Читать книгу Interfaith Grit - Stephanie L. Varnon-Hughes - Страница 7

Our World Just Won’t Stay Still

Babies and toddlers are used to their worlds being upended. Depth perception, object permanence, new textures and foods—reality shifts, is added to and changed; new information transforms what they thought they knew, all day long.

Dissonance is uncomfortable. We are literally experiencing a shakiness which can feel like a threat to the world, and how we fit in it. And yet, disequilibrium precedes all real learning. It’s a necessary ingredient to learning. If we hope to learn, if we seek to mature, we must take the risk of being changed.

How do we cope with change? How do we cope with difference? Some of us avoid. Some flee. Some bargain, and some try to debate. Some experience a crisis of faith or become paralyzed by moral relativism. Some fear outsiders as a perceived threat. Some become energized by travel, new foods, new customs, and difference. Some meet great friends, roommates, coworkers, or fall in love with someone different. Some feel their own religious or ethical traditions illuminated or strengthened by exposure to and relationship with difference.

What divides these two groups of people? Or rather, what keeps us from being more open to difference? Are some of us more naturally inclined be okay with this dissonance? Are there practices or things we can learn to help us deal with disequilibrium? Can we teach those in our communities to encounter difference with a positive posture of openness?

This book operates on the idea that we can become more comfortable with difference. Further, if we are a teacher, parent, religious leader, or manager in a workplace or organization, it is our responsibility to help others grow in their ability to withstand dissonance. It takes a little courage, it takes a willingness to be occasionally uncomfortable—it takes interfaith grit.

Recently, there has been a bit of a backlash against the idea of “grit,” especially as applied to urban youth—the concept has been much in public discussion. But misconceptions about grit and resilience characterize those traits as somehow innate. In fact, resilience is a transferable skill. It is a practice, and leaders can help teach and foster strategies that lead to great resilience and, in turn, to more effective learning and lasting positive relationships.2

What do we know about resiliency, psychology, and the human brain? The work of Norman Garmezy has been instrumental in the development of the study of human resiliency as a field. The literature begins in child psychology and psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s on “vulnerable children,” “social effectiveness,” “protective factors,” “temperament,” and “social competence,” including the work of Norman Garmezy, Edward Zigler, Ann Masten, Michael Rutter, and Leslie Phillips. Moving into the 1980s and 1990s, research covered such concepts as “stress resistant,” “risk,” “vulnerability,” “coping,” and “adjustment,” with the work of the authors mentioned above, as well as J. K. Felsman, Eric Dubow, A. L. Rabin, and J. Aronoff. Resiliency emerged as a concept that could be studied and applied in education.

As early as the 1970s, Garmezy and Masten were identifying examples of “at risk” children who succeeded despite their circumstances. Garmezy in particular sought to lead a shift in researching moving from how to protect children in troubled circumstances to trying to understand how children who thrived anyway did so. By 2006, developmental psychologists and educators had made that transition; the new perspective is exemplified with Steven J. Condly (summing the work of Garmezy, Masten, and their peers in “Resilience in Children: A Review of Literature with Implications for Education”) writes,

There is a clear class of children who defy the conventional wisdom and not only survive hostile environments but also actually thrive; these are the resilient . . . resilience is . . . perceived as a label that defines the interaction of a child with trauma or a toxic environment in which success . . . is achieved by virtue of the child’s abilities, motivations, and support systems.3

Over the course of shifting from looking at children who weren’t thriving, to seeking to understand the special capacities that thriving children had, terms such as “invulnerability,” “adaptation,” and “competence” were used by researchers.

The idea of “competence” as a positive attribute to be studied exemplifies the switch to studying positive capacities in children instead of keeping track of the trauma surrounding them. Ann Masten, herself a pioneer in this area, tracks the development of the field in “Resilience in Developmental Psychopathology: Contributions of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study,” written in 2012. Masten writes, “To investigate resilience, we defined and measured the quality of adaptive behavior . . . the nature and severity of adversity or risk encountered, and the individual or contextual differences that might account for the variable patterns of adaptation.”4 Note that current resilience research still focuses on the behaviors and capacities of individual children—developmental psychologists have made recommendations to parents and teachers, but teachers have not made links between what makes up resilience and what can be taught or fostered at school. A current scan of the field of resilience in education reveals studies for teachers about resilience and programs that can build resilience in at-risk youth, but there is no mention of how resilience and inter-religious education may be linked, or how they can benefit from one another. Currently we know a great deal about resilient children and even about the resources that sustain them. Next steps for widening the field will include broadening our understanding of resilience in adult populations, linking resilience to specific areas, like inter-religious education, and learning how such connections cause learning to flourish (or not).

