Writing, Religious Faith, and Rooted Cosmopolitan Dialogue: Portraits of Two American Evangelical Men in a Public School English Classroom

Written Communication2015, Vol. 32(2) 121 –149

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Article

Writing, Religious Faith, and Rooted Cosmopolitan Dialogue: Portraits of Two American Evangelical Men in a Public School English Classroom

Mary M. Juzwik1 and Cori McKenzie1

AbstractSome literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie,

1Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:Mary M. Juzwik, Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, 308 Erickson Hall, 620 Shaw Lane, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. Email: [email protected]

576480WCXXXX10.1177/0741088315576480Written CommunicationJuzwik and McKenzieresearch-article2015

mailto:[email protected]

122 Written Communication 32(2)

on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

Keywordsreligion, evangelical Christianity, secondary English, writing, essay, cosmopolitanism, English education

I don’t care what anyone else thinks. . . . I’m here to please the Lord and no one else.

—Charlie, 18

With this pronouncement, Charlie suggests that his commitment to God in heaven is more important than his relationships with people on earth. This stance is epitomized by the popular American evangelical idea that Christians be “in” the world but not “of” the world, a belief evangelicals attribute to New Testament scriptures (e.g., John 15:19, John 17:14). U.S. public school class-rooms, however, are often conceptualized as spaces where young people are educated in the service of goals that are “of the world.” These “worldly” goals include supporting democracy, maintaining the economic status quo, and help-ing students climb up the social ladder (Labaree, 1997). The tension between the worldly goals of schools and evangelicals’ desire to remain “in” the world but not “of” the world seems especially noteworthy when teachers approach education, including writing instruction, as a way to promote cosmopolitanism, a disposition that not only serves “worldly” ends, but also requires that people hold their known loyalties—including their religious faith—loosely, in order to engage openly with new perspectives, ethical vantage points, and values.

This article focuses on this tension, exploring the way that an evangelical youth, Charlie, engaged with a cosmopolitan writing unit designed by an evangelical teacher, Sam, in a U.S. public school classroom. Using a portrai-ture methodology, we narrate certain tensions that emerged out of Charlie’s engagement with this unit. By raising new questions for the field to consider,

Juzwik and McKenzie 123

we hope to inspire new ways of thinking about religious faith, evangelical-ism, writing instruction, and cosmopolitan-minded education.

Conceptual Framework and Related Literature

Cosmopolitanism

For most of human history, people were born into small communities and rarely—if ever—encountered new people; however, this state of affairs no longer holds true (Appiah, 2006). Communication technologies, global capi-talism, migration, and economic and political changes have not only put people into contact with more diverse cultures, but also altered the way per-sons engage in these interactions (Hansen, 2010, p. 2). In particular, such changes may threaten people’s capacities to maintain and enact the values and practices central to the culture(s) to which they belong, thus forcing them to reimagine their responsibilities to those outside of their communities (e.g., Nussbaum, 2012).

Theories of cosmopolitanism have recently enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, because they offer a response to this global situation, suggesting how people might engage with an ever-changing, pluralistic, and globalized world. Most scholars today agree that cosmopolitanism indexes an open, curious orientation toward difference and Others. Some further believe that a cosmopolitan orien-tation requires one to relinquish one’s ties to the local and known in order to be fully receptive to the global and unknown. Proponents of such “strong” ver-sions of cosmopolitanism extol moral responsibility to the shared human com-munity at the expense of other, more locally rooted loyalties (e.g., Nussbaum, 2012). More moderate versions suggest that some kind of recognition of the shared human community need not, in fact ought not and cannot, unseat the felt ties of kinship, love, and loyalty to a local community such as a family, an eth-nic or racial group, a neighborhood, a region, or a nation (e.g., Appiah, 2006; Hansen, 2014). Hansen, Burdick-Shepherd, Cammarano, and Obelleiro (2009), for example, argue that cosmopolitanism is an “orientation” or “outlook” (p. 587) in which “receptivity to the new and loyalty to the known” are juxta-posed or fused together (p. 588). Many advocates of a moderate cosmopolitan-ism see it as a disposition deeply tied to the local, because its enactment “becomes instantaneously particularized and is informed by a sense of rooted-ness in the world” (Hansen, 2010, p. 5). Such a moderate approach has vari-ously been called a “rooted” (Appiah, 2006), dialogical (Canagarajah, 2013), “banal” (Ong, 2009), or “on-the-ground” (Hansen, 2010) cosmopolitanism, to mention just some of the available nomenclatures.


Cosmopolitan-Minded Writing Pedagogy

This article joins the voices of literacy scholars who believe that a rooted cos-mopolitan orientation can serve as an educational goal with potential to pro-mote ethical engagement with difference in a globalized, pluralistic world. Proponents of education for rooted cosmopolitanism vary in how they concep-tualize such an education. Hansen (2010), for example, imagines that educa-tion for rooted cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of helping students cultivate a “cosmopolitan artfulness” that involves learning how to discern when to show loyalty to the known and when to embrace the new (p. 5). For her part, Hawkins (2014) understands such an education as one that must engage students with the global while remaining deeply responsive to the particulars of students’ local contexts (p. 108). Similarly, we assume that rooted cosmopolitan-minded pedagogy does not ask individuals to give up local ties in order to engage with the new, but rather takes students’ local root-edness as the very grounds on which cosmopolitan dialogue can flourish.

Dialogue is a central theme echoing across the scholarly literature devoted to enacting rooted cosmopolitanism. The idea is to engage students in conver-sations across difference to expand their communicative, literate, and ethical horizons—their capacity to engage with “the other.” Campano and Ghiso (2011), for example, suggest the value of engaging students in cosmopolitan dialogues with subaltern literature through talk and writing to help shift epis-temic privilege in classrooms away from pervasive colonialist ideologies and assumptions, opening up and cultivating cosmopolitan stances among stu-dents. Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014) argue that a person’s willingness to “be part of an ongoing conversation” (p. 37) is an essential component of a cosmo-politan orientation toward Others. Finally, this emphasis on dialogue is further underscored by the way many scholars of cosmopolitan education argue for the privileged role of social media and other communication technologies that facilitate making connections beyond and across community, national, and many other kinds of borders (Harper, Bean, & Dunkerly, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010, 2014; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010; Vasudevan, 2014).

