In classrooms shaped by political conflict, religious identity, and institutional constraint, instructors often face a central dilemma: how to engage difficult material without retreating from controversy or destabilizing students’ commitments. This session introduces a set of adaptive pedagogical strategies designed to support rigorous, ethical engagement in high-tension learning environments.
Drawing on classroom practice at Georgetown University in Qatar (a Catholic institution in a Muslim-majority context), this session presents three interrelated approaches: religious deidentification, comparative theology, and pedagogies of play. Together, these strategies create structured conditions in which students can examine identity-laden material while maintaining intellectual and emotional safety.
Participants will engage with concrete, transferable teaching practices, including:
- Hermeneutical bracketing exercises that enable students to critically analyze texts without abandoning confessional commitments - Comparative sequencing techniques that distribute interpretive authority across traditions and reduce representational pressure - Game-based learning activities (e.g., Power Bingo, role-based debate) that support engagement with complex theoretical and ethical concepts
The session will include brief interactive components, allowing participants to experience these methods and consider how they might be adapted across disciplines.
By the end of the session, participants will leave with some practical tools for teaching sensitive or controversial material, a framework for structuring classrooms as sites of ethical encounter, and strategies for fostering student engagement, critical reflection, and interpretive humility in increasingly complex educational environments.
Sherie Gayle is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, where her research examines gender, power, and interpretive authority across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts. Her work brings critical theory into conversation with religious studies... Read More →
