Page - 22 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

22 | Mirko Roth www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 17–35 gious studies to become religious scholars with a shared-knowledge canon and a common language and attitude as well as a shared toolkit and thus able to represent our particular discipline in the public sphere.8 so what do we want to achieve in our teaching of religious studies? again and again i hear lecturers complaining that they do not get through their material. this may have many reasons, but we need also ask, can merely getting through the material be the point? and if so, how can that best be achieved? the times when “funnel learning” and “container communication” were considered le- gitimate teaching models are long gone. these practices assumed that informa- tion could be enclosed in words or sentences in a container-like manner and passed on and unpacked by a recipient without loss of meaning, funnelled, as it were, into their brain. Communication is a highly complex process with numer- ous uncertainties that are highly dependent on the prior knowledge and affec- tive perception processes of the recipient. the result is quite individual and po- tentially idiosyncratic readings of what has been communicated, which proves difficult for instructors, because their information is no longer under their con- trol. But to merely get through the material cannot be our goal, for to know that the Prophet Muhammad founded the Ummah (the Muslim community) in Medina in 623 Ce is not yet to understand that this new social form represented a socio-religious revolution for central Arabia. Is the objective of teaching reli- gious studies to elicit understanding? do we want to evoke understanding by explaining the connections between socio-historical and religious facts? in German-language religious studies, a current developed around the mid- 20th century that called itself “understanding religious studies” (verstehende Religionswissenschaft). Gustav Mensching, and others, proposed that the sym- bolic level (“the sacred” as the signified) could be experienced and understood via the real level (the physical-material signifier) through empathy and personal experience, the application of the symbol in one’s own experience.9 in modern cultural studies, such essentialist and normative perspectives and approaches are no longer viable. anti-essentialist and empirical religious studies methods and theories have demonstrated the cultural specificity of the perceptions, in- terpretations and meaning (re)production of religious actors – notwithstanding the fact that the validity of “the sacred” must remain a question for another discipline. the term “understanding” in the following thus is to be understood in rela- tion to the degree of complexity of learning objectives with regard to the aca- demic relationship of “explaining and understanding”: grounded explanations 8 Cf. Engler/Stausberg 2011, 129–134; Laack 2014, 377. For learning objectives in religious studies in rela- tion to the constructive alignment model cf. Laack 2014, 395–398. For methods of teaching religious studies with the premise of action-based didactics based on Laack 2014 cf. Weiß/rademacher 2015. 9 Cf. Mensching n.d., 9–12.