ABSTRACT
Religious educators of many faiths, disciplines, teaching contexts and grade levels have identified the importance of helping students better understand the historical, sociocultural and geophysical contexts in which world religions originated and flourished. This chapter examines some of the new media tools available for so-called pedagogies of contextualization in the vast majority of religious education settings where travel to these sites is not possible. A useful critical lens for evaluating these technologies is the notion of “digital geographies,” used by educational anthropologist Lalitha Vasudevan to describe the dual role of technologies that bridge sites of learning. New media technologies both mediate access to landscapes in the physical world and become digital learning settings in their own right. Media inevitably become spaces in and through which students construe and construct meaning about the religious sites they are studying. This phenomenon is not in itself problematic and indeed can have significant learning benefits. Nevertheless, educators must be aware of and account for how the media will become a part of the message. This chapter begins by making the case for digital contextualizing in the religious education classroom. It then introduces the lens of digital geographies and demonstrates its use by examining several relevant learning artifacts. The remainder of the chapter presents a practical survey of broad categories of digital resources for studying religious sites and discusses them according to this digital geographies approach.