In this section, we will briefly examine key features of resiliency as it has been applied in developmental psychology and education, with particular attention to the latter. This research seeks to explore if and how resiliency might be an essential ingredient for inter-religious education. To that end, we will connect aspects of resilience that are particularly integral to inter-religious learning.

In 1970, the father of resiliency research, Norman Garmezy, presented a paper entitled “Vulnerability Research and the Issue of Primary Prevention” at the annual meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric5 Association. By “primary prevention,” Garmezy means “coping,” and he sought to understand how some young people—even with few resources—coped with stress and trauma better than others. This was a puzzle; researchers were seeking to learn why some children succeeded against all odds. Could they learn from those “high risk” children? As Garmezy put it, “a simple declaration of physical, psychosocial or sociocultural resources cannot explain divergent paths to adaptation or to deviance.”6 This “variability in outcomes”7 led to Garmezy’s consideration of development from the end (either the traumatized and not flourishing, or traumatized and still flourishing) child, to try and determine what had justified that outcome. This was a new lens with which to consider the outcome—previously, researchers (including Garmezy) had begun with the starting situation or traumas (poverty, illness, sick mother, low IQ). Garmezy marks this new lens and the meaning for how researchers saw children within the context of his outcomes as he writes,

Provide us with a slum child who is forging a pattern of strength and we will cast about for environmental surrogates who must have served as inoculators against despair, for events that must have encouraged hope rather than hopelessness, for inner resources that must have proclaimed vitality rather than helplessness. However, were we to convert this same slum child into someone prone to violence or aberration, our focus would be turned with equal efficiency and perhaps even greater facility to alternate figures and facets that would buttress our perception of deviance.8

Note that even Garmezy’s verb “inoculate” suggests the idea that something external, when applied to a child, can foster healing and strength. Instead, what Garmezy and his peers find is that the strength is already present within some children and adults.

How does this relate to possibilities for inter-religious education? When we examine engagement in inter-religious settings, we will find that some participants are able to withstand the disruption and dissonance of alterity better than others. And yet, learning cannot take place if participants abandon the project as soon as they feel uncomfortable. One task of inter-religious educators and facilitators is to create containers and methods to foster a kind of in-the-moment resiliency in students, so that they might draw upon interior and even external resources (their relationship with peers, support from the instructor, the required nature of a course as extrinsic motivation) to remain participants.

Just as reflective practice ought to be the focus of educational activities, especially in inter-religious settings, so too can resilience be included in models and practices that can be taught and fostered. Although Garmezy made this move in 1970, it is still infrequently included in stated capacities for inter-religious learning, or even religious or multi-cultural learning. Garmezy’s early questions provide some ideas for qualities we can examine in this project. He writes,

Can we use our schools and clinics as centers for training these [high-risk] children in more adaptive techniques for coping? Can we use participation in successful play to increase the flexibility of the response repertoires of these children? Can we stimulate adaptive behavior by introducing into such training centers healthy children who can serve as models for the vulnerable child?9

We might well ask the following questions: Can we use our spaces of inter-religious encounter as centers for training students in more adaptive techniques for prolonged engagement with others? Can we use participation in study groups and microteaching to increase the flexibility of response repertoires of these students? Can we stimulate practice in withstanding disruption by introducing models for successful relationship and engagement?

In this chapter, we will explore major themes in resilience research and discover which features might be salient for religious-and inter-religious education. All three strands of our understanding of resilience—competence, coping, and community—offer something that we might glean for inter-religious education.

