Session Information
23 SES 06 A, Teacher’s Work and Professionalism
Paper Session
Contribution
In ‘common sense’ thinking, and in much academic writing, faith and rationality are oppositionally constructed. Indeed, even for Thomas Acquinas, faith takes over where reason ends (MCGRATH, 1993). Yet Habermas calls for secular societies across global contexts to grant that 'religious convictions have an epistemological status that is not purely and simply irrational' (HABERMAS and RATZINGER, 2005:51). Further, while as researchers we endeavour to acknowledge and to mitigate for our positionality, it remains the case that whether theist, atheist, or agnostic, all researchers take ‘a view from somewhere’. In this paper, therefore, I reflect on a narrative research process in which I chose to foreground my own, albeit tentative, Christian identity, and to locate myself with my participants on a continuum of faith which encompassed doubts, uncertainties and ambiguities as well as beliefs (GANIEL and MITCHELL, 2006). With Howell, I contend that Christian identity might usefully be understood as 'a subject position analogous to other committed subject positions… of gender, race, sexual orientation and so forth' (HOWELL, 2007:371/372). Just as feminist-standpoint epistemology attempts to make women’s experience rather than men’s its point of departure, so might a Christian claim that her ‘view from somewhere’, albeit an ambiguous and uncertain somewhere, enriches and liberates the research endeavour.
This paper emerges from a broader research endeavour which offered an exploration of the intersections between Christian faith, gender and primary teaching understood and examined as work. By drawing on the lives of women primary teachers who were members of Presbyterian churches in Scotland, I sought to explore the issue of the apparent conformity, resulting marginalization, and 'silencing' of women in the structures of both school and church, and to explore women’s apparent collusion in these processes. Through this enquiry into the interrelationship of institutions and experience, I offered an exploration of the relationship between meaningful individual lived experiences and the cultural and meaning-making institutions of education and religion.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
GANIEL, G. & MITCHELL, C. (2006) Turning the Categories Inside-Out: Complex Identifications and Multiple Interactions in Religious Ethnography. Sociology of Religion, 67, 3-21. HABERMAS, J. & RATZINGER, J. (2005) The Dialectics of Secularisation: on reason and religion, Ignatius. HARDING, S. (1991) Representing Fundamentalism; the problem of the repugnant cultural other. Social Research 58, 373-393 HOWELL, B. M. (2007) The Repugnant Cultural Other Speaks Back: Christian identity as ethnographic 'standpoint'. Anthropological Theory, 7, 371-391. MCGRATH, A. E. (1993) Doctrine and Dogma. IN MCGRATH, A. E. (Ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought. Oxford, Blackwell.
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