Writing, religious faith, and rooted cosmopolitan dialogue: Portraits of two American Evangelical men in a public school English classroom. (original) (raw)
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English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2022
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The The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, 2021
At a moment in which religious diversity is ever-increasing in the United States and more than three-quarters of the world's population identifies with a religious tradition, it is important for writing teachers to consider how to best cultivate writers who are equipped to build identifications across religious difference. This essay traces my efforts to engage this exigence in my advanced undergraduate writing course at Baylor University entitled Religious Rhetorics and Spiritual Writing (RRSW). In what follows, I outline my pedagogical goals, course design, and approach to teaching RRSW. I then share the results of a qualitative pilot study that used teacher-research methodology to develop an understanding of what students learned about engaging across religious difference in RRSW. Results of this study show that students learned the value of approaching rhetorical engagement across religious difference with dispositions of hospitality, curiosity, and humility. 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In the midst of our ongoing encounters with a diversity of perspectives, invitational rhetoric is offered as a framework for interaction that seeks for rhetors and audiences to gain "understanding that engenders appreciation, value, and a sense of equity" (5). Exigent questions concerning how best to foster the kinds of writing knowledge, abilities, and dispositions that are essential for thoughtful engagement across difference in our twenty-first century context have likewise influenced current approaches to rhetorical education in generative ways (see, for instance, Clifton; Duffy; Glenn et al.; Roberts-Miller). Scholarship in this vein offers valuable pedagogical insights concerning ways to prepare writers to engage in ethical deliberation. A dimension of difference that we have yet to adequately account for in our discussions of twenty-first century rhetorical education, however, is engagement across religious difference. Religious diversity is a major facet of our contemporary context in the United States and around the world. Sociologists of religion widely assert that the United States is more religiously diverse in our present moment than in any other previous era in recorded history (Jones and Cox 10). On a global scale, there are equally dramatic shifts in religious affiliation underway that are altering the world's religious landscape. Not only is this ever-increasing diversity of the world's religious composition significant to the more than 84 percent of the world's population who identify as religiously affiliated (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, "Global" 9) or the more than 75 percent of Americans who claim religious affiliation (Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, "Religious"), but these shifting dynamics pertain to all who are concerned with how to promote peaceful, respectful, and ethical forms of engagement across difference in our present moment. Readers are all too familiar with the long record of tragedies in which clashes over religious difference have fueled wars, genocide, oppression, demagoguery, violent hate crimes, harassment, and other such ills. These religious conflicts erode human dignity, sever bonds, undermine deliberation, and threaten the very foundations of democracy. Such outcomes, however, are in no way a given and indeed may be subject to intervention through rhetorical education.
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