American Religions Class with Michael T. Pasquier

I have tried a couple of times to have students create blogs for the class, but never has it worked as effectively as Michael T. Pasquier’s class at http://religioninlouisiana.blogspot.com/

Here are some paragraphs from him describing the course and the website.
Michael T. Pasquier
“American Religions” is a 2000-level general education course at LSU. We’re reading The Color of Christ alongside Amanda Porterfield and John Corrigan’s Religion in American History. Throughout the semester, students are required to produce four blog posts for our classroom blog: http://religioninlouisiana.blogspot.com/. I encourage them to use multimedia materials (websites, images, podcasts, Youtube, etc.) that might stimulate conversation about the relationship between religion and race in American history. I also take advantage of the “Classroom Materials” feature at http://colorofchrist.com/ to give the students some ideas about what to post on the blog. I prefer not to give them too much explicit guidance on what to post. By the end of the semester, there will be over 100 blog posts exploring the religious and racial history of the United States.
In addition to blogging, students will be working together to produce a visual exhibit on the history of race and religion in Louisiana. Each student will identify one object, artifact, manuscript, or other primary source from the LSU Special Collections (http://lib.lsu.edu/special/) to include in the exhibit, which (if I can get university facilities services to agree) will be hung in the hallway of a prominent building on campus. We will pair facsimiles of the original primary sources—either photographs or high resolution scans—with short citations and descriptions that speak to the exhibit’s themes of race and religion in Louisiana.

2 thoughts on “American Religions Class with Michael T. Pasquier

  1. Great stuff. Please report back on what it is you think the students learned through this exercise. I think one of the things historians can teach undergraduates is research methods, which is increasingly happening online. This seems like a great way to get them to do that productively. Let us know!

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