This seminar invites participants to survey key leaders, perspectives, and theories of practice in contemporary histories of Christian religious education. While the examination will be influenced by the issues and concerns of US-North American religious education movements, efforts will be made to broaden the query toward transnational and intersectional cultural-religious landscapes, for an attempt at a “geocolonial material historical”[1] framework for understanding and analyzing the histories and theories of Christian religious educational leadership across times and contexts.
[1] This “geocolonial material historical” framework follows the analyses of cultural theorist Kuan-Hsing Chen, in Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Its basic tenets call for cultural and historical studies to 1) be intersectional, multidimensional, inter-subjective; 2) foreground subaltern histories; and 3) probe local and colonial encounters in geographies marked by social, political, and geological space-time.
We will test out these foundational tenets together in class.
- Teacher: Mai-Anh Le Tran
- Teacher: Virginia Lee