Dr. Roy E. Barsness, Professor of Counseling Psychology, and Richard D. Kim, Intercultural Credibility Coordinator/Consultant, recently partnered on an article that was published in the Association of Theological Schools’ Theological Education journal, Volume 45, No. 2. The focus of the issue is “The Changing Character of Faculty Work,” and Barsness and Kim address the need to develop a philosophy of education that fits the increasing diversity in seminary classrooms. The article is available in PDF form here or in full text below, and no portion of this text may be reproduced without proper permission (full copyright notice below).
ABSTRACT: As seminary classrooms become increasingly representative of the diversity of current culture, faculty are challenged to rethink the Eurocentric theologies and the pedagogies that resist the varied hermeneutics that emerge out of the richness of diversity. This paper focuses on a pedagogy of engagement informed from a particular theological/ecological anthropology that creates a posture of mutuality by identifying individuals as equally susceptible to culture’s influence. Faculty who seek to implement these practices must be willing to engage in the messiness of open dialogue and acknowledge their own fears and subjectivity as an opportunity for engagement.
As educators, faculty are tasked with preparing graduates to meaningfully engage the world with intelligence and compassion. In a culture and context that is increasingly complex, where identity is considered as hybrid, dynamic, and open to construction, our once-proven practices and pedagogies are becoming less tenable. Though emerging concepts allow for more dynamic constructions of identity, a means of authentic engagement in multidiverse communities is still lacking. Diversity and pluralism are exposing the limits of deeply held Eurocentric assumptions of superiority that undergird many current pedagogies and conflict with the egalitarianism of contemporary culture. As a first step, educators and their institutions must be willing to critically rethink existing practices, standards, policies, and pedagogies in order to better equip graduates to meaningfully engage a culturally diverse and complex world. Second, they must find mutual partners of diverse backgrounds to engage in discourse and relationship.
Universities have historically relied on a model of education based on the transmission of formal knowledge, where learning has been content specific, framing knowledge as an achievement rather than as a process. The problem with a knowledge-centric modality is that it holds the accumulation of knowledge as the central goal of education and draws students toward a common, static, sometimes dogmatic orientation. The hierarchical, power-laden structures of knowledge-centric pedagogies are easily threatened by critical engagement, when the questions shift to why knowledge is of value and how it is applied. Knowledge-centric models value objective knowledge, where data is privileged and the one who has developed the superior argument is admired. This stance perpetuates differences; values power; and excludes those who think differently, act differently, and exist in outside contexts.
The problem with a knowledge-centric modality is that it holds the accumulation of knowledge as the central goal of education.
A pedagogy of engagement is an experiential approach to education that invites faculty to meaningfully engage students in interpersonal relationships, rooted in the values of mutuality and dignity. By acknowledging an embodied, intersubjective, dialogical approach to education, faculty are able to engage the varied hermeneutics that emerge out of the richness of diversity while confronting the underlying objective and objectifying tendencies of a persistently biased, power-laden culture. By attending to the particular complexities of culture and diversity, faculty will be better able to equip all students to meaningfully engage a diverse and complex society.
A pedagogy of engagement is an experiential approach that invites faculty to meaningfully engage students in interpersonal relationships, rooted in the values of mutuality and dignity.
Anthropology
James Smith suggests that behind every pedagogy is anthropology, and undergirding traditional pedagogies is a view of humanity as simply a collection of cognitive machines.1 Theological educators, with the help of education theorists such as Smith and Parker Palmer, have moved toward a view of education as not simply “informative” but “formative.”2 Formation sees knowledge not as an end unto itself but looks to the whole person, inviting experiences, emotions, hopes, and desires as “texts.” According to Smith,
Christian education would not be primarily a matter of sorting out which Christian ideas to drop into eager and willing mind-receptacles; rather, it would become a matter of thinking about how a Christian education shapes us, forms us, molds us to be a certain kind of people whose hearts and passions and desires are aimed at the kingdom of God.3
Undergirding a pedagogy of engagement is an anthropology rooted in contemporary theological, psychological, and social frameworks that honors dignity, mutuality, and community.
