David Mussatt
Re-Embodying the Disembodied:
A Personal Reflection on Critical Pedagogy andthe Use of Anthologies in the Classroom
I believe that teaching has to do with being-in-the-world, and the world is conceived in texts. A great text, be it the Republic or the Bible, raises questions that are answered only in the process of raising them again and again. The recurrence of the questions entails endless presence of the texts. Teaching has to do with letting the texts face the students. I have had real pleasure in helping the students connect the present with the past, showing them how thinking, like life itself, is a temporal act.1
In a recent graduate course,I was asked to construct an undergraduate course in American religioushistory. Primarily, the professor asked that I consider seriouslythe most applicable texts for such a course. This assignment presentedquite a challenge. Not only did I need to familiarize myself withthe vast literature of the field, but also I needed to articulatemy pedagogy so that I could have some criteria for choosing textsmost applicable to my teaching style. In addition, I needed tofigure out which texts would help students most effectively crossthe border between the cultural norms by which they understandtheir world and the critical way academics try to alter thosenorms.
During my search of potentialtexts, I noticed that a large portion of the current books beingpublished that deal with various aspects of American religioushistory were anthologies, or books composed of essays that arecompiled by an editor. For example, of the texts in the graduatecourse syllabus, seven out of eight published after 1995 wereanthologies. Of course, throughout the course of the semester,my fellow classmates and I discussed some of the pros and consof anthologies, but little was settled. In this essay, I willreflect further on these pros and cons and on whether anthologiesare useful for entry level undergraduate courses.
This essay may thus be calleda speculative reflection because as a graduate student, I havenot designed a course that uses the texts I am analyzing in thisreflection. However, I have gone through the mental process ofdesigning such a course. Therefore, in this essay, I will attemptto accomplish three goals related to this reflective process.
First, I wish to lay out my philosophytoward teaching undergraduates. This philosophy is derived, althoughnot exclusively, from the work on pedagogy by bell hooks and PauloFreire. I will summarize their development of a liberartory pedagogyand discuss why it needs to be analyzed and deepened further.Second, I will place an anthology that claims to be an "entrypoint" text into this pedagogical context. This anthology,African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History andCulture, is a collection of "salient essays" byvarious authors from various periods. I hope to elucidate someof the benefits and faults of using such an anthology in an introductorycourse. Third, I will compare African-American Religion,edited by Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, to A Firein the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History,an anthology composed of essays by a single author, Albert J.Raboteau. Although still an anthology, A Fire in the Bonesdiffers greatly from African-American Religion in style,substance, and, I will argue, pedagogical usefulness. It is myhope that this comparison will contribute to an understandingof my pedagogy and the field of African-American religion.
Critical and Engaged Pedagogy
In 1970, the Brazilian scholarPaulo Freire published a comprehensive account of his methodologyof teaching the oppressed poor people throughout the North Eastof Brazil. This book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has becomethe cornerstone from which critical pedagogy has been built. Itis a pedagogy that encourages students to break out of what Freirecalls the "culture of silence," which is the culturedeveloped by the dominant to keep the people oppressed. His objectiveis to break the cycle of education as a tool of the dominant classesto legitimize and perpetuate their dominance. He offers a criticalpedagogy that works toward fostering liberatory practices to replacethis old model of pedagogy.
Freire argues that the goal ofeducation must be to break this cycle of oppression by empoweringstudents to learn their own history and to transform their society(12). To accomplish this goal, Freire does not begin thinkingabout teaching from the standpoint of the instructor and his orher knowledge of the course material. Rather, Freire begins hispedagogy from the standpoint of the student. Instead of seeingstudents as "empty vessels" who need to be filled withthe instructor’s knowledge, as is the case in the "banking"concept of education, Freire views students as coming to the classroomalready full of vital information that can be shared with theinstructor through dialogue. From this viewpoint, Freire argues,"Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-studentcontradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction sothat both are simultaneously teachers and students"(53). Freire argues that the classroom can become replete withstudent-teachers through the abandonment of the traditional "banking"concept of education and the application of problem-posing education,where problems are posed in class and students and teachers engagein dialogue about them. This concept of education breaks fromthe hierarchical idea of education and fosters self-reflectivedialogue between students and teachers so that both become "criticalco-investigators" (62).
