Content area
Full text
I teach theology at a Catholic, urban university, which was founded by Jesuits and Sisters of Mercy. The university understands itself to be guided by core values and grounded on principles of justice. A Women's Studies Program, founded in 1992, which contributes a rigorous focus on gender, race, and class constructions, and sometimes promotes more experimental teaching models, can find itself in the middle of conflict. This happens especially when exploring religions' impact on women: the concrete experiences of oppression challenge the kinder, gentler abstractions of justice. Many times, those who have a stake in the status quo view those who are oppressed and who dare to speak from their pain with suspicion. The voicing of the realities of oppressions calls uncomfortable attention to the others' cloaks of privilege and power. Little wonder, when pain is given voice, that well-meaning institutions are baffled or that white males fear extinction. These themes were brought into sharp relief during a Barbie doll display at our university.
In this academic setting like other schools, some faculties use liberatory pedagogies in order to analyze aspects of society and effect reflective social change. The methodologies used in these pedagogies are often creative, expanding the idea of the text to incorporate various modes, such as ethnography, autobiography, music, folklore, or poetry. These pedagogies might have various labels applied to them and there are shifts in the application of the methodologies. Yet a constant factor remains: these pedagogies power to effect transformation. This essay examines some of the concrete realities that occurred within the contexts and resulting interactions of liberatory teaching methodologies.
As one person committed to liberatory pedagogies, I have begun to regard our current turn of the century as a "pre -Inquisition" period. Conservative groups zealously seek to enforce a climate of religious antiintellectualism in line with their political agendas. Free inquiry is a threat to their world and values; efforts are made to keep those in power safe from dangerous new thought. Those of us committed to liberation in the classroom can find ourselves attacked for threatening the foundations of society.
This climate lives in a particular way at Catholic universities, now dealing with the impact of the document penned by the Pope in 1990, Ex Corde Ecclesia....