Even after Garmezy made the initial move from focusing on the negative to examining what might “inoculate” some children against trauma, researchers still tracked the negative attributes of children’s surroundings and circumstances. However, once researchers moved to considering the development of “competence,” some positive attributes came into focus. Ingrid Schoon, in her book Risk and Resilience: Adaptations in Changing Times, identifies the pitfall in focusing on the negative, and demonstrates how far the field had come by 2006. Schoon argues, “A focus on resilience and resources, on the other hand, aims to understand adaptive development in spite of risk exposure and to maximise [sic] wellness even before maladjustment has occurred,”10 and underscores her point, writing, “the resilience framework entails emphasis not on deficits but on areas of strength.”11 As we shall see, once researchers began considering areas of strength as well as deficit, and examined “understanding adaptive development” as part of a wider interpersonal matrix, the field began to include capacities that can be isolated, taught, developed, and modeled in interfaith settings.

By the early 1980s, some developmental psychologists began to tease out the meaning of “competence” or “social competence” as related but separate from resilience. In “Social Competence as a Developmental Construct,” Everett Waters and L. Alan Sroufe define competence in a way particularly suited to our purposes. That is, they move from considering a person’s interior resources to thinking about what a person does. This action focus is helpful as we consider which capacities can be taught and fostered. Waters and Sroufe write, “Competence is viewed as an integrative concept which refers broadly to an ability to generate and coordinate flexible, adaptive responses to demands and to generate and capitalize on opportunities in the environment (i.e., effectiveness).”12 Competence in this form is easier to measure as a competency. That is, we can look for evidence of inner resilience, but it seems difficult to articulate as a learning outcome. In contrast, competence per Waters’s and Sroufe’s definition points us to looking for responses to concrete moments. One can imagine, in an interfaith setting, creating a microteaching opportunity to engage in a disruptive idea—the use of case studies comes to mind as one potential example. After the initial lesson, time for reflection can be expanded to include questions like, “What was your initial impression?”; “What was your process for working through the dilemma?”; “Did your ideas change during the encounter?”; and “What resources (prior experiences or knowledge, modelling by instructor or peers, relationship) helped you work through the experience?”

We notice that these are questions of reflection; indeed, the reflection and resilience are related. If we consider reflection to be a flexible, responsive action-in-practice, this concept meets another part of Waters’s and Sroufe’s articulation of competence. They continue, writing, “Competence . . . is identified with the ability to mobilize and coordinate these resources in such a way that opportunities are created and the potentials or resources in the environment are realized; again, for a good developmental outcome.”13 This idea of “coordination” reminds us of metaphors used to describe artists or jazz musicians. In addition, coordination itself is a practice. That is, students can identify the components of coordination (identifying resources, applying ideas, evaluating their success, reflecting on the outcome), practice them, and share their practice with others.

Coordination is also a positive attribute (in the sense that it is a skill one possesses, unlike precursor ideas of resiliency that sought to describe how a person should have been failing to thrive, given the conditions surrounding them) in addition to being a practice. In “IQ and Ego-Resiliency: Conceptual and Empirical Connections and Separateness,” Jack Block and Adam M. Kremen note both that competence is a practice and that it is also rooted in outward engagement with others. First, Block and Kremen write, “Within a single life, too, it will be observed that at times a person is much more resourceful and adaptively effective than at other times.”14 With this in mind, we move from the idea of “an invulnerable person” whose resilience allows her to overcome all manner of obstacles to the sense that all of us are more or less resourceful and adaptive at different points. This is good news for those of us who would seek to develop resilience as a capacity in education. Similarly, we find another part of the capacity that can be taught in Block and Kreman’s connection between resilience and engagement. They write, “ego-resilience is expected to predispose individuals not only to an absence of susceptibility to anxiety but also to a positive engagement with the world, as manifested by positive affect and openness to experience.”15 And here again is a practice; learners can practice a posture of openness to experience. This also can be deliberately included in direct instruction and modelling in inter-religious classes and settings. Below, we shall explore more deeply how “positive engagement with the world” supports a kind of resilience that might support deeper and longer-lasting student engagement.

