Over half of all U.S. states have enacted legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, LGBTQ content, or boycott, divestment, & sanctions (BDS) discussions in higher education. This panel invites creative and critical reflections on how religion educators can teach against the state under such politically hostile circumstances. Are educators ethically obligated to defy state and institutional prohibitions, even when it threatens their personal security? What innovative tactics might allow religion scholars to continue pushing transformative education when colleges, universities, and theological institutions are intent on minimizing legal liability? How might research in the study of religion support these efforts to teach against the state?
In a climate of increased educational surveillance—much of it powered by the white Christian religious right—this paper argues from the lineages of feminist of color history and critical pedagogy that it is necessary to support innovative sites of education outside traditional academy. To that end, I discuss the contemplative and critical pedagogies I have used to build alternative classrooms for Christian clergy to study at the intersections of feminist/queer/anti-racist historical change and religious history. This paper suggests that studying how and why these histories of change have been erased is itself a vital democratic habit. I link scholarship in ethnic studies, feminist studies, and religious history to explore how teaching clergy and empowering their creative public voices in justice work—from racial justice in the U.S. to Palestinian rights— is one model of enacting transformative, innovative education and contesting anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-BDS laws.
Drawing on the radical pedagogical thinking of Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004), this presentation explores the tension between pedagogical authority and pedagogical authoritarianism. Through an exercise drawn from my classroom teaching, we reflect on the ways utopian freedom so often inverts into dystopian unfreedom, and think about the authority of the teacher as necessarily frail, contingent, and messy. The goal (both in the classroom and in the AAR presentation) is to live at the border between a facile anti-authoritarianism and a despairing return to authoritarian order, allowing students—led to this point through the authority of a pedagague—to find the freedom and responsibility of mutual accountability.
This paper traces the development and on-going assessment of a six-year experiment teaching community organizing as a required ethics course in graduate level theological education, and harvests insights useful to others seeking to integrate community organizing or other activist arts into theological and religious studies education. Assessment draws on recorded evaluations by students, faculty and guest instructors who are community organizers, and on three theoretical fields: community-organizing theory developed by feminist and Black women organizers, critical pedagogy, and decolonial theory. Questions arise: How can courses in community organizing address white supremacist undergirdings of theological and religious studies education, and neoliberal mentalities impacting morality? What are guidelines for teaching social change arts in academic curricula? What are relationships of community organizing to traditional fields in theology and religious studies? What are criteria for courses with explicit political implications that are required courses? What role may arts play in the pedagogy?