Religious Identity and Curriculum Development: The Lived Experience of Spirituality in Schooling

• In Event: Understanding the Power of Analytical Shifts in Intersectional Scholarship: A Focus on Race, as Well as on Class, Gender, Religion, Sexuality, Dis/ability, and Family Configuration

Abstract

The role of religion in public education had long been the source of tension. Avoiding or proscriptively limiting the discussion of religion in schooling precludes students and teachers from bringing their full selves into schools and classrooms, and from seeing their religious, spiritual, and/or secular identities reflected back to them through curricular engagement (Brimhall-Vargas, 2011). The research on religious identity and curriculum development that this paper discusses is intentionally intersectional in examining the ways in which religion, race, and sexuality reciprocally inform each other, at the same time prioritizing the issue of religion, and locating race as the secondary research concern.
Purposes and objectives. This research that this paper takes up challenges and extends existing and unfolding simplistic discourse on identity politics, prejudice reduction, and anti-intellectual theology. Using intersectional analysis to reconsider human identity formation beyond ‘either/or’ constructions, this research seeks to rename identity so as to capture the wholeness and movement of it in a manner akin to how poetry seeks to bring forward complex of experiences of truth (Allport, 1950; Allport and Ross, 1967). In developing curricula informed by student and teacher co-created identity narratives, identity becomes a more fluid concept, negotiated in ways that avoids false dichotomies and oppressive relegation to silent spaces. Accordingly, this research seeks to enable educators to actualize an allied vision of religious, racial, and sexual curricular identity (Crenshaw, 1991b).
Framework, modes of inquiry and data sources. Grounded in the philosophical work of Derrida (1978, 1982, 1989), Gadamer (1989), Heidegger (1962), Levinas (1979), and Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968), the research at focus in this paper engages the concept of phenomythology—the existential weaving of myth and phenomenology together to uncover and illustrate that what may be a universal search for ultimacy and liminality in life’s small events, is revelatory of the larger significance and deeper inward meaning of life itself (Brimhall-Vargas, 2011). Van Manen (2003) iterates a process by which intersectional identity-based philosophy can be used to conduct phenomenological research: evidence is amassed through iterative processes of single and group structured conversations that also contain periods of reflective writing as well as non-traditional forms of phenomenological expression such as art, poetry, and music (Allport, 1950; Allport & Ross, 1967; Brimhall-Vargas, 2011; VanManen, 2003). Accordingly, the identity narratives discussed in this paper are drawn from single and multi-person conversations, reflective writing assignments, and an art project. This is consistent with phenomenological study.
Conclusions and significance. The identity narratives suggest that intersectional identity development must be deeply understood as a complex phenomenon often mirrored in the mythological heroic journey commonly found in cultures around the world (Brimhall-Vargas, 2011). Linking this journey to education, curricula must be extended to explore the (dis)connections between ontological and sociopolitical identity, especially at the intersections of religion, race, and sexuality. Such curricula is more responsive to the needs of all students, particularly those whose identities situate them at the center of these intersections, yet still in the margins in public schooling.

Author

• Mark Brimhall-Vargas, University of Maryland - College Park