Longer-lasting engagement with the materials, settings, and encounters of inter-religious education is necessary because inter-religious learning requires movement, over time, through several ways of being; this theory of development is described both formally by inter-religious scholar educators and by voices in our participant interviews. For example, imagine the time involved in practicing and becoming more masterful at the kinds of learning Judith Berling describes, writing, “Learning in a diverse world requires not merely mastering some set of information but also learning to understand and negotiate areas of human difference, envisioning new ways of being and new possibilities.”16 To learn how interfaith education actually happened—and to identify best practices—I interviewed ten practitioners in higher education settings across the United States. I asked them to reflect upon the qualities they saw in themselves and their students, and to describe interfaith learning at its best. While at least one interview participant noted that, at some level, her role does require her to give students enough new information—particularly about new traditions or religions—mastering mere information takes some time. Learning to understand difference can be for many of us a life-long practice, and becoming visionary in the way one regards conflict and possibilities may rarely be possible in academic time parcels.

In fact, each one of these categories of learning can be broken apart into smaller tasks or realizations that inter-religious educators try to facilitate. F. is a Jewish professor of religion in both a rabbinical school and a large public university; he also serves on several large inter-religious non-profits and facilitates Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim adult educational events. F. describes the kind of beginning reflective work that students and participants often encounter earlier in their learning processes. He began by asserting that initial introductory knowledge about other traditions should lead to more substantial developments. When asked about the outcomes of one of his classes, he began by stating,

A student is able to—there are a couple of different levels I think—the student is able to be literate in some of the concepts, practices, and language and vocabulary of the other religious traditions (and we are talking only about three and that is, right? We are talking about Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.) So people, everyone who leaves the class has to know, because I ask them on a quiz, on a midterm or a final what—they have to know the words “Surah” and “Hadith” and “Ayat” and what this “Quran” actually means.

What does “Islam” mean? And I don’t—these are just real basics, but they have to know that, same thing about “Torah,” “Talmud,” stuff like that. It is a little bit less problematic in the Christian world because we live in such a Christianized culture, that kind of vocabulary and assumption is there.

So there is that—another outcome is a, I think, is a deeper respect for a scripture and [the] religious sensibilities of another religious, at least two other religious communities with the expectation of the hope that transfers beyond . . . creates a kind of attitudinal development.17

After a pause, F. moved to describing a kind of “learning to negotiate human difference” continuing,

And flexibility in thinking that is really important, we spend a lot of time on reading, what is the reading process, when we read things, not just words on a page but when we read people, when we read people’s clothing, when we read architecture, how are we actually processing the information that we are getting, how much are we looking objectively of the material and to what extent are we inserting our own history into our processing, all of that is really, we are very content about that, we are very, what is the word for it?18

F. was encouraged with a question prompting, “But it’s deliberate,” and F. affirmed, “Deliberate, we are deliberate.”19 When asked about challenges to students making that move from learning content to learning practice, he answered,

I think the overwhelming one is getting beyond the—, and [then to] acknowledge stereotypes, I think that is the issue because it creates, I think, real barriers from the very beginning that people aren’t really aware of, it’s a kind of preconceived notion, prejudices, pre-judgments that we have that we are really unaware of . . . They are not intentional—that color our ability to see the phenomenon that we are looking at in a way that is, I don’t want to use the word “positive” but in a way that is more real, right.

Or a way that that phenomenon is associated with something, a phenomenon that is associated with, let’s say religion or culture—where the observer sees it in the way the presenter would like it to be seen or sees it himself or herself.20

By identifying the ability of a learner to see from her co-learner’s point of view, F. echoes here classic foreparents of inter-religious dialogue, including Raimon Pannikar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Leonard Swidler; interfaith theologian Judith Berling also captures this interpretive process when she declares,

Unraveling, naming, and describing the threads of the learning process offer an interpretation of that process. The five threads are 1) encountering difference or entering another world; 2) one’s initial response . . . ;21 3) conversation and dialogue on several levels; 4) living out what has been learned; and 5) internalizing the process.22

Again, we see that what can be phrased succinctly can take years of practice and engagement. For those who see inter-religious dialogue as personally spiritually enriching (for example, à la Paul Knitter’s Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, or countless mono-religious adult education earnest endeavors to understand neighbors), part of the reason spiritual development happens is that inter-religious encounter can take time—giving reflective practice time a chance to connect to spiritual and emotional practices, new habits, the time to take chances and try new ways of engaging, and time to build relationships. In the next section, relationship building particularly will be related to resilience; let us keep in mind that relationships also take time to build, another reason resilience to withstand new encounters is beneficial for longer-lasting inter-religious engagement.

