Insider/Outsider: Efforts Toward Relationality and Social Justice With Students in a Predominantly Mormon Public University

• In Event: 26.034 - Intersections of Faith in Education: The Often Silenced Connections of Faith, Education, and Global Religions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how whiteness (Allen, 2001; Lipsitz, 2006) is not the only hegemony in specific spaces and how whiteness, alongside a global religious tradition’s local hegemony, can intersect and also be problematized toward the ends of student growth and social justice. This reflective essay is theorized through the lens of the Nepantlera (Anzaldúa, 2002), or one who sees between and through situations in often uncomfortable, liminal and ambiguous circumstances while acting as a bridge builder (Author, In press). She writes about her first year in a predominantly Latter Day Saints, or LDS, public university and the intersections of her positionality (Johnson-Bailey, 2004) as someone who not only passes as middle class white--despite her working class upbringing in Appalachia--but also as LDS. She draws from experiences such as speaking Spanish with her own children, often recognized by locals as the fruit of her having gone on a two-year mission to a Spanish-speaking country, to the ambiguities she experiences when she finds proselytizing pamphlets left near her office. Through autoethnographic field notes (Boylorn & Orbe, 2013), the author codes and sorts for emergent themes (Emerson, Fretz, & Snow, 1995). Her data demonstrate there are spaces of intersectionality (Grant & Zwier, 2011) and bridge-building with her LDS students, such as traditions of ethics of fairness, hard work and thrift, which she draws upon to help her students in working toward social justice in the field of education. She also draws on the often liminal experiences she has with students, such as their argument using Kumashiro’s (2004) work on common sense to show why teaching evolution exclusively in biology is “oppressive” to LDS students. This paper demonstrates nuances lurking behind a sometimes glossing and totalizing sense of Whiteness as well as what can happen to whites when their whiteness is decentered from being the pinnacle of hegemony in a teacher education context.
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Author

• G. Sue Kasun, Utah State University