Recognizing Religion With Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Intersectionalities of Christian Literacies and Literacy Education in U.S. Schools

Abstract

Purpose
Teacher preparation programs increasingly consider how they prepare preservice teachers to address issues of diversity, particularly around identity issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in their own classrooms. However, teacher preparation programs have not yet adequately grappled with religious identity, both as a part of the teacher identity preservice teachers bring into teacher preparation programs, but also in considering how to prepare preservice teachers to deal with religious identity in their own classrooms. Teacher educators must consider the ways in which religion can and must be approached, particularly as part of a cosmopolitan (e.g. Pinar, 2009), multicultural curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Nieto, 1996).

Theory
We ground our work in Honneth’s (2007) recognition theory. Honneth understands recognition as central to the struggle for autonomy and emancipation. Recognition is typically associated with a sense of familiarity and a response to another person who demands us to “see” them as an autonomous equal. Recognition is about the critical creation and delineation of social spaces that determine the people and ideas that are accepted and rejected in any given culture.

Method
We present a qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) around the experience of evangelical Christian preservice teachers as they participated in an English education teacher preparation program. Data collection took place over a month-long period during the three focus participants’ cohort experience.

Data sources
We conducted semi-structured interviews with all of the interview participants. Questions focused on how students felt their personal beliefs were either supported, ignored, or challenged by their instructors, their peers, and the curriculum of the courses they were taking. Additionally, we drew from participants’ postings on a classroom discussion board. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Guest, 2012) to analyze the data.

Results
We identified three categories of codes that account for the experience of the evangelical Christian participants in their teaching education program related to their beliefs and religious identities.
1) Invisibility--There were instances where it evangelical preservice teachers felt as if they had to censor themselves, particularly during classes that discussed how to work as an ally for LGBTQ students.
2) Recognition--Participants reported finding peers and instructors who shared their beliefs and stances as a way of making sense of their experience within the program, and this held true no matter what those beliefs and stances were.
3) Misrecognition--Evangelical preservice teachers shared a sense of being misrecognized, and the anxiety of misrecognition by peers was far greater than the sense of being misrecognized by instructors.

Scholarly significance
If the goal of teacher educators is to model for preservice teachers how they might affirm the identities of all the students in their own classrooms, what does it mean that preservice teachers report feeling misrecognized and ideologically marginalized in teacher education classrooms? As a result of our study, we argue here for more open conversations about religious identity with preservice teachers so that they can explore, understand, and critique their own cultural backgrounds and/or privilege as they prepare to enter increasingly pluralistic and diverse classrooms.

Authors

• Heidi Hadley, Missouri State University

• William Fassbender, University of Georgia