Turning students into scholars: using digital methods to teach the critical study of religion

Incorporating digital tools into Religious Studies courses provides experiences and conditions that transform students into scholars. In this essay we discuss two courses we taught in conjunction with the Religious Soundmap Project of the Global Midwest, a collaborative digital humanities project that we co-directed from 2014 to 2016. Engaging students as contributors to a collaborative digital research project helped them to appreciate some of the key practical, theoretical, and ethical challenges that we face as scholars of religion. In particular, our work together brought to the fore critical questions about definition, classification, and representation. Even more, because they knew their work would be accessible to broader audiences outside the classroom, potentially including the very communities whom they were studying, students were able to perceive the stakes of these questions in ways we had not previously experienced. Incorporating digital tools enabled our students to see themselves as scholars of religion.