TEACHING THE “MOST BEAUTIFUL OF STORIES”

Narrative Reflection as a Signature Pedagogy for Interfaith Studies

Matthew Maruggi and Martha E. Stortz

In his book God Is Not One, religious historian Stephen Prothero offers a four-part analytic for comparing religious traditions. He posits that each identifies a problem, a solution, a series of practices that move believers from problem to solution, and an exemplar or figure whose life embodies the tradition. Accordingly, in Buddhism, the problem is suffering; the solution, nirvana. In Judaism, the problem is exile; the solution, return. In Christianity, the problem is sin; the solution, salvation.¹

Yet we argue that these problems are addressed not so much with “solutions” as with stories that are subtle, expansive, and filled with mystery. Jews reenact the story of the Exodus in Passover seders. Christians offer four biographies of Jesus. Buddhists return to the story of their exemplar, Siddhartha, a rich prince whose first encounter with suffering sent him out of his palace and into pilgrimage. According to the Qur’an, Allah is a divine storyteller, revealing “the most beautiful of stories.”² Prothero’s fourfold analytic handles the content of the great traditions, but narrative captures their heart.

We teach at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, a church-related institution rooted in the Lutheran tradition and located in an urban hub that is home to the one of the largest Somali communities in the United States. The neighborhood is one of the most diverse zip codes west of Chicago and east of Seattle. The undergraduate student population includes 37 percent students of color, a large group of first-generation and immigrant-American students, as well as students in recovery from substance abuse. The undergraduate curriculum requires two courses in religion and vocation, an introductory course in the student’s first year and an upper-level course. A keystone or capstone course in the student’s final year returns to the question of vocation and meaning-making within the context of the student’s major. Augsburg’s mission commits to educating “informed citizens, thoughtful stewards, critical thinkers, and responsible leaders.”

We take seriously the university’s mission, particularly the challenge to educate responsible leaders for religiously plural environments. While few students will become religion majors, they will all need interreligious literacy and interfaith competence to be “responsible leaders” in whatever profession they choose. Interfaith competence entails certain knowledge of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions (the “what” of interfaith studies), skills that include conflict management, appreciative inquiry, and deliberative dialogue (the “how” of interfaith studies), and distinctive sensibilities like humility, empathy, and resilience (the “why” of interfaith studies).³

We have found narrative to be a powerful pedagogy for training interfaith leaders in the undergraduate classroom. Yet, we have also found that stories matter differently depending on the curricular level. For example, the introductory course uses core narratives from the world’s religions, as well as spiritual autobiographies of their key exemplars, inviting students to see their own journeys as narratives. The upper-division course places these core narratives in conversation with the students’ own. Finally, the keystone course asks students to craft case studies from their own experience, drawing out interfaith dimensions for discussion and analysis.

In this chapter, we will look at why and how stories matter, at the narrative aspect of transformative learning, and finally at effective narrative strategies for the different curricular levels of entry-level, upper-division, and graduating students.

NARRATIVE: WHY AND HOW STORIES MATTER

Theologians and philosophers of religion note the unique role of narrative in forming and transforming religious identity. Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan notes the importance of historical memory, which invites one into an ongoing, collective story: “Without roots, without memory, without belonging to a group, [humankind] is left prey to economic logic.”⁴ He underscores the need for stories that young people can inhabit and exemplars whose lives they can emulate.⁵ Similarly, Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues that “the mysterious thing we call a self is best understood exactly as a story.”⁶ Roman Catholic moral theologian Richard M. Gula notes that all transformation involves a repatterning of the imagination to attend to stories that make life worth living.⁷

Religious traditions offer thick, complex webs of narrative meaning, but all stories are not equal. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that caregivers should be persuaded to tell their children only “noble stories.”⁸ He understood that stories have the power to inform and transform, but also to malform and deform.

Stories matter—but what constitutes a good and worthy one? Theologians and philosophers of religion have long wrestled with the criteria.⁹ We distill these criteria in three points:

• A good story helps people recognize and honor the full humanity of all persons, especially the stranger, the enemy, the powerless, and particularly the religious “other.” The parable of the Good Samaritan from the Christian scriptures relates the story of a religious outsider who assists a beaten man of unknown ethnic or religious identity who has been ignored by two religious insiders.

• A good story helps people step away from violence and reckon with suffering and tragedy. The Hadith tells the story of Mohammed, who makes a nonviolent pilgrimage to a city from which he was violently banished. His journey leads to a peace treaty.

• A good story helps people accept the paradox of their own humanity, both their tremendous gifts as well as their terrible flaws. In the Hebrew scriptures, the prophet Nathan points out King David’s adultery indirectly and through a story, inviting him to pass judgment first on a character in the story, then ultimately on himself.¹⁰

A good story highlights the best of a religious tradition, thereby contributing to common human flourishing.

