Grave marker of Josiah Leavitt, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Experiential learning, which gives emphasis to experiences outside the classroom, has become a priority for the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada. As a consequence, university instructors are encouraged to think about new ways to enhance student learning. While this area of interest opens some exciting new avenues, teaching in experiential ways is not always intuitive for those of us who teach ancient texts. The materiality of our subject area often concerns books that are only poorly preserved – if at all.
While drafting the syllabus of my course “Death and Afterlife in Early Judaism and Christianity,” I started to brainstorm ideas for experiential learning components. This course introduces students to images of death and afterlife in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The coursework includes two weekly lectures and a tutorial hour, exploring topics such as burial practices, mourning, good/bad deaths in the biblical corpus, ideas concerning the afterlife, gender roles related to death, gravestone inscriptions attesting to remembering people after their death, and testaments. Whereas the biblical texts reflect ideas of the past, I wanted to invite the students to evaluate critically how some concepts present in the texts are manifested in contemporary practices. I was also inspired by a conversation with my colleague Dr. Helen Dixon who studies history of Phoenicia from the perspective of dead and who told me about a course she recently taught. Therefore, I decided to take the students to a site visit in a local cemetery where they could compare the ideas reflected in the ancient texts to contemporary traditions and material artifacts.
I envisioned that whereas the visit to the local cemetery provides students with a new experience in an environment of which at least some of them are familiar, afterwards, students needed to analyze and reflect on the experience and how it connects with the theories of the course.
Providing the Experience
The first thing to do was to get in touch with the local congregation. Here I made the decision to approach the Catholic congregation as the owner of one of the oldest local cemeteries. The local congregation has an entire cemetery department and very importantly, a guide who regularly guides tours in the cemetery. We agreed on a date and time of the visit. The cemetery department did not ask us for money to visit the cemetery, but we agreed to make a small donation for the church for accommodating the group. Before the excursion, students prepared questions they wanted to pose the guide (this was my suggestion to avoid that awkward moment of “does anyone have any questions?”).
The visit began with a history of the congregation and the cemetery. Then the guide instructed us on regulations who initially could have been buried in a catholic cemetery. Rules around that have changed over the years. While walking around the cemetery, the guide narrated us stories about some prominent individuals buried there and that pushed the group to think about burial practices of different social strata: wealthy and less privileged members of the community, those with questionable reputation, and young children. We paid attention to what type of information is carved in gravestones in different eras and the decoration of the stones. Moreover, the students were interested in observing how different parts of the large cemetery reflect the socio-economic backgrounds of the deceased. By the grave of a local mafia the group pondered whether anyone can have a proper funeral mass. The guide also narrated in detail how funerary services are held and how cremation is becoming more and more common. Students had many questions concerning how cremation is done, and furthermore discussions on cremation led the students to think about different concepts of afterlife such as the role of the human body in resurrection.
Already during the excursion, the students made some important connections between the material culture and the practices they were learning about in the cemetery and those of the biblical texts we had studied in the classroom. We discussed how the materiality reflects life after death and how the deceased loved ones continue living in memories. Also, students had observed how some gravestones were seemingly personalized and wondered to whom these personalized elements are important. I built my first written assignment around the excursion. The students had to write a short essay where they were asked to compare ancient and contemporary funerary practices with each other.
Outcomes
I was positively surprised about how enthusiastic the students were about a site visit. While I initially worried that the additional logistics that the excursion required would cause the students stress, everyone embraced the possibility to have an outside the classroom experience with great interest. They really seemed to appreciate the possibility of doing something a little different than a traditional lecture. Despite the rainy October weather, everyone showed up the day of the excursion!
During the excursion, the students directly interacted with the guide who was a representative of the local Catholic community. This experience provided many of them a new contact with a different faith-based community, allowing them to learn directly about their beliefs and practices, such as the Catholic funeral mass and its significance. Students specifically asked how various biblical passages were interpreted in the community and how biblical texts influence Catholic rituals and customs. The visit enabled the students to make use of their prior knowledge and focus their attention on aspects they were interested in. They could elaborate those topics in their written essays. I observed that a lot of students were interested in the Catholic views on cremation. The church has accepted the practice but continues to debate about how to deal with the ashes.
Teaching a course on a topic like “Death and Afterlife” offers a unique opportunity to engage with students. While in other courses students may feel intimidated for lacking content expertise, typically everyone has some experience with death and mourning. Most of the students have attended someone’s funeral, and have thought about their own mortality in some ways in relation to their experiences. For instance, one of my students had worked in a funerary home and had already very detailed plans for an ideal funeral! Further, in a multicultural context like McMaster University, it is enriching to compare different funeral traditions with each other and realize how many religions are particularly interested in death and have specific rituals for the situation of death and mourning.
Finally, should I organize a similar excursion now, would I do something differently? I would make sure that certain topics such as tombs and mourning practices were covered in the classroom before the visit to make sure students could get out of the visit as much as possible. If possible, I also would allow more time for the visit than the one hour that we spent in the cemetery. As much as the excursion offered us a new perspective to the studies, I understood that the students’ visit was a pleasant experience – and equally a change to their routines - for the staff of the cemetery.
In developing this course, I was particularly influenced by scholarship on experiential learning. For more on this, see David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development.[1] 2nd My course benefited from this excursion in various ways, and over the course of the semester the class continued returning to different observations they had made during it. Reading the students’ essays I realized that the visit to the graveyard had really made it concrete to the group how Western concepts of mortality and afterlife are not static but have developed over the course of the history.
Dr. Tervanotko is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University.
[1] David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development.[1] 2nd edition (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2015).