Within the field of literacy and especially writing studies, then, cosmopol-itan-minded pedagogy is usually framed as a response to cultural difference in the face of globalization and increasingly global communication. This framing may be, in part, because certain premises of sociocultural literacy scholarship align well with those of cosmopolitanism. In particular, the focus on dialogue within cosmopolitan-minded education accords with widely accepted conceptualizations of writing as utterance within historically unfold-ing and socioculturally situated dialogue (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Nystrand, 1986; Prior, 1998). Within such dialogic understandings of literate practice


generally and of the English language arts curriculum specifically, class-room-based writing in public schools seems an ideal way to practice cosmo-politanism on the ground.

If dialogue is taken to be a central aim and method of cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy, then what practices might follow? First, teachers would invite students to use writing in service of recognizing and articulating where they stand in relation to global possibilities while also minimally get-ting used to others who are different from themselves (Appiah, 2006) or, more ideally, “learning from or with other traditions and human inheritances” (Hansen, 2014, p. 6). Knowing where one stands, moreover, requires articu-lating both for others (the social element of writing) and for oneself (the expressive, self-performing element of writing). This practice also involves a recognition of an audience of others who are different from oneself. For example, Hull and Stornaiuolo (2014) write about a cosmopolitan-minded writing project where groups of youth in New York City and in Lucknow, India, used digital media to write to and for each other, an endeavor allowing the researchers to study the “ethical exigencies” of dialoguing across differ-ence in a globalized world (p. 16). They explore difference stances the youth writers took vis-à-vis their readers with respect to a “proper distance” in dia-loguing across difference: “‘the capacity to enlarge one’s perspective, and the willingness to recognize the other in her sameness and difference [Silverstone, 2007, p. 119]’” (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014, p. 19). While the literature on cosmopolitan-minded pedagogy usually takes diversity to mean those of other cultures, ethnicities, or languages, Hull and Stornaiuolo stand out in the literature by paying attention to the explicitly ethical aims of cosmopolitan-minded writing instruction. They suggest the importance of examining how young people might learn the cosmopolitan art of engaging in written dia-logue across ethically different vantage points.

We assume that students’ and teachers’ ethical vantage points are closely tied to, but not necessarily coincident with, their cultural roots. Oftentimes religion meaningfully shapes students’ ethical vantage points vis-à-vis liter-ate acts. For example, Spector (2007) documented how two distinct groups of students in a large metropolitan area—one predominantly European American, the other predominantly African American—shared Christian nar-rative frames in interpreting Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, in their English classrooms. Students in neither group engaged the protagonist’s Jewish faith as an ethical vantage point to be curious about, learned from, or respected as ethically distinct from their own Christian vantage points. Spector’s interpretation, while focusing on literary interpretation, illuminates how religiously grounded ethical vantage points can significantly shape liter-ate engagement in secondary English classrooms.


Religious Faith, Rooted Cosmopolitanism, and Writing Pedagogy

The present special issue, alongside other recent scholarship (e.g., Davila, in press; Juzwik, 2014; Rackley, 2014; Skerrett, 2014), further testifies that reli-gious faith shapes the purposes for and practices of literate acts, pervading contemporary life just as religion has loomed large in the history of U.S. lit-eracy. It seems likely, moreover, that religious faith shapes some students’ and teachers’ ethical construals of written communication.

Yet scholars seem mixed about the place of religion within a rooted cos-mopolitanism. Appiah (2006), who writes and speaks about his own evan-gelical Christian roots, is troubled by the religious fundamentalist, whom he sees as a “counter-cosmopolitan,” because a universalizing morality leaves no room for tolerating difference or for the possibility that one’s worldview may be fallible. For the religious fundamentalist, it is a moral imperative that everyone, everywhere share his or her faith. While Appiah takes neo-Muslim fundamentalists as his focal case, Stambach (2010) uses the label “counter-cosmopolitan” to understand the problems she sees with American nonde-nominational evangelical Christian missionaries teaching literacy in eastern African schools. Again, the problem is the absolutist universalizing morality that prevents American evangelicals from valuing ethical frameworks differ-ent from their own. Yet Hansen (2010) cites Englund’s (2004) ethnographic study of Pentecostals in Malawi as an example of religiously rooted cosmo-politan morality, it seems because the Pentecostals employ a “universalized discourse” of shared human suffering rather than a polarizing binary between virtuous believers who are blessed and infidel unbelievers who are damned (Hansen, 2010, pp. 13-14). And the evangelical sociologist Lindsay (2007) argues that some north American evangelical Christians embody cosmopoli-tan orientations (as opposed to the more culturally insular or “populist” ori-entations that characterize a large swath of evangelicalism), regularly and competently dialoguing across moral difference. As a consequence, Lindsay argues, “cosmopolitan evangelicals” enjoy positions of considerable social influence.

The emerging scholarship on religious literacies, alongside the conflicting ideas about the place of religion within rooted cosmopolitanism, points to new questions about cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy: How is the “cosmopolitan turn” in literacy—and particularly the concern with ethical difference pursued by scholars like Hull and Stornaiuolo—complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it pos-sible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy


by these considerations? We set out to explore these themes through an inves-tigation of a classroom writing pedagogy and practice that placed writing about ethical concerns at its center.

Method

Our interest in contextually exploring cosmopolitan-minded writing peda-gogy in relation to religious faith prompted us toward portraiture as a meth-odology (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). This approach allowed us to present complex portraits of religiously faithful persons in a particular class-room context. As an explicitly interpretivist approach (e.g., Dyson & Genishi, 2005),1 portraiture allowed us to explore a case of possible religious configu-rations (one of myriad) in a classroom unit designed around what we will argue is a cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy. This methodology seemed especially well suited to the study of cosmopolitanism “on the ground” (Hansen, 2010), because of its capacity to present the complexity and rela-tionality of particular human lives (i.e., students, teachers, researchers) in relation to more global or universal moral subcultural worlds (i.e., evangeli-cal Christianity). Calling upon anthropologically minded research, our por-traiture work involved generating data at a field site (on which more below). But it also involved listening “for” a story as we interpreted field data (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005); therefore, crafting compelling and sympathetic narratives about our focal participants (i.e., main characters) became an essential methodological responsibility.

