A New Geography of Theological Education and the Ethics of Community-Centered Learning

Abstract

Institutions and scholars working in the area of community-based education are keenly attuned to the ethics of engaging those communities and their members. The concern is that the local community not be exploited but be treated with respect and understood as a mutual partner in the program. Yet continually, as we argue in this essay, such programs tend to repeat the very instrumentalization they are hoping to avoid because their design focuses more on student-centered experiences of individual growth and enrichment constructed upon a relational geography that privileges the ends of the learning institution. Such a dynamic shapes community-based theological education too, the institutional location we focus on in this essay. Hence, we propose that our institutions of learning need to be (re)located within local communities if we are going to shift this structural dynamic. To develop more just and transformative learning institutions, we argue, requires a new geography of education by developing community-centered modes of knowledge production through action-research practices that foster collaboration, solidarity, and collective action to forge a shared ethic. Moving in this direction will require a new geography of education for community-based learning. As an example, we offer a sketch from our own work at The Black Mountain School of Theology & Community.

Notes

1 Carrillo, Juan F. “The Unhomely in Academic Success: Latino Males Navigating the Ghetto Nerd Borderlands.” Culture, Society and Masculinities 5, no. 2 (Fall, 2013): 193–207.

2 Carrillo, Juan F. “Lost in “Degree”: A Chicano PhD Student’s Search for Missing Clothes.” Journal of Latinos and Education 6, no. 4 (09/01/2007), 348.

3 Carrillo, The Unhomely in Academic Success, 193. For a fuller description of whitestream academics and the particularly the dislocation of educators of color in white institutions, see also Luis Urrieta, Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009).

4 David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 121.

5 Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 246.

6 Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 247, 252. As Harvey is quick to note in his critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism, we should not see capitalism as only producing accumulation through expansion into non-capitalism territories. Instead, as the growing number of vulnerable and adjunct faculty recognize, capital also actively generates its own internal periphery by tearing down older barriers or limits on its advance through processes of creative destruction. The increasing eclipse of tenure can be seen as just one example of this (Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 260).

7 David F. Labaree, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 80.

8 Labaree, A Perfect Mess, 83–86.

9 Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 239. Harvey argues, following Marx, that crises are endemic to the capitalist process of accumulation. We think this applies as much to educational institutions focused on knowledge-capital as any other industry.

10 Evidencing the sense of crisis within theological education, Eerdmans Publishing has commissioned a new series of studies, edited by Ted A. Smith, entitled Theological Education between the Times. The outflow of a Lilly Foundation funded project housed at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology with the objective of “gather[ing] diverse groups of people for critical, theological conversations about the meanings and purposes of theological education in a time of deep change,” the book series is already at ten volumes. Information on and resources from this project can be found at: https://tebt.candler.emory.edu/about

11 For the latest Gallup Poll and Pew Research Center reports on religion, see: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx and https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/religion/.

12 Ted A. Smith, The End of Theological Education (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023), chapter 2. A shorter version of his argument appears in Ted A. Smith, “The Education of Authenticity: Theological Schools in an Age of Individualization,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2022): 297–299.

13 Smith, “Education of Authenticity,” 297.

14 Smith, “Education of Authenticity,” 298.

15 Smith, “Education of Authenticity,” 299.

16 Smith, “Education of Authenticity,” 298.

17 Smith, “Education of Authenticity,” 305.

18 See Smith, The End of Theological Education, chapters 4 and 5.

19 For a discussion of the origins of the seminary as a “seedbed” see, Justo L. González, The History of Theological Education (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2015), 122–123.

20 Testimonies similar to that of Carillo’s have also come from scholars, particularly scholars of color, in theological institutions. See, for instance, Keri Day, Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021) and Willie James Jenings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).

21 The term “organized abandonment” was coined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore to describe the intentional process of violence a racial-capitalist system deploys to render certain communities more pliable for extraction and accumulation. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, eds. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (New York: Verso, 2022), 303–308.

22 Marshall University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, for instance, describes community-based education, or community-based learning (CBL) as it is sometimes called, as simply a mode of learning that interweaves community engagement with instruction and reflection in order to produce a more robust process for knowledge expansion and acquisition. See https://www.marshall.edu/ctl/community-engagement/what-is-service-learning. One of the fields within which CBE has gained significant traction over the past three decades is health care and human services, including medicine and public health probably because the dissonance and disparity between institutions, scholars, and students and the communities they purport to serve is so acutely felt and obvious. In creating these programs, their developers name exactly some of the core ethical tensions we elaborate below. See Sandra Crouse Quinn, et al. “Ethics and Community-Based Education: Balancing Respect for the Community with Professional Preparation,” Family Community Health, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2001): 9–23.

