Position Paper:
By Lisa Johnson
I was a little startled this summer when I saw that student evaluations include a line for evaluating whether professors relate course materials to the Christian faith effectively. But the surprise soon shifted to excitement at this challenge. Despite my formal schooling in a public high school and three state universities, I am not taken aback by the integration of scholarship and spirituality. In fact, the mission of Lenoir-Rhyne College to address the full student—mind, body, and spirit—coincides neatly with my own feminist pedagogical commitments. Feminist pedagogy breaks with traditional Cartesian divisions of people into minds and bodies, asserting instead that teachers and students must be permitted to bring our full selves into the classroom, not just our thinking apparatus. In composition class, this can mean a less authoritarian relationship between teacher and student, as well as more writing from personal experience, acknowledging how our beliefs and perspectives have been shaped by personal and cultural upbringing. This goal of critical self-consciousness presupposes a belief that what we do in the classroom connects to how we live our lives outside and beyond it, so in this sense feminist composition pedagogy strikes me as inherently spiritual, as well as political and academic.
Beyond the basic structure of my courses, I have begun shaping their content partly in response to the invitation to relate my discipline to issues of faith and spirituality. This semester I am conducting a cultural studies course with a theme of Women in Love; our texts actively question and revise the gender roles traditionally scripted for romantic love relationships, so that even as our intellectual faculties engage the aesthetic form and value of these texts, our personal and spiritual dimensions will be called on to apply the questions raised by the texts to our own lives and the culture around us. Religious views of marriage will be examined along with literary revisions and legislative incentives; the cultural belief in couple-hood as the ideal human state will be analyzed as a social construct with historical and political underpinnings. More directly related to faith are the upcoming Bluestocking discussions planned for spring semester, in which we will examine various interactions between feminism and religion in music and literature. I also plan to offer a course next fall on questions of faith and religion in contemporary women’s literature, with special focus on feminist debates over religion and female sexuality across the genres of philosophy, poetry, and fiction.
In these ways, I imagine forging my own position with the Lenoir-Rhyne community, from which I can both embrace the commitment to addressing the mind, body, and spirit of students in the classroom and promote a critical engagement with students’ personal beliefs, including those based on the Christian faith and/or Lutheran tradition. I disagree with those who suggest hiring more Lutheran faculty as the best way to strengthen the school’s commitment to being a faith-based institution. My background is Methodist, but I don’t practice an organized religion at this time, yet my approach to education as a force that shapes character and society resonates with the Lutheran-ness of Lenoir-Rhyne, and perhaps adds texture to its definition of spirituality in the classroom.