THE NARRATIVE ASPECT OF TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

Theologians and philosophers are not the only ones to recognize the unique role of narrative in human meaning-making. Educational theorists emphasize narrative reflection as a signature pedagogy for transformative learning. M. Carolyn Clark argues that the “understanding of the self as narratively constituted opens up new possibilities for [transformative] learning theory.”¹¹ In distinguishing transformative from informative learning, Robert Kegan notes the value of both, while underscoring that the former comes closer to the meaning of “education,” literally, e- + -ducare in Latin, “leading out.”¹² Informative learning fills in a preexisting form, while transformative learning creates new forms. In this way, transformative learning is always about epistemological change, challenging old ways of knowing and clearing the path to new ones.¹³

Religious literacy often focuses on informative learning, with an emphasis on knowledge about tenets, texts, and traditions. In contrast, interfaith studies offers great potential for transformative learning. Encountering the stories of religious others, a person or community is prompted to construct narrative meaning in new ways.¹⁴

Narrative reflection is the process of analyzing one’s own narrative in order to make sense of new experience. Because of the role narrative plays in the construction of identity, stories offer enormous potential for personal change. Identifying with a powerful story makes sense of experience in new ways and leads to action.¹⁵ The intentional process of constructing a personal narrative reveals discrepancies and creates disorienting dilemmas, internal and personal crises that disrupt the established story.¹⁶ Whether dramatic or subtle, these dilemmas offer the opportunity to retell that story, exploring and clarifying past experiences. By “re-storying” that narrative, one develops a new, more truthful story.¹⁷ The life of Malcolm X embodies this process of disorientation and reorientation. Disillusioned with a newly perceived “racism” in the Nation of Islam’s teachings, he makes the hajj. The pilgrimage inserts him into the stories of Mohammed, Hagar, and Abraham, reorienting him to the “sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together.”¹⁸ Thus, he re-stories his life as a Muslim.

NARRATIVE AS A SIGNATURE PEDAGOGY IN THE INTERFAITH CLASSROOM

Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter describe three modes of narrative learning: learning journals, autobiographical writing, and instructional case studies.¹⁹ Learning journals permit students to create a conversation between themselves and the material, both cognitively and affectively. Reading and writing spiritual autobiographies invite dialogue between the story of self and others for mutual illumination. Finally, instructional case studies give students the opportunity to engage in a real or fictional incident that has the possibility of multiple endings. Case studies make the participants part of the story through both listening and creating. To achieve transformation, we scaffold these three modes of narrative learning into the required sequence of religion courses.

The task of the interfaith educator is to discern which narratives might best be used at various curricular levels of students’ academic journeys in order to maximize their transformative potential. Entering students need to discover they have a story to tell. They journal their way into the whole process of storytelling, and they learn from examples of spiritual or religious autobiographies. Upper-division undergraduates are ready to dig more deeply into the stories of the world’s religions; they can engage in comparative narrative reflection and storytelling. Finally, graduating seniors have accumulated stories from their own experience, and they are eager to examine the interreligious dimensions of these encounters through case studies. Taken together, these levels of narrative align with courses required for entering, upper-division, and graduating students to offer transformative learning with the goal of creating interfaith competence.

The Introductory Course

Students, particularly in their first year, often need to be convinced they have a story to tell. They need encouragement to see themselves as “storied” people, already bearing unique gifts. We have found that the best way to offer that encouragement is to give them biographies and autobiographies of people wrestling with the same big questions they have. Interacting with these stories in learning journals then empowers them to author their own stories.

The first required course in religion, Religion, Vocation, and the Search for Meaning, covers Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, focusing on how each describes the problem of the human condition by acquainting students with the central stories that address that problem. We have found it helpful to display these great traditions as lived realities, assigning a spiritual autobiography written by someone inside each tradition. For Judaism, we have used Robert Schoen’s What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About Judaism; for Christianity, Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Pastrix; and for Islam, Eboo Patel’s Acts of Faith.²⁰

Two strategies can be used to invite students into dialogue with the narratives. Learning journals demand that students intentionally engage material as they experience it. For example, an assignment called “Letters to the Class” invites students to write a series of letters addressed to their classmates. Sometimes the prompt for this assignment concerns themes unique to a particular reading; sometimes the prompt simply invites students to share something that they found interesting, insightful, or challenging. Always the prompt requires students to articulate how the reading intersects with their own life stories in some way. Students write to their classmates, and this exercise launches small group and plenary discussions.

Spiritual autobiography invites students to tell their own stories. A second signature assignment, “Roots and Wings,” focuses on Eboo Patel’s Acts of Faith. Rubrics for this assignment reference one of the book’s key insights: “The tradition you are born into is your home, Brother Wayne told me, but as Gandhi once wrote, it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen. ‘It’s good to have wings,’ he said, ‘but you should have roots too.’”²¹

Students are asked to reflect on the sources of Patel’s beliefs and values. What are his “root” experiences? How do they shape the “wings” of his commitment to interfaith work? What obstacles has he encountered, and how did he overcome them?

