Gwendolyn Gillson

My teaching centers on recognizing the humanity in all people, especially those considered “other.” Grounded in the feminist concept of intersectionality, my teaching is driven by the idea that much of global, local, and interpersonal strife comes from an inability to imagine others, whoever those others may be, as complex humans. This focus on mutual humanity extends to a recognition that students learn in a variety of ways and a dedication to giving students the tools to recognize their own effective learning strategies to enable them to become co-learners. In addition, I strive to develop students’ information literacy to enable them to independently discover and critically analyze numerous types of information.

As an extension of my interest in lived religion, I utilize ethnographic or biographical articles, books, and videos to emphasize the diversity of the ways that “other” people live. Even when teaching abstract concepts, I employ real-world examples to ground theoretical ideas in something relatable for students. For example, in my first-year seminar called “Living and Dying in East Asia,” we discussed the concept of tradition. I combined an academic article with a video of a Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony to show how something that seems extremely ancient on the surface is a practice with only a century of history. As part of their required Course Journals, students expressed surprise at the negotiability of tradition and said they had started to rethink it.

My teaching strategy involves recognizing that students often have relevant background knowledge or a good understanding of materials but lack the confidence to talk about them in an academic setting. For example, in Healing and Healthcare, I partnered with the campus archives to capture student life during the Covid-19 pandemic. The major assignments increasingly empowered students to independently learn about, conduct, and analyze interviews. They wrote and justified ten questions for the interviews, voted on the questions to ask, found interviewees, conducted and transcribed interviews, and reflected on the experience. It was extremely rewarding to watch their recorded interviews, read their reflections, and observe their increasing confidence in themselves through their developing understanding of the material. In addition, I co-presented on this project with students at the Conference on Illinois History in October 2021 to further develop students’ skills at communicating with outside audiences.

Through my training in Library and Information Science, my teaching also focuses on developing information literacy. As a stated learning objective in my Cults and the End of the World class, I had an information literacy session at the library and provided additional instruction on finding and assessing information sources. In addition to building confidence, the assignments were designed to develop information literacy, particularly through the annotated bibliography and the final research paper. The research paper requires students to take at least three academic and three popular electronic sources and create Word Clouds for each. Then, students compare the Word Clouds to understand how the two types of sources utilized the frequency of words to describe the students’ selected topic. Discovering and selecting sources, combined with analyzing and writing about the sources’ presentation of their topic of choice enables students to develop information literacy skills by encouraging them to pursue research on a topic of personal interest.

This emphasis on diversity, understanding others, and developing existing skills informed my two articles on effective pedagogy published during the pandemic and my textbook, The Essential Guide to Buddhism, with Bloomsbury Academic. Based on this expertise, I received the Malcolm Stewart award to develop and co-lead an Anti-Racist Pedagogy workshop for faculty at Illinois College, focusing on how to integrate anti-racist theory into the classroom across the breadth of the liberal arts curriculum. In recognition of my teaching success, I have received the Student/Faculty of the month award from Student Senate and received an average of 4.7 out of 5 for both “I gained knowledge and/or appreciations I value from this course” and “My overall rating of this professor is high.”

Students in my classes leave with a firmer understanding of themselves and others. I provide them the opportunity to hear other voices and to cultivate their own, crafting an inclusive and equitable framework for friendly interactions with “others.” One student wrote, “Professor Gillson is one of the best professors I've ever had. She kept the class interesting, she was very helpful in answering questions or offering extra help, and discussions were always good because she is so open to hearing what people think, even if we end up being wrong.” Comments like this demonstrate my commitment to cultivating an inclusive space where students are encouraged to actively negotiate readings, ideas, and sometimes their own identities. With a firmer grasp on the complexities of the human experience, students leave my classes with the confidence and the tools to discover, analyze, and critically engage with issues of personal, local, and global significance.