Through portraiture, we unearth new questions for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by examining how teacher and student religiosity may interact with the goal of simultaneously getting used to those with ethical vantage points different from ones own and sustaining students’ own ethical roots. Given a context where a teacher and some students profess religious faith, we look specifically at how this rooted cosmopolitan aim played out in the teaching and sharing of essay writing about beliefs, including beliefs about God. We focused on a specific subculture of religious persons, American evangelical Christians.

Given our interest in cosmopolitanism and writing instruction, this choice may seem counterintuitive or inherently contradictory to some. We believe, however, that focusing on evangelicalism is warranted for several reasons. First, evangelicalism was the moral framework upon which midwestern American public schools were historically designed and the basis of the default moral discourse (e.g., biblical excerpts in early readers) that came to seem natural, normal, and immovable in American public schools (Applebee, 1972; Balmer, 2000; Fraser, 1999). Second, evangelicals compose the largest


religious faith group in the United States today (Lindsay, 2007). If teacher religiosity roughly follows that of the general population, as suggested by Hartwick’s (2007) research, then evangelicals very likely constitute the larg-est proportion of the population of teachers who count themselves religious. It follows, furthermore, that evangelical students may form the largest pro-portion of those U.S. public school students who count themselves religious. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, we have mentioned religious funda-mentalism as a problematic issue within theories of rooted cosmopolitanism (e.g., Appiah, 2006), and we follow Stambach (2010) in assuming that some evangelicals pose similar problems to rooted cosmopolitan pedagogies. Studying an evangelical teacher and student, then, allowed us to explore ten-sions that can emerge when religiously rooted teachers and students engage in cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogies.

Research Setting

Given our interest in examining cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy in light of student and teacher religiosity, we chose to situate the study in a school district located within a region of the country known for its religiosity. The Oak Hill School District is located in a suburb of a large midwestern U.S. city we call Lake City that is an important intellectual and cultural center of American evangelicalism: It is home to multiple evangelical Christian pub-lishing houses, Reformed theological seminaries, and a nationally and inter-nationally recognized evangelical Christian liberal arts college. With 2,000 students in Grades 10 to 12 enrolled, Oak Hill High School is overwhelm-ingly white and predominantly middle and upper-middle class. Students we interviewed perceive Christianity as the overwhelming majority religion: One young woman explained, “Oak Hill . . . we’re very conservative, very, um, Caucasian, very Christian” (interview 2/27/13); another asserted that “pretty much most of [the focal] class is Christian” (interview 2/27/13); and a third assumed that most students in the class we observed held Christian beliefs (interview 2/27/13).2 Among the school’s many clubs and activities for students are the secular, progressive, and conservative clubs. A dominant athletic program shapes the school’s reputation around the state.

We studied a 12th grade Advanced Placement (AP) Language and Composition class enrolling 37 students, because earlier conversations with Sam indicated that the focal “This I Believe” unit explicitly invited students to articulate their own ethical vantage points—including beliefs about God and religious faith—through essay writing. This unit presented an ideal opportunity to explore religious faith with reference to cosmopolitan-minded writing instruction.


Research Participants

Because our case study focuses on a student who identifies as a “nondenomi-national evangelical Christian” and a teacher who identifies as an “evangeli-cal,” defining these terms is essential. Taking a social movement approach (as opposed, for example, to a theological approach), we define an evangeli-cal as an individual who (a) believes the Bible to be the supreme authority for religious belief and practice, (b) has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and (c) enacts an activist approach to faith in everyday life (Lindsay, 2007, p. 4). We therefore attribute evangelicalism at the level of the individual, rather than at the level of the denomination (Lindsay, 2007, pp. 255-256). By implication—and especially relevant for the U.S. context, where a “market-place of religion” and a constitutional mandate for religious tolerance as opposed to a state-sponsored religion, provides the historical setting (Balmer, 2006; Nussbaum, 2012)—those who count themselves part of the evangelical movement can cross denominational, sociocultural, and other boundaries. The designation nondenominational evangelical Christian further suggests that traditions or doctrines of particular denominations are less important than being part of the broader “evangelical movement” (Lindsay, 2007). Some evangelicals may not even attend church at all. Placing the choice of the individual believer—and not the doctrines of the church denomination—at the center of our definition of “evangelical” becomes all the more salient in the United States as those who count themselves religious or who attend church regularly continues to decline (Pew Research Center, 2013).

Sam Vandenhouten. We focused on Sam Vandenhouten’s classroom for three reasons: (a) He self-identified as a committed evangelical Christian for whom religious faith was highly important. (b) He had taught secondary English for 16 years (all in the same school) and was in his late 30s, although to us he looked much younger. We sought a teacher over 30 because younger adults (i.e., those under 30) are often still in the process of religious identity forma-tion (e.g., Marty, 1976; Wicker, 2008); moreover, survey research suggests that emerging adults (from 18 to 29) tend to be significantly less religiously active than older adults like Sam (Lyons, 2003). We appreciated, too, that as Sam was a husband, father of four, church leader, and entrepreneur,3 his life was complicated. And finally, (c) Sam enjoyed a reputation as a strong teacher. He was highly regarded by the principal and by others we spoke with in the district and absolutely revered by his students. After receiving his mas-ter’s, Sam worked as a teacher consultant and teacher researcher with the National Writing Project (NWP); in fact, Sam traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for continued NWP funding. A Distinguished Alumni Award from


Sam’s alma mater in 2007 testified to the regard he enjoyed within the broader community.

Charlie. The interpretation presented here focuses on one male student in Sam’s 12th grade AP English course: Charlie. We introduce Charlie in more detail below. We chose to focus our analysis on Charlie, rather than on one of the eight other focal students in our study, because his religious convictions as a populist evangelical Christian seemed at the time of our data generation to be most at odds with what we understood to be a cosmopolitan orientation. While it may be fair to call Charlie a “fundamentalist” (a subcategory of “populist evangelical”), he does not use that label, so we do not use it either. Nonetheless, some of the problems raised about religious fundamentalists and American evangelicals with respect to rooted cosmopolitanism seem to apply to Charlie. In short, Charlie was the strongest example of vocal reli-gious fervor among the students in our data set, allowing us to illustrate the extremes of religious belief and practice that—we will argue—need to be accounted for in theorizing how religious faith might interact with cosmopol-itan-minded writing instruction in American public school classrooms.

