Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces

Callan, Eamonn

doi:10.7202/1070555ar

Cited by 53 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…As Winnifred Fallers Sullivan noted on accepting the AAR's 2017 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion, "Going to school is a dangerous thing" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=XxtbUAiJ4cg at 1:03:18). Also helpful is the notion of Callan (2016) distinguishing between "intellectual safety" (where one's ideas go unchallenged) and "dignity safety" (where, despite disagreements, all parties understand one another as equals).…”

Section: Consideration 1: Politically Marginalized Groups In the College Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

Accepting the Inevitability of Politics in the Classroom

Fruchtman¹,

Park²

2020

Wabash Journal

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Once we acknowledge that we cannot escape politics in the classroom, it is imperative that we, as instructors, adapt our pedagogy accordingly, with the knowledge that our choices in the classroom will replicate, reinforce, or resist the political status quo. The political embeddedness of religion makes this all the more urgent for instructors of Religious Studies, as we attempt to guide students through explorations of communities, identities, histories, ideologies, and representations of human experience which all have political implications in the present. This article delineates several parameters for crafting our pedagogical initiatives, offering classroom climate considerations to keep in mind while we establish our own best practices. It then offers several suggestions—structural, instructor-focused, and student-focused—of best practices to implement in the Religious Studies classroom so as to achieve optimal learning outcomes for all of our students. Key among our conclusions is that inclusive pedagogy is effective pedagogy in Religious Studies.

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Section: Consideration 1: Politically Marginalized Groups In the College Classroommentioning

confidence: 99%

Accepting the Inevitability of Politics in the Classroom

Fruchtman¹,

Park²

2020

Wabash Journal

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“…Recently, religion education (RE) researchers have discussed the role of controversial issues in teaching (Anker and von der Lippe 2016;Franken and Levrau 2020;von der Lippe 2019;Lockley-Scott 2019a;O'Grady and Jackson 2019;Avest 2020;Toft 2020;Woolley 2020). RE discussion has been entwined with a parallel discussion concerning the concept of 'safe space' as a pedagogical ideal (Arao and Clemens 2013;Barrett 2010;Boostrom 1998;Callan 2016;Flensner and von der Lippe 2019;Holley and Steiner 2005;Iversen 2018;Osbeck et al 2017;Redmond 2010), initiated by the promotion of the RE classroom as a safe space in Signposts (Jackson 2014), the influential Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) primer on religion education as intercultural education. The topic of controversial issues has been discussed since the early 1980s but has been reinvigorated in the last decade, initially by scholars of citizenship education and education for democracy (Rangnes and Ravneberg 2019;Saetra 2019Saetra , 2020.…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controversial Issues and the Rhetoric of Common Values

Iversen

2020

Religions

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In this article, I identify a broad, international ‘rhetoric of common values’, which hinges on the poorly supported assumption that values should be promoted because the sharing of values are the basis for social cohesion in groups. Through discussing two cases, I identify, analyse and critique key features of the empirical phenomenon that I call the rhetoric of common values. The two cases are the British government response to the so-called ’Trojan Horse’ incident in 2014, and Norwegian core curricula since 1974. Previous research has critiqued the use of the term ’fundamental British values’ as being unhelpful when schools teach controversial issues. The results of my analysis provide international breadth, some historical depth and metaphorical structure to our understanding of how the rhetoric of common values is used in education policy today. The article focusses less on dilemmas faced by teachers and more on the context of choice established ‘upstream’ by education policy. I argue that it is timely and important for teachers in religious education to understand the rhetoric of common values. It is a contemporary and politically relevant way in which religion is mobilised and politicised for exclusionary forms of national identity. Avoiding the rhetoric of common values does not mean avoiding values in education policy. The rhetoric of common values identitizes values. This causes the terms ‘values’ to be mobilised in boundary work separating ‘us’ from ‘them’, thus undercutting a better role of values in education policy: to reflect upon, and make relevant in life, guidelines for future action.

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“…The same dignity/intellectual safety distinction is relied upon by Eamonn Callan (2016) in his essay on ‘Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces’. Like Ben-Porath, Callan believes that an education worth having will inevitably make some students intellectually unsafe.…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

“…The college campus is a student’s home. And, as Callan (2016) observes, ‘a plausible condition of being at home in any social environment is the knowledge that one is dignity safe’ (p. 72). My own home is open to rough-and-tumble discussion (though there is considerably less of it now that my children, alas, have found homes of their own).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is not a safe place, however, for verbal aggression in substance or form. Students have been invited, perhaps even courted, to make campus their home; the humiliation effected by hateful speech calls into question whether that invitation was made in good faith (see Callan, 2016: 67). It is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that students want only the opportunity to be heard.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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