Faculty share a common humanity with their students as image bearers of the Divine Creator, fully aware that each was created uniquely, intentionally, and for a purpose. Just as the Triune God is distinct and united, humanity was created to be distinct and united—as individuals united within a common culture or distinct cultures among other human cultures. Whereas Babel stood against the imperial powers driving unity through uniformity, Pentecost accounts a miraculous Spirit-led unity, reimagining community, while maintaining cultural differences.4 Paraphrasing the work of Justo González, Russell states, “the Spirit does not so much create the structures and procedures but, rather, breaks open structures that confine and separate people so that they can welcome difference and the challenges and opportunity for new understanding that they bring.”5
As people of God, we are called to love one another in our difference, not in the remaking of the brother or sister in our own image, but as imaged by God; to be recognized in that image not superficially but deeply toward a new united community. God intended for us to be partnered with one another and to care and to nurture the other. In fact, to singularize the self, to make one over and above the other is, according to Hegel, the place of evil. For Hegel, “evil first occurs within the sphere of rupture or cleavage . . . being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal.”6 As the Apostle Paul reminds in 1 Corinthians 12:4–11, the Christian community is built up of “varieties of gifts.” Russell states, “It is the koinonia or community in Christ that provides unity, across the differing gifts; a community in which the Spirit inspires understanding across differences.”7
We are people of embodiment. True community is marked not by whom it is willing to receive but how all are brought into a reimagined community—a place where the Other is seen, acknowledged, engaged, and received. This requires that students and faculty of the dominant culture recognize the uniqueness of their own context and not assume it to be universal, while acknowledging that the understanding of all cultures adds value.8
We are people of embodiment. True community is marked not by whom it is willing to receive but how all are brought into a reimagined community.
Social scientists also contribute significantly to our understanding of the nature of the human condition and how the formation of the self is situated in our capacity and ability to identify and be identified with difference. Mary Lowe and Steve Lowe explain that, “while reductionism with its accompanying fragmentation and specialization was the hallmark of scientific inquiry in the twentieth century, holism is the operating principle of science in the twenty-first century.”9 Contemporary classrooms require new attitudes about learning particularly as a bidirectional ecological (emphasis ours) endeavor, which “appreciates the similarities between the reciprocal interconnections of humans with one another in social ecosystems.”10 In this age of globalization, urbanization, and technology, anthropologists stress the importance of seeing cultures as “complex, with permeable boundaries, instead of as isolated, bounded entities.”11 Philosopher Jane Flax believes, “a unitary self is unnecessary, impossible, and a dangerous illusion. Only multiple subjects can invent ways to struggle against domination that will not merely recreate it.”12 When there is only one way to understand the self or the other, it results in domination. As culture trains us to singularize and objectify, realizing a multiple self offers us a category for relating to others and resists the escape to power and dominance. The interior life is actually steeped in sociopolitical forces, and the psychic life is made equally of inner and outer worlds. This new paradigm’s premise is that the self is historical, linguistic, political, and contextual.
Pedagogy of Engagement
Rethinking pedagogy, faculty must look beyond the acquisition of knowledge as the sine qua non of learning and lean into the paradox that recognizes multiplicity. A pedagogy of engagement creates a communal learning experience where information, knowledge gathering, and objective facts, though valued, are a means to a greater and deeper learning where both teacher and student are changed. A pedagogy of engagement is less interested in proclamation, declaration, and certainty as its primary teaching means and seeks to place invitation, story, and mystery as its primary learning tool. Learning is perceived not by how much one can know but by how one can live and is only useful as it brings us into community. With this in mind, we are urged to consider a pedagogy that does not submit to offering only information but understands its mission as the formation of a person. Teaching, therefore, must be conceptual and relational. Much can be taught through reading, analysis, and inquiry, but educators should seek to offer “an education that embraces every dimension of what it means to be human, that honors the varieties of human experience, looks at us and our world through a variety of cultural lenses, and educates our young people in ways that enable them to face the challenges of our time.”13
A pedagogy of engagement creates a communal learning experience where information, knowledge gathering, and objective facts, though valued, are a means to a greater and deeper learning where both teacher and student are changed.