Researchers. We both identify as midwestern Americans, having grown up in small-town north-central Ohio (Mary) and suburban Chicago (Cori). Mary is an evangelical Christian by heritage, having grown up in a family, church, private school, and Christian college that saturated her in evangelical belief, theology, subculture, and practice—much the “total world” described by Peshkin (1986). After distancing herself from evangelicalism for nearly 20 years, largely due to her experiences—many of them, as a teacher—confront-ing social inequities in the United States, she now practices Christianity and teaches Sunday school in an Episcopal church. Cori is a Catholic by heritage and participated in Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and Catholic youth groups throughout her childhood and adolescence. In college, however, her views on social issues began to diverge from those of the Church, and she began to question her faith. She now counts herself an agnostic.

Data and Interpretation

Data generated included classroom observations of Sam’s “This I Believe” (TIB) unit, described in more detail below, a 90-minute formal interview with Sam and Mary, and 30- to 90-minute interviews with Cori and nine students who participated in the unit. All interviews occurred after the unit ended. We conducted eleven classroom observation during the unit in late January and early February 2013. For each observation, we generated video recordings of


the classroom activity and interaction as well as field notes describing the happenings of the classroom. The camera placement in the corner of the classroom, mostly trained on the teacher (initially the primary focus of the study), meant that we did not visually capture student facial expressions, for example as they listened to essays read by others, although we did capture precise teacher language much of the time. Furthermore, we faced some chal-lenges with our video camera memory, so that not every minute of every observation was captured on video. We scanned copies of all student writing made available to us (not all students wanted to share their writings with us). Primary data for this analysis include the unit curriculum plan, observational field notes from 11 class sessions, and, most significant, transcribed inter-views with Sam and Charlie. Secondary data included the text of Charlie’s writing and interviews with other students.

In keeping with some enactments of portraiture, we did not engage in traditional social scientific coding. Rather, we read and interpreted the data to construe (a) narrative themes, storylines, and perspective-taking, in which we scrutinized participants’ own understandings of what was going on in the focal unit (emic perspectives) in light of key ideas from the literature about cosmopolitanism “on the ground” (etic perspectives) and similarly critically examined key ideas from the literature in light of participants’ perspectives in our data set; (b) characterization, particularly with an effort to search for goodness in the focal participants (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005)—to sympa-thetically present them as complex, multifaceted human beings engaging with moral matters through writing and the teaching of writing; (c) narrative conflicts, problems, moral tensions, paradoxes; and (d) scene-setting and ori-entation. Our interpretation process was more narrative art than science, once again because we sought to illuminate what is possible, rather than what is certain or even probable in a given situation. Thus, our study is data-driven, but it is likely not replicable or aggregable (Haswell, 2005), and we do not make generalizable claims, for example, about the compatibility between evangelical worldviews and the aims of cosmopolitan-minded writing peda-gogy. It is also worth pointing out that studying cosmopolitanism “on the ground” in this case is necessarily restricted to the ethical differences enter-ing into this classroom setting.

Teaching and Responding to a “This I Believe” Personal Essay Writing Unit

We begin with a description of the teacher, Sam, who crafted the TIB unit as a way to encourage students to put their “stake in the ground” (interview


5/13/13, transcript p. 34) in preparation for a larger unit on argumentative writing. While Sam never uses the word “cosmopolitan” to define himself or his unit, he and the unit nevertheless exemplify a rooted cosmopolitanism.

Sam Vandenhouten, Believer and Teacher

Having grown up in a community 30 miles or so away from Oak Hill, Sam is strikingly and deeply connected to the people and places of the region. He talks daily, for example, with his best friend from childhood, Jim, with whom he and his wife have a business partnership and a deep and nourishing friend-ship. His students fondly and frequently call him “Van.” Being a believer is a highly salient facet of Sam’s way of being in the world.

Sam the Believer. Sam grew up in a Baptist church, and he describes himself and his family during his childhood as “fundamentalist.” As a Baptist, Sam believed in scriptural authority, salvation through Jesus, and active evange-lizing. Being a Baptist meant that many contemporary cultural practices were considered “sinful” (e.g., movies, dancing, drinking alcohol, listening to rock and roll). He grew up saturated in the life of the church, attending services Sunday morning and Sunday evening, and being actively involved in a Word of Life biblical studies program, including extensive scriptural study, that eventually led him into preaching competitions. Sam was saved when he was 5 years old and prayed to accept Jesus, an act he engaged in with the support of his mother and father, whom he describes as central moral influences in his life. He reports having had a relationship with Jesus Christ since that time in early childhood (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 29).

After graduating from the small public high school in his hometown (where he made a name for himself playing basketball), Sam considered attending a Bible college several states away. He decided, however, to attend a state college located in his hometown. He initially started to study business, but after the first year he discovered that he really enjoyed his literature courses and was good at them (perhaps unsurprising, given his many years of scriptural study and interpretation). During college, he met his future wife Annie and “led her to the Lord” (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 13), meaning that she had a conversion experience during which Jesus became real and personal to her—as he already was to Sam.

Sam now calls himself a “believer.” He also considers himself an “evan-gelical,” meaning that he “wears his faith on his sleeve” and is prepared to talk about it with anyone who asks, although—unlike his college years—he would no longer make the choice to “witness” to, or share the gospel without solicitation from, complete strangers. He reports that “part of the maturation


process of faith for me” has entailed taking more of a relationship-building approach to sharing Christ, openly talking with those he befriends and some-times with young people about his belief in Jesus, but not actively seeking to convert everyone he meets (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 22-23). As Sam puts it,

I figure people know who I am, they know I’m a believer, and if they have questions, and—Because I look at Christ and often and I say this, he was very careful, he basically was like here I am, this is what I’m about, if you’re interested, great, if you’re not, I’m not going to chase you down, you know? And I sort of look at him as my model. (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 22)

He describes himself as having gotten more “liberal” over the years, while still holding on to the “fundamental” beliefs in the Bible as God’s authority and in salvation through Jesus (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 23). He no longer considers himself a fundamentalist, however. He and his wife left his hometown Baptist church when he was 26 and the pastor, with whom they were very close, moved on. After searching for a church with a “biblical foundation” (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 17) that was closer to their home, they now attend a small evangelical Wesleyan church located five minutes away. Sam, however, does not affiliate strongly as a Wesleyan—the identification as a “believer” in Christ is what matters most to him.

