On Teaching: Propaedeutics and Islamic Law

This past semester, I got to teach at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It was particularly hard work adapting to a remote format with no class meetings, but I’m glad I got the chance to teach some classes directly from my research work.

One of these classes was on world history. We could pick any theme as long as we used sources from diverse places and times, so I decided on the history of education. The class challenged me to think about how to introduce a complicated field of issues to people who may not have thought about things the way I do even with their firsthand experience.

Teachers think a lot about how to introduce something complicated in a way that’s approachable and inspires and structures further curiosity, but the topic doesn’t get enough attention in research, where scholarly publications can tend to the arcane and esoteric. So often we assume any readers will have read not only everything we have, but know what it is we’re thinking about, and I know it’s not only my own work that suffers from this.

In this issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society, I’ve written an article that considers how to teach and present scholarship in a way that widens access. I consider teaching and publishing on the complex and fraught topic of Islamic law, where the temptations to oversimplify are great, and politics overshadows so much of what we do in the classroom and outside it.