Moving away from these long-standing pedagogies is difficult, as it forces us to turn away from a system that taught us how to think, oftentimes neglecting how “education shapes us, forms us, molds us to be a certain kind of people.”14 To remain relevant we must be willing to engage in open dialogue, acknowledge our fears, and engage authentically in the conflicts and controversies of our differences within our classrooms.
A Case Vignette
On one particular day, a diverse group of students expressed that they found my assigning articles on diversity and allowing space for conversations of difference with the classroom to be token gestures. They stated that I had no idea of the agony they live in, the pain of showing up for class on a day where difference is discussed, and the insensitivity of my place of privilege and of power. As the room grew tense, I tried to not react with my own anger or shame or to use my power by turning the conversation into a defensive debate.
A student spoke up, a gentle white man. He expressed his guilt of the harm that his race and gender had inflicted upon persons of color, women, and all persons deemed different. He apologized and hoped he could do better. The space only intensified. I could see him disintegrate as he heard the response: “We’ve heard it all before.” In this moment he and many of us in the room had inadvertently been “caught” in dominant culture blindness. In the moment, it seemed as though all the lack of our recognitions, fears, shame, biases that exist among us were present, and the haunting question left unanswered was, “Do you really get it?”
As the professor, I (Barsness) felt conflicted and began to wonder how to get out of this mess. I considered a number of responses such as “parading” my understanding of such things by highlighting his lack of cultural awareness; or pulling rank/privilege and redirecting the discussion to the readings of the day; or encouraging the students to take this very important conversation to their multicultural class; or doing as I teach and paying attention to the conflict that was in front of us, believing that, in working through the conflict, we would all become better formed.
At that moment, one of the students of color stated how powerless she felt and that I held all the power in the room. I responded that I was well aware of the power and privilege that I hold and that I was very tempted to use it. I added that at this moment, however, multiple subjectivities were at play and I too felt powerless, ineffectual, hopeless, and voiceless and that the student in this moment also held a great deal of power. I then asked, “would it be possible for us together to try and reimagine some other means, some other way to understand what we are doing to the other?” I stated that I felt that if together we could honestly speak, to our own experience and listen to the experience of the other, we might get closer to each other’s experience. And perhaps we could begin to find our way, arrive at a new knowledge of each other, informed out of our relationship rather than our biases.
As the last person left the classroom, I was not sure if we really had met with any success traversing these muddy waters of race, ethnicity, and difference. As we gathered the next week, it appeared that in working through our distortions and our biases, we discovered a modicum of integrity and were able to stay in range of each other with the hope of future growth and transformation. This experience also led to a deep reflection of my own positioning within this dramatic theater of learning we call the classroom, challenging me to value presence, conflict, and working through.
An Examined Life
As we face the complexities of an increasingly diverse classroom and construct a model based on formation, the often-unexplored self becomes a starting point. Parker Palmer states,
When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life—and when I cannot see them clearly I cannot teach them well.15
Faculty teaching in a diverse context must be sensitive to personal biases, the institutional biases we espouse, and the orienting influence of dominant cultural frameworks. If students distrust our motivations, experience us having given little thought to the dynamics of culture, or think that we have not examined our own values and biases, the default is to return to the conforming orientation; a place of disembodied knowledge and persistent difference. As faculty, we must take the impact of ourselves within the classroom seriously, for it is not only our expertise that is being digitally recorded but also our attitudes, our presence, and our cultural awareness that are deeply imprinting and educating the students with whom we have been charged.
