Table Of ContentLegacies of Christian
Languaging and Literacies
in American Education
Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and
cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly fi nd 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.
The authors not only examine how Christianity—the historically dominant
religion in American society—shapes languaging and literacies in schools and
other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be
reconfi gured. 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, homophobia,
and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational
confi gurations within and across the myriad American Christian subcultures
coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning.
T his 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.
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.
Routledge Research in Education
T his series aims to present the latest research from right across the fi eld of
education. It is not confi ned to any particular area or school of thought and
seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from
around the world.
Recent titles in the series include:
The Complex Web of Inequality in North American Schools
Investigating Educational Policies for Social Justice
Edited by Gilberto Q. Conchas, Briana M. Hinga,
Miguel N. Abad, and Kris D. Gutiérrez
Fear and Schooling
Understanding the Troubled History of Progressive Education
Ronald W. Evans
Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory in
Educational Settings
May Britt Postholm and Kirsten Foshaug Vennebo
Sonic Studies in Educational Foundations
Echoes, Reverberations, Silences, Noise
Edited by Walter S. Gershon and Peter Appelbaum
Designing for Situated Knowledge Transformation
Edited by Nina Bonderup Dohn, Stig Børsen Hansen and Jens Jørgen Hansen
Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools
Critical Approaches to Global Justice Education
Edited by Barbara O’Toole, David Nyaluke and Ebun Joseph
Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies
in American Education
Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning
Edited by Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila
For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393
Legacies of Christian
Languaging and Literacies
in American Education
Perspectives on English Language
Arts Curriculum, Teaching,
and Learning
Edited by Mary M. Juzwik,
Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke,
and Denise Dávila
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and
Denise Dávila to be identifi ed as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
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Act 1988.
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without intent to infringe.
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A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-13634-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02760-4 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Foreword ix
DAVID E. KIRKLAND
Introduction: Legacies of Christian Languaging
and Literacies in American Education 1
MARY M. JUZWIK, KEVIN J. BURKE, JENNIFER C. STONE,
AND DENISE DÁVILA
SECTION I
Babel: Conversation, Confl ict, and Contested
Terrains of Schooling 17
JENNIFER C. STONE
1 “Real Religion”: The Roles of Knowledge, Dialogue,
and Sense-Making in Coming to a Faith 21
ALLISON SKERRETT
2 Recognizing Religion with Preservice Teachers 37
HEIDI L. HADLEY AND WILLIAM J. FASSBENDER
3 Institutional Rituals as Interpersonal Verbal Rituals
as Interactional Resources in Classroom Talk 51
ROBERT LEBLANC
SECTION II
Purity: Making Present the Stranger 67
KEVIN J. BURKE
4 Myth and Christian Reading Practice in English Teaching 71
SCOTT JARVIE
vi Contents
5 “Racism Is a God-Damned Thing”: The Implications
of Historical and Contemporary Catholic Racism
for ELA Classrooms 82
MARY L. NEVILLE
6 Regulating Language: Language Policies of Early
American Christian Missions in Alaska 96
JENNIFER C. STONE, SAMANTHA MACK, JACOB D. HOLLEY-KLINE,
AND MITCHELL HOBACK
7 A Dream Come True: Young Evangelical Women’s
Negotiations of Dreams, Reality, and Ideologies
on Pinterest 111
BREE STRAAYER-GANNON
SECTION III
Wisdom: Loving God, Loving Our Neighbors,
and Engaging Religious Pluralism Through
Literary Response 125
MARY M. JUZWIK
8 Entering Into Literary Communion: Nourishing
the Soul and Reclaiming Mystery Through Reading 131
KATI MACALUSO
9 “Love Your Neighbor”: LGBTQ Social Justice and
the Youth Canon of WWII Literature 145
DENISE DÁVILA AND ELOUISE E. EPSTEIN
10 Disrupting Protestant Dominion: Middle School
Affi rmations of Diverse Religious Images in
Community Spaces 160
DENISE DÁVILA AND ALLISON VOLZ
SECTION IV
Resurrection: Contemplative Essays on Navigating
Christian Literacies, Teaching, and Pedagogies in
the English Language Arts Classroom 175
DENISE DÁVILA
11 Ambivalence in Two Parts: Legacies of Catholic
Languaging 179
ADAM J. GRETEMAN
Contents vii
12 Exploring the Multilingual, Multimodal, and
Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Two Young Cuban
American Women’s Religious Literacies 192
NATASHA PEREZ
13 I Had to Die to Live Again: A Racial Storytelling of
a Black Male English Educator’s Spiritual Literacies
and Practices 205
LAMAR L. JOHNSON
14 (Re)Mystifying Literary Pedagogy 222
MARY M. JUZWIK
Afterword: The Gift of Babel 234
SANDRO R. BARROS
List of Contributors 241
Index 251
Acknowledgments
St. Thomas Aquinas writes—of the inherent human inability to account for
the vast mystery of God—that we suffer, always, from a poverty of language.
