced to some place or entity ostensibly outside or beyond itself.

I say “ostensibly” because these claims rest their legitimacy upon the presumption, or even faint association, with something that is somehow sui generis. If something can be shown to be unique and of its own kind, so the notion goes, then it is the end of the line. This would mark a beginning, causal origin or grounding point. Rudolf Otto postulated such a starting point for his phenomenology of religion, as did Paul Tillich for his theology. Religious studies, at least the critical sort, has long since moved past Otto and Tillich. Yet the temptation remains to affiliate and associate with or towards whatever seems to be “authentic”: be it the Holy, Ultimate Concern or supposedly natural foods. Likewise, the language of “authentic” assessment may cover a temptation to make the workplace into the font of sufficient reason for the existence of higher education.

Sui generis claims are unconvincing to the critically-savvy folks, however, on the grounds that they do not mark epistemic stopping-points so much as they mark junctures of socio-political power-brokering. It’s not so much that X is in fact real, natural, authentic, or original, rather, the right constellation of authority has deemed it so. This is why Kraft carefully reconstructs the authenticity of their slices with appeals to rhetoric with images and affiliations of “farminess” along with legal and scientific discourse.

Awaiting your Replies…

All this talk about “authentic assessment,” for me, reveals an important juncture or disjuncture between subjects in the humanities, and perhaps religious studies in particular, and so-called cutting-edge pedagogies. Authentic assessment is supposed to evaluate students’ performances in scenarios that emulate their ultimate destination: the workplace. Aside from academia, I know of no other sufficiently determinate “workplace” towards which religious studies students are demonstrably and on the whole destined. In other words, there seems to be no sui generis origin to religious studies outside of itself. The discipline has no “real world” that is its sufficient cause.

What am I missing? It seems to me that a change in pedagogy towards authentic assessment and outcomes-based instruction demands the conception of clear lines between religious studies and professional lives in contemporary society. But to answer that, I need to determine how might religious studies teaching authentically assess learners. What are your suggestions?

Photo Credit: “Cutting The Cheese” by JD Hancock – CC by 2.0

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