23 On the disruptive nature of CBE spaces, see Bianca J. Bladridge, et al., “Toward a New Understanding of Community-Based Education: The Role of Community-Based Educational Spaces in Disrupting Inequality for Minoritized Youth,” Review of Research in Education, Vol. 41 (March 2017): 382.

24 Quinn, et al., “Ethics and Community-Based Education,” 22.

25 For a very short account of the origins, development, and purpose of field education, see Matthew Floding, ‘What is Theological Field Education?’ in Matthew Floding, ed., Welcome to Theological Field Education! (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 1–16.

26 The more recent use of ‘contextual education’ reflects the ongoing influence of educational studies on the discipline of practical ministry. As Elaine Johnson recounts, within the field of educational studies contextual teaching and learning grew out of a grassroots movement of educators (associated with the 1983 study ‘A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform’ and an initiative launched by the Secretary of Labor’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) to focus on applied learning in an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of traditional education. A strong emphasis on learning in context and the principle that knowing cannot be divorced from doing characterizes this movement. See Elaine B. Johnson, Contextual Teaching and Learning: What it is and Why it’s here to Stay (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc, 2002), pp. 1–20.

27 On the theme of trust in ministerial field education, see Barbara J. Blodgett, Lives Entrusted: An Ethic of Trust for Ministry (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008); on professional standards and stakeholder respect, see Joseph E. Bush, Jr., Gentle Shepherding: Pastoral Ethics and Leadership (Atlanta, GA: Chalice Press, 2006); on cross-cultural competency, see Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, “Beyond Diversity: Cultural Competence, White Racism Awareness, and European-American Theology Students,” Teaching Theology and Religion, Vol. 5, no. 3 (2002): 141–148; and on the practice of service, see Richard M. Gula, Ethics in Pastoral Ministry (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996).

28 While not exactly oriented to radical education, we could also add here the influence of broad-based community organizing networks, particularly the Industrial Areas Foundation, and affiliated training institutions like the Midwest Academy on our work and its approach. All three of us are IAF trained organizers with decades of experience. Furthermore, as will become apparent in the case we offer below, we make great use of organizing tools, tactics, and methods as part of our broader community-centered education initiative.

29 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 67.

30 One of the best accounts of such experiments is given in Mary Ann Hinsdale, Helen M. Lewis, and S. Maxine Waller, It Comes from the People: Community Development and Local Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995). See also, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “Participatory Action Research: Practical Theology for Social Justice,” Religious Education, Vol. 101, No. 3 (2006): 321–329 and Clare Watkins, Disclosing Church: An Ecclesiology Learned from Conversations in Practice (London, UK: Routledge, 2020).

31 Daniel P. Rhodes, “Theology as Social Activity: Theological Action Research and Teaching the Knowledge of Christian Ethics and Practical Ministry,” Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 73 (2020): 340–357. Timothy Conder, “A Moral Vision of Postcritical Ethnography: Reflexive Sensitivities that (In)form Ethnographic Political-Moral Agency” in Allison D. Anders & George W. Noblit (Eds.) Evolutions in Critical and Postcrtical Ethnography: Crafting Approaches (New York: Springer, forthcoming in 2024).

32 Working from the insights offered by Kathryn Tanner and Nicholas Healy, Christian Scharen among others has been influential in promoting the use of ethnography in theological research and education. An account of this turn is offered in Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen (eds.), Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011). See also, Elizabeth Phillips, ‘Charting the “Ethnographic Turn”: Theologians and the Study of Christian Congregations’, in Peter Ward (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 95–106. George Noblit, in cultural studies of education, has influentially established postcritical ethnography as a methodology that uniquely conjoins critical theory with interpretative ethnography and has theorized such methods as moral production. See G.W. Noblit, S.Y. Flores, & E.G. Murrillo, (2004). “Postcritical ethnography: An Introduction” in G.W. Noblit, S.Y. Flores, & E.G. Murrillo (Eds.), Postcritical Ethnography: Reinscribing Critique (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004) 1–52. Allison D. Anders in (2019) in Postcritical ethnography in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Education, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), carefully narrates the history of postcritical ethnography from its colonialist roots in anthropology to an interpretative methodology that ultimately grafts moral production, collaboration, and emancipatory expectations into the method.

33 Sara A. Williams, “On the Borders: A Multiaxial Pedagogical Approach to Community-Based Global Learning,” Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 24.

