Bobbi Patterson, Emory University

Barbara (Bobbi) Patterson is a Senior Lecturer in the religion department and has served the Emory community as the Associate University Chaplain, director of the Emory Scholars Program, founder of the Theory-Practice-Learning (TPL) Program, and as a faculty associate of the Office of Sustainability Initiatives. Patterson received her BA from Smith College, MDiv from Harvard University, and her PhD in religion from Emory University. Her current research focuses on the intersections of place, contemplative practices, and the ethics of sustainability. Patterson’s leadership in the classroom has earned her the 2010 Excellence in Teaching Award from the American Academy of Religion and she has published numerous articles on the scholarship of teaching.

Community Internships and Classroom Confrontations

As Jan leaned into the wooden, oval seminar table, he set his eyes directly on Jason. The room bristled from the tension between these two seniors: Jan, a thin African-American man, and Jason, a stockier guy from the Mid-Atlantic. This “Religion Internship” class strove to link community-based experiences to religious studies theories: we focused on how communities make and share meaning and purpose and act ethically. Community-based leaders helped me design the course and provided placements in which interns could learn through hands-on experiences. Students worked as medical assistants in a mobile healthcare unit, as case workers for families living with AIDS, and as in-take personnel at a large homeless shelter. Our methods for engaging these partnerships emphasized joining assets for community-defined change rather than focusing on needs (Kretzmann and McKnight). The class was initially designed in the year 2000, and now in 2010 we continued to work with many of these original community-partners. 

Before class began, each intern filled out an initial application form describing relevant experiences and what brought the intern to this course. In some cases, former interns vetted these applications, following up with interviews and initiating further discussion to help candidates sharpen their goals. By the end of this process, students had a solid idea of what they hoped for — and naturally, their internships ended up taking directions they never expected. Throughout the semester, they continued fine-tuning their goals and objectives using a suggested worksheet including due dates and requiring specific forms of assessment. Biweekly meetings with supervisors added input for that document as well as mentoring. Class time usually began with “check-ins:” sharing what happened, feelings, ethical dilemmas, questions about their experiences that warped the theories we read. We analyzed texts and then put them in dialogue with the students’ actual work. Discussions reflected a class-developed covenant of behaviors and attitudes, respect, listening to the end, etc. By the time the tension between Jason and Jan broke out, we knew a good deal about each other and how we thought.

In fact, our communication skills sharpened through serious discussions like that of Jason and Jan. We learned to trust enough to go deeper into the tough issues of racism, structural poverty, and religious and ethical responses. Yet that day, I felt anxious as Jan pressed Jason, a white man. Jan said Jason could never grasp the damage of white domination. Why had Jason’s retort, that he would not be reduced to the cause of all social ills, made my stomach tighten? Jan’s analytical heft took the conversation on to ethics and texts about structural racism, capitalism, and access to educational opportunity. Jason, on the other hand, drew from material by Colby, Ehrlich, et. al., focusing on moral responsibility in relation to citizenship. Both spoke well to different levels and aspects of our shared concerns, how to think and act effectively for justice. But failing at that moment to bridge the gap, they fumed and stalled in mutual frustration as their younger classmates tried to figure out if this kind of confrontation was okay in class.

Over years of teaching this class, I felt my stomach turn. I struggled to invite students to take charge of their own conceptual and experiential learning and really mean it. It made me feel so out of control in my own class! But as I realized I had to let them learn to stand on their own feet, they thrived, drawing deeply from the wells of unresolved, even unaddressed, issues in our communities. Through structured portfolio assignments, they grew more observant about causal factors of poverty and racism. They pursued descriptions of organizations’ missions and leadership charts in order to integrate sources of value-conflicts among staff. They drew from our readings to shape proposals for new actions and decisions. They synthesized tough questions using and adapting ethical frameworks. How do a well-established and respected soup kitchen and its guests begin shaping mutual covenants of behaviors, which when broken, break the relationship for six months? Our class struggled theoretically and humanely with such real-world dilemmas. Would they actually refuse those guests food?

When in the mid-1990s I joined the pedagogical cascade toward community-partnered or service engaged-learning classes, I never imagined the stakes of learning about religion and ethics would become this tactile. Finding spiritual and moral strength to take up hard questions drew up droughts of life fuller than most of us had ever swallowed. Tapping into the workshops, grants, and resources from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Campus Compact, and the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE), teachers like me across the country tried to grow. We held to NSEE’s best practices for an engaged classroom: clear intentions and planning, reflection, monitoring and assessment, and evaluation. As a scholar of religious studies, practices as a form of learning felt natural. And NSEE’s steps rang true to the sequenced growth in insight and action that religious practitioners expected on their experience-driven paths. But the explicit goal in engaged education then was saving civic, participatory democracy through community-partnered social change. Led by Dewey’s, hook’s, and Frieire’s theories, teachers pledged to try, cheered on by Giles’s, Eyler’s, and Harkavay’s research confirming that well-structured engagement could make a positive difference in communities. 

At Emory University, we designed our own sequence for community-based learning, research, and scholarship. We recommended students begin with a structured volunteer experience followed by reflection. We hoped they would then take a course providing theories by which to analyze and critique their volunteer experiences. Next, we suggested taking a course with a unit or two devoted to community-based fieldwork. By then, we hoped, students would have enough maturity, intellectual flexibility, and communication skills, to serve and learn through a community-based internship. In our “Religion Internship” course, we emphasized working with organizations devoted to social service and civic justice. We continued to change our readings, trying to better relate our field to the specific placements of that year. But we continued to emphasize themes of community meaning-making and ethics. The sequencing prepared our students to seriously learn and contribute, as Jason and Jan demonstrated. We keep trying to improve, and now Emory University has a university-wide Office of Community Partnerships that offers training, community-coordination, and assessment.