In this investigation process,history becomes vital. However, the history named here is nota history passed down to students, but discovered by studentsin dialogue with each other and their teachers. It is a processof seeing oneself as an active Subject in history, and not theobject of history. To become a Subject of history, reflectionand action, or "praxis," is necessary. As Freire reiterates,"Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity andstimulates true reflection and action upon reality . . . In sum:banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces,fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posingtheory and practice take the people’s historicity as theirstarting point" (65). In this way, the cycle of oppressionmay then be broken.
In Teaching to Transgress:Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks builds uponFreire’s critical pedagogy to construct what she terms "engagedpedagogy." She argues that engaged pedagogy is more demandingof educators because it insists that "teachers be activelycommitted to a process of self-actualization that promotes theirown well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowersstudents" (15). In other words, like Freire, hooks’goals are the empowerment of students and an education that leadsto the practice of freedom, but she begins her pedagogy with theparadigm of excitement. To generate excitement, the teacher mustfoster a community of learners who truly contribute to the classand who are acknowledged. She writes, "As a classroom community,our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by ourinterest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices,in recognizing one another’s presence" (8). Like Freire,hooks argues that the classroom cannot be made up of an instructorand students, but of student-instructors only. The hierarchicalstructure must be broken so that students and teachers can begindialogue on common ground.
In constructing a course basedon the critical and engaged pedagogy of Freire and hooks, theselection of texts becomes complex. However, Freire and hooksdo not mention the selection of texts because of their emphasison teacher-student relations. Nevertheless, texts are a vitalcomponent of a course and teaching a class, and it is necessaryto critique texts based on criteria derived from critical andengaged pedagogy. For example, if we understand a class readingassignment as taking the place of the instructor outside of theclassroom, then we can try to critique a book’s usefulnessbased on its ability to be a "student-instructor," asthe teacher tries to be in the liberatory classroom. Applyingthis criterion to a text, we must first ask if a text begins froma position that is in accord with the knowledge of the students.To return to my case of creating an introductory course on Americanreligion, it would be important that I select a text that assumesthe students have no previous understanding of the subject. However,it must not assume that the student has no knowledge. This pointbecomes difficult because, unlike an instructor, a text cannotaddress the vast realm of experiences that students bring to aclassroom. It only addresses a general audience. For instance,an introductory book to American religion will usually assumethat the students reading the book come to the class with a minimalunderstanding of all religions. The knowledge that particularstudents have based on factors of race, class, sex, and religioncannot be taken fully into consideration by a text. Therefore,it is important that a book states who the assumed audience is,and what other assumptions about that audience’s knowledgehave been made.
The second criterion that wecan attempt to apply to a text deals with self-actualization.Just as bell hooks argues that teachers need to be embodied andself-actualized, texts will be most successful in a liberatoryclassroom if they too are premised on the same principle of self-actualization.In other words, the most useful texts are those where the authorsare present through personal reflection in the text. When theauthor places his or herself in the text, the book does not simplytell information to the reader. Rather, empathy can begin to developbetween author and reader. A text that includes personal reflectionby the author breaks down the disembodied "objectiveness"that stymies critique and problem-posing. Personal reflectionby the author of a text allows readers a greater chance of empathizingwith the author and comparing the author’s position to theirown. This empathy is required for dialogue that will foster conscientization,or a raised awareness of suffering and oppression.
The two criteria presented aboveare very limited and not the only criteria to be considered whendeciding on course texts. However, they are a starting point fromwhich we can proceed to look at texts that are being written nowand being marketed as "introductory." They will allowus also to reflect on how useful a particular text may be in aliberatory classroom.
Anthologies and Critical Pedagogy
Given the brief criteria forchoosing texts for a "problem-posing" and "excited"class, we can now look at specific texts to include in a coursesyllabus. As mentioned earlier, the impetus for the reflectionon pedagogy was to understand the trend toward scholars producinganthologies as introductory texts, in lieu of synoptic histories.To do so, we must look more closely at anthologies and synoptichistories to analyze their relationship to critical pedagogy.
