Why We Use Slack in the MA in Religion in Culture

slack

Have you ever heard of Slack? I first heard about it in an ad on one of my favorite podcasts. It’s a group messaging app that allows to build a closed “workspace” where a team of people can send messages, share files, and communicate. It can even assign your office Secret Santas for you. But here in the Department of Religious Studies, we’re using Slack to communicate across our new MA program in Religion in Culture.

Part of our new MA program is a foundations course, REL 502: Religion and Public Humanities, that I was in charge of teaching this year. In that class students learn a whole bunch of new digital tools for conducting and presenting their research and I knew we’d need an easy way to communicate, share links and files, and collaborate on projects. Email would have been to clunky for all of this so I decided to use Slack. When I told other faculty about this, it became clear that we could use Slack beyond just REL 502. Slack could provide a space for faculty and graduate students to share information, collaborate, and communicate.

""

So, rather than a Slack workspace just for my class, we have had a Slack workspace for the MA program as a whole and it has been really helpful. Every faculty member and all of our graduate students have access to it and it has made communication much easier in our new program. Within the workspace we have channels for each of the two foundations courses (REL 501 and REL 502), a channel called #gradhacks where we post advice for navigating graduate school, a general channel for information and announcements, and one for digital humanities within religious studies. The REL 501 class is using it to share brief responses to their readings each week while my REL 502 class uses it to collaborate on our digital projects.

""

More than communication, though, Slack provides camaraderie across the MA program. One student told me yesterday that she liked Slack because it was something more professional than a Facebook message or a text because it’s dedicated “for work” but less formal and complicated than an email because of its easy to use desktop and mobile apps. As our MA program grows and begins to produce alumni, we hope the Slack becomes a space where MA graduates can share ideas and advice with current MA students. The workspace will grow as the program grows and provide a stable digital hub for students and alumni. And it’s fun to share gifs.