34 Other exciting experiments in CBE education within seminaries settings are being conducted by Miguel De La Torre and Peter Gathje. De La Torre’s work in creating immersion classes and teaching Christian ethics in border spaces and Gathje’s work at Memphis Theological Seminary to develop a Doctor of Ministy program that seeks to integrate scholarship, agriculture, and cultural studies maybe goes even further in the direction we ultimately recommend. Yet, both experiments remain configured and confined to some extent by an institutional structure that prioritizes individual learners and learning experiences that extend their home institutions without a full reshaping of the landscape of core and periphery itself. Similar to Williams above, their projets also struggle to break out of the mold. See Miquel A. De La Torre, Doing Christian Ethic from the Margins, 3^rd Ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023). For more on his pedagogical approach, see: http://drmigueldelatorre.com/philosophy/More information on Memphis Theological Seminary’s program and Peter Gathje can be found on their website: https://memphisseminary.edu/drofministry/.

35 We echo here the sense of “transforming the game” named by Romand Coles, see Romand Coles, “Transforming the Game: Democratizing the Publicness of Higher Education and Commonwealth in Neoliberal Times,” New Political Science, Vol. 36, no. 4 (2014), pp. 622–639.

36 Smith, End of Theological Education, 97. Our founding leaders and initial faculty were arrayed in a variety of vocational spaces. The three authors of this article reflect a diversity of academic titles and spaces. Cowser was then a tenured faculty member and an associate dean in a seminary with over thirty years of as an organizing leader in several Southern cities, She continues to teach community organizing in the academy, but now works primarily as an organizer on the ground. Rhodes is a Clinical Associate Professor in a theological school teaching on the intersections of political and ethical theology with community organizing. He complements his teaching with long experience as an organizer and a pastor. Conder has served for over thirty decades as a pastor and nearly two decades as an organizer. He teaches qualitative reseach methods, adaptive/critical leadership, and social justice pedagogies as an adjunct professor at a historically Black theological institution and in the education department of a research university. All have substantive and active research portfolios. We also reflect the commonalities of our leadership including deep critical, intersectional, and missional interests in the academy and lifetime commitments to spaces of practice such as congregations and organizing collectives. We are committed to using both scholars and experienced practice-based leaders in all of our pedagogical environments.

37 Students in our programs, whether as participants in sustained multi-years congregational cohorts, ad hoc trainings, or courses that resemble semester-length classes heavily trend toward “organic leaders” or laity with formal roles in congregations (to use organizing language, leaders defined as “those who are being followed”), professional clergy seeking to enliven their congregations through organizing/research tools and expand their social impact, students in traditional institutions who seek to supplement their formal curriculum who often have aspirations to lead outside of traditional clergy roles, and organizers (often in faith-based organizing settings) who seek greater understanding of theological intersections with public leadership. Commonalities of these partners and learners include strong appetites for critical theological leadership in public spaces. These attributes of our students naturally inspires a pedagogy of collaborative learning that draws on critical theology and the historical tenets of participatory action research, popular education, and action-based critical theory. As examples of action-based critical theory, see Daniella Ann Cook and Tiffany J. Williams, “Expanding Intersectionality: Fictive Kinship Networks as Supports for the Education Aspirations of Black Women,” The Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 39, no. 2 (2015), pp. 157–166. Also see Daniella Ann Cook and Adrienne D. Dixon, “Writing Critical Race Theory and Method: A Composite Counterstory on the Experiences of Black Teachers in New Orleans Post-Katrina,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol. 26, no. 10 (2013), pp. 1238–1258. Our application of these pedagogical commitments complements dialogical teaching often supported by tools and practices refined in popular education and community organizing with regular coaching in the ministry/leaderships sites of our students.

38 The practices and history of broad-based organizing are taught and illustrated in Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1972) and Edward T. Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for power, action, and justice (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). To see how these principles can be applied within congregations and a theological logic for this practice, see Tim Conder and Dan Rhodes, Organizing Church: Grassroots Practices for Embodying Change in Your Congregation, Your Community, and our World (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2017).

39 To better understand the role of “research-action” teams in organizing, see Michael Gecan, Going Public (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002).

40 In one powerful example, the Creek (Muskogee) Nation in the 19th Century faced cultural annihilation in the wake of Christian evangelistic and Euro-American economic interests. Their research of these arrayed spiritual, economic, and nationalistic forces assured a profound cultural legacy. See R.F. Steineker, “‘Fully Equal to that of any Children:’ Experimental Creek Education in the Antebellum Era,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 56, no. 2 (2016), pp. 273–300.

41 See Charles R. Hale, ed., Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (Berkeley, CA: University California Berkeley Press, 2008) for the growing field of engaged scholarship and methods of engaged ethnography.

42 Special thanks are due to our colleagues at the Wendland-Cook Institute at Vanderbilt Divinity School, the Freedom Center for Social Justice in Charlotte, NC, the Miller Summer Youth Institute at Pittsburgh Seminary, Union Seminary in Charlotte, NC, and Montreat Conference Center for joining with us in our work and learning.