Six Sensitivities of the Examined Life
In a move toward a pedagogy of engagement rooted from classroom experiences and the view of education as formation, we have been able to name at least six sensitivities16 (and we are sure there are many more) that faculty have to be mindful of to work effectively within the classroom.
Privilege and power
Faculty must be aware of social structures of power and privilege and bear the responsibility to consciously steward their own privileged position within the classroom. From grading criteria to establishing the “rules of engagement,” faculty hold a great deal of power to influence and counter socialized biases and establish a more equitable space for learning and relationship. As is evident in the case vignette, it was incumbent upon me to take into account my power and privilege and to find a means for dialogue and engagement rather than dominance.
Addressing categories of power and privilege, both socially and interpersonally, for student and teacher
demand[s] a variety of lenses that must take into account intricate historical constructions that cannot easily shake off legacies of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and colonialism embedded in contemporary contexts; theological formulations; and power and privilege differentials in church, academy, and society.17
Tacit ethnocentrism
Tacit ethnocentrism “is the assumption that one’s own way of life is just normal, not cultural.”18 This way of thinking perpetuates what Letty Russell calls “othering,” which consists of “social structures and interactions that divide the world into subjects and objects and often demean, disgrace, or destroy the ones who are objects or others.”19 Ethnocentrism, particularly from a dominant cultural context, can have far-reaching impacts. Russell connects the cognitive and emotional challenge of overcoming a propensity to “other” and be “other”:
Othering works through the internalization of fear: fear of being other, or being seen as other; fear for one’s own identity and the need to conform to the dominant paradigm of those who fit in a culture. Those declared “other” are forced to internalize this need to conform in order to avoid being othered. In the same way, those from dominant groups also internalize the norms so that they will fit in and refuse to associate with those who are different.20
When we objectify the other, we make them into objects which predisposes us to adopt a depersonalized view toward others in which one is focused on what the other needs to do for the self, rather than what the self might do for the other.
Bias
In the field of psychology, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald refer to two facets of the mind, reflective and automatic.21 For example, the reflective side of the mind may express belief in diversity and acceptance of difference and otherness and honestly embrace Others and advocates on their behalf. This same individual, however, has grown up in a culture where Others have been viewed as a threat and consequently may harbor negative associations of difference as bad, and this other mind, the automatic mind, may elicit feelings of discomfort and even shame.22 Because of the cognitive dissonance between the automatic and reflective sides of the mind, “checking” our biases requires awareness of our potential to harbor these blind spots and a willingness to confront them when exposed.
Historical legacies of bias along socially constructed lines of race, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, age, and others must be considered. Bias is largely implicit association generated from years of experience in a social context. Acknowledging bias as normative anticipates the eventual engagement with conscious and unconscious blind spots that occur as part of any and every social engagement. These unconscious biases are often expressed in today’s society as microaggressions.
Microaggressions
Egalitarian principles have proven to simply not be enough to quell the insidious and often unconscious internalized biases that were once overt but are still commonplace. A latent remnant of historical biases, microaggressions often unconsciously reveal internalized biases received through socialization. Microagressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal or behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults [that potentially have a harmful or unpleasant psychological impact on] the target person or group.”23
Describing it as the “American dilemma,” Gunnar Myrdal identifies a paradox between “egalitarian values and racist traditions in the United States.”24 The American dilemma “reflects the tension between central principles of equality and fairness in the society and the daily operation of systematic prejudice and discrimination, at an individual and societal level.”25 Socialization “culturally conditions racist, sexist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors in well intentioned individuals.”26
Shame
Faculty have become savvier in language, and in some ways actions, when facing the complexities of difference, but in so many ways, many of us still don’t get it. This not “getting it” creates a form of melancholia or shame regarding internalized fear, biases, and socialized hatreds toward the Other. Freud’s definition of melancholia was a “mourning without ending, an irresolvable grief.”27 Faculty in their own humanity risk depression or melancholia when they grow weary of not getting it. Part of the shame I felt within the classroom on that day, and often feel, emerges when I privilege cultural competency over engagement. When cultural competency is sought as a way of knowledge gathering or skill building, faculty quickly realize the limitations. Consequently when things go awry in the classroom, teachers become frustrated and saddened by a lack of knowledge competency and a sense of hopelessness toward change. The problem with this hopelessness, however, is that faculty often withdraw and isolate from that which they cannot bear.