From one standpoint, anthologiesseem like a great idea. I would argue that partly as a resultof the postmodern impulse to have people of particular cultures,races, religions, etc., speak for themselves, scholars have avoidedtrying to write synoptic histories. To elude problems associatedwith having one author attempt to write about areas that he orshe has limited knowledge, anthologies allow an editor to compileessays by scholars who are writing within their area of expertiseor experience, and to let people of a particular culture writeabout themselves. Therefore, some may argue that an anthologywould be more accurate than a synoptic history.
Proponents of synoptic historiesmay argue that the continuous narrative a synoptic history providesis vital to learning. In theory, a synoptic history has a "story-line"that is followed throughout the text. This theme is introducedand developed so that the reader has a continuous story from beginningto end. Unlike anthologies, the reader does not have to repositionhis or herself before each chapter to understand what the mainidea is. Likewise, no previous knowledge is required before eachchapter; only the knowledge that was acquired from the last chapter,unlike anthologies where each chapter assumes a slightly differentaudience.
When analyzing anthologies andsynoptic histories in the context of critical, engaged pedagogy,we can see how both styles are suitable. Anthologies enable numerousvoices to enter the classroom. With an anthology, it is possiblethat the dialogue can be expanded to accommodate the various positionsof each author or the various themes of each chapter. However,this would only occur if the authors of the essays are self-reflectiveand make themselves "present" in the text. Essays thatare written by authors who are not self-reflective would fallinto the banking concept of education where the reader is toldinformation and not encouraged to critically think about it.
Synoptic histories, on the otherhand, may be even more useful in introductory courses. Synoptichistories, although problematic to the postmodern impulse in thatthey include only one voice and one story-line, are, I propose,better for undergraduates who are being exposed to an area forthe first time. There is coherence, orderliness, and accessibility.It may be that the best reason to use a synoptic history is thatit is not an anthology.2 It is difficultfor anyone to learn something new when it is presented in a fragmentedfashion, like an anthology. Learning takes place by making connectionsbetween what we know and new information. When reading anthologies,it is quite difficult to make connections between the essays becausethey are not written to be linked together and are written withdifferent agendas. In addition, anthologies often assume we knowmore than we do. Thus, they are useful for scholars in the fieldand as supplemental material for neophytes, but are difficultwhen used exclusively in an introductory setting.
Case Study of African-American Religion
Returning to my assignment ofcreating an introductory course in American religion, I want todiscuss two books on African-American religion and, using criticalpedagogy as my foundation. One anthology that I will use as acase study in this paper is African-American Religion: InterpretiveEssays in History and Culture, edited by Timothy E. Fulopand Albert J. Raboteau. There are two main reasons why I consideredthis text for my syllabus. First, as most of the class agreed,African-American Religion is one of the better anthologiesthat we read.3 This text is better thanmost anthologies in American religious history because it doesnot deal with "American religion," in general. Rather,it has a narrower subject area and is therefore more inclusive.This narrowing down of subject allowed the editors to include,for the most part, articles which had a related theme: the agencyor empowerment of African-Americans.
To support how this theme isdeveloped, I will outline the text briefly. David Wills beginsthis theme in the first essay of the text by examining how Americanreligious history can be written by using the encounter betweenBlack and White as its paradigm. The theme then continues throughoutthe text. For example, Raboteau’s own essay on slaves’conversion to Christianity and Will B. Gravely’s essay onthe making of African-American churches stress the agency of African-Americansin their religious lives and their encounters with an oppressivesociety. In addition, Carol V.R. George looks at the work of justicedone by lower-class clergy in the Civil Rights Movement; ClayborneCarson analyzes how the intellectual encounter of African-Americanand European-American theology was reconciled by Dr. Martin LutherKing, Jr.; and Bruce Jackson argues that conjure magic has providedagency to practitioners and their "patients" throughoutAfrican-American history. These articles and many others in thetext do an excellent job of displaying the active role African-Americanshave taken in their religious history. In this way, many of thearticles included in this anthology are connected. This, in myopinion, is a useful accomplishment for an anthology compiledof previously published essays.
