Religious Education Person to Person: Attending to Relationality

Abstract

Based in an ethnographic project involving three Episcopal high schools, five teachers, and roughly three-dozen students, this article addresses the importance of personal and relational pedagogy for spiritual growth in youth. Grounded in interview conversations with students and teachers, the results of the collaborative project suggest that personal spiritual and religious formation is both a reality and an open possibility in an academic setting through relational educative practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the following for the time and care that they gave to reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article: David Gortner, Dori Baker, Dan Heischman, Ryan Gardner, Charles Chesnavage, Ned Edwards, Joyce Mercer, and most especially Emily Geiger. Two final notes of thanks: to Barbara Repp for transcribing the student interviews, and to the generous, big-souled participating students at GUESS, CASE, and MASS.

Notes

The project was the basis of a participatory action research doctoral thesis (Geiger 2013) at Virginia Theological Seminary, and the ethnography was conducted in regular consultation with the thesis advisor Rev. Dr. David Gortner. Three Episcopal Church affiliated high schools participated: “Girls Urban Episcopal Secondary School” (GUESS), “Many Anglican Saints School” (MASS), and “Christian Anglo School Education” (CASE). The five teaching faculty were: Mr. Lisbon, Ms. Aer, and Rev. English at GUESS; Matthew W. Geiger at MASS; and Rev. Baptiza at CASE. School administrators were in knowledge of the project and supported it. Small group and one-on-one interview conversations were audio recorded with roughly a dozen students at each school. All names of institutions, faculty members (save the author), and students are fictional, and all students read and signed human subjects research forms granting permission for interviews and use of data for later publication. All students who at the time of interviews were not yet 18 years old were allowed to participate only with signed parental consent.

As I have developed the practice in my own setting, I do not call the notebooks “journals” because I stress to students that they ought never to be more personal in their reflections than they feel comfortable.

Rev. Baptiza (CASE) articulated this ideal of empathetic learning during our first meeting, saying: “I really want the students to get into these perspectives, to really understand them from the inside.” Due to practical limitations, I cannot here take up the important issue of whether or to what extent something like genuine understanding of a religious worldview that is different from one's own worldview is possible. I do not believe that a student who “tries on” a Buddhist or Hindu worldview, for instance, gains a full understanding of what it means to be a Buddhist or Hindu. I agree with scholars such as Diane Moore who do not want religious educators to “essentialize” a religious worldview and rob it of its inherent diversity (Moore 2007, 69; see also Aldridge 2011, 43 and Jackson 1999, 208–210). Moore's worry that students may receive one cultural representation of a religious tradition as the form of that religion is legitimate. These concerns are not, however, capable of being addressed in the present article.

The “ethical” aspect of RE should not be confused with matters of morality or moral philosophy. “Ethical” reading and engagement with course content refers to the ancient, broad conception of the ethical: how one's life, mind, and desires are altered and shaped by engagement with texts/content. Ethical engagement concerns, therefore, the reasons for and importance of “bringing to the text our hopes, fears, and confusions, and allowing the text to impart a certain structure to our hearts” (Nussbaum 1990, 22).

According to Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “literally and originally, ‘to believe’ means ‘to hold dear’” (Smith 1998, 105).

The reader should be aware that notebooking aimed to be an invitation to students to be personal, and I strongly caution practitioners to not embark brashly on being personal in a relational pedagogy. I refer the reader to Dori Baker's Doing Girlfriend Theology (2005, 167–168), where she discusses the advantages of group versus one-on-one reflection practices. While it is extremely important to note that “one-on-one relationships run the risk of leading to the abuse of power,” students participating in the project testified early and often to the value and importance of notebooking's personal relationality. At all three schools the project and practice of notebooking was supported by administration and all participants were aware that normal safeguards for child safety, such as the absolute obligation of a teacher to alert an administrator of a student's reflection if it was threatening to self or other, were in place.

Rev. Baptiza, the CASE Chaplain and religion teacher, had a complicated professional situation and was not able to devote the time and energy to notebooking that he had originally volunteered for. I am grateful to Rev. Baptiza and the eleven CASE students who talked with me “on the record.” Although the data at CASE was significantly smaller than at GUESS and MASS, what Baptiza and the students were able to give proved to be a most valuable relief for interpreting why things worked well at the other schools. Since, however, CASE supplied the least amount of data, in the interest of being fair and just to all involved from CASE, rather than analyze why things did not go well at CASE I will focus on interpreting the positive outcomes at GUESS and MASS.

Relationality does not have a univocal meaning in scholarly literature. This is due, in part, to its somewhat contemporary origin in the “relational school” of psychotherapy and the intersubjective philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. See Cooper-White (2004, 25 and 201, n. 77).

I realize that the examples that I have used from the experiences of Tabby and Maddie are both connected to their troubled relations to the Roman Catholic Church, and I ask the reader to believe in the good faith, rather than poisonous intention, of my use of them. They have been chosen because they illustrate the relational form of student–teacher interaction.

They did not discourage me from sharing the practice—the point is simply that its value was not on their radar screen.

Although there is not space to share the nuances of the “conversation” of notebooking at MASS, the reader should be aware that MASS students were invited to give written responses to my written feedback in the notebook. The notebook was literally, therefore, a place of conversation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew W. Geiger

Dr. Matthew W. Geiger teaches in the Religion Department at St. Stephen's and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia. E-mail: [email protected]