HDS - PRSE - Profile - Joseph Laycock

Program in Religious Studies and Education

Student Profile

Joe Laycock

"When I went to parties and things like that, and I mentioned that I was studying religion, people would ask me these bizarre questions about religion, which made me start thinking that maybe I should get paid to answer them," Joe Laycock, 24, says with a smile, remembering his undergraduate years as a religion major at Hampshire College.

The comment is made tongue-in-cheek, but Joe's interest in religion and education—the education of high school students and their teachers (as well as his friends)—is solid.

While in the PRSE, he student-taught psychology to honors students at Watertown High School, highlighting for the students how their religious ideas informed their beliefs about issues of justice, the death penalty (in a section on conditioned response), near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, and even memory.

But equally important to the Austin, Texas, native's PRSE experience was H-STARS, the Harvard Divinity School Study on Teaching About Religion in the Schools, which he was instrumental in organizing. H-STARS evolved from a reading and research project in which he interviewed and surveyed U.S. high school teachers of religion. The project's findings, showing a wide range of teaching practices, also pointed to a lack of dialogue about how religion should be taught.

Through H-STARS, his own teaching experience, and his HDS classes, Joe says that his commitment to teaching has deepened. "I have a much better sense of mission now. I really think teaching religious literacy is important for its own sake. We have such terrible problems in this country with education in general—with things like funding for education and racism, the lack of teaching values, of teaching critical thinking."

"So much needs to be done," he says. This fall, Joe will be living his mission with a move to Indiana to teach at a small charter school that stresses individual learning and social justice.

Posted July 2005