Opening Remarks

When I enter a classroom, I see my students’ eyes piercing me with expectations and curiosity. I think at that moment of the University as the archetype of eternity. Years go by, and I get older, but my students remain of the same age – always young and forward-looking, filled with the thirst for knowledge and a spiritual direction. The Hippocratic oath starts pulsating in my mind: “Do no harm.” I look at my impatient audience and say: “Ok, guys, let me tell you a joke...” And the class begins – the beginning that has no beginning until the end that will have no end.

Building Up the Religious Studies Curriculum

I immigrated to the United States in 1991 to study religion – an opportunity that was not available to me in the atheist Soviet Union. Six years later, I graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a Ph.D. in religious studies and started my teaching career at the University of the Arts. When I came to the University, its offerings in religion were nominal, to say the least – two courses in the Abrahamic traditions (Monotheism and Introduction to the Bible) and one course on Eastern religions (Indian and Chinese traditions).

It is my deep-seated conviction that the area of religious studies is of vital necessity in any institution of higher learning, so I decided to form a religious studies curriculum in the Division of Liberal Arts. I began by adding two basic introductory courses – World Religions and Religion in America – to cultivate students’ interest in multi-cultural studies. Then I introduced more specialized courses – Religion, Art and the Apocalypse, Russian Philosophy, Literature and Mysticism, and later Christianity – focusing not only on cultural diversity but also on cross-disciplinary approaches.

In six to eight years of my teaching, I increased the number of courses taught in religion from the initial one to two and, finally, to three per semester – often with full enrollment in each class. As an important milestone of my efforts to put on a solid footing the study of religion at the University of the Arts, I created in 2009 the Philosophy and Religion Minor – the third one in the Division of Liberal Arts after the Minors in Creative Writing and Art History. As a Philosophy and Religion Minor coordinator, I signed up eight students to its program in the first year.

Developing Spiritual Trust and Intellectual Integrity

As a professor of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of the Arts, I have offered various courses on both the introductory and upper curriculum levels. Most of my classes involve the study of religion. Still, I have also taught general humanity courses such as Texts and Contexts and 19th and 20th-Century Modernism, which address broader issues of Western history, art and culture from classical antiquity through the Modern and postmodern times.

Student enrollment in my classes usually runs between 20-30 students and consists of people from diverse ethnic origins and socio-economic positions, various and sometimes even conflicting religious traditions or spiritual upbringing, and different art schools and artistic specializations. In such a complex and challenging learning environment, A responsible teacher of religion, in my view, must respectfully engage students by accomplishing the following two key goals:

(1) building spiritual trust, and (2) developing academic honesty and integrity.

(1) Religion is like no other subject to teach. It touches the hearts of people, whether they are religious or not. Therefore, it is imperative to win the students' trust because otherwise, they will isolate themselves from the rest of the class and not learn and interact as much as they should have. In my teaching practice, I find it useful to apply two methods to build such trust. First, I relate to my students by sharing personal stories with them from my spiritual journey. Second, I use humor and laughter, which lowers the image of authority and inaccessibility that the students may otherwise have of the teacher and makes them more willing to share their thoughts and feelings with the rest of the group.

(2) The building up of spiritual trust between the teacher and the students is inter-connected with the development of academic honesty and integrity. That includes the rejection of plagiarism and creating such a learning environment in which students of any religious or non-religious persuasion could freely speak their mind without being intimidated by classmates or punished by the teacher in any shape or form. As a person who comes from the Soviet Union where honest discussion of one’s conviction was forbidden and often punished by law, I firmly believe that a bias-free learning environment in the classroom is vital for a healthy education process, especially in religious studies.

Balancing the Classical and Modern Educational Models

As a person who studied both in Soviet Russia and the United States, I am acutely aware of the differences between the classical European and contemporary American educational systems. I am trying to combine the best from both the Old and New World’s approaches in my pedagogical practice. I believe that no alternative learning strategy can substitute for well-structured lectures that constitute my courses' foundation and are supplemented by extensive class discussions. To engage my students in full, active participation, all of my offerings also require a side project involving independent research, often a field visit to a place of worship, and an oral presentation at the end of the class.

The course's written assignments reflect the similar earning for the balance between the so-called objective (multiple-choice, true-or-false questions) and subjective (vocabulary terms, journal reactions, and term papers) types of examinations. During my many years of teaching, I experimented with various forms of written assignments. At least for the moment, I ended up replacing traditional term papers with alternative, more specific, and target-based reports. I retain the mid-term and final exams as an essential instrument to check how well my students have digested the course material.

I am also open to co-operative learning strategies that involve the Internet. In addition to Canvas – a teachers’ software that our University is providing for the faculty – I incorporated some educational projects into my professional website. For instance, I started publishing an e-book Timeline in Religion and Philosophy, a joint venture of my students and myself. I encourage them to write short articles on various topics of their interest for extra-credit, which I later post on-line under their names.

Thoughts in Conclusion

When I think about the importance of the teaching profession, I always remember my teachers. I remember my school instructor in Russian language and literature and how she, a devout Orthodox Christian believer, tactfully guided me – an atheist back then – to the life of spirituality. I remember my Hindu professor at Temple University, with whom I had countless conversations on philosophical and existential issues. Those people, along with many other mentors, have shaped the inner life of my soul.

My highest aspiration as a teacher to extend that influence to my students is to create a spiritual bond that transcends ethnicity, nationality, gender, cultural upbringing, language barriers, social status, political preferences, and religious affiliations. I strive for a bond that reaches our shared humanity's nerve and motivates my fellow humans to extend it even further to their family and friends. I hope that my students will remember me with gratitude and prayer one day, as I always remember my beloved teachers.