Interfaith Learning and Development

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to introduce the theory of interfaith learning and development to the scholarly community. Building on the work of others, the authors adopted an interdisciplinary, equity-oriented approach to developing the theory, which also serves as the basis for a framework intended to guide and inform interfaith practice. Development occurs through exposure to and participation in college experiences that help students achieve outcomes related to religious, spiritual, and worldview development. Outcomes specific to interfaith learning and development include pluralism, self-authored worldview commitment, appreciative knowledge of religious and non-religious traditions, and appreciative attitudes toward religious and non-religious narratives.

As the public continues to scrutinize higher education for its societal value, student development theorists—and by extension their theories—must sustain their distinctive relevance, not only as both academic and pragmatic, but as responsible and timely. Indeed, “bridging theory and practice” continues as the mantra of the student development field, with foundational texts, curricula, and practices pivoting on the fundamental notion that knowledge of student and context loses meaning without pragmatic application to—if not deference toward—deeper understandings of students-in-context. Theory with practice genuflects to theory in practice.

What does it mean for theory in practice to be responsible and timely? Responsible student development theory-building must account for the experiences of students with different identities and narratives and the practices that help them make developmental gains. Critical questions must continue to disrupt exclusive, hegemonic, and irresponsible theory building: Who benefits from this practice? How have institutions succeeded or failed to design inclusive practices that invite, welcome, and appropriately challenge and support all students?

Complicating questions like these is the notion of timeliness. Practices documented for their efficacy in helping students learn and develop need consistent attention and revisioning if they are to help students succeed. Imagine, for example, the dramatic changes in the practice of study abroad necessitated in a world shaped by COVID-19. Certainly, to remain responsible and keep student development theory relevant, theories-in-practice must be refined and sometimes introduced to the field.

The purpose of this article is to introduce interfaith learning and development as a responsible and timely theory-in-practice to the field of student development. Building on the excellence of scholars both in and out of the field, we hope that this theory-in-practice will usher in a new era of thinking about religion and spirituality, students’ approach to their own religious and spiritual selves, and of course, the practices and developmental mechanisms needed to help students grow in these areas.

To this end, we provide a narrative outline of this effort. First, we will define interfaith learning and development and argue for its use as an emergent but valid theory-in-practice. Second, we will discuss the interfaith learning and development model, a conceptual framework for examining the institutional conditions and educational practices empirically documented for their success in helping all students develop.

Origins

The process of interfaith learning and development is possible, measurable, and important. First, we assume that interfaith learning and development occur among college students. Not only is the interfaith learning and development process an ontological reality, dimensions of it can be theorized and studied, reflecting our epistemic posture that interfaith observations and their resulting measurements shed light not only on interfaith dynamics among individuals but also on the psychological mechanisms underlying its development. Finally, we value the study of the interfaith learning and development process for its potential in disrupting historic and hegemonic student development narratives that skew heavily toward privileged religious identities, improving students’ lives, and ultimately enriching society.

The interfaith learning and development model extends theoretical work related to faith and spiritual development. Well-documented for its utility in describing sequential processes involved with maturing faith, Fowler provided a framework for describing students’ faith journeys as they proceed through college. Similarly, Sharon Parks addressed spiritual development by thoughtfully analyzing the ways students made meaning of their sense of purpose through college. Building on the shoulders of these great thinkers, we add to conversations of religious and spiritual development by offering interfaith learning and development, a theory-in-practice designed to account for the growth of students, not just those representing the religious or spiritual majority.

Our theory-in-practice describes developmental growth for students in a manner that honors differences in the religious or spiritual narratives they bring to college. One of the challenges with the theories advanced by Fowler and Parks concerns their very restricted sampling of mostly White, Christian students. For example, the nonrandom sample Fowler (1981) used to derive his model for faith development consisted of 359 individuals with 97.8% identifying as White and 81.5% as Christian (i.e., of the 329 individuals whose faith origins were known). Similarly, Sharon Daloz Parks (1980) interviewed 20 students of whom only two presented differently than the others by way of country of origin and race. Unlike its predecessors, the interfaith learning and development theory-in-practice—introduced in this article—was built upon the observations and voices of students across different racial/ethnic, religious, and spiritual narratives.