We echo this sentiment in thinking about the ways that we will, inevitably, fail
at properly rendering the scope of our gratitude to those who have made this
project possible. Of course, language is all we have here, and so with a sense of
the scale of our shortcomings, we wish to thank a number of colleagues, friends,
and mentors for this work. First, thank you to our editors at Routledge, fi rst
Matthew Friberg and then Elsbeth Wright, for the technical guidance neces-
sary to produce a text as disparate as this one. We’d like to extend our gratitude
to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and to the invitation
from Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, then-chair of the NCTE Standing Commit-
tee for Research, for scheduling the original forum out of which this project
grew as a Featured Research Session at the 2017 annual NCTE convention.
We’re grateful to conversational partners along the way who have helped shape
our thinking on the problems of this project, the work, and the intersecting
fi elds of Language and Literacy Studies, English Education, and educational
research, most especially Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Haas Dyson,
Avner Segall, and Anne Whitney. Special thanks are due to David Kirkland,
who signed onto the project sight unseen on a street in St. Louis some years
back, and to Sandro Barros, who was kind enough to overlook our belated
acknowledgment of his shared interests and jumped in readily and with great
depth at later stages of the project. Mary would like to thank Dusty for his lov-
ing support, especially during the fi nal intense weeks of bringing this project
to completion. Jennifer thanks Scott and Katrina for their love, patience, and
good humor. Kevin extends his gratitude to Lauren for her generosity along
the way and to those Marists, Jesuits, Vincentians, Sisters of the Most Precious
Blood, and lay ministers who taught him that the institution of the Church is
always secondary to the work of its people toward a more just world. Finally,
and most importantly, thank you to the contributors in this volume for taking
risks in your scholarship and for pushing the conversation in, we think, profound
and useful ways.
Foreword
David E. Kirkland
I have studied the intersections of race, gender, and literacy for nearly two
decades. My early studies were ethnographic, detailing literacy in the lives of
Black young men and boys. After countless hours spent with them, I found
that the relationship between Black young men and boys and their words was
deeply spiritual, something ancestral like the roots of an ageless tree, more vast
than the possibilities of words, like nebula or dreams—something akin to God.
T his should not have been surprising to me. Black young men and boys, like
many other human groups, exist in cultures that blur the sacred and the secular,
creating a kind of haze that makes it impossible to distinguish between where
language begins and faith ends. The language of faith and the language of a
faith-driven people are remarkably kindred. This kindred space, both for the
young people I learned from and other l iterate people like them, gives breath to
literate being, holding in place recollection and reconciliation and, thus, the
sweetest blues of, say, Coltrane borne of “the sorrow songs” of DuBois all in
the space of the living word. In this space, literacy whispers and raps, but tran-
scendently in the tradition of griots where the language of faith soils the soul
until it becomes etched into memory. This is how literacy works.
The connection between the spiritual power of words is understood in West
African cosmology as Nommo —the spiritual power of the word. The spiritual
power of the word, or language, operates through such faith traditions as Juda-
ism, Christianity, and Islam, among others. Thus, literacy is what faith accom-
plishes in a people striving to communicate that which is impossible—the act
of bringing others inside themselves to experience a deep hunger, an aching
hurt, an incomplete history, all of which live in the body. And for the young
people I have spent my life learning from and about, literacy was also the story
of what lives inside the body, of wounds set against swollen smiles, of practices
of survivance that act as a prayer whose words sit adjacent to the echoes of holy
books and the cries of “a holier-than-thou” people.
This is why I fi nd this book fascinating, for it gets it. It explains to me the
remarkable connection between faith and literacy, which I have witnessed over
and again in the fi eld researching race, gender, and literacy. It has taken me to
a new place in the study of literacy—outside the classroom and into the ideo-
logical embellishments of nations and borders, into the stew of our social and