The second reason why I selectedthis text is that the editors state that their book is to be usedas an "up-to-date entry point into the field" (2). However,the editors of African-American Religion do not state thattheir text should be used exclusively as an introductory text.They also intended the book to "point to new avenues of investigationand new interpretive directions" for scholars in the field(2). These two different intentions imply that the text is meantfor two different audiences. However, since one intent is forthis text to be used specifically as introductory, I am usingit as an example in this essay.
On the other hand, as outlinedearlier, the reasons why anthologies are not effective as primaryentry-points into the field are also obvious in African-AmericanReligion. First, the text is unhelpful to the neophyte becausea certain amount of knowledge is necessary to understand manyof the essays. For example, the David Wills’ article on usingthe encounter of Black and White as the paradigm for doing Americanreligious history is only truly understood and appreciated ifone is familiar with the existing historiography of American religion.The authors of the essays did not write their essays with theintent of them being "entry-points." In addition, theauthors of the essays were writing scholarly pieces that wereplaced in an academic dialogue. Therefore, the embodiment or author’spresence necessary for a text to be truly useful in the liberatoryclassroom is missing from most of these essays. The essays werewritten for various audiences and various purposes. Thus, it canbe argued that African-American Religion is problematicto use in an introductory course.
Another reason why this textmay not be effective is that many areas of African-American religionare not included. This is because, as Fulop and Raboteau pointout in their introduction, the work on these areas is not "outthere" yet. This is a considerable problem with anthologiesof this type; they are limited to articles that were previouslypublished.4<,sup> Because the current scholarshipon African-American religion has dealt mostly with ProtestantChristianity, essays on this subject dominate the Reader. Exceptfor one article by C. Eric Lincoln on the Nation of Islam, thearticle on conjure magic by Bruce Jackson, and an article on Ogouin Haiti by Karen McCarthy Brown, all the articles are withinthe Protestant realm. In addition, one must look hard to findreferences to Black theology or the names of James Cone and GayraudWilmore, and there is no mention of the Million Man March. I believean "up-to-date" history text needs to cover these topicsand many more because these are events and ideas that are constantlyreferred to in the field now. A student must learn of these specificsin an introductory course in order to offer critiques and analyseslater.
Therefore, largely because ofthe nature of an anthology, I do not feel that African-AmericanReligion is an effective entry-point into the field. I dobelieve that a synoptic history may be more useful for studentsunfamiliar with the subject. If I were teaching a course on Americanreligion and needed an "entry-point" text to African-Americanreligion, I would be much more inclined to use older texts onAfrican religions, such as African Religions and Philosophyby John Mbiti, and on American religious history, a text suchas America: Religions and Religion by Catherine Albanese.Albeit these texts have the problems of synoptic narratives thatwere previously discussed, they allow students to understand moreeasily the contexts of African-American religion and professorsto spend less time lecturing in class. The class can more easilydialogue with these texts because the connections can be morereadily made. African-American Religion, or at least particularessays within it, could be used as a supplement for class discussiontopics, but I would not use it as the entry-point for a class.
Interestingly, Fulop and Raboteaureadily admit that a synoptic history would be a better alternativethan the anthology they offer. The main theme of their introductionis that a synoptic history of African-American religion needsto be written. Fulop and Raboteau state that scholarly treatmentof the field of African-American religious history did not "begin"(in the form of publications for a broad audience) until W.E.B.DuBois wrote Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Even with DuBois’breakthrough, it was not until the 1960's and 1970's that "thestudy of the religious experience of African Americans began toblossom and gain its rightful place in scholarship" (Fulopand Raboteau, 1). At the same time, as I have argued, postmodernthinking, which finally allowed voices from other places to beraised, was spreading within academic ideology. The same postmodernimpulse debunked the grand narratives of American religious historyand questioned whether or not they should even exist. Therefore,it can be argued that partly because of the simultaneous "entrance"of African American scholarship and postmodernity in the academy,a synoptic history of the African American religious experiencehas never been done. This has made entry into the field difficultfor students.
