Guest lecturing on geographies of religion: Interviewing my colleagues' students, focusing on tangents

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Higher Education; Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3103; https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v45i2.30879
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This 'Teaching Tips' article focuses on my recent experience of guest-lecturing in colleagues' classes. Influenced by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my initial guest-teaching revolved around posing an argument about geographies of religion as 'grounded theologies' as a problem for students to challenge. However, my recent guest lectures have involved interviewing my colleagues' students to discover why they find grounded theologies interesting. I show that this new mode of guest-lecturing - also influenced by Freire - has opened up new conversations at a primal ontological level through a wider breadth of topics discussed, including occupy movements, Game of Thrones, Black Nordic Metal, and modern imperialist ideologies. Following Sam Rocha's folk phenomenology, I suggest that the primal depths that this interview-lecture style of guest lecturing is perhaps worth a try, even though I plan to use the argumentative lecture in the future as well.