Utilizing Pedagogy for Disrupting White Supremacy

Shannon Frediani

doi:10.3390/rel11110544

Abstract

This article focuses on how practical theology and interreligious education can utilize pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy and coloniality. It draws primarily from postcolonial studies, practical theology, ethics, and interreligious studies. Creating learning crucibles that privilege those most impacted by systemic injustice, incorporating their knowledges, their experiences, and their agency in countering specific oppressions, has the capacity to change how students approach scholarship, change what they consider knowledge, and change their relationship to religious leadership. This article also draws upon the scholar’s experiences teaching at Starr King School for the Ministry (SKSM), which has an institutional commitment to creating religious leaders in the world dedicated to structural change through their Educating to Counter Oppressions (ECO) philosophy.

Highlights

The question this article asks is: How can practical theology and interreligious education utilize pedagogy for disrupting power framed, wielded, and perpetuated by white supremacist patterns?Without trying to oversimplify disrupting the power of white supremacy, this article will cover four basic aspects of pedagogy designed to re-distribute power based on decolonial theory and the pedagogy of Starr King School for the Ministry, part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA:(1) inversion of power, (2) knowledge formation utilizing subjugated knowledges with the intention of creating liberative and emancipatory knowledge, (3) recognition of trauma, and (4) creating a religious leadership threshold requiring commitment to countering oppressions
Pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy demands that we understand how to close the gap of lived reality of raced bodies and unrecognized harm in all aspects of practical theology, spiritual care, religious education, liturgy, etc., as well as how to counter logics of white supremacy embedded within academia, practical theology, and interreligious classrooms involving experiential learning
Growing into the tensions, connecting systemic injustice, providing time and space for people to recognize their trauma exposure, bridging lived reality with theological education, imagining a new world, and building relationships with people living in the midst of trauma due to the legacy of coloniality all need to be an integral part of theological education and interreligious engagement to disrupt patterns of white supremacy

Summary

Introduction

The question this article asks is: How can practical theology and interreligious education utilize pedagogy for disrupting power framed, wielded, and perpetuated by white supremacist patterns?. IRE relies on the subjugated knowledges of peace studies, transformational leadership, and relational learning incorporating feminist and womanist pedagogy Given these shifts in power away from a few patterns of white supremacy in IRE, how do these intersect examining power in the wider field of practical theology? Pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy demands that we understand how to close the gap of lived reality of raced bodies and unrecognized harm in all aspects of practical theology, spiritual care, religious education, liturgy, etc., as well as how to counter logics of white supremacy embedded within academia, practical theology, and interreligious classrooms involving experiential learning

Pedagogy and the Inversion of Power

Utilizing Subjugated Knowledges

Recognition of Trauma in Pedagogy

SKSM Threshold and ECO Commitment

Conclusions