Dr. Caleb Simmons
Dr. Caleb Simmons is the focus of December's Instructor Spotlight. Caleb is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and specializes in religion in South Asia, especially Hinduism. Recently, Caleb adapted RELI 367 to the new General Education program through conversations with his colleagues in the Gen Ed Office during the Quick Start program. Learn more about his experience with Quick Start below!
Caleb shares how his initial apprehension about needing to revise the Gen Ed courses he already put a lot of work into turned out to be a positive experience with the Quick Start. With his revision, he describes how he was able to be more purposeful about discussions with students about the different perspectives that are central to his Building Connections course.
"One thing that I really enjoyed about the refresh and the process of going through the Quick Start is through my discussions with my colleagues in the Gen Ed Office, I realized that my course had a very implicit but very thorough foundation of talking about power and inequities from the classical period, with hierarchies, within caste systems, to contemporary settings in which there's the dynamic of colonized people from India and the appropriation of yogic ideas in the West. And while this was constantly there in the class, it had never really come to the forefront in a way that I saw that it could. So eventually I decided to list my course as a Diversity and Equity course [to] take all of those implicit conversations and discussion and make it very explicit."