Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism

This chapter proposes that a proper telos for the study of religion is Critical Humanism. Drawing on Aristotle and Charles Taylor, it explains how Critical Humanism provides a theoretical framework for studying religion and describes its mobile, liberal, dialogical, and inclusive aspects. Building on the ideas of Felski, Walzer, Rorty, and the environmental humanities, it notes how Critical Humanism places a premium on expanding the moral imagination and examines the connections between that idea and humanistic scholarship. That discussion leads into an account of four values to which the study of religion can be connected: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. The chapter then describes four works in the study of religion that exemplify these values. Lastly, it summarizes the chapter’s arguments in response to the challenges posed by Weber’s view of science and Welch’s reckoning with the field’s “identity crisis” as described in chapters 1 and 2.

Why Study Religion?

This book asks, can the study of religion be justified? It poses this question on the view that scholarship in religion, especially work in “theory and method,” is preoccupied with matters of methodological procedure and is thus inarticulate about the goals that can justify the study of religion and motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, it insists, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. The book identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, each of which it critically examines as symptomatic of this crisis, on the way toward offering an alternative framework for thinking about purposes for studying religion. Shadowing these methodologies is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality. This ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive conscience about thinking normatively within the field’s regime of truth. After making these points, the book describes an alternative framework, Critical Humanism, especially how it theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship and offers a basis for thinking about the ethics of religious studies as held together by four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, the book argues, the study of religion can imagine itself as a valuable and desirable enterprise so that scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and avow the values of studying religion.

Developing and Supporting Educational Leaders for Successful Community Partnerships

Effective community school leaders build strong, reciprocal, and sustainable partnerships to support student growth, as well as to strengthen families and communities. Developing authentic alliances among teachers, parents, and community stakeholders creates a climate of trust and positive relationships that strengthens democratic schools. Community schools are an effective way to support families and students, as well as to mobilize the support needed to engage the community in developing effective partnerships. Yet in particular, it is community school leaders who cross traditional role boundaries and build cross-cultural fluency while balancing managerial concerns, navigating politics, dealing with external accountability pressures, and fostering shared accountability. They are the people who make community schools successful, and in turn, their leadership promotes positive growth in areas not traditionally perceived as falling in the domains of education. When school leaders engage in community-organizing strategies to enhance the quality of life in neighborhoods, as well as to empower parents to take active roles in the education of their children, they inspire positive holistic changes within their schools and communities. Successful leaders make this look easy, yet the interplay of a leader’s knowledge base, skill set, and disposition is complex. A developmental model based on knowledge, skills, and dispositions that cultivate reciprocal sustainable partnerships is presented within the context of national leadership and community school standards.

DEFINING THE INTEGRATIVE COMMUNICATIVE SPACE AS A FACTOR INFLUENCING THE LINGUO-METHODOLOGICAL STRATEGY FOR TEACHING RUSSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Modern sociocultural interaction tools and technologies bring forth multiple information transmission forms and methods, which in its turn leads to the emergence of new mono- and multi-code communication systems that intrinsically differ from verbal or creolized texts. Among the category features of the communication field are, on one hand, its universality resulting from the global nature of Internet resources and, on the other, its diffuseness determined by the simultaneous incorporation and synergy of the real and virtual language environment, which exert a special impact on the language personality. The authors understand the successful development of the secondary language personality as the development of the learner’s multilinguistic and multicultural personality, i.e. the combination of linguistic and cultural fluency and professional speaking skills. It is directly and closely dependent, in terms of methodology, on the awareness of the existing relationship between the “natural” language order and various semiotic ways of explaining the totality of national distinctions and values and the methodological interpretation of the present-day integrative communicative space. A competent organization of the language learning process, based on the integrated communication environment, will blur the boundary between in-class and natural communication, will provide foreign learners with the opportunity to acquire, through various channels of communication, the necessary communication experience to be effectively engaged in sociocultural, academic and professional activities in the Russian language. It will also contribute a deeper understanding of the Russian linguistic culture as an integral part of the global value paradigm.Keywords: real and virtual language environment, information and communication resources, online space, secondary language personality, language learning strategy.

Disposition and Early Childhood Education Preservice Teachers

This study sought to investigate the development of social justice dispositions in early childhood preservice teachers. The participants of the study included two preservice teachers assigned to a four-week prekindergarten field experience, one Black and the other White, both female. This was a qualitative study utilizing observational case study methods and open coding. Data were collected using the Cultural Fluency Survey, the annotated lesson plans of the preservice teachers, and the reflective journal the kept; as well as the recorded responses of the prekindergarten students during the literature lesson in pictorial form. The researchers found the early childhood preservice teachers who participated in this study exhibited strong social justice dispositions in development. The current study may help teacher educators consider what areas of the early childhood program could be changed to equip relevant preservice teachers with multiple opportunities and field placement.