Teaching Religion in Public (TRiP) wrapped up its year with a Teaching Tables Showcase. Organized by TRiP postdoc, Dr. Hannah Garvey, the event showcased teaching experiments designed by the TRiP Grad Lab cohort. Sweta Dutta’s Writing Unreadable Bangla created encounters with unfamiliar sacred texts and recitations. Participants at Playing with Prayer by Alina Williams crafted new prayers from existing psalms. Classroom Rebellions by Grace Morris questioned the role of rules in the creation of communities. Tom Jackson’s Daoist a.i. Sage offered the opportunity to think about the ethics and pedagogy of generative AI by conversing with a chatbot version of the Zhuangzi, Moriah Reichert’s teaching table staged a real-time teaching challenge in Classroom Confessionals, and Sammy Allen created an immersive modern encounter with questions of fate and choice in Ancient Sonic Divination. Lasting well over two hours, this lively event attracted a steady stream of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to what one student described as “really fun!” and a faculty member praised as “a thoughtful window into how the department is thinking and reimagining religion.”
The College of Arts