religious educator as cultural spec-actor: Researching self in intercultural pedagogy, The

Religious Education, Summer 2003 by Irizarry, Jose R

Abstract

This article seeks to explore notions regarding the conceptualisation of culture in the field of Christian religious education. These conceptualizations are central to understanding the social nature of faith communities and the role of religious educators as they respond to this nature. The author proposes that the faith community is intercultural in that people with distinct cultural perspectives come together to forge a shared religious identity. Consequently, the vocation of the religious educator is presented as a call to be a specactor1, a practitioner who constantly assesses his/her own cultural orientations in relation to those of the learners. The article concludes the paper with some suggestions on how to develop a contrastive pedagogy that takes into account both the intercultural dynamics of the Christian educational experience and the vocation of the intercultural religious educator.

"CULTURE" AS A FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPT FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Every so often certain generative concepts surface within scholarly discourse that stirs up the academic imaginary2 within the interdisciplinary praxis. In fact, this introductory sentence validates its own claim since terms such as discourse, imaginary, and praxis are among those concepts that, lacking semantic precision, allow diverse and creative usage across disciplines. In similar ways, the concept of culture is one of the most theorized about across disciplines of knowledge. Researchers of culture who are methodical about their inquiry procedures enjoy the flexibility of the concept which allows them to engage a constructivist approach, where the theoretical framework of research develops as research evolves. Scholars of culture who construct their research around already defined outcomes are assisted by the imprecise nature of the concept which offers them a way out of theoretical concreteness. Both approaches to research, around issues of culture, have found their place in educational literature.

While the word "culture" is not a new fad within academic vogue, it has been rejuvenated as cultural studies, cultural criticism, cultural history, and even "cultural wars" gain prominence in academic, public, and religious life. A review of literature in which the subject of culture is addressed would demonstrate how the concept has been interpreted in vastly different ways to refer to distinct and dissimilar phenomena, even within a singular discipline (Verma 1991). The very polysemy of the concept has allowed researchers to address the issue of culture without being determined by the contentious currents of anthropological research and social theory (Ulin 2001).

In religious education, and especially in research dealing with multiculturalism, the concept of culture has been central in framing theoretical claims while keeping its semantic referents more or less elusive. In keeping with the judgment on secular multicultural education made by F. Javier Garcia Castano (1999), I will maintain that the concept of ctfiiwg has not played a central role in the construction of the overall theory and practice of religious education. Moreover, when the concept of culture is used in religious education research, as it is the case of works on multicultural education (Ng 1996; Wilkerson 1997), congregational diversity (Foster and Brelsford 1996) and ethnographic studies, its treatment remains considerably separated from anthropological and ethnosocial analysis which accounts for a narrow usage of an otherwise complex and dynamic concept. This observation is not a judgement on the adequacy of these important treatments of culture in religious education research, but a description of the inherent limitations that any educational study dealing with the idea of culture confronts. A comprehensive anthropological and ethnosocial analysis requires the ability to diagnose the different expressions of a cultural composition before culture is identified with any particular grouping of people (i.e., racially or ethnically). The anthropological analysis sees ethnicity and race as instances of a group identity, not as that which essentially defines culture in its totality (Bullivant 1993). Discussing culture in religious education in terms of racial and ethnic groupings is just a partial and static treatment of a complex process by which communities represent themselves as unique and differentiated (Donald and Rattansi 1992).

Before engaging any discussion about the place of culture in religious education theory and practice a delimitation of the concept is required. To be sure, within Christian theological discourse the concept of culture has had three major connotations (Tanner 1997). The first connotation can be called synchronic, since it refers to culture as a structured system of epistemological trends and social practices which are shared by humans in time regardless of their diverse geographical, social and "representational locations".3 In this case culture is the overarching social and material conventions of an era that influence human groups directly or indirectly in the way they engage subjective formation and objective reality. This is the concept of culture which today is defined by totalizing themes like information technology, economic globalization, neocolonial politics, environmental consciousness, modernity crisis, and post-secularism among other themes. This use of the term culture always in the singular, is embraced by social ethicists who in a Niebuhrian fashion refer to culture as an encompassing reality, the given-world that confronts the individual as an ethical dilemma. It is the same culture that philosophical phenomenologists, after Edmund Husserl, will identify as "life-world" a universally shared Me of meaning and experience (Husserl 1962; Niebuhr 1951).