Sam, then, is an evangelical Christian insofar he believes in the Bible as authoritative for religious belief and practice (i.e., the importance of a church with a biblical foundation), he has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that he reports began as a child when he said the sinner’s prayer, and his faith actively shapes how he lives his life each day (e.g., following the way of Jesus). Although Sam himself did not use the label, we think it would be accurate to describe him as a nondenominational evangelical Christian, given that denominational affiliation or identification is not highly salient for his practice of faith.

Sam the Teacher. The walls of Sam’s classroom are papered with images of famous authors (e.g., Toni Morrison, William Faulkner), exceptional athletes (e.g., Michael Jordan), and superheroes (e.g., Spider-Man, Batman, Super-man). In fact, the superheroes stand out for their abundance, and they some-times come up in classroom discussions, which occur frequently in Sam’s classroom. The most salient superhero toy for purposes of this project is per-haps his Jesus action figure (see Figure 1), standing in its original packag-ing—a gift from a colleague and close teacher friend down the hall (who is an atheist) — hanging beside a Batman poster at the front of the room.


The door to Sam’s classroom establishes an ethical register for all who enter and for all that happens therein. It features a poster with Sam’s last name, his room number, and the titles of courses he teaches, above an inscription reading, “inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with the high hopes of living to be brave men and women, famous to all the ages.” Below this sign hangs a poster featuring Sam’s nickname sur-rounded by Marvel superheroes Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Green Lantern, Captain America, Flash Gordon, and more (see Figure 2 for detail).

Sam seems to want to invite students to become superheroes, persons who transcend human limitation by locating themselves in a larger moral universe than that of their own local worlds and families (Hansen, 2014). His door implies that he wants students not only to learn basic language arts skills in

Figure 1. Sam displays a Jesus action figure and a Batman poster above the white board in his classroom.


his classroom, but also to become more virtuous and courageous human beings. The Jesus action figure perched atop the wall at the front of the class-room reveals Sam’s own primary moral compass, but its existence alongside

Figure 2. The posters on Sam’s door establish an ethical register for all who enter.


the other superheroes seems to imply an acceptance of and appreciation for other moral models as well.

The TIB Unit

Sam taught the TIB unit to introduce the argumentation unit directly follow-ing it. A self-professed National Public Radio (NPR) junkie (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 33), Sam drew from the similarly named NPR project that engages diverse people in writing and reading aloud essays about the “core values that guide their daily lives” (http://thisibelieve.org/). Sam’s asked students to do the same as part of the 2-week unit.

The unit had a predictable rhythm. Sam chose a daily writing theme (e.g., “God,” “relationships”). After playing three published examples of TIB essays on the theme (from the NPR website), he shared a prompt with stu-dents. Students then engaged in exploratory essay writing for 20 to 30 min-utes. To conclude class sessions, Sam typically invited students to share their writing, which at least some students were always eager to do. He used an exploratory writing sharing technique gleaned from the NWP:

In This I Believe I don’t want them to [give feedback], and that comes out of the writing project, we would, we would go off and do these writing marathons and we would write and we would read [aloud] and say “thanks for sharing” but it gave you a lot of freedom to write and, and experiment. And not have to worry about people saying “you know you really need to—.” It was just “thanks.” (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 37)

Students were free and invited to share their writing on a daily basis, but none were required to turn in or share the everyday exploratory writing. Finally, students developed a TIB essay to share aloud with the class as the final per-formance, most developing an idea from one of lower-stakes writing they had done.

The low-stakes exploratory writing task was at the heart of the unit, and Sam framed it as an opportunity to build community, in preparation for a unit on argumentation:

For your writing time—we’re not looking for you to come up with a perfect . . . essay within this time. None of these [NPR] writers did that. . . . So there is a . . . writing process, . . . an opportunity for you to draft, explore, experiment. I’m asking you to share, not just because I want you to share your beliefs with your classmates, but I also want you to share how your process is going. We’re trying to build a community before we enter into some pretty serious discussions about some pretty big issues. (field notes 1/22/13)4

http://thisibelieve.org/


Sam explained focusing on community during the TIB unit because he wants students to feel confident that when they share their beliefs with the rest of the class, their ideas will be valued instead of ridiculed for being “wrong” or strange (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 37). The sort of “ethos” work being done through this unit (in an Aristotelian sense where the character of the speaker or writer is constructed through discourse) seemed critical to Sam. If students and Sam would hazard to make themselves vulnerable to others through TIB essay writing, sharing, and listening, that vulnerability would create a generous atmosphere of trust and courageousness that would be needed for “some pretty serious discussions about some pretty big issues” in the argumentation unit that would follow.

Another central goal for the unit was exploring and sharing a core belief. Religious beliefs were but one possible avenue for exploration and writing. Throughout the unit, students also explored core beliefs focused around rela-tionships, patriotism, and paradoxes, among others. The instructional idea was in no way for them to articulate a “correct belief” about God or about anything else, but rather to articulate in an essay who they were as ethical beings—in Sam’s words “where I put my stake in the ground” (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 34)—around some particular theme or value. The themes students chose to write about varied, from big breakfasts to being vegan to second chances and love (field notes 2/7/13). Sam elaborated his rationale for asking students to do a kind of personal writing that they often find “tough”: “If you [students] can’t share your personal credo to the class and say to them ‘this is something that I believe’ not about, you know, these issues that are out there but about me personally, then you have no business arguing about this other stuff” (interview 5/13/13, transcript p. 35). For Sam, this invitation to “put my stake in the ground,” coupled with his focus on community building, was part of establishing an ethos of trust among students.

