An intervention which is only provocative, seeking to provide the kind of creative discrepancies which might induce disequilibrium, is essentially an address to the person in equilibrium.... but have we learned how to join or accompany the meaning-maker when he or she faces a world that is already heated up, already stimulating, even to the point of being meaning-threatening?

Robert Kegan, "Evolving Self," p. 277.

Robert Kegan

One of the aspects of Kegan's thought that I find particularly helpful when thinking about nurturing learning, is his suggestion that learning/transformation of meaning frames occurs through an ongoing process of "confirmation, contradiction, continuity." "Confirmation" has to do with joining a person in the world they've created, understanding it's internal consistencies, and so on, before trying to walk with them somewhere else. "Contradiction" is something that emerges naturally through the process of living, but can also be a deliberate intervention on the part of a teacher. So when Kegan speaks of an "intervention which is only provocative, seeking to provide the kind of creative discrepancies which might induce disequilibrium," he is naming one kind of contradiction a teacher might make.

In the case of the comic and the resulting webboard discussion, Debra brought to the discussion an example which was in its best intent, provocative in this way. But I think that for some of the students in the class, the world is already "heated up" to such an extent -- the culture around them is already so chaotic and fluid -- that they felt a need to fit the comic into their frame, rather than allowing it to challenge them. As some of them struggled, it seemed to me that they found it very difficult to entertain the notion of a world in which the symbol of the cross was not wholly a good one, in which the cross could actually be highly problematic.

To answer Kegan's question here, I'm NOT sure that we have learned how to join or accompany people in this kind of context.

"Is experience what happens to me, or what I do (or, in this case, am unable to do) with what happens to me?"

Robert Kegan, p. 265, The Evolving Self

This quote appealed to me in part because it is a concise statement of what I hope to be able to nurture in my students -- an ability to see a distinction between experience as "something that happens" to them, and experience as something that they DO with what happens to them. In other words, I believe adult education at its best is about supporting an ability to be more self consciously reflective and intentional about one's experiences.

In the case of the discussion in this class, part of how I tried to do that was by asking them to think about a moment in their own experience when they had found pop culture appropriating a Christian symbol in a way they found offensive. My hope was that I could work from those experiences. But as you can read, they had a hard time identifying such an example.

In retrospect, I think there must have been a better way to approach the question on the listserv. In the class itself, when next we met, we spent some time discussing Mary Boys' article, entitled "The cross: should a symbol betrayed be reclaimed?" I think that that article helped model a sort of self-conscious reflection that engaged Christian theology. But I still ponder what would have been better questions to ask.

"What the eye sees better the heart feels more deeply. We not only increase the likelihood of our being moved; we also run the risks that being moved entails. For we are moved somewhere, and that somewhere is further into life, closer to those we live with. They come to matter more. Seeing better increases our vulnerability to being recruited to the welfare of another."

Robert Kegan, p. 17, The Evolving Self

"Methodological doubt represents the human struggle to free ourselves from parochial closed-mindedness, but it doesn't go far enough. Methodological doubt caters too comfortably to our natural impulse to protect and retain the views we already hold. Methodological belief comes to the rescue at this point by forcing us genuinely to enter into unfamiliar or threatening ideas instead of just arguing against them without experiencing them or feeling their forces."

Peter Elbow, "Embracing Contraries," p. 262.

Peter Elbow

Elbow argues, in his essay "Embracing Contraries", that we spend far too much time practicing "methodological doubt" in our current academic settings, and not enough time practicing "methodological belief." In the case of the class discussion, I quite deliberately was trying to entice people into finding a way to "believe" in Debra's argument, and to find ways to suggest to Debra that she might have some empathy with Ben's position. I'm not at all sure, however, that simply asking for that kind of identification works. I wonder how I could have invited it? Perhaps if I could have come up with a vivid example from a film, that might have coaxed it?

"Nonfoundational knowledge ... assumes that knowledge ... is a community project. People construct knowledge by working together in groups, interdependently. All knowledge is therefore the 'property,' not of an individual person, but of some community or other, the community that constructed it in the language spoken by the members of that community."

Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning, p. 222.

Kenneth Bruffee

Kenneth Bruffee's view of knowledge is a much more relational one, requiring us to understand how what we know and how we know it, is a process that happens by way of social construction.

But it also prompts me to think of the ways in which the questions raised by this example -- of the comic strip, that is -- point to the dilemmas religious communities face when their symbols are no longer solely their own. When the meaning and authority of the symbol, for instance, is carried into the wider public through some process over which religious communities have no control. It may be that this has always been the case, but it is certainly true now, in media culture, that religious symbols are more often circulated by mass media than by religious communities.

What does that mean about the religious knowledge we are constructing? When my students suggested that supersessionism was perhaps not an issue, or no longer an issue, because it wasn't framed that way by them -- how accurate an argument is that? In what ways do we define knowledge as a community project? Which communities are "authorized" to use these symbols, and in what ways? I think this is a much more complicated question these days, given the global reach of various kinds of media.

"... a pedagogy of possibilities.... it is a pedagogy which aims not to predefine its outcome (even in terms of some imagined value of emancipation or democracy) but to empower its students to begin to reconstruct their world in new ways, and to rearticulate their future in unimagined and perhaps even unimaginable ways. It is a pedagogy which demands of students, not that they conform to some image of political liberation nor even that they resist, but simply that they gain some understanding of their own involvement in the world, and in the making of their own future. Consequently, it neither starts with nor works within a set of texts, but, rather, deals with the formulations of the popular, the cartographies of taste, stability, and mobiblity within which students are located.... It is a pedagogy which draws unexpected maps of the possibilities of and constraints on agency as it intersects with both everyday life and social formation."

Lawence Grossberg, p. 18, Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies

Lawrence Grossberg

This quote is too complex for me to comment on well in this context, but I am always trying to figure out what a "pedagogy of possibility" could be in religious education. In some ways, my deliberate decision not to intervene in the conversation around the comic strip until it had gone on a while was part of my commitment to empower my students, not to simply "lecture" to them. But of course, I think I am emotionally invested in a particular framing of the issue, and found myself trying to ensure that that frame (one which believes that Debra's reading of the comic strip was "right" and that since supersessionism is alive and well, we must actively seek to dismantle it) prevailed. To the extent that I did so, I was clearly NOT successful at creating this kind of pedagogical opportunity. As I noted in a different quote comment, I think I ought to have left my first question to stand alone, and NOT tried to provide an example.

On the other hand, the class culture was an environment in which a student felt free to bring an example into class from a popular context, and the example did spark a a fair amount of discussion.Those are two ways in which I am at least somewhat successful in attempting to create a "pedagogy of possibility."

"Self-directed learning... [is] the mode of learning characteristic of an adult who is in the process of realizing his or her adulthood is concerned as much with an internal change of consciousness as with the external management of instructional events."

Stephen Brookfield, Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning, p. 58

Stephen Brookfield

I like this definition, and it certainly rings true with a lot of human development theory. But I also have to wonder to what extent it's accurate across various cultures?

"An activity is an example of effective facilitation... to the extent to which it enables participants who initially saw themselves as passive recipients of transmitted knowledge to begin to take responsibility for managing the group process, for controlling their own learning, and for pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and experience in the group"

Stephen Brookfield, Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning, p. 280