Muslim Lifeways Field School - Center for Bodylore & Learning

Muslim Lifeways in Chicago
Summer 2009 Research Expedition
July 5 - August 8, 2009
Dr. Sara K. Schneider, Principal Investigator

This five-week Research Expedition for 25 middle and high school teachers assembles distinguished humanities scholars in history, anthropology, performance studies, and religion, who will partner with master middle and high school classroom teachers in world studies and American history, to: (1) offer Expedition teachers an in-depth approach to understanding the varieties of living Muslim experience, and (2) guide them as they develop, in collaboration with Muslim ethnic communities, original primary materials on specific, documentable behavioral practices along with lesson plans to bring back to their classrooms. Integrating traditional classroom instruction and investigative field experiences, this active approach to learning about Islam in its living cultural variations will deepen and create greater resonance in our teachers’—and their students’—experiences.

The middle and high school teachers who will participate in the Expedition will read a variety of texts to build their general understanding of Islam in America, including basic texts that offer a grounding in Islamic thought; works of cultural history that examine the experience of immigrant Muslim populations in Chicago; and both classic and targeted texts dealing with Muslim gender relations, body image, and comparative religious practices. Because they will be learning actively, building relationships and doing fieldwork within Muslim communities in Chicago, they will also read classic texts in anthropology that highlight ethical and methodological issues in working with populations we deem as “other” in some way, as well as ground-breaking studies in the emerging subfields of the anthropology of the senses and of the body that will best support their data collection. (A detailed list of daily activities and readings, as well as the Expedition Bibliography, are available as separate documents.)

In all, Expedition lectures, readings, workshops, small-group discussions, field trips, and field experiences are designed to help the teachers work productively with the questions currently being asked by scholars, journalists, and their own students: To what degree is there unity in a “Muslim experience in America”? What does it mean to be perceived as Muslim by non-Muslim Americans, and how do Muslims alter the performance of their identity in response to current events? How are Muslim practices shaped by national and ethnic cultures? What generational adaptations to non-Muslim American culture can be identified? And how might the “feeling” of living as a devout Muslim in America be communicated meaningfully to students?

While introducing participants to some of the methods, concerns, and modes of thinking of the contributory disciplines, faculty will guide teachers in small Research Teams as they gain firsthand experience in creating new primary materials with four of the ethnic Muslim populations in Chicago, employing (as permitted) digital photography, videography, interviews, and field notes. The Expedition proposes that the many populations to be found in Chicago homes, mosques, and community centers are a reflection of the diverse Muslim populations, with their multiple perspectives and practices, to be found around the United States. The Expedition will focus on African-American Muslims and on South Asian, Arab, and African Muslim immigrants, as well as on their American Muslim children and grandchildren. Topics for teachers’ firsthand investigation will include such specific and documentable behavioral practices as appropriate dress for men, women, and children; the encounter of the gaze of the opposite sex and of non-Muslims in the public sphere; practices for worship, to include gestures, postures, and rituals of prayer and observance, including ablutions and hajj, or pilgrimage; foodways, including the designation of foods as halal, or permissible, and practices around hospitality; and life cycle practices, including birth, maturation, marriage, and death and dying, particularly as they are changing with the generations. All of these topics place behavioral manifestations of culture into a central role. The fieldwork will offer teachers the opportunity to study acculturation, generational differences in practices and values, and local variations in practices.

This approach, which intertwines classroom-based lecture and discussion about Islamic history, culture, and thought with fieldwork in contemporary communities, has been expressly selected as a means of giving teachers—many of whose classrooms around the country are becoming significantly more diverse—direct, in-home and in-community contact, in a spirit of respectful inquiry, with populations with which they may have had more limited exchange, as well as the opportunity to engage with the actual methods of problem formation and inquiry of working scholars in history, anthropology, performance theory, and religion, as well as with the cultural politics of museum representation. The visual, oral, and textual materials they gather will contribute to a web-based, publicly available living archive of practices, and will serve as the basis for their own curriculum and lesson planning in the second half of the Expedition. Teachers will thus be trained in the use of the tools and modes of thinking that historians and anthropologists draw on to create primary sources, germane to two of the five principal Standards for Historical Thinking for grades 5 through 12 published by the National Center for History in the Schools: Historical Analysis and Interpretation, and Historical Research Capabilities. (Please see description of these standards under “Intended Beneficiaries,” below.)

Faculty

Core faculty members Sara K. Schneider, Peter Alter, Kathryn Geurts, Rüdiger Seesemann, and Guven Witteveen will all contribute weekly lectures, discussion leadership, and advising to Research Teams, along with ongoing relationship-building with the Muslim communities with which we will be working. Individual specialties and responsibilities are named within the biographies below. Geurts, Schneider, Seesemann, and Witteveen will each serve as primary advisor to one Research Team, consulting with advisees in person twice per week, standing available to attend at least one afternoon fieldwork session per week, and for advising by telephone throughout the Expedition. The Chicago-based core faculty members (Schneider, Seesemann, and Alter) will also pre-interview and build relationships with all research subjects during the 2008 - 2009 academic year. All core faculty members, along with the master middle and high school teachers from the American Anthropological Association network, will participate in the planning of the Expedition beginning in Fall 2008.

