Education Fellow 2023-24

SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: My name is Sarabinh Levy-Brightman. And I'm a teacher, educator, and scholar of religion. I'm also a person who believes that the life of the mind is essential part of our human being, and its care and cultivation necessary for our wellbeing.  

Consequently, one of my burning questions is, how do we craft a classroom such that it is a place of dynamic intellectual vitality, where students and teachers experience intellectual awakenings, transformation, and development individually and collectively?  

For the past five years, I have worked with teachers around this country and increasingly with graduate students around the integration of the study of religion into a variety of academic topics in K through 12 education.  

And over that time, I have had the privilege of hearing teachers and students talk about the way in which the study of religion has transformed their understanding of education, their understanding of the world around them, and their understanding of themselves.  

Listening to students reflect on the effect of studying religion in their classes prompts me not only to wonder where these students will take their new learnings, how they will carry their understandings of the world forward, their transformed and renewed understandings of themselves.  

It also gives me hope in what can actually happen in the classroom, that our classrooms around this country can be sites of dynamic intellectual engagement, of flourishing, of conversations across radical differences that open our eyes to each other and make possible a vitality that we need, especially now.