Part of having such an atmosphere involved respectfully listening to oth-ers who hold different ethical frameworks from one’s own (including both students and NPR writers). Sam reported that he loved listening to the NPR essays. One of the essays he played prior to inviting students to write about their beliefs about God came from an atheist (and a student in the class, like-wise, wrote and shared a defense of his disbelief in God). Here Sam’s open-ness and his ability to stand back from his own beliefs were critical:

Even though I’m a believer, I let them share whatever they want. Within reason. As long as it isn’t vulgar, offensive. I let them, you know, I let them share that, you know, whatever those beliefs are, and I really do my best to keep my political and religious beliefs. . . . I share with the kids what I believe but I don’t


influence them. And that’s the problem that some teachers have with this. You’ve got to keep an open door policy. You’ve got to let your atheists and your anti-American kids and your communists, your kids who have a terrible relationship with their parents share. (interview 5/13/13, transcript pp. 42-43)

Sam wanted to create an environment where students could share what they truly believe and experience with one another. Part of creating this environ-ment is being honest about his own beliefs, including his own identification as a “believer,” testified by the Jesus action figure (Figure 1). Like the cos-mopolitan evangelicals described by Lindsay (2007), Sam maintained an openness that respected the distance between his own beliefs and those of others. This openness was also modeled in his friendship with the atheist teacher down the hall.

Although not built upon an explicitly named cosmopolitan vision, the TIB unit displayed key elements of a cosmopolitan-minded writing instruction as we understand it. What Sam had in mind for students sharing TIB writing in his classroom seems akin to Appiah’s (2006) idea of cosmopolitan dialogue for the purposes of “getting used to one another.” It is a sort of small-scale associative practice. Rather than engaging students in grand ethical dialogues about deeply held, culturally cherished ethical stances (along the lines advo-cated by Kunzman, 2006), the unit design seemed to provide an opportunity for students get used to one another—and their differences—as ethical beings. In asking students to write about and listen to one another’s writing about “the core values that guide their daily lives,” for example, Sam drew students into a metaphorical everyday “small-d” dialogue about values. Listening to others’ essays seemed to be an opportunity for students to prac-tice “valuing valuing” (Hansen et al., 2009) as they viewed classmates as beings that value and listened to those values without (vocal) critique or judg-ment. Certainly this invitation to listen may have invited some kind of dis-tancing from one’s one beliefs, but it did not—and could not—insist upon it. In this sense, the unit fell short of inviting student to learn with and from others’ values, as discussed by Hansen (2014) and others.

However modest the opportunities Sam presented for cosmopolitan valu-ing, not all students seized them. Our next portrait focuses on Charlie, who engaged with and enjoyed the TIB Unit.

Charlie the Believer

Charlie describes himself as an evangelical Christian, although he doesn’t really “like denominations and all that” and prefers to simply call himself a Christian (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 13). While Charlie regularly


attends a nondenominational church with his family, he also prides himself on also attending other churches, including a Baptist church and a “rap” church in a nearby city (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 13). For Charlie, going to church where the “spirit calls you” is what matters most (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 6).

Charlie testifies that he became a Christian at age 5 when he “asked the Lord in my heart” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 11). It wasn’t until his junior year of high school, however, that Charlie reports fully committing himself to Christ. Up until that time, he perceives himself being “just kind of lost in the world and just looking to please everybody and everything and I was very self-conscious” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 11). During his junior year, however, Charlie sustained a head injury in football and experi-enced his fourth concussion, an event that required him to sit on the sidelines for the rest of the season. The concussion also made it difficult for Charlie to read and think, and so a few weeks after the concussion, he decided to “give it all to God.” A month later, Charlie was “healed,” which amazed his doctors and functioned as the “jump start” to his faith (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 12). Since then, Charlie has committed himself to living a Christ-centered life.

For Charlie, being a Christian means centering one’s life on “God and God alone” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 15). He seeks to follow Christ in all that he does, and “hopes and prays” that his actions and thoughts “honor the Lord” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 13). He believes that God’s love is “dumbfounding” and that the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice “leaves [his] with an obligation to honor everything—to point everything in life towards Him and towards His glory alone” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 15). Charlie points [his] life toward God by respecting the Bible as authori-tative in “every bit of life” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 24). The deeply personal nature of Charlie’s relationship with Christ is manifest not only in the way Christ helped to cure his concussion when Charlie prayed for help, but in a powerful experience in which her reported seeing and hearing God during a mission trip to Guatemala (this trip was the occasion for meeting the widow who becomes the protagonist of his TIB essay discussed below—see Figure 3). Charlie testifies to seeing “the throne in the heaven and the . . . the glory of the throne around me . . . the weight of the Lord’s presence brought me to my knees and I physically couldn’t get up” (interview 2/27/13, tran-script p. 15). Just as Charlie talks to Jesus, then, he also experiences Jesus talking back to him (Luhrman, 2012). Finally, for Charlie, following Jesus means actively embodying his faith and persuading others, as well, to allow Jesus to transform their lives. He reports “always sharing [his] faith” (inter-view 2/27/13, transcript p. 25) and feels called to talk about his faith with peers (interview 2/27/13, transcript. P. 9). And he intentionally enacts this


Figure 3. Charlie’s This I Believe essay.


commitment through his English class: Because Charlie can’t talk to all “648 people or however [many] are in our class” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 9), he views writing as a way to tell others what he believes, an ethical stance evident in the pact he made with a Christian friend early in his senior year to “share the gospel at least in some way or just to give the Lord praise in every paper we write” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 8).

Charlie the Writer: Honoring God Through the TIB Unit

Charlie’s TIB essay (hereafter “Charlie’s essay”), titled “I Believe in Faith,” both enacts and communicates his religious faith.

The first two paragraphs of the essay tell a vicarious story of faith, from the perspective of a widow whose life was upended by the Guatemalan Civil War and who finally found help when a group of Americans came and built her a house.5 Interview data helped us to understand that Charlie was in the group of Americans who helped the woman build this “small primitive house” (interview 2/27/13; Charlie’s essay). Charlie chose to tell this story to highlight the widow’s faith that God would help her: “It was just kind of like the epitome of, like, this is what faith looks like and I just—I wanted to por-tray that in my [essay]” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 19). The second two paragraphs offer a set of general reflections about faith, saturated with bibli-cal and other literary allusion and language. The essay suggests that the mag-nitude of the widow’s suffering and how long she waited for God’s help highlights her faith and underscores one of the messages of Charlie’s essay: “I believe that true faith is an unutterable trust in God, trust which never dreams that He will not stand by us.”

