Pedagogy and the paradox of American evangelical involvement in East African schools

Abstract

This article analyzes the ideals and principles that organize American evangelical Christians' work in Africa. Based on field research conducted among a group of American restorationist missionaries working in Kenya and Tanzania, the author argues that the education-oriented work of these missionaries is paradoxically socially encompassing, yet excluding. Missionaries themselves anticipate that their educational programs will help to connect Africans with a global community and that by evangelizing quietly, through actions more so than through words, they can establish a sustainable church that has buy-in at the grassroots level. On the ground, however, these missionaries' work is neither fully integrative nor well established. Yet globalization, indigeneity, grassroots-focus, and sustainability are powerful organizing tropes that carry these missionaries' projects forward.

Keywords:

• religion
• Africa
• American evangelism
• health
• education
• marriage

Notes

1. Smith (1998, p. 136), in Apple (2006a, p. 161).

2. Long-term is defined by Weber and Welliver (2007) and by Welliver and Northcutt (2004) as those who work in one non-US location for more than four years.

3. I am grateful to the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology and the Republic of Kenya, Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology for permission to conduct field research. I am also grateful to Kristin Phillips for her outstanding research assistance.

4. For discussion of the details of missionaries' program at Musoma, including the head teacher's support for it, see Stambach (2010). Briefly, missionaries' program in Tanzania consisted of teaching English to cohorts of students at two public schools.

5. Recorded interview, 13 June 2002.

6. For a discussion of courses pertaining to religion at NBC, see Stambach (2009).

7. Fieldnotes, Tanzania, June 2002.