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John Camardella, MRPL ’22

“My job in the classroom is to bring in a wide variety of voices to give the students an understanding that religions are internally diverse, changing all the time, and embedded differently in the cultures in which they are practiced.”

John Camardella is a student in the inaugural Master of Religion and Public Life Program at Harvard Divinity School. He is an educator who teaches high school and graduate level courses using the cultural studies approach to religion. Over the next year, he will develop a comprehensive religious and cultural literacy program to train superintendents and administrators at the high school level.

Catholic Roots and a Turning Point in Bali

When my parents met in the early ’70s, my mother was a Dominican nun from Detroit, and my father a Xaverian brother from Brooklyn. After a few years of friendship, they decided to leave their orders, marry, and start a family in the Chicago area. I was raised in a very loving Italian Catholic household and attended some great public schools, but never had the educational opportunities to develop the knowledge, language, and skills needed to interact respectfully with the beautifully diverse world we all inhabit.  

After college, I started teaching a variety of high school courses in the social studies department at Prospect High School in 2003 but had no formal training in religious studies when I began my career. In 2006, I attended an interfaith gathering on the Island of Bali called “The Quest for Global Healing,” co-hosted by the Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu. I was one of about 500 people from a wide variety of religious traditions and over 40 different countries. The experience changed everything I believed about education.

In speaking to my mother about experience, her response was, “John, God is not Catholic.” This might be the most profound statement of my personal faith journey. It allows me to honor who I am and how I was raised while simultaneously working to develop a course that offers students an opportunity to learn how others grapple with some of the most pressing existential questions and develop rich traditions around a variety of answers.

It got me thinking about the type of education I felt should be offered to students in public schools. After the two-week trip to Bali, I went to my administration and asked if I could write a curriculum for a religion and culture elective course. In the end, it was a long and arduous journey, but after three years, two graduate degrees, and multiple curriculum submissions, this course was finally approved in 2009.

The Traditions-Based Approach vs. the Cultural Studies Approach

Most contemporary educators have come to realize it is no longer sufficient to simply deliver content to students without challenging them to think about information in sophisticated and nuanced ways. Just knowing specific dates, dogmas, or religious rituals does not improve one’s understanding of the world, nor will that rudimentary knowledge make students more inclined to engage with it.

Here in the United States, the handful of stand-alone religion courses in public schools use a textbook as a foundation, and when I started, I was no different. Educators are often wary of talking about religion in the classroom. The textbook, they perceive, is the safe path, a way to protect themselves from conflicts and deliver basic religion content to students. For years, my pedagogy emphasized names, dates, and doctrines from different religious traditions, and student success was tied directly to their performance on multiple-choice exams.

In 2016, Harvard Divinity School graduate Benjamin Marcus contacted me while working at the Religious Freedom Center in Washington D.C. Ben’s research focused on how best to address religion in public schools, and we quickly realized there was no approved set of guidelines specifically for high school teachers to build curriculum. So, Ben assembled a small team with HDS’s Dr. Diane Moore to produce a “Religious Studies” appendix to the C3 Framework published by the National Council for the Social Studies.

The C3 is a comprehensive guide for states to strengthen their social studies standards and assist local school districts, teachers, and curriculum writers in enhancing their social studies programs. The disciplines of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology all had their guidelines, and our work focused on making sure religion would also be taught in ways that are constitutionally sound and consistent with high academic standards. The National Council for Social Studies published our document in June 2017 to provide guidance to all 50 states on how to address religious studies in the classroom.

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Perfecting the Pedagogy

During our collaboration on the C3 Project, Dr. Moore helped me come to terms with the civic consequences of religious illiteracy in ways that forced me to reconsider my firmest convictions as an educator. In previous years, I had worked diligently to master the content needed to teach an effective World Religion course. Still, I soon realized I was not doing enough to help students understand different religions in their complex and culturally embedded realities. As I dove more into Dr. Moore’s scholarly work and thought critically about what our Prospect seniors needed most upon graduation, I decided to commit to rewriting all 40 weeks of our curriculum to follow the Cultural Studies Approach to studying religion. I took a hard look at previous lesson plans to measure how much I addressed three of the core premises of the Cultural Studies Method: that religions are internally diverse, culturally embedded, and change over time. As I began to apply this new lens, it became clear my lessons were doing the opposite and frequently reinforcing the assumption that religions are monolithic, universal, and static. The bottom line was I needed to change.

At the beginning of the school year, we help students “situate” themselves with an assignment we call “a worldview autobiography.” We encourage each person to dive into their own histories to honor the cultures they come from, and think critically on how their race, gender, ethnicity, and other aspects of their identities shape how they think about and experience the world. Once they have that foundational framework, we can then ask them to talk, listen, and engage respectfully with one another.

The cultural studies approach honors each individual and then allows them to see other examples of religion and culture as authentic, but not exclusive, expressions of religion. We make sure that in the process students can recognize the difference between a devotional expression of religion, where someone is making a religious assertion or speaking on behalf of a religion, and a non-devotional statement from someone like me as their public-school teacher who offers an academic analysis of religion. Another core premise of the cultural studies approach is recognizing that there is nothing inevitable about violence or peace. We help students remain mindful that religions have been a force for good throughout world history, but also a force that has done incredible harm and diminished human flourishing.

Harvard Divinity School

In late 2017, Dr. Diane Moore offered me an education fellowship at the Religious Literacy Project at HDS. It was challenging, but over the course of three years, I rewrote all 40 weeks of my curriculum, restructured all of our assessments, partnered with Eastern Illinois University to make our high school class dual credit, and developed and taught nine different graduate courses for high school teachers working on advanced degrees.

This year in the MRPL program, I am developing a program for superintendents and administrators to learn more about how religious and cultural issues can be addressed during teacher development sessions. I want to help them to better understand how religion intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and power dynamics in a public-school classroom, and have a real interest in helping administrators in the same way that Dr. Moore and her team at HDS have helped me. I will not be an expert at the end of this MRPL program, but I already feel more confident in offering guidance to leaders who have to make really important decisions for their schools and their districts across the country.

Looking Forward

Learning about the complexities, sophistication, and nuances inherent in religion can be utterly transformational. I have discovered that many professional development programs in public schools avoid discussing religion altogether or present religion as a category separate from all other aspects of identity (gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.). These frameworks that silo identities for inclusion are problematic, and sadly, most public-school districts offer professional development that reinforces these exact methods. My current project aims to fix this deeply embedded and structural problem in teacher development programs by building a comprehensive curriculum in service to high school superintendents and upper-level administrators. The primary aim is to assist them in recognizing how religion is embedded in culture and intersects with all aspects of life. By increasing their own religious & cultural literacy, they can better serve their staff, students, and surrounding communities by improving their programming and support structures.

I will launch this program in October of 2022 with an hour-long lecture and interactive presentation at the annual conference of the Illinois Association of School Administrators. I plan to invite attendees to join me for a series of live sessions during the 2023 spring semester, where the program will offer district leaders the language and tools necessary to understand the power of religion and disrupt the essentialism of categories too often associated with professional development in public schools. I want to offer administrators an educational experience where they first situate themselves in their specific context and then work to deepen their knowledge surrounding the intersections of identity, with a particular focus on how religion plays a role in society and public schools. I hope to facilitate a convincing experience that will enable each leader to create an environment that encourages all staff members and students to participate fully in the school’s culture without fear of being their whole and complex selves.

Interview by Emily Chaudhari; photos by Zach Miller in 2018