As mentioned above, Charlie framed the writing he did in Sam’s class as an opportunity to honor God through his writing and speaking, living out his activist evangelical faith. He saw his final TIB essay as not only another opportunity to share the gospel, but also an opportunity to bend himself to God’s will. Charlie explained hearing God call him to write about the Guatemalan widow and faith before this essay was due. While debating between two topics, faithfulness and God’s grace, Charlie and another Christian friend were out to dinner and felt called to read and study the first chapter of the New Testament book of Second Timothy. After reading it and “hacking through it” together, Charlie realized that “God was showing us that you guys gotta write about faith and God’s faithfulness” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 26). For Charlie, “it was—it was blatantly clear, like, I had no choice but to write about God’s faithfulness” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 26). In writing the TIB essay, then, Charlie embodied his personal relation-ship with God and his belief in the Bible as authoritative. Moreover, his story


of the construction of the essay suggests that in some ways, Charlie views himself as the conduit for God’s word instead of the actual writer of the text. At the same time, Charlie does acknowledge that he ultimately could have chosen to write about a different topic, but that “it wouldn’t have gone was well as it did” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 26).

Charlie’s conceptualization of the act of writing and his engagement with writing for the TIB unit suggests that the ideals of cosmopolitan-minded writ-ing instruction outlined above might be at odds with Charlie’s faith. The way Charlie uses writing to share and enact his faith may make it difficult for him to treat cosmopolitan-minded writing assignments as an opportunity to prac-tice “valuing valuing.” Might Charlie view himself as stopping short of hon-oring God if he used writing to “value valuing” instead of to convince others that they should take up his own Christian values? Moreover, for Charlie to engage in this kind of dialogue, he would have to recognize that because his faith in God is a value, it shares some similarity with values strongly held by others (e.g., humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims). This recognition could undermine Charlie’s belief that his God is the one true God.

Charlie’s sense that God contributes to the construction of his written words my also prevent Charlie from engaging in open dialogue about values. Because Charlie perceives himself as a kind of vehicle for God’s word, he seems unlikely to possess the capacity to identify the underlying values of his writing as his values; instead, he may see them as the values of God, the true author of his written texts. Furthermore, a meta conversation—one in which students consider why they value and why they hold the values they hold—seems especially tricky for Charlie because it may prove difficult for him to distance himself enough from his values to see them as the result of his lived experience and not the result of divine intervention.

Listening to “the Other” in the TIB Unit

Just as Charlie enacted his faith while he wrote his TIB essay, the way he engaged with other TIB essays (by peers and published essayists alike) also reflected his religious convictions. For example, on the day that Sam asked students to write about their beliefs around God and religious faith, Charlie listened to several different published essays, including one that featured an atheist who argued against the existence of God and another in which a Christian argues for it. When Charlie heard the “atheist guy’s” message, it “made [him] wanna, like, scream out, like, ‘that’s the reason that there is a God.’” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 22) . When he listened to the next essay, written by a Christian believer, Charlie appreciated the way the author “just kinda put the slam down [on the atheist’s view]” (interview 2/27/13,


transcript p. 22). At least when it comes to conversations across religious faith difference, Charlie seems to view values dialogue as a competition where one camp puts the “slam down” on the other.

In addition to listening to published TIB essays, students in Sam’s class also listened to each other’s essays. While not every essay centered around religion and/or ethical vantage points, there were moments when Charlie had to listen to students talk about religious beliefs that were not aligned with evangelical Christianity. Charlie shared that when he hears viewpoints that contradict his own, his first impulse is anger. After this passes, however, his “second [impulse] is to love them . . . it’s the Spirit and it truly overpowers all fleshly thoughts” (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 27). When Charlie engages with different worldviews, he enacts his faith by allowing the Holy Spirit to work through him and help him overcome his anger. After the initial anger subsides, Charlie gets “more anxious to share [his] beliefs” with those who hold different ethical vantage points because they are “missing it” and he “sees opportunity” to share his faith (interview 2/27/13, transcript p. 27). For Charlie, then, the act of listening to those who do not share his faith is some-thing he does in order to share his views to those who are “missing” the truth.

In a theory of education for rooted cosmopolitanism, dialogue helps stu-dents realize that they can learn from “the valuing beings” around them and this experience can pave the way for students to treat each other as “valuable” instead of “mere instruments of [their] will and desire” (Hansen et al., 2009, p. 599). The case of Charlie, however, highlights difficulties in enacting this ideal in morally and religiously pluralistic classrooms. Because Charlie val-ues his faith first and foremost, he cannot stand far enough away from his values in order to engage in this dialogue. Instead, his sense of calling to “lay the smackdown” on people who disagree with his faith and his desire to help unbelievers see the truth suggests that Charlie never sees his peers as people and instead sees them as “mere instruments” of his “will and desire.” Charlie’s engagement with the other, then, generates questions about the degree to which others who share similar populist evangelical or fundamentalist reli-gious beliefs more generally will be able to dialogue with other worldviews on their own terms.

Discussion

Our portraits of Sam and Charlie illuminate the extent to which religious faith can be a pervasive part of life in U.S. public school classrooms. If faith is cen-tral to the identities and cultural worlds of evangelicals such as Sam, Charlie, and Mary, our portraits suggest how religion might be considered as an element of ethical difference within conversations about cosmopolitan-minded writing


instruction. Yet serious, sympathetic consideration of religion in student and teacher lives poses some challenging questions for writing teachers and schol-ars who embrace rooted cosmopolitanism to take up.

First, we see Sam undertaking to promote cosmopolitan dialogue—in the sense of “getting used to one another” (Appiah, 2006) and articulating and sharing some aspect of one’s own ethical rootedness (Hansen, 2010)—within a setting that it is probably appropriate to see as culturally insular as well as racially and linguistically homogeneous. Critics may question the very pos-sibility of cosmopolitan dialogue in such a setting. We think it is, in fact, worthwhile for teachers to engage even such students with the big, wider world of ethical discourse, with those who do not share their ethical vantage points. We see this endeavor as a small-scale “action verb” (Watson, 2015), we might say a process of everyday, on-the-ground cosmopolitanization. While small and perhaps even unglamorous in the bigger sweep of the equity needs in the field, we still see such pedagogical work as a worthwhile and virtuous quest.