Definition

The interfaith learning and development model is based on the assumption that robust interfaith engagement is a precursor to cultivating the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that signify growth. In straightforward terms, “interfaith” reflects the “coming together of people who orient around religion differently” (Rockenbach et al., 2020, p. 1). Importantly, aligned with Eck’s (1993) definition of pluralism, interfaith is inherently interactive; it is more than simple compositional diversity. That is, the mere presence of students with different religious and spiritual narratives on campus does not make it an interfaith environment. Rather, interfaith environments are those in which people encounter one another’s stories, identities, beliefs, values, and practices to such a degree that they come away changed. Exchanges that are truly interfaith provoke and challenge, disrupt stereotypes and misinformation, foster empathy, and provide an avenue toward bridge-building and productive relationships. In our view, interfaith is highly intersectional such that students’ religious or spiritual narratives are woven together with other core dimensions of self, such as their race, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Intersectional identity narratives critically shape power, privilege, and marginalization in interfaith spaces, undercurrents that must be named and navigated by those committed to the work of interfaith engagement.

The ideas of learning and development have been considered essential for scholars interested in college and their effects on students. Although scholars like Bob Rodgers (2009) maintained a distinction between learning and development, most other thought leaders in the fields of higher education and student development use these terms interchangeably (King & Baxter Magolda, 1999; Kuh et al., 1991; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991), especially since the publication of the Student Learning Imperative in 1996 (American College Personnel Association, 1996).

The interfaith learning and development theory-in-practice assumes that learning and development share overlapping qualities but are distinct in several important ways. They share an ontology—in the context of interfaith, each exists and can be accessed through observation and measurement. Also, each can be positioned as something that can be affected—achieved on the interfaith learning side and developed on the interfaith development side.

Their differences lie in the contextual nuance interfaith learning and development bring to the conversation. Patel and Meyer (2011) suggested that appreciative attitudes toward religious difference lead to shared understanding and common action, but they are predicated on interfaith literacy and relationship building. For development to occur, there must be some knowledge acquired or learning attained, either through literacy or relationship. Because interfaith learning and interfaith development differ to some degree, our approach to their measurement also differed, something we explain in further detail in the next section.

Interfaith learning and development manifest in four critical domains, including appreciative knowledge toward religious and non-religious groups, appreciative attitudes toward religious and non-religious groups, self-authored worldview commitment, and pluralism. We turn now to an explanation of each.

Domain 1: Appreciative Knowledge

Appreciative knowledge of worldview identities relies on factual information that holds worldview traditions and communities in a positive regard. More than religious literacy, appreciative knowledge includes information about specific worldviews in the context of appreciation, as opposed to toleration.

The theoretical rationale pushing tolerance toward appreciation is a critical feature of interfaith learning and development. Grounded in the work of Bloom et al. (1956), Eck (n.d.) and Patel and Meyer (2011), we locate knowledge as a learning cornerstone, from which more sophisticated ideas emerge. As part of this process, Eck (n.d.) offered her view on sophisticating notions of religious tolerance: “tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity” (para. 3). Extending the idea of appreciation, we asked questions about specific religious and non-religious traditions. These included atheism,¹ Buddhism, Catholicism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Latter-day Saints. Although we could not include all religious and non-religious categories, we wanted to ask students about their knowledge of specific religious and non-religious traditions, rather than assuming that deeper knowledge of one or two would indicate a level of appreciation for all.

The knowledge component of the outcome refers to didactic information students might retain as a result of appreciating worldview differences. In this sense—and unlike any other part of the interfaith learning and development theory and model—knowledge is either known or not: There are right and wrong answers to each of the eight items comprising this construct.

Seven items were used to measure appreciative knowledge. Specifically, we asked students: (a) if they know the foundational sacred text used in the Jewish tradition, (b) what distinguishes atheists and agnostics, (c) what spiritual practice takes place from dawn until dusk during the month of Ramadan in the Muslim tradition, (d) what the gospel refers to in Christianity, (e) what the notion of Nirvana in the Buddhist tradition refers to, (f) who founded the Latter-day Saints movement, (g) the name the religious identity of Mahatma Gandhi, and (h) the name of a Catholic social activist from a list of 6 choices.

Domain 2: Appreciative Attitudes

The appreciative attitudes component of the interfaith learning and development framework takes its cues from theoretical and empirical efforts to understand how intergroup contact reduces prejudice and opens the door to positive regard between people of different social identities (e.g., Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998, Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000). Of course, appreciation in the context of attitudes adopts a theoretical posture similar to its use in the context of knowledge. As Bowman et al. (2017) noted: “Rather than simply increasing tolerance on campus, appreciative attitudes serve as bridges, helping individuals to respectfully engage across difference and work together in serving their communities (p. 102). Put simply, our framework queries an individual’s proclivities for productive relationships across difference by way of their degree of positive regard for people who do not share their worldview.