Back in 2000, we emphasized participants more than procedures. Community-partners and I turned to readings by Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, and Michael Harrington. I shared new pedagogical texts by Parks-Daloz, et. al., Howard Gardner, and David Kolb. I tried to draw in other relevant disciplines, including Pierre Bourdieu’s Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford University Press, 2000), Lee Shulman’s new taxonomy of learning, and selections from Robert Kegan’s In Over our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Harvard University Press, 1998). In those days, we created a kind of Venn Diagram of disciplines looking for sweet spots of analytic and humane help in our asset-based approach. Valuing growth in cross-cultural and moral behaviors and attitudes, as much as well-informed analyses and critical thinking, we emphasized processes of reflective judgment. Students returned to earlier portfolio entries, asking themselves to take their first investigations a step further, initially trying to include others’ perspectives. Could they reframe their criteria for judging success, and why should they? Did they seriously question their moral and social assumptions, and even change them as a result of shared experiences in dialogue with theory? What were the systemic impacts? With midpoint and final evaluations in class and with supervisors, students received serious feedback about their academic development, moral reflection, and conceptual maturation. 

That was “then” and this is “now,” with our smart podiums, web-based shared sites with community partners, and students with international service experience. Most of our work was local then; now, every day in class we live the power of global reality. I took time off from the internship teaching and am now returning to it this fall (2010). Standing at today’s crossroads, I ask myself — on many levels — what has changed and why. Yesterday’s crossroads of pedagogical innovation drew on struggles of inequity across race and class predominantly in the United States. Challenges at today’s crossroads reach out to global proportions, demanding evolved pedagogies capable of work beyond interdisciplinarity. How savvy of the students writing the 2001 Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement to predict that engaged learning and learners “are not inseparable from the global critique” (Long, 11). Their expectation for a multifaceted synthesis of analytics and action embedded in global questions of justice and thriving now draws religious studies into a wider and more complex arena.

Today’s integrative pedagogies will intellectually draw us into more contested territory where conflicting viewpoints and stakes will become necessary water and food. Rather than working the “sweet spot,” we will learn to pause and hang in between the lines of even multidisciplinary assumptions and methods. By lingering, we can attune ourselves to new and just emerging intellectual spaces beyond and/or through disciplinary norms. In these spaces, contemplation and adding perceptive judgment to rational inquiry draws in necessary creativity and imagination to work with global knots of issues and stakes (Arthur Zajonc; Mary Rose O’Reilley; Howard Thurman). If I felt anxious as students took increasing charge of their own learning, how much more might I feel as we press wider the gates and adapt together? Though my discomfort may rise, the possibilities and potential for new kinds of learning and engagement draw me to try this work again. How to become, as Kwame Appiah advocates, “rooted cosmopolitans” who can link theory and practice through engagement and commitment to ethics and thriving?

Some of the paths we will go down are obvious. We hear raucous demands from sustainability, economic recalibration, as well as insurgency politics and war. If we believe these global issues are not in our settings, we need to take time and look more closely. All local communities are struggling with waste dumping, including materials from other countries. As the numbers of prisoners increase, who now sits behind our walls? How does domestic and child violence intertwine with issues of refugee and immigrant rights? Following the threads from global to local, from interdisciplinary resources to transdisciplinary courage, we are facing a new crossroad that will energize our engaged teaching, learning, and scholarship. We can and cannot know what to expect. But the call is clear — for increased flexibility and imagination, building on the strong core of what was “then.”

To reconceptualize our civic, engaged, “knowing” teaching and learning as global civic engagement, I am musing on an evolutionary trajectory model, building tangentially on the work of Scott Atran and Douglas Medin. In their book The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (MIT Press, 2010), they draw from cultural anthropology and cognitive science to envision how evolutionary causal trajectories unfold within cultures. Their model of development begins with “essentials” or core concepts, behaviors, and cultural perspectives that serve as original “place holders” for future growth and change. For engaged, civic education and scholarship, what might be those core “essentials” that could interweave with future factors, driving meaningful and relevant growth into the twenty-first century? What will we need to adapt from our core ideas about community participation and partnership, broad and local analysis, and action with assessment? What intellectual competencies must we cultivate to prepare our students for positions of decision-making beyond their comfort zones, to release control so that new spaces for knowing and learning can emerge? How might our insights and pedagogies morph and collapse, in order to evolve and meet the challenges of global proportions?

I think of a few possible strategies: 1) We could cultivate skills of structured and reflective pausing able to link existent knowledge with intuitive information; 2) Before testing hypotheses, we could practice listening longer and to more dissonance in order to discern gaps in understanding: 3) We could engage creative arts to work with analytical dilemmas and discover next steps.

A flood of questions arise. How might we explore for other skills and theories — linguistic, scientific — that would reach beyond personal, relational, and cultural ones we already know well? How might we re-aggregate relevant elements from existent pedagogical models? Could resistances become engines of positive change? What shifts in epistemologies, in senses of place re-placing the dominance of time, will put us in real world territories of participatory and engaged teaching, learning, and research?

Truthfully at this point, we can only say, “We shall see.” I look forward to sharing with you in the discoveries.

Syllabus - Religion Internship - Patterson