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Hazards of the Therapeutic: On the Use of Personalist and Feminist Teaching Methodologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Ken Homan
Ken Homan*
Affiliation:
Quincy University
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Abstract

This article expands a project begun as a participant in the first American Academy of Religion and Lilly Endowment Teaching Workshop on Religion. The original project examined feminist teaching methodologies and how a male theology professor could use these methodologies in a general undergraduate theology classroom. This work describes the processes of feminist and personalist teaching methodologies and analyzes their impact on undergraduate theology classrooms.

While these approaches help students come to a greater sense of participation in and ownership of their knowledge, there has also been the attending risk that such pedagogies seemingly involve the student too intensely, too personally, and the course becomes a form of therapy. This study examines how this therapeutic turn appears to develop. It concludes with a discussion about the need for clearly articulated teaching methodologies and how their use where appropriate helps us anticipate and respond to therapeutic classroom dynamics.

Type
Creative Teaching
Information
Horizons , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Fall 1997 , pp. 248 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1997

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References

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7 Much of the conversation on community in education emphasizes commonalities, for it is the things that we have in common which foster community. An insight from postmodernist thought is the notion of identity politics wherein we are formed within and speak from particular identities. It is the particularities of these identities that creates an awareness of the critical differences between persons and groups.

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10 Self-disclosure refers to the process of the manner and degree to which one reveals one's personal life, values, and commitments to one's students. One of the major issues involved with teacher self-disclosure in the classroom is how powerfully it changes the teacher-student relationship. On one level an argument can be made for self-disclosure because such action humanizes the professor for the students and also shows how the professor wrestles with the issues involved. On another level the argument made against self-disclosure is that it puts the professor too much at the center of attention in the classroom, so that the students begin to focus primarily upon the personal elements of the professor's life, and the subject matter which the students were to be addressing falls from view. For example, in some of the courses which I teach we spend a fair amount of time exploring the concepts of jouissance and the erotic. The students frequently struggle with these materials on a conceptual plane and with the idea that these are proper data for intellectual inquiry. In my own mind I have examples that I know I could use il-luminatively to illustrate these concepts. But to do so, in my view, would entail being far too self-revelatory with the students for their good and for mine.

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13 Many of us have experienced the students' hermeneutics of suspicion. Even when we give relatively simple, straightforward questions to students on an exam, or instructions for a paper, we hear the students ask, “What does Homan really want?” Such a question implies a distrust of the instructions and reveals a belief on behalf of the student that, if they are able to cipher what the professor really wants, they will get a better grade on their work. Consequently when work is graded lower than what the student expected, the student appears confused and says, “But I thought that that is what you wanted!”

14 Written by Martin P. Britt, who was a student at Quincy University at the time. Marty gave me this poem when he heard that I was working on this article.

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24 See Appendix for instructions given to students.

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29 Deborah Tannen refers to this phenomenon as “troubles talk” (Tannen, Deborah, Gender and Discourse [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 207).Google Scholar “Troubles talk” is a term that Tannen borrows from Jefferson, Gail, “On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversations,” Social Problems 35/4 (1988): 418–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Troubles talk” is “a ritual exchange of woes in the service of solidarity” (207). Tannen develops this insight in her important essay, “The Sex-Class Linked Framing of Talk at Work” in Gender and Discourse, 195-221. See also her discussion in chapter 1 on the relationship between power and solidarity.

30 What I mean by “boundaries of difference” is that the declarative “In my experience…” effectively serves as a walling off of any potential critique. When another challenges such a declarative by reference to his or her own experience, the response is frequently of the character, “That might be true for you, but it was different for me.” Rather than building solidarity by seeing one's experience in communion with another, the person establishes herself or himself as distinct. This becomes a self-referencing, self-norming process that validates the self by holding others at a distance.

31 Shrewsbury, , “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” 6.Google Scholar

32 See Groome, Christian Religious Education, for his initial development of this understanding. Especially see his Sharing Faith for an extended treatment and for applications beyond the strict limits of religious education.