Finally, students are asked to pose these same questions to their own emerging life stories. What are the “root” experiences in their own lives? In reading their own life stories alongside Patel’s life story, students gain a sense that they too have a story to tell. More importantly, they begin to author it. Claiming agency or authorship of one’s own narrative is a crucial step toward transformative learning.

The Upper-Division Course

Stories of self are crowded, peopled stories. Parker Palmer relates his teacher’s wisdom that, because there is no selfhood outside relationship, “the ancient human question ‘Who am I?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question ‘Whose am I?’”²² For better and for worse, individuals shape and are shaped by many different communities, including families, neighborhoods, religious traditions, and political parties. Communities can call out an individual’s gifts and confirm them. Communities can also overlook an individual’s gifts and stifle them, particularly if they don’t fit that community’s leadership profiles or stereotypes.

Students enter college knowing a lot or very little about the tradition or traditions in which they were raised. They may or may not feel they belong to these communal stories. Some students were not raised in a religious tradition at all, and they claim affiliation with the “nones.” Whatever their upbringing, students form commitments. With modeling and invitation, they learn to narrate the stories of how their values came into being.

After students are clearer about their own stories and how communities may have shaped or misshaped them, they listen more closely to stories of people from different religious traditions. Because they have a critical appreciation for the role of communities in shaping selves, they can hear stories from other religious traditions not simply as stories of “them” but as stories of “us.”

Students continue to explore the themes of vocation and the search for meaning in a second required religion course, which often explores Eastern and Western religions, as well as perspectives from Native American, shamanist, and atheist and agnostic thinkers. One course in particular, Ethics and World Religions, demonstrates how narrative reflection can be used to further students’ understandings of these worldviews, of their own worldviews, and the impact of these stories on how they show up in the world, propelling them toward seeing themselves as interfaith leaders.

A series of assignments move students to engage in a more advanced form of autobiographical writing, comparative narrative reflection and storytelling. An initial assignment asks students to write a reflection on the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon. They respond by composing a poem-essay describing places, experience, people, and events that have shaped their identities and made meaning for them. Students are then asked in small groups to share all or part of their work, as they are comfortable. The more students risk sharing across their differences, the more potential there is for transformative interfaith learning.

In one class, Maryam, a Muslim student, was in a group with Carlos, a Catholic, Amber, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and Adam, who identified as agnostic or atheist. After sharing their work, they reflected on two questions: What commonalities did you find in your stories? What did you find unique in the other person’s story? Maryam was surprised to learn that they all highlighted how a grandparent shaped their belief systems. Adam delighted in hearing that Amber shared his love of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. While the BWCA deepened Amber’s connection to God, for Adam it deepened a connection to all living things. Carlos asked Maryam how fasting during Ramadan could be a rich spiritual practice. Comparative storytelling enriched the narrative of each, a deepened mutual understanding.

This strategy gives students an appreciative understanding of their own belief systems, as well as the worldviews of others. While creating a common environment, it also invites students to explore difference. This opening exercise sets the stage for students to then learn from exemplars in different traditions, all of whom have been agents of change. Later in the course, students come back to this assignment, thinking about how they have re-storied their own narratives through the personal narratives of these exemplars.

A final assignment asks students to engage in a twofold reflection process. First, they place in dialogue two exemplars from different traditions, comparing “where they are from” in terms of the exemplars’ core commitments, examining both the commonalities and differences. Then students reflect on how the lives of these exemplars challenge them to think differently about their own sense of what it means to live ethically. Which of their own beliefs have been reinforced or challenged? In the finally analysis, these assignments invite students into the process of re-storying, opening them up to new ways of knowing and being.

The Keystone Course

As students prepare to graduate, they return to the central theme of the introductory courses in religion, “vocation and the search for meaning.” These courses have become increasingly interdisciplinary, pairing religion faculty with faculty in departments ranging from business to the natural sciences. The students integrate curricular and co-curricular elements of their undergraduate experience, reflecting on incidents they have witnessed on campus or in the workplace.

Case studies provide a helpful framework for reflection. They invite students to retell the story of an interfaith encounter, focusing more analytically on the narrative trajectory of an incident. This final narrative strategy in our curricular design explores the path from “is” to “ought to be,” what happened and what might have happened. The distance between these two worlds generates change, as students draw on a usable past to acknowledge a broken present and point to a more hopeful future. Stories of past struggle can animate change in the present.²³ In her chapter for this volume, Pluralism Project’s research director Ellie Pierce explores case studies in more depth. Here we signal how they might work in a rudimentary way in a course such as Augsburg’s Senior Keystone.²⁴

As Pierce notes, case studies move students “beyond storytelling” into an imagined public