Melancholia is also related to shame, shame of misrecognitions, biases, and microagressions. The problem with shame, as Davies points out, however, is “that the most secret and shameful self is usually dissociated and extruded outward.”28 Judith Halberstram states that shame “records in dramatic fashion a failure to be powerful, legitimate, proper—it records the exposure, in psychoanalytic terms, of the subject’s castration, be it racial, gendered, class-based, or sexual.”29 And back to Davies, “shame forces one to hide, to mask oneself as cover is sought from this sense of deep pain,”30 and to project onto the one we cannot “get.” Altman talks of projection in this way:
[P]eople try to rid themselves of particular feelings and impulses by attributing them to others . . . to the extent that we wish to believe that our violence, our greed, our exploitiveness, our passivity, and our dependence are “out there” and not “in here” then the “other” group . . . come[s] to represent what Sullivan (1953) called the not me. Sullivan’s locution is most felicitous: the not me is, of course, me—the disavowed me.31
The need to be liked
As faculty examine their lives, they must also take into account a deep need to be liked. To be the one who does not offend, the one who “gets it.” This need to be idealized stands in the way of authentic conversation of our differences. Far too many prefer the position of the “good” teacher, and far too many classrooms remain stagnant because of an unwillingness to be the “bad” teacher. When faculty are willing to face that which they fear and engage in authentic conversation evolving from their own self-examination, opportunities emerge for deeper learning.
When faculty are willing to face that which they fear and engage in authentic conversation evolving from their own self-examination, opportunities emerge for deeper learning.
Five Dimensions of Praxis
A good deal of a pedagogy of engagement starts and ends with the examined life of the teacher. In fact, in addition to our scholarship, the key to a successful classroom is the examined (or constantly examining) life. Palmer states, “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”32 As faculty enter the classroom, they enter fully immersed in their discipline, but they must also enter with humility, with an openness to a genuine encounter with their students, and with a sense of courage that contends with the inevitable conflicts and a willingness to work it through.
To help faculty in the classroom, we suggest five dimensions of practice that flow from the six sensitivities of the examined life.
Scholarship
Although a pedagogy of engagement suggests that knowing primarily emerges from relationship, it also includes the rigor of serious study. The task of educators is to possess both the knowledge of their respective disciplines and the skills to evaluate and implement knowledge. As scholars, faculty must be well studied and passionate of what they know but also willing to surrender to the deeper knowing through dialogue and engagement. If faculty approach the classroom unprepared and do not know their subjects well, they tend to enter defensively, hindering the possibility for new learning to emerge. When faculty enter defensively, they enter isolated and unable to create and participate in communal learning affirming that knowledge outside the context of community is destructive.33
Humility
The classroom can be both frustrating and humiliating. Both are commonly experienced. Faculty entering the classroom must choose to enter with a sense of awe, not so much of what they have to give but of what they might also learn. As noted above, it is incumbent upon faculty to be well-prepared, to possess a high degree of expertise in their fields, and to have an inner confidence so that they can then be fully present in the classroom.
Faculty entering the classroom must choose to enter with a sense of awe, not so much of what they have to give but of what they might also learn.
