FOR TEACHERS

The principal audience for the American Religions Timeline is undergraduates in survey courses of American religion. However, the timeline can serve a variety of educational purposes.

Representing pluralism: The timeline addresses a central challenge to thinking about American religious history: How to represent the pluralism of American religion? Unlike a historical narrative, the timeline allows for a compact presentation of data related to a broad range of religious groups. The A.R.T. Project brings together information about American religions not currently available in any other single source, including events important to marginalized religions, landmarks in church-state relations, and key instances of interreligious contact or contest. The timeline allows teachers to juxtapose events unlikely to be treated together in any historical survey, thus opening up the possibility of illuminating new relationships within and between American religions.

A reference guide: The American Religions Timeline can serve teachers of American religion survey courses—long-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants alike—as a handy reference for preparing their coverage of traditions outside their specialty. Teachers can direct students to the timeline as a reference source for generating ideas or gathering background information for research projects. Because the timeline is online, it is easy for students to access at home and for teachers to bring into the classroom. It has the ready accessibility of a resource such as Wikipedia, but it is more authoritative, since contributions to the A.R.T. Project are reviewed by specialists before they go online.

Student contributions: Like Wikipedia (though with greater editorial oversight and quality control), the timeline grows as volunteers submit items to be included. Teachers might consider assigning students to create entries for the timeline as a class project. Depending on how the assignment is constructed, such a project could introduce students to research sources in American religion and could help students think through questions about how "American religious history" is defined. Who or what is often left out of grand narratives? In what various ways does culture impact religion and religion impact culture? How does a transnational perspective broaden our understanding of the forces that shape American religion? Writing an entry for the timeline would let students practice the skills involved in effective summary and would give them the experience of working with an editor in finalizing their writing for a kind of publication.