In place of generic measures that ask students how they feel about people of religions and worldviews other than their own, our measures are attuned to nuanced impressions students have of specific groups. We ask students to consider four statements in relation to seven different religious and nonreligious identities (i.e., atheist, Buddhist, evangelical Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Latter-day Saints, Muslim):

1. In general, people in this group make positive contributions to society.

2. In general, individuals in this group are ethical people.

3. I have things in common with people in this group.

4. In general, I have a positive attitude toward people in this group.

Domain 3: Self-Authored Worldview Commitment

Self-authored worldview commitment is the individual’s ability to make meaning of their religious selves. As Mayhew and Bryant Rockenbach (2013) noted, “[w]hen applied to religiosity, spirituality, and ideology, a self-authored individual creates an internal script for making meaning of his or her beliefs, identity, and relationships with others” (p. 64). Based on Kegan’s (2009) notions of human development and Baxter Magolda’s (2014) self-authorship frameworks, students self-author their religious narratives through exposure to and engagement with different religious perspectives; this process influences how students think about their religious selves, how they identify religiously, and how they relate to religious others. Developmental movement occurs through the responsible and equitable resolution of the dissonance engendered by exposure to and engagement with difference. Resolution does not necessarily indicate abandonment of or change in belief systems; quite the opposite, it often occurs by way of the student’s “willingness to engage in learning opportunities that challenge existing worldviews and strengthen them as a result” (Mayhew & Bryant Rockenbach, 2013, p. 65).

The worldview component of this outcome considers worldview to reflect students’ “guiding life philosophy, which may be based on a particular religious tradition, a spiritual orientation, a nonreligious perspective, or some combination of these” (Mayhew et al., 2016, p. 362). It is an inclusive term intended to capture the essence of the belief system of all students.

The commitment dimension of this outcome is worth explaining. Finding theoretical support in work by James Marcia (1966) and William Perry (1970), we frame commitment as critical for explaining developmental achievement. Successful resolution of the dissonance or “crisis” that comes with exposure to and engaging different religious perspectives leads to a form of commitment that may and will likely continue to evolve, based on encountering difference over time. As Mayhew et al. (2016) noted, “Students with more sophisticated forms of self-authored worldview commitment are more likely than other students to come to commitment through authentic dialogue with people of other religious and worldview identities” (p. 363).

Taken together, self-authored worldview commitment is a new interfaith outcome, theoretically based, and empirically tested. Items comprising the construct ask students to reflect upon the degree to which they think the following statements are accurate:

1. I have thoughtfully considered other religious and nonreligious perspectives before committing to my current worldview.

2. I have had to reconcile competing religious and nonreligious perspectives before committing to my current worldview.

3. I talked and listened to people with points of view different than my own before committing to my worldview.

4. I integrated multiple points of view into my existing worldview before committing to it.

Domain 4: Pluralism

Our conceptualization of pluralism draws on Eck’s (1993) multifaceted definition, which includes four components: “engagement with diversity rather than the sheer fact of diversity alone; migration from tolerance to acceptance of others; commitment as developmentally distinctive and possible within a relativistic society; and an understanding and appreciation of worldview differences (not merely commonalities)” (Rockenbach et al., 2015, p. 28). Pluralism is an orientation that is at once attitudinal and behavioral—it reflects openness, respect, and empathy toward others as well as active efforts to learn from and work with people of other worldviews in the interest of advancing social change.

All told, growth in pluralism during college positions graduates as ready and able to navigate and contribute to a religiously and culturally diverse society. Plentiful evidence suggests that higher education holds tremendous promise with respect to helping students make gains in diversity-related outcomes like pluralism as a result of curricular, co-curricular, and interactional/relational opportunities for engagement across religious, cultural, and other core identity differences (see Mayhew et al., 2016).

Pluralism consists of four sub-dimensions, including global citizenship (i.e., active engagement in learning about and caring for people of diverse worldviews across the world), goodwill toward others of different worldviews, appreciation of worldview commonalities and differences, and commitment to interfaith leadership and service. Specifically, pluralism is represented by statements such as

1. I am actively learning about people across the globe who have different religious and cultural ways of life than I do.

2. I feel a sense of good will toward people of other religious and nonreligious perspectives.

3. My faith or beliefs are strengthened by relationships with those of diverse religious and nonreligious backgrounds.

4. Love is a value that is core to most of the world’s religions.

5. There are essential differences in spiritual practices that distinguish world religions.

6. I am committed to leading efforts in collaboration with people of other religious and nonreligious perspectives to create positive changes in society.