Relationship
Thomas Merton has said, “the purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to his world.”34 Much can be taught through reading and assignment, but education without relationship results in “shape without form, shade without colour, . . . gesture without motion.”35 Faculty must hold that, “our prideful knowledge, with which we divide and conquer and destroy the world [must be] humbled.”36 “Knowledge [must draw] us into faithful relationship.”37
Conflict
As stated in the beginning of this essay, if classrooms are not messy, it is most likely that faculty and students are not engaged authentically in the conflicts and controversies of our differences. The classroom is a lively place where students and faculty engage in rigorous discourse. As we get caught up in the complex dynamics of difference, we often misrecognize exposing our biases, privileges, and powers.38 In a pedagogy of engagement, the classroom is a place of embodied difference. When differences are brought up, therefore, it is not just an academic question, as we were able to note in the classroom vignette; it sparks something deep within each person as to how we have been seen, recognized, or traumatized. For example, in the vignette we could have opted to objectively “talk” about race, gender inequities, or correct attitudes regarding difference in a disembodied way—as knowledge or as information. But had we done this, we would have missed the real learning experience, that conflict in relationship challenges long-standing conceptions of identity. Conflict exposes our objectifying assumptions of otherness rooted in essentialist notions of identity, which are too often dismissed, ignored, or avoided. Staying disembodied keeps us safe and avoids entering into the messiness of knowing through engagement. It is through engagement that our values, beliefs, and prejudices can be reimagined and where change and learning take place.
Faculty often misunderstand conflict in the classroom as failure. Miscommunications, or mishaps, are translated as mistaken pedagogy, and yet it is these moments that give traction toward learning and formation. Ogden states,
It is essential to understand that enactments [conflicts] are not “mistakes” but rather mysterious, nonconscious strivings for a higher level of growth and organization, and their negotiations are a function of the developing and emerging relationship. The processing of each person’s implicit self/selves within the relationship provides the raw material for new experiences, new actions, and new meanings for both parties. The intersubjective process of joining and co-creation cannot be defined, identified, or predicted ahead of time, because it occurs within the context of what transpires unexpectedly . . . and thus requires a leap into the unknown . . .”39
Furthermore, conflict reveals places of misrecognition where not just relationship but also identity is challenged. When we reduce identity down to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other “objective” categories of identity, we perpetuate a model of socialized objectification of the other. Conflict challenges even emerging identity constructions such as hybridity and other dynamic concepts of identity leaning more toward a sacred and elusive, but deeper, understanding of identity.
Dialogical space
To truly practice a pedagogy of engagement, it is not only the examined life of the teacher that results in formational learning, but also a necessary reorientation of students toward a dialogical learning process. It is incumbent upon the teacher to establish the dialogical space inviting students to become dialogical partners with them, emphasizing learning as a formational process that occurs through the interaction of the two, not in the presentation of the one. Students are invited to consider the other—both teacher and fellow students as partners in learning—a subject rather than an object, valuing diversity, ambiguity, and honesty. Students are invited to approach the content and the Other with curiosity, empathy, authenticity, and surrender of certainty. “Dialogue requires individuals to ‘soften’ their certainties and have a humble attitude for transformational learning [that] occur through reflection.”40 In this invitation, students will need to be made aware that, in an intersubjective dialogue, conflict is inevitable. It is expected of each of us that we will not shy away from our differences but push into them, holding to a value that learning occurs in the embrace of the complexity and richness in the multiplicity of ideas, persons, and experiences. As we enter together into the dialogical classroom, we will remind ourselves that “such an intersubjective educational community is not comprised of a knowing subject (the teacher) and known objects (the content and the students). Rather, teacher, students, and content are related as co-creative subjects in a hermeneutical conversation.”41 In the spirit of Martin Buber’s I/Thou, dialogical learning happens when we then turn toward the Other, listen with an ear to confirm the Other, address the Other as a sacred subject and respond with our truest selves as entering into the demands and struggles that define the rigor of the learning process.
Conclusion
So what is the bottom line of a pedagogy of engagement? Given the complexity of culture, we have questioned the efficacy of knowledge-centric methodologies. By acknowledging an anthropological function of culture in the process of meaning making, we have proposed an embodied, intersubjective, dialogical approach to education. Culture viewed anthropologically creates a posture of mutuality by identifying the observer/observed as equally susceptible to culture’s influence. By embodying culture, we have sought to transform intercultural engagement from an objective analysis to an intersubjective relationality. Through a posture of humility, mutuality, and working through conflict, dignity becomes the standard that resists objectifying the cultural Other by affirming a common humanity. Faculty who seek to implement these practices and invite their students to join them must be willing to engage in the messiness of dialogue. Reimagining learning through dialogue, “we” enter the dialogical classroom with humility and open-mindedness toward the other, positioned to teach, to learn, and to be transformed.
