Religious Studies Honors Alumnus Educator
The Department of Religious Studies has named High School Director Sean Blevins from Annoor Academy of Knoxville the 2025 recipient of its Charles H. Reynolds Distinguished Alumnus Award.
“He demonstrates one of many ways in which our students go on to become important leaders in their community,” said Tina Shepardson, a distinguished professor in the humanities and head of the award selection committee.
“He has dedicated most of his adult life to cultivating his skills as a teacher in different contexts in order to best serve a really broad constituency of students,” said Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballas, who also served on the committee.
Blevins (BA ’98, MA ’03) builds education experiences for students around the same types of learning that were meaningful to him. “The religious studies department has been very formative to me,” he said.
He intended to major in music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, but realized during his freshman year that his interests were much broader. “I wound up taking two or three religious studies classes, an English class, an astronomy class, and anthropology and really, really loved my religious studies classes,” he said. “I was interested in why people are the way they are. I thought the most interesting answers were somehow tied up with what they believe.”
Blevins settled on a major in religious studies with a minor in English. He was particularly interested in Buddhism, and with encouragement from religious studies Professor Miriam Levering applied to a study abroad program in Bodh Gaya, India. “I lived in a Theravada Buddhist monastery and was able to study there for a semester,” he said. “That was an outstanding experience the first semester of my senior year.”
Career Start
The next semester he began volunteering at Ijams Nature Center a few days a week. Leading elementary school groups on field trips, walking in the woods with children and talking about what they found, was a rewarding experience for Blevins.
After graduation he worked in environmental education at Ijams through the AmeriCorps national service program. “I spent the next two years in some low-income schools around Knox County building gardens and nature trails, doing waste audits, and starting recycling programs,” Blevins said. “It wasn’t directly connected to my religious studies work, except that I was trying to find a way to live a life that felt meaningful.”
Blevins returned to UT in 2001 to earn a master’s degree in religious studies with a plan to concentrate on the New Testament. “And then September 11th happened, and everything was about Islam,” Blevins said.
“I was taking a class on Islam with (Professor) Rosalind Hackett and was very aware of the discourse that was happening around Islam, the way people were talking about Islam,” he said. “The lived experience of Muslims in America and around the world at that time suddenly became hyper relevant, and so I shifted my focus to Islam.”
The summer after his first year of graduate school, he traveled to Amman, Jordan, studying Arabic and meeting with scholars of Islam. He developed a deep respect for Islam and became Muslim.
Meeting High Standards
As a graduate student, Blevins also served as a teaching assistant (TA) in the Department of Religious Studies. “One of the biggest honors I’ve had in my life was when (Professor) James Fitzgerald asked me to be his TA,” Blevins said.
“As an undergraduate, he was the first professor—the first teacher—I ever had in my life to give me something other than an A on a paper,” he recalled. “It rocked my world.”
Blevins went to see the professor during his office hours and ask what needed to be better. “I remember what he recommended to me, and that was a very, very eye-opening transformation, meeting somebody who was going to push me to meet new, higher standards. So, when I came back, to have him invite me to be his TA was tremendous.”
After completing the master’s program, Blevins became a lecturer in the department, teaching the history of world religions and a thematic comparison of world religions for five years. He noticed, however, that some incoming students struggled with reading texts and articulating their own arguments in writing, and he decided to become a high school English teacher. Blevins earned his third degree from UT, an MS in English education, in 2009. Later he earned an educational specialist degree.
Blevins taught for two years at Knoxville’s Austin East High School before traveling with his family to Jordan for two years. There he studied Arabic and Islam, and he taught English as a second language. His wife, an attorney, had a Fulbright award to study human trafficking.
Over the following eight years Blevins taught at L&N STEM Academy, where he was recognized as a Teacher of the Year by students (2015) and faculty (2017). The school’s English department was so successful that he and his colleagues presented their work at conferences for the National Science Teaching Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.
Rich Classroom Experiences
“I found myself trying to recreate in the classroom what some of my richest classroom learning experiences had been,” he said, “reading something interesting and then talking about it, pulling the ideas out and weighing those ideas.”
In 2021 the private Islamic school Annoor Academy hired Blevins to develop its high school program. The first seniors will graduate in spring 2026.
“I intentionally have gone about trying to build what I think of as a reasonable approximation of a liberal arts academy,” he said. “Students are required to take a number of classes that are really explicitly designed to help them understand the world that we live in and why the world is the way it is, and why people behave the way they do, and then, when they go out into the world, how can they be meaningful agents of change in the world.”
Blevins recalls reading a 2023 column by David Brooks titled, “In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human.” “Religious studies speaks directly to that,” Blevins said. “What does it mean to be a human being? How do human beings express their humanity? What are the consequences of believing in certain ways and behaving in certain ways, and what role do rituals and beliefs play in shaping us in our world and our environment and our shared communities?”
“Those are the things that I feel like really matter,” he said, “and those are things that I learned and got to explore for years in religious studies. I’m really grateful for that.”
By Amy Beth Miller