Ingrid Schoon explores the idea of “adaptation” as a key part of resilience in her Risk and Resilience: Adaptations in Changing Times. Schoon is more interested in the “ordinary23 adaptive processes”24 as a dynamic, ongoing process than in what might inoculate an individual from the impact of her surroundings. For Schoon, adaptation is part of a life-long process and individuals are intimately connected through their relationships with others; both of these influence how and why one might be resilient in a given situation. As we review Schoon’s emphasis on inter-connectedness and the dynamic construction of life course, let us keep in mind possible features that might be mapped onto inter-religious education.

Schoon articulates five principles as part of the concept of “life-course” in competency; she enumerates the following:

1. Human development is a life-long process.

2. Individuals construct their own life course through choices and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of history and social circumstances, a principle also referred to as human agency.

3. The life course is embedded and shaped by social structures and the historical times and places experienced by individuals over their lifetime.

4. The developmental antecedents and consequences of life transitions, events and behaviour [sic] patterns vary according to their timing in a person’s life.

5. Lives are lived interdependently, and social and historical influences bear on this network of linked lives.25

While these concepts are connected to resilience as understood by Garmezy, for example, we see that Schoon has definitively moved beyond thinking about flaws that need to be addressed, or disordered individuals that might be studied. Instead, she has moved into considering interdependent relationships and how these “networks of shared relationships”26 surround individual development. As Schoon puts it, “resilience is a multidimensional phenomenon.”27 All five of Schoon’s life-course aspects coordinate with the work of educators, and can be included in inter-religious pedagogy. Indeed, Schoon takes a kind of holistic approach to understanding how and when individuals are resilient, and how they can both learn from their own experiences and help teach others in their “network of linked lives.” This is the stuff of both religious education and inter-religious education. Is it possible to leverage this network to foster resilient practices? Are religious or inter-religious communities particularly suited to cultivating positive networks for this growth?

Pioneers in the area of resilience research barely mention religion as a factor in resilience. Occasionally, one will note that “religiousness” can provide an external resource for those suffering from illness or trauma, but it has been left relatively unexplored, particularly when compared to the field as a whole. In “Anchored by Faith: Religion as a Resilience Factor,” by Kenneth I. Pargament and Jeremy Cummings, the obstacles faced by those wishing to include religion are described in their survey of human resilience. They write,

In spite of the fact that the founding figures in psychology viewed religion as central to an understanding of human behavior, the field of psychology largely neglected religious issues for much of the 20th century. When religion was considered, it was often (1) viewed as a source of pathology, (2) measured by a few global religious items, and (3) explained in terms of purportedly more basic phenomena . . . The number of studies on religion has grown, and it has become clear through this research that religiousness can play a significant role in response to major life stressors.28

Pargament and Cummings assert “religiousness is a significant resilience factor for many people.”29 Pargament in particular has done much of the foundational research connecting religiousness and resilience, and he bemoans the fact that researchers have “neglected or diminished”30 the role of religion to this point. For a religious educator or practical theologian, though, Pargament and Cummings cover no new ground. They sum how prayer and membership in a religious community give comfort and even pain relief to the afflicted, can give a sense of meaning in the face of trauma, and they explain how some therapists (their examples are all Christian) use “psychospiritual interventions” to enhance their work with patients.31 Their final assertion, “religiousness can be a catalyst for positive life changes and stress-related growth,”32 is true enough, but they provide no road map for how religious or inter-religious educators might connect religious or ethical commitments and fostering resilience as a capacity for learning.

While reflective practice includes competencies that dovetail well with religious and inter-religious education, resilience as a possible competency fits less well. Limitations include: focus on the personal, to the exclusion of considering how resilience might be fostered in group settings like classrooms; focus on internal processes; and lack of research on how people might learn resilience practices.

And yet, challenges in life—and in the classroom—are normal, particularly when we move beyond shallow, more initial relationships and experiences into the turbulence that truer encounters can create. As we close this section, let us examine some possible connections between competence or resilience and the wider learning community that surrounds individuals. These connections are most likely to be fruitful for understanding how resilience might work as a capacity in inter-religious learning.