This Learning Reflection is your main opportunity to explore what you have actually learned during the first unit of the course. Part 1 is where you will demonstrate (to yourself as well as to me) what you’ve learned. Part 2 is where you have a chance to reflect on how you’ve learned. Part 3 is where you will make your argument for how well you did.
Before and during your work on this reflection, you should look back over your class notes, other students’ class notes, and the assigned readings. The more you can incorporate this stuff into your answers, the stronger your answers will be.
Remember: do your best. I’m not going to give you grades for your work, and if anything is missing, you’ll have more chances to get it right. Don’t worry about failure. Instead, concentrate on showing both of us how much you’ve actually learned.
Part 1: What you learned
In this section, answer each question in at least three fully-developed paragraphs. Make arguments and back them with evidence. Use ideas from your class notes and from the assigned readings. Remember that our rubric emphasizes deep analysis and using specific examples to illustrate your claims.
Concepts you have learned about in Unit 1:
lived religion
embodied experience
practice
the Eucharist
Our Lady of Guadalupe
popular devotion
Curanderismo (el Don, desarrolla)
religion and magic
Question 1. Read the following block quotation from p. 151 of the article by Salazar on Curanderismo (assigned for Sept. 12 and attached below). It’s from Alfonso Gracia, a man who goes to a curandera for help:
There was this young girl, 16 years old from Mexico, who started swinging back and forth and going into a deep trance and going to sleep. She swung like a butterfly and waved her arms like angel wings. She was like floating. It was beautiful. She walked toward me, the spirit in her spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear her because of the chanting. After five times of repeating I understood what she said. She said I needed to do a lot of prayer. But a holy spirit came into me and I felt changed. It was a beautiful and overwhelming peace. I kept wanting it. The session ended that day and we left. I wanted more. I felt I had a calling. I asked who this spirit was and it said it was Niño Fidencio.
In one paragraph, use what you know (from lectures/discussions and from the readings) to explain what is happening here from the perspective of someone who practices Curanderismo. Then in another paragraph, explain the same things from the perspective of a member of the Society of Saint Pius X. Make sure you explain how each community, based on its distinctive worldview, would interpret Alfonse’s experience. Finally, use the “lived religion” framework to interpret Alfonse’s experience. How do his experiences, his background, and his assumptions contribute to his experience? How does it fit within his broader sense of identity and culture?
Question 2. From the perspective of lived religion, what is wrong with the following statement? “The difference between religions and folk traditions is that religions are made up of sacred books, formal rituals, and official institutions, while folk traditions are made up of magic that is practiced in the home and passed down orally from one generation to the next.” Make an argument, using concrete examples and specific concepts, to explain why this statement misrepresents religion as a lived practice.
Question 3. What else have you learned about that has impacted your understanding of religion? Use this space to talk about anything that didn’t fit into your answers to the first two questions. Give yourself credit for things you may have learned that I’m not aware of, or that I didn’t even know I was teaching. Again, use specific examples.
Part 2: How you learned
Take this section seriously and answer these questions honestly. You should need a couple of sentences or a short paragraph for each question. The point here is to identify what is going well and what could be better so that we can make changes while there is still time to do it.
What have we done as a class that has worked best for you so far?
What has been the most difficult thing about this class so far? What steps have you taken to manage the challenge? What else could we do to help?
How many absences did you have this unit? Did you communicate about your absences in a reasonable amount of time?
How did you do on our in-class writing and discussion prompts? Did you feel prepared for most class sessions? When and how did you prepare before class?
What is most important for you to improve upon in the next unit? (It can be academic as well as personal.)
What are you most proud of about yourself from this unit? What did you do that worked really well for you?
If you could change anything about this class so far, what would it be?
PART 3: What you earned
There’s just one question here: Based on the class rubric, what grade did you earn? Make an argument; write a couple of paragraphs, and cite evidence to support your claims. What did you earn? Why? What have you done that demonstrates it (to yourself as well as to me).
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