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Abstract
Based in an ethnographic project involving three Episcopal Church–affiliated high schools, this article considers how reflective and relational pedagogy influenced students’ personal growth in religious education classes. Students became self-responsible for their spiritual development in the school settings where the practice of “notebooking” (similar to “journaling”) was robustly relational and nurtured emergent personhood. The results of the project suggest that religious educators will benefit from reflecting on the nature and function of relationality, personae, and personhood in religious education praxis.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the REA members who attended and provided feedback at my presentation of an earlier draft of this article at REA Boston 2013. Thanks as well to two anonymous reviewers for suggestions that have allowed me to include a more comprehensive final section.
Notes
Although the “iron cage” is a metaphor used by followers of Max Weber to describe the constrictions of modern social life and its influence on worldly vocations, it is also a metaphor that describes a teenager's experience of school—and lack of agency: “School's a jail for the most part, and we just clang our tin cups against the bars and nobody listens, nobody hears, or cares to hear what we have to say” (Hersch Citation1998, 90).
For details of the collaborative project, see Geiger (Citation2013; 2015).
For a critical history of this tension between autonomy and pluralism in education as it relates to psychological praxis see Martin and McLellan (Citation2013).
For an extended discussion of Moore and Nord, see Geiger and Gardner (Citation2012).
John Wall connects human growth and the tension of relationality, and seeks thereby to subdue anxiety over the presence of tension: “Tensio literally means stretching” (2010, 53).
Relationality refers, broadly speaking, to the positive forms of relationship between individuals. Relationality concerns modes of intersubjective relating and the quality of relationships through “care, love, friendship, and mutuality” (Wall et al. Citation1999, 139). On the details of the relational practice see Geiger (Citation2013; 2015).
On the inequality of student competition for the attention of adults in schools, see Kegan (1982, 19).
On these desired outcomes in RE, see Jackson (Citation1999, 213).
Candace was referring to reflective exercises that invited, but did not force, students to identify negative character traits in case studies that they could also see in themselves. The reader should note that students were repeatedly told that they should share their ideas (with the teacher) only to the degree that was comfortable for them. All students, moreover, were made aware that anything written by a student that caused concern for the health or safety of any person was required by law to be brought to the attention of an administrator and/or school counselor. On the ethical safeguards of the project see Geiger (Citation2013; 2015).
Notebooking at GUESS and MASS resembles the kind of welcoming practices—saturated with face-to-face, honest relationality—that Mary McClintock Fulkerson (Citation2007) observed as capable of generating the genuine “appearing” of marginalized bodies and persons.
I had access to significantly less data at CASE, especially regarding student written reflections, and therefore believe that I should not make sweeping claims about why notebooking did not work as well at that school.
I use the terms sincerity and authenticity in their traditional senses: to say what one really thinks; to stay true to oneself. See Trilling (Citation1972, chapter 1).
On the unobservable, yet scientifically relevant concept of the soul or core, see Smith (Citation2010, 22 n. 30).
I am adopting here the language of Soren Kierkegaard, for whom the “aesthetic” realm of existence entailed observing, objectifying, perceiving—but not committing. The “ethical” mode of life, in contrast, actualizes the personality because it requires the commitment of the will to make real the imagined, ideal possibilities of the reflective self. See Taylor (Citation1975, chapter 4).
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, Alexandria, Virginia. E-mail: [email protected]