As Principal Investigator, performance theorist Sara K. Schneider is Assistant Professor of Integrated Studies in Teaching, Technology, and Inquiry at National-Louis University. Teaching master’s level teachers, she advises individual and team-based long-term action research projects founded on an anthropological methodology. She founded and directs the Center for Bodylore and Learning, which links public education about global cultures, from the perspective of actual practices, with teacher professional development, and has been invited to share her work on the relationship between physical expressions of spiritual practice and comparative cultures as a plenary presenter, with bell hooks, at the annual meeting of National Council of Teachers of English/The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, as well as in workshops at the Esalen Institute. She is the author of three books that deal centrally with the meanings of the body in expressive and material culture. Dr. Schneider received her undergraduate education at Yale and her M.A. and Ph.D. at New York University in Performance Studies, the nexus of cross-cultural studies and trans-disciplinary expressive culture. Schneider will provide content expertise in Performance Studies and anthropological research methods, and will be responsible for all scholarly aspects of Expedition planning and delivery.

Prior to coming to National-Louis University, Schneider taught and consulted at the forefront of learning innovation projects at the University of Washington and Andersen Consulting, among others. She founded and served as artistic director of the experimental theatre company Chaparral in New York, where she directed creative teams while managing a board and donors and forging partnerships with government, foundation, and corporate sponsors. During 2005 – 06 she served as the external evaluator of a pilot action research project using dance education to further students’ literacy; the project was initiated by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and paired the world-renowned Hubbard Street Dance Company and the Chicago Public Schools. A practitioner and teacher of yoga, active in the world dance and music communities, she has traveled and conducted fieldwork in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, with the Tibetan exile community in northern India, and with practitioners of kalaripayyattu, an indigenous martial art in South India.

Peter Alter, Ph.D., Curator, Chicago History Museum. Historian Peter Alter earned his doctorate at the University of Arizona, writing about Serbian immigration to Chicago. In line with the Chicago History Museum’s mission to collect, interpret, and present the rich multicultural history of Chicago and Illinois, Alter’s work brings him into close daily contact with Chicago’s immigrant communities, whose lives he documents through interviews, video, and artifacts. As Project Coordinator for the Museum’s program Global Communities: Chicago’s Immigrants and Refugees, he worked extensively in the Asian Indian, Mexican, Polish, Romanian, and Vietnamese immigrant and refugee communities. In the months immediately following the September 11th attacks, he conducted a series of oral histories with Muslim immigrants and Muslim Americans. In addition to his resident core faculty duties, he will be responsible for coordinating the methods training of the Expedition.

Kathryn Geurts, Ph.D., Anthropology, Hamline University. Kathryn Geurts earned her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in African Studies and Cultural Anthropology and is the author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, which carefully documents how kinesthesia, hearing, and balance function as highly valued sensory modes in Anlo-Ewe speaking contexts in southeastern Ghana. Geurts teaches Ethnographic Methods and Cultural Psychology courses on a regular basis, and works closely with undergraduate students to develop skills in observation, fieldnote writing, the collection of life history narratives, interviewing, and ethnographic representation. In addition to her core faculty responsibilities, she will help Research Teams apply her method of understanding kinesthetic data to the ethnic Muslim cultures, while supporting ethnographic methods training in the Expedition as a whole.

Rüdiger Seesemann, Ph.D., Religion, Northwestern University. Rüdiger Seesemann earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at the University of Mainz, and in 2004 earned the prestigious Habilitation credential from Bayreuth University. He specializes in Islamic Education and Islamic Mysticism, with a regional emphasis on Africa south of the Sahara. Currently a Co-Principal Investigator on a Ford Foundation grant on “Constituting Bodies of Islamic Knowledge,” he is fluent in Arabic. Seesemann will be an invaluable bridge to both the African and the Arab ethnic Muslim communities. In addition to his core faculty responsibilities, he will oversee and be principal faculty for the Islamic Studies component of the Expedition, and be responsible for bringing in Islamic scholars and community experts as visiting faculty and speakers.

Guven Witteveen, curriculum consultant on international education. Guven Witteveen earned his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and specializes in school outreach, specifically interpreting anthropology and area studies material for middle and high school social studies students. Through his work with the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology Education Committee, he will be responsible for identifying, bringing in, and coordinating the contributions of three master teachers currently incorporating anthropology in their teaching to help with Expedition planning and to work on collaborative lesson planning with participants during Weeks 4 and 5. He will also conduct practice sessions on the use of technological devices in fieldwork.

Judy van Zile, Dance, University of Hawaii at Manoa. A certified Labanotation teacher and Fellow of the International Council for Kinetography Laban, Professor Van Zile has been largely responsible for developing the dance ethnology curriculum at the University of Hawaii. Former editor of Dance Research Journal, van Zile will present interactive sessions on perceiving and writing about human movement, crucial for our documentation of prayer practices in particular, and will be available for individual or Research Team consultation with the teachers.

Staff

Ellen Jackson, independent consultant in conference and site planning and faculty training, will serve as Expedition Administrator, coordinating communications with applicants, the selection committee, and the faculty, and handling scheduling, housing, and other coordination issues. Rob Bowe, Academic Technology Facilitator, National-Louis University, will build the Expedition website, and instruct and support participants in the technological side of the project, particularly the design and functionality of the Expedition website, all the way through the dissemination phase of the project. NLU librarians will establish library accounts for all Expedition participants, conduct orientation sessions on the university’s extensive databases, and be available throughout the Expedition for reference support.

Community Partners

The Muslim Community Center of Chicago and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago have agreed to make introductions among their ethnically diverse membership, as core faculty living in Chicago prepare for the Expedition by building relationships during the 2008 - 09 academic year; Peter Alter and Rüdiger Seesemann already have strong contacts in these communities. Tamara Biggs, of the Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Cultural Alliance, which offers access to the Indo American Center and to the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago, will help us identify appropriate community members to bring into Expedition sessions, among others Week 4’s workshops in performing ethnography. Marie Scatena, the Chicago History Museum’s Youth Programs Manager, will help us make contacts with the Museum’s Teacher Advisory Board, from which we expect to draw a member to serve on our selection committee.