Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education
Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning
Routledge Research in Education Series

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education.

Authors not only examine how Christianity ? the historically dominant religion in American society ? shapes languaging and literacies in schooling and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism and homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian sub-cultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning.

This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others.

01 Contributor Bio

02 Acknowledgements

03 Foreword

04 Introduction: Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education

Mary M. Juzwik, Kevin J. Burke, Jennifer C. Stone, and Denise Dávila

1.0 Section 1

Babel: Conversation, Conflict, and Contested Terrains of Schooling

Jennifer C. Stone, Editor

1.1, Chapter 1, "Real Religion": The Roles of Knowledge, Dialogue, and Sense-Making in Coming to a Faith

Allison Skerrett

1.2, Chapter 2, Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers

Heidi Hadley and Will Fassbender

1.3, Chapter 3, Institutional Rituals as Interpersonal Verbal Rituals as Interactional Resources in Classroom Talk

Robert LeBlanc

2.0 Section 2

Purity: Making Present the Stranger

Kevin J. Burke, Editor

2.1, Chapter 4, Myth and Christian Reading Practice in English Teaching

Scott Jarvie

2.2, Chapter 5, "Racism is a God-damned thing": The Implications of Historical and Contemporary Catholic Racism for ELA Classrooms

Mary L. Neville

2.3, Chapter 6, Regulating Language: Language Policies of Early American Christian Missions in Alaska

Jennifer C. Stone, Samantha Mack, Jacob D. Holley-Kline, and Mitchell Hoback

2.4, Chapter 7, A Dream Come True: Young Evangelical Womens’ Negotiations of Dreams, Reality, and Ideologies on Pinterest

Bree Straayer-Gannon

3.0 Section 3

Wisdom: Loving God, Loving our Neighbors, and Engaging Religious Pluralism through Literary Response

Mary M. Juzwik, Editor

3.1, Chapter 8, Entering into Literary Communion: Nourishing the Soul and Reclaiming Mystery through Reading

Kati Macaluso

3.2, Chapter 9, "Love your Neighbor": LGBTQ Social Justice and the Youth Canon of WWII Literature

Denise Dávila and Elouise E. Epstein

3.3., Chapter 10, Disrupting Protestant Dominion: Middle School Affirmations of Diverse Religious Images in Community Spaces

Denise Dávila and Allison Volz

4.0 Section 4

Resurrection

Denise Davila, Editor

4.1, Chapter 11, Ambivalence in Two Parts: Legacies of Catholic Languaging

Adam J. Greteman

4.2, Chapter 12, Multilingual, Multimodal, and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Two Young Cuban-American Women’s Religious Literacies

Natasha Perez

4.3, Chapter 13, I had to die to live again: A racial storytelling of a Black Male English Educator’s Spiritual Literacies and Practices

Lamar L. Johnson

4.4, Chapter 14, (Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy

Mary M. Juzwik

Afterword

Mary M. Juzwik is Professor in the departments of Teacher Education and English at Michigan State University, USA.

Jennifer C. Stone is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage, USA.

Kevin J. Burke is Associate Professor of English Education in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, USA.

Denise Dávila is Assistant Professor of Literacy and Children’s Literature in the Language and Literacy Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.