The Interfaith Learning and Development Model

The interfaith learning and development model was guided by equity considerations relating not only to minoritized religious narratives but to the intersections of any religious narrative with other social identities, such as race and gender. The model presupposes that interfaith learning and development is most likely to occur when the culture and climate of the institution are optimized for success for students given their diverse religious, raced, and gendered presentations and expressions. Exercising this supposition, we understand that the religious challenges minoritized students face on college campuses will differ based on the needs expressed by any particular social identity group and that it is the institution’s responsibility to support students through these distinctive set of challenges. See Figure 1 for the conceptual framework guiding this study.

Figure 1. Interfaith Learning and Development Framework (Mayhew & Rockenbach, 2018)

College impact theorists, such as Astin (1984), Pascarella and Terenzini (2005), and Tinto (1994), and Hurtado et al. (1998) provided fundamental insights into the framework. Surely, these scholars were the thought leaders who grounded any inquiry into college and its effects on students as an exercise in understanding what students bring to college, how these pre-college experiences and distinctive narratives inform the college experiences they choose, and how each of these influences student learning and development.

Ecologists, such as Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979), guided our thinking by locating the person–environment relationship as reciprocal, where individual development is a function of many environmental cues that in turn are shaped by the individual’s interpretation of those cues. He also placed importance on the construct of time for its potential influence on the person-environment dynamic. In our framework, extensions of Bronfrenbrenner’s thinking are represented in the structure of the model, with arrows representing this reciprocity and concentric circles indicating the layered environmental cues students use to interpret the institution’s commitment to interfaith learning and development. In addition, our model accounts for time. Indeed, religiously based issues reflecting the socio-political, national context (e.g., federal policies concerning Muslim bans) are important to study for their potential influence on interfaith learning and development at any given time.

Turning to the environment, we included institutional conditions, organizational behaviors, cultural indicators, and climate contexts as the next set of constructs hypothesized for interfaith learning and development to occur. Discussed by Bronfenbrenner (1979) and extended by others like Weidman (1989), Hurtado et al. (1999), and Berger and Milem (2000), these constructs are critical for examining the institution as an environment poised to help students learn and develop. Institutional conditions represent immutable characteristics scholars often used to categorize institutions: Examples include institutional type, geographical region, selectivity, size, Carnegie classification, and control. Organizational behaviors are mutable characteristics of an institution—university-sponsored educational practices designed to help students achieve desired learning outcomes (See Terenzini & Reason, 2014). Including organizational behaviors as a construct involved administering surveys to institutional champions with information relevant to interfaith practice (e.g., the presence of an interfaith council, resource allocation toward interfaith programming, etc.).

Peterson and Spencer (1991) defined institutional culture as “the deeply embedded patterns of organisational behaviour and the shared values, assumptions, beliefs, or ideologies that members have about their organisation or its work” (p. 142). To explain the cultural dimensions of a university’s commitment to interfaith development and learning, we adopted an analytic practice—aligned with this theoretical notion of shared values—used by scholars interested in outcomes similar to interfaith development and learning. Cultural dimensions of the institutional environment were calculated by averaging the student learning and development scores by the institution they attended, a process which resulted in assigning each institution a series of specific “cultural” scores. Examples include an institution’s average change over time in pluralism, self-authored worldview commitment, and appreciative attitudes.

Turning to climate, Hurtado et al.’s (1998) work on racial climate spurred our conceptualization of the environmental cues related to outcomes pertaining to interfaith learning and development. Rankin and Reason (2008) defined climate consisting of “the current attitudes, behaviors, and standards of faculty, staff, administrators and students concerning the level of respect for individual needs, abilities, and potential” (p. 264). Consistent with the call for more multi-dimensional approaches to addressing campus climate issues (Harper & Hurtado, 2007) and based on the results of initial analyses, we learned that not all of the climate perceptions and experiences were readily captured by two categories: positive and negative (see Bowman, 2012; Engberg, 2007; Gurin et al., 2002; Hurtado, 1992; Mayhew & Engberg, 2010; Nelson-Laird et al., 2005; Nora & Cabrera, 1996; Saenz et al., 2007) or productive or nonproductive (see Shapses-Wertheim, 2014). Therefore, we adopted a two part-strategy for addressing climate issues within the context of interfaith learning and development. For climate constructs that aligned with the literature related to more positive and negative dimensions of a campus interfaith experience, we created a second-order factoring solution and used the process of averaging student scores by the institution they attended to create two institution-level climate indicators: positive and negative. Positive campus climates are both religiously diverse and welcoming, while negative climates are religiously divisive. Five other constructs that did not appropriately, nor analytically, fit within these categories—and that reflected interpersonal interactions rather than institution-level features of climate—were subsumed within what we call the relational context for interfaith development and learning.

