UPDATE: Sometimes I screw up. This is one of those times. When I looked at this data and read the report, I misunderstood the meaning of the “attitudes toward integration of religion and spirituality in higher education” scores. So below I stated, “On average, Augustana students believe that religion and spirituality should be a comparably less integral part of college life than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.” In actuality, our students reported the opposite. It turns out the the questions in this scale are framed in the negative and thus the scores need to be reversed in order to understand them properly. One could argue that the report isn’t quite clear on how to interpret this scale . . . but I still missed it. The rest of this blog post stands and I think is still worth the pixels on the screen. My apologies. Mark
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At one time or another, I’ll bet you’ve heard the old advice about discussing religion or politics. As I remember it, it boils down to one word: don’t. These days you only need to turn to CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News to see what can happen when folks go down that road. Interestingly, these flailing pundits demonstrate perfectly why we should care so much about developing our students’ ability to effectively and civilly converse about personal beliefs, especially when talking to someone with whom they don’t agree. Because no one can make where they live a better place if they can’t interact across all manner of difference to solve complicated problems and live better together.
The commitment to developing this attribute in our students is one of the core motivations of those who participate in the Interfaith Understanding student group, the Honest Conversation series, and Salon (among others). Bringing disparate people together for the specific purpose of discussing conflicting personal beliefs can have a powerful impact on learning important skills like perspective-taking, suspending judgment, and reflecting instead of reacting. Of course, it can also be uncomfortable, destabilizing, and just plain hard. But that is exactly what good educating is – precisely because learning so often comes through stretching students beyond what is safe and familiar.
Last year Augustana participated in a national survey to better understand the impact of our efforts to foster a community where these conversations can happen. The survey – the Campus Religious and Spirituality Climate Survey (CRSCS) assess three dimensions of a campus environment that might influence a religious and spiritual climate of tolerance, interaction, and impact.
- The structural worldview diversity: Perceptions of the proportional representation of various religious and non-religious groups on campus.
- The psychological climate: Perceptions and attitudes between and among different worldview groups.
- The behavioral climate: Formal and informal interactions among students of different worldviews.
We surveyed sophomores and juniors in March and April of 2013. Although our response rate wasn’t as high as we would have liked (124 useable responses), we got enough data to make some inferences about our students’ experiences in this area and how those experiences might set up our next efforts to strengthen this aspect of student learning.
The crux of the results suggest:
- On average, Augustana students perceive their campus community to be comparably more homogenous than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
- On average, Augustana students are comparably more accepting and express more appreciative views of students from alternate faith or belief systems (e.g., Muslim or agnostic students) than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
- On average, our students perceive there to be less conflict or separation between students from differing faith systems and worldviews on this campus than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
- On average, Augustana students have had challenging or stimulating experiences with students from different worldviews more often and believe that their college experience has altered their religious or spiritual worldview more substantially than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
- On average, Augustana students believe that religion and spirituality should be a comparably less integral part of college life than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
Overall, Augustana students’ appear to be more interfaith literate and appreciative of other worldviews and belief systems than students at the other participant institutions during 2012-13. This seems to be reflected in both the degree to which students appear to be accepting of other faith or worldview groups and the degree to which they perceive the climate to be less divided. Moreover, Augustana students seem to perceive a greater benefit from their interactions across faith and worldview differences than students at other participating institutions. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are making progress toward 1) creating an environment conducive to a positive college experience for students of all faiths or worldviews and 2) achieving the college-wide learning outcomes regarding intercultural competence.
Interestingly, despite the students’ own comparably more positive experiences and educational growth as a result of interfaith encounters, they seem reticent to believe that their college experience should include more integration of religious and spiritual issues. Even in the context of attending a private, church-affiliated liberal arts college, Augustana students seem to be more likely to think that the religious and spiritual worldview sphere should be relegated to a private domain and not brought into the classroom or the public sphere.
The combination of these findings suggests to me that the groundwork may be in place for us to more explicitly take ownership of interfaith literacy as a critical element of intercultural competence and make it more a part of the mainstream learning experience. This groundwork seems to be in place not because the data suggests that students are asking for a heightened emphasis on interfaith literacy, but because we have data to show students that their experiences have impacted their own growth. In my mind, this might be one way of shifting their own engagement in this conversation – by showing them that they have already benefitted from the thing that they think they shouldn’t do.
Make it a good day,
Mark