As we consider this project, whether in a school like Oak Hill or in an environment where ethical (and other) differences are more pronounced, we find ourselves grappling with the question of how to account for some public school English teachers and students who, on religious grounds, will reject dialogue across pluralism as a social good. What are productive ways to con-ceptualize students or teachers who seem to be “counter-cosmopolitans” (Appiah, 2006) like Charlie? It seems to us that, from a pedagogical stand-point, the term “counter-cosmopolitan” inserts such persons into a discourse of moral deficiency—a deficit discourse—that is unhelpful for writing peda-gogy, theory, and instruction.

One way to resist such discourses about religiously rooted students and teachers is to appreciate the considerable differences among individuals within religious groups such as American evangelicals. For example, the por-traits of Sam and Charlie reveal that these two nondenominational evangeli-cals share certain ethical roots as evangelicals: a devotion to respecting the authority of the Bible, following Jesus Christ, and living a transformative faith (Lindsay, 2007). At the same time, our portraits reveal the within-reli-gious-category variation that may be possible—possibly even common-place—in classrooms. Whereas Sam is a more cosmopolitan evangelical, well accustomed to openly dialoguing with others who hold different ethical vantage points, Charlie is more of a populist evangelical who has not (not yet, anyway) been socialized to value such dialogue. It is possible that these dif-ferences are developmental, given the age differences between the two men, but the sociological research suggests that such differences are also subcul-tural. Sociological and political science research on religion in American life


has argued that there is likely to be more across-religious-group similarity around the distinctions of traditional/modern than there is to be within-group similarity (e.g., Chaves, 2011; Schmidt et al., 2010). So in terms of ethical valuing, a cosmopolitan evangelical like Sam may share more in common with a liberal Jew or a progressive African American Christian than he does with the more populist evangelical Charlie.

Another strength-based strategy would instead frame evangelical Christians like Charlie and Sam, anyway, as Biblicists who are participat-ing in a rich historical interpretive tradition in their speaking and writing (Juzwik, 2014). Various cultural manifestations of the Biblicist tradition have played significant roles in movements working toward societal justice (i.e., the U.S. civil rights movement), even as they have been used to justify oppressive regimes of dehumanization such as American slavery in the past and homophobic stances, behaviors, and policies in the present. A Biblicist framework might focus on understanding interpretive and writing practices evangelicals do engage in vs. those they don’t engage in. It might examine how Biblicists like Charlie and Sam engage themselves in the unceasing social work of establishing and sustaining transitive relationships among biblical text, right beliefs, and righteous actions. Understanding Charlie as a Biblicist, then, could entail getting curious about Charlie’s construction and enactment of transitive relations among belief (i.e., in God’s faithful-ness to him and to the widow in his essay), the Word (the passage from Second Timothy that he studied with his friend, as he prepared to write the TIB paper), and the righteous (in Charlie’s view) action of listening to God and, in response, writing this paper about God’s faithfulness (McKenzie & Juzwik, 2015).

Understanding Charlie from this perspective still raises questions about how a cosmopolitan-minded teacher like Sam holds on to his or her own convictions about the value of dialogue while still respecting some Biblicists’ (like Charlie’s) deeply rooted resistance to open dialogue across ethical dif-ference (i.e., Charlie’s desire to put the “slamdown” on wrong views). Ought a teacher undertake to talk such a student out of a Biblicist ethical rooted-ness? Ought a teacher, more mildly, work to loosen the roots a bit?

Along this same line of reasoning, the work raises further questions around the reality that some students of faith may construe the purposes of writing in English in terms of their relationship to God, rather than only their relationship with fellow human beings. This possibility of “writing to honor God,” as a way of framing an academic writing task, seems worthy of respectful consideration from writing scholars and teachers. What might it mean for the teaching of writing if a writer—like Charlie—construes God as author of his text? For peer review of writing? For teacher responses to


writing? How might a teacher or student respond in generative, open, and possibly even loving ways, as opposed to condemnatory ways, to such an ethical stance?

Conclusion

Our data push us to grapple with these and other difficult questions about dialoguing across ethical difference that vex not only contemporary public school classrooms, but also the global public sphere (Butler, Habermas, Taylor, & West, 2011). Framing the religious dimensions of such dialoguing across ethical differences—and the role writing may play in such dialogues—in terms of rooted cosmopolitanism offers one path forward in the scholar-ship on writing and literacy. We appreciate how rooted cosmopolitanism, as an educational ideal, pushes teachers and scholars toward attention to both everyday, particular, and local ethical enactments and engagements on the one hand, and the global or “macro” implications of such acts on the other. It seems probable, however, that other theoretical conversations (i.e., beyond cosmopolitanism) have potential to push the conversation about writing and dialoguing across ethical difference still further. Whatever the limitations of rooted cosmopolitanism frameworks for understanding how writing and the teaching of writing are enacted and resisted in public school classrooms, we hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writ-ing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was overseen by the Social Science Institutional Review Board at Michigan State University. We thank Sue Brindley, Samantha Caughlan, and Matt Ferkany for their lively commentary on earlier versions of the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was conducted with fund-ing support from the Spencer Foundation and from the MSU College of Education Seed Grant Program.


Notes

1. Because we see all research as inherently interpretive in nature, we use the adverb “explicitly” here.

2. We suspect students may be referring more specifically to evangelical Christians and would not include Catholics, for example, in this assessment.

3. At the time of the study, Sam, his wife, and a couple of his close friends were in the process of starting a home-based assisted care facility. Because teachers in the district had received no raises and essentially had their pay cut due to paying more for benefits, Sam was eager to supplement his income.

4. Please note: This data excerpt may read like a transcript, but it is a field note, because our video recorder malfunctioned on this day of the unit and we were not able to have a word-for-word transcript. Fortunately, Mary (who is a fast typist) took copious notes and was able to capture much of the language.

5. We interpret what may seem a distressing and colonizing rhetorical choice in depth elsewhere (McKenzie & Juzwik, 2015).

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Author Biographies

Mary M. Juzwik is associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University and coeditor of Research in the Teaching of English.

Cori McKenzie is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Program at Michigan State University.

www.pewforum.org/growth-of-the-nonreligious-many-say-trend-is-bad-for-american-society.aspx

www.pewforum.org/growth-of-the-nonreligious-many-say-trend-is-bad-for-american-society.aspx

Writing, Religious Faith, and Rooted Cosmopolitan Dialogue: Portraits of Two American Evangelical Men in a Public School English Classroom

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