By embodying culture, we have sought to transform intercultural engagement from an objective analysis to an intersubjective relationality.
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- References
- James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 27–28.
- For further discussion, see Smith, Desiring the Kingdom; and Parker J. Palmer, Arthur Zajonc, and Megan Scribner, The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).
- Letty Mandeville Russell, “Encountering the ‘Other’ in a World of Difference and Danger,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 4 (October 1, 2006): 462–464.
- Justo L. González, “Reading from My Bicultural Place: Acts 6:1–7,” in Reading from This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, vol. 1, eds. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 146, quoted in Russell, “Encountering the ‘Other’ ”, 464.
- Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151.
- Dominant culture here refers to all orienting structures of power and authority in a given context and not simply racialized categories such as “white dominant culture.” This often refers to categories perceived as socially normative in a given context.
- Mary E. Lowe and Stephen D. Lowe, “Reciprocal Ecology: A Comprehensive Model of Spiritual Formation in Theological Education,” Theological Education 48, no. 1 (2013): 3–4.
- Brian M. Howell and Jenell Williams Paris, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 30.
- Jane Flax, “Multiples: On the Contemporary Politics of Subjectivity,” in Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy, vol. 16 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 93.
- Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 3.
- The following sensitivities highlight a broad range of “awarenesses” in an attempt to highlight important sensitivities needed to navigate a complex sociocultural influence on diverse classrooms.
- Carmen Nanko-Fernández, “Held Hostage by Method? Interrupting Pedagogical Assumptions—Latinamente,” Theological Education 48, no. 1 (2013): 41.
- Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013), 53–70.
- Derald Wing Sue et al., “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Implications for Clinical Practice,” American Psychologist 62, no. 4 (May/June 2007): 273.
- Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio, “Understanding and Addressing Contemporary Racism: From Aversive Racism to the Common Ingroup Identity Model,” Journal of Social Issues 61, no. 3 (September 2005): 617.
- See John F. Dovidio, Samuel E. Gaertner, Kerry Kawakami, and Gordon Hodson, “Why Can’t We Just Get Along? Interpersonal Biases and Interracial Distrust,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 8, no. 2 (May 2002): 88–102.
- Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz, eds., On Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (London: Karnac Books, 2009), Kindle e-book.
- Jody Messler Davies, “Whose Bad Objects Are We Anyway? Repetition and Our Elusive Love Affair with Evil,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 14, no. 6 (2004): 711–732, quoted in Melanie Suchet, “Unraveling Whiteness,” in Relational Psychoanalysis: Expansion of Theory, vol. 4, eds. Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris (New York: Routledge, 2012), 202.
- Judith Halberstam, “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” Social Text 23 (2005): 225, quoted in Suchet, “Unraveling Whiteness,” 202.
- Harry Stock Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1953), quoted in Neil Altman, The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 106.
- Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 66.
- T. S. Eliot, “Hollow Men,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1971), 56.
- See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Pat Ogden, “Technique and Beyond: Therapeutic Enactments, Mindfulness, and the Role of the Body,” in Healing Moments in Psychotherapy, eds. Daniel J. Siegel and Marion Solomon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 46.
- Donald Zauderer, “The Benefit of Dialogue in Public Management,” The Public Manager 29 (Winter 2000–2001): 27–30, quoted in Izhak Berkovich, “Between Person and Person: Dialogical Pedagogy in Authentic Leadership Development,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 13, no. 2 (2014): 252.
- Kenneth Paul Kramer, Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom (United Kingdom: Rowan and Littlefield Education, 2013), 27.