Welcome!

Thank you for visiting the digital home of Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard (L2BB), a collaborative, multi-year project of “The Workshop” based out of the Tang Institute at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts). This website was originally produced by the 2022 L2BB cohort to serve as a “living archive” of their work. Scroll down for an explanation of the spring 2022 L2BB project in the words of these six high school students. You’ll find a land and lineage acknowledgment crafted by the 2022 cohort on our Gratitude page, as well as articles and other materials related to L2BB on our Read page. If you have questions, suggestions, or ideas for collaboration, please do reach out—we’d love to hear from you!

Our Project

We are six high school seniors at Phillips Academy (Andover, MA) who spent the 2022 spring term visiting and learning from local Buddhist communities in close collaboration with Chenxing Han, author of Be the Refuge, and Andrew Housiaux, Director of the Tang Institute at Phillips Academy. Through our project, Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard, we visited nearly a dozen different Buddhist temples in the Merrimack Valley and spoke to monastics and laypeople to learn about Buddhism. We have been deeply moved by the community and kindness we experienced at these temples, and have come to better understand and deeply appreciate the diversity of American Buddhism today. This website houses the work we produced to reflect and build on our experiences throughout the term, including blog posts, social media posts, and a culminating symposium and conference.

The Workshop

The Workshop is a spring term interdisciplinary learning experience for high school seniors at Phillips Academy Andover. The program immerses students in project-based learning, real-world engagement, and research outside the classroom. We rely on relational accountability* and curiosity to create meaningful work, rather than traditional grading systems. This program is supported by the Tang Institute, a center for teaching, learning, and innovation. In 2022, it was led by our incredible teaching team: Andrew Housiaux, Corrie Martin, Nicholas Zufelt, and Christopher Jones.

*Relational accountability: holding researchers responsible to participants as well as participants’ communities; participation in group work and holding each other accountable to our goals.

L2BB

Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard is a project within the Workshop focusing on experiential research of local Buddhist communities in the Merrimack Valley. The program is designed and mentored by Chenxing Han, author of Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, and Andrew Housiaux, Director of the Tang Institute at Phillips Academy. Visiting nine Buddhist temples in a week-long intensive, we spoke with monastics and laypeople (members of the temple) and were immersed in the physical spaces, Buddhist practices, and community events. For the next eight weeks, we conducted further research and interviews with scholars in the fields of Buddhist studies and education, as well as revisited some of the temples, all in order to create meaningful work. Click the buttons below to learn more about the end-of-term online conference and in-person symposium that we hosted in May 2022.