More than any other model consideration, the relational dimension of the campus climate for interfaith learning and development centers religion as the focus for understanding the student–environment dynamic. Specifically, the relational context includes the degree to which individual students report: (a) provocative experiences that challenge their religious worldviews, (b) supportive spaces for them to explore religious difference, (c) coercive places where they feel forced to examine or change their beliefs, (d) unproductive environments where students feel silenced by religion-based micro-aggressions, and (e) overt discriminatory practices. At what point does sharing faith become coercive? What does religious challenge look like in the college environment? Support for this challenge? Presenting distinctive challenges for scholars interested in interfaith development and learning, these questions demonstrate the need for creating a climate dimension distinctive to the study of climate in the context of interfaith learning and development. Indeed, the relational climate—how religion mitigates the relationship between the student and the institution—is a critical consideration for scholars interested in interfaith development and learning.

Of course, the disciplinary context is also one worth pursuing because it relates to interfaith learning and development. Based on the empirical work in this area, college major tends to influence the degree to which students learn and develop, even in the context of outcomes related to religion and spirituality (Bryant & Astin, 2008). Still lingering are questions about the college major itself: What is it? A purely organizational strategy educators adopt for overseeing academic delivery? A proxy for peers who share common academic interests and coursework? Although questions like these are not distinctive to the study of interfaith learning and development, they present challenges associated with understanding students’ relationship to the college environment because questions of purpose—and calling—are often entangled with academic performance within courses related to college major.

Student experiences are also critically important to understanding interfaith learning and development. Work by Pascarella (1984), Weidman (1989), and Tinto (1994) suggested adopting a framework that deconstructs experiences into four dimensions: formal academic (i.e., discussion of interfaith cooperation in at least one academic course, visiting a religious space off campus as part of a class, or enrolling in a religion course on campus specifically designed to enhance one’s knowledge of different religious traditions), informal academic (i.e., using a case study as a way to examine religious and nonreligious diversity in the world, discussing religious or spiritual topics with faculty, and reflecting on why interfaith cooperation is relevant to one’s field of study), formal social (i.e., participating in an interfaith dialogue on campus, attending a formal debate on campus between people with different worldviews, and learning about religious diversity on campus in orientation or other required events), and informal social (i.e., having conversations with people of diverse religious or nonreligious perspectives about the values everyone has in common, dining with someone of a different religious or nonreligious perspective, and studying with someone of a different religious or nonreligious perspective). Of course, we used this framework to include experiences the literature identified as relevant for approaching the study of interfaith learning and development.

Conclusion

Building upon the shoulders of thought leaders, our theory-in-practice and framework provides insights into the empirical study of interfaith learning and development. Established on equity considerations, this theory-in-practice and its accompanying framework are intended to generate more nuanced conversations about interfaith learning and development and the collegiate conditions and educational conditions that spur their achievement and development. How do these ideas extend equity considerations? In what ways do they fall short? As scholars who straddle the lines between college impact and student development, we remain committed to and open to critique from scholars on both sides as well as those from other disciplines that share an intellectual curiosity and investment in interfaith work.

Our goal in doing this work is simple: to change the world by making it a better place for people of all worldviews. We believe that college provides a distinctive and exciting space for change to occur. Change not abandonment, learning and development not learning or development, appreciation not tolerance, collectivist not individualistic—these are the ideas that inspired the interfaith learning and development theory in-practice and framework. We offer them in the generous spirit of Jon Dalton, co-editor of the Journal of College and Character, whose work and publications relating to the moral, spiritual, and civic development of college students continue to inspire us and scores of others seeking to change the world through responsible and timely empirical research on the effects of college on students.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funders including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, Porticus UK, and the Arthur Vining Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Matthew J. Mayhew

a

Matthew J. Mayhew ([email protected]) is the William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor of Educational Administration with a focus on Higher Education and Student Affairs at The Ohio State University.

Alyssa N. Rockenbach

b

Alyssa N. Rockenbach ([email protected]) is Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University.

Notes

¹ Some religious traditions are atheist.