Case Study of A Fire in the Bones
The entire discussion about anthologiesand synoptic histories may not be completely hopeless. In goingthrough the literature to see which book about African-Americanreligion should go in my introductory course, I came across anotherwork edited by Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflectionson African-American Religious History. It too is an anthology,but this anthology is compiled of essays written by Raboteau himself.In this collection, I believe I found an anthology that is conduciveto critical pedagogy and to engaged teaching in an introductoryAmerican religion course. The author is present in all of theessays, for the essays present problems to the reader who mustthen reflect on these problems. The text provides an historicalfoundation that is unified around common themes, and it is easyto follow.
Raboteau comes through in thistext as self-actualized. For example, the anthology begins withhis reflection of being in Paris as a child in an all-white Catholicchoir and being asked to sing a "Negro spiritual" bya French priest. Raboteau reflects on his feelings about thisinquiry,
I was troubled by his request, my uneasiness enhanced by a sense that spirituals belonged, not to our Roman Catholic choir’s public repertoire, but to a more private and meditative place, reflecting my people’s distinctive identity, an identity that I already felt uncomfortable about exposing so far from home and family. I had never before felt so American and so un-American at the same time (ix-x).
Again at the end of this anthology,Raboteau reflects on the experience of his youth and how it shapedhis scholarship. He spoke of finding a slave narrative in graduateschool that described the experience inside the slave churchesas "a fire in the bones" where sorrow and joy intermingledand converged. Raboteau reflected on this contradiction, "Theparadox resonated within me, stirring memories of forgotten ancestorswhose stories I needed to learn, stories with important lessonsnot only for me, but for others as well" (184). These exemplifyhow Raboteau is present throughout this "scattered"anthology. By positioning himself within the essays, Raboteaulets the reader not only know him better, but also lets the readerdevelop empathy. When a person has empathy, dialogue is improvedand the process of liberation as taught by Freire and hooks isbegun.
Against the backdrop of thesevery personal self-reflections, Raboteau presents a number ofpreviously published articles about the history of Black Christianityin the United States. More limited in scope that African-AmericanReligion, A Fire in the Bones is not presented as anintroduction to the field of African-American religion. Rather,"The essays collected in this book represent the result of[Raboteau’s] attempts to understand the religious historyof black Americans and to ascertain what that particular historymeans for the nation as a whole" (x). To accomplish thisgoal, Raboteau presents rich essays that are the grounding forclassroom problem-posing and dialogue. For example, in the prologueto the anthology, Raboteau challenges the new student of Americanreligious history to rethink the history of Black Americans thatthey might have been taught by hegemonic culture.
Black Americans, if historians discussed them at all, figured prominently only in the story of slavery and in the topic of race relations. In both cases, they appeared not as actors in the national drama but as victims or problems. As an oppressed minority, they represented an unfortunate but minor exception to the main plot of American history: the gradual expansion of democracy to include all citizens . . . We were, so to speak, invisible (5).
In this example, we can see thevalue of the text to critical pedagogy. Raboteau poses a problemfor the reader. He presents the normalized way of understandinghistory in a way that allows the reader to reflect on that norm.In so doing, the reader’s faith in history is challenged.Instead of "receiving" history, Raboteau challengesthe reader to be empathetic to the lives and cultures of thosewho are the subject of that history. He challenges the readerto be empathetic by being a self-actualized author who presentshimself and his faith, embodied as one in the text. As he writesin concluding the prologue, "And yet, I, as historian andbeliever, cannot but hope that our history is touched by the providenceof God" (14). Such a sentence is blasphemous to many historians,but, as I explained, it is necessary for engaged teaching.
