Religious Studies News

My research deeply informs how and what I teach in the classroom. The process of making people who are different from the dominant white culture the “Other” has long been of interest to me. Anyone who is of a different skin color is looked down upon as lesser and undesirable. This dangerous phenomenon occurs and reoccurs in Western society and even in our classrooms. Thus, classroom pedagogy needs to be negotiated and renegotiated in light of the various dangerous ‘isms’ such as racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism etc., that occur in our society and within the classroom. These dangers influence my pedagogy, particularly in respect to how sensitive I need to be when I prepare my class and when I enter the classroom. My own beliefs and understandings also inform how I am to teach prophetically and instrumentally in the classroom.

My theological pedagogy is based on both traditional and modern approaches to education. Traditionally, I agree with Heinrich Pestalozzi, who said education is based on love. Thus love needs to be the beginning point of our theological pedagogy. Pestalozzi also asserted that we need to train people to be independent, so students must be taught to think for themselves and develop their own theology from their experiences, encounters, and revelations. I concur with the liberative approach of teaching holistically. This modern view asserts that people learn through all their senses, and thus teachers need to incorporate various teaching methods. I believe every student in the class has unique gifts and talents, and my role as a professor is to encourage each student to find his/her own gifts and use them to the fullest of his/her capacity. I want each class to be a learning experience for every student, and hence will use various teaching methods (discussion groups, workshops, student presentations, storytelling, audio equipment, etc.) in order to address different learning styles. People learn, develop, and categorize information in many different ways, and it is important to be aware of these differences. It is also important to give students a voice so that they can claim theology as their own.

My model of theological pedagogy is also based on “faith seeking understanding.” Theological study must lead to a deeper understanding of God and it should also lead to praxis, which is action with reflection. Thus, theological studies need to begin with a committed action, followed by reflection, and then return again to action. Much of my teaching leads to committed action, such as social justice, equality, and liberation. With this premise, I design my liberation theology class to incorporate a praxis component to make it a lived-out theology.

Theology must seek to love and welcome those who are the least of us. Orientalism is a tendency to dichotomize humanity into we-they contrasts and to essentialize the resultant Other (see Said). It represents a white Euro-American power over the Orient and has been used by Europeans and North Americans as a way of dominating and having self-ascribed authority over the East. European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself against the Orient as a sort of surrogate. In the North American context, the Others are our neighbors, who differ from us by culture and whose very Otherness is often a factor in our conflicts with them. 

In one’s own pedagogy, it is important not to make a stranger the Other. With increasing immigration, globalization, and migration, it is imperative to welcome the Other if we are to live in harmony within diversification. This needs to be lived out in the classroom as students experience this amongst themselves. It needs to become a lived-out pedagogy rather than a philosophical one that does not take into consideration the context, the situation, and the being as a whole.

In this context, the Othering of women merits particular attention and theological analysis. The lives of women in the industrialized world have improved enormously in the last hundred years and especially in social, cultural, and political terms in the last forty years. But, throughout the rest of the world, a great many women lead lives of misery and even plain horror. In many cultures, women have been, and in some cases still are, viewed as inferior and simply as the Other, which allows terrible acts of violence, dominance, sexual objectification, and slavery to occur. This issue is significant to the North American church today, as churches must respond to the outcry of women who have suffered in the name of religion. We must develop and enact new ways of viewing and treating women — and, in particular, immigrant women.