As the foremost scholar of slavereligion in the United States, Raboteau includes essays that havethe experience of life in slavery at their core. The first partof the text, "In Search of the Promised Land: African-AmericanReligion and American Destiny," contains three essays thatdeal with the way Africans experienced, resisted, and accommodatedlife in America as slaves. The second part, "Under TheirOwn Vine and Fig Tree: The Black Church," discusses autonomousand public Black churches in America, in particular Richard Allen’sAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church and Black Catholicism, of whichRaboteau is a member and expert. Between these two chapters ondenominational Black religion, Raboteau includes a chapter onAfrican-American religious community experience. With this chapter,the reader is presented not only with African-American religionas institutional structure, but also as lived experience. Thethird section, "The Performed Word: Religious Practice,"is dedicated to this lived experience of religion. With two chapterson the experience of preaching and conversion in the Black Church,this final section provides a detailed look at the "feel"of African-American Christianity from particular standpoints.By focusing on the religious experience of the practitioners ofa tradition, Raboteau continues to allow empathy to build andproblems to be presented in a classroom setting. This is particularlytrue in light of the self-reflective prologue and epilogue whereproblems are shared by him. The historical information the chaptersprovide contributes to a deeper understanding of these problems.Therefore, despite its narrow scope, A Fire in the Bonesis an excellent text to introduce students to African-Americanreligion.
Because A Fire in the Bonesis an anthology of the works of one author, it re-embodies whatis in presentation disembodied. The self-reflective prologue andepilogue written by Raboteau provides important context for thedisparate essays that make up the text. It combines the unifiedtheme and coherence of a synoptic history with essays in whichthe author is an intimate "insider" and present participant.It undoubtedly could benefit from the addition of essays thatreveal the diversity of African-American Christianity and religion.However, what it includes can be incorporated easily into theliberatory classroom, and its limitations can be fodder for furtherclassroom dialogue.
Works Cited
- Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970, 1993.
- Fulop, Timothy E., and Albert J. Raboteau. African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
- hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York and London, Routledge, 1994.
- Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston: Beacon P, 1995.
Notes
- 1.This quote was taken from a letter by Bibhuti S. Yadav, regarding the receipt of a Temple University distinguished teaching award, to the chair of the religion department, February 10, 1992. It was read at the department of religion memorial service for Dr. Yadav, November 10, 1999.
- 2. Of course, this postmodern impulse of cultivating diverse voices beyond the scholarly norms has been a refreshing and stimulating trend in academia. I do not wish that any critique I may make of anthologies to imply that I yearn to return to the days when white males spoke for all people throughout the world. In addition, I do not want to imply that anthologies should include only authors who embody the culture about which they write.
- 3. The anthologies which the professor, Dr. Robert Schneider, included in this course were Timothy Fulop and Albert Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (Routledge, 1996), David G. Hackett, ed., Religion and American Culture: A Reader (Routledge, 1995), Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, eds., Religion and American History: A Reader (Oxford, 1998), Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (California, 1997), Harry S. Stout and Darryl G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (Oxford, 1997), Walter Conser, Jr., and Sumner Twiss, eds., Religious Diversity and American Religious History (Georgia, 1998), and David G. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America (Princeton, 1997). In addition to these anthologies, Dr. Schneider had us read essays on older narratives, including Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1972), and Winthrop Hudson and John Corrigan, Religion in America (Macmillan, 5th ed., 1992), as well as two narratives: Catherine Albanese, America: Religion and Religions (Wadsworth, 2nd ed., 1990) and Susan Hill Lindley, "You Have Stept Out of Your Place": A History of Women and Religion in America (Westminister John Knox, 1996).
- 4. In the course, Dr. Schneider distinguished between two types of anthologies: readers and conference products. Readers are anthologies composed of previously published articles and/or chapters from texts. In readers, the editor(s) are limited by the work that is "out there" already. African-American Religion is an example. Conference products are anthologies composed of essays submitted to a conference directed by the editor(s). In these anthologies, the editor has more control of the essays included, and themes are potentially much more specific than in readers. I find the conference products more useful as introductory material because of this development of specific themes.
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David Mussatt's area of specialty is social ethics and American religious history, in the Department of Religion at Temple University. He is writing his dissertation on an analysis of the ethics of activism in the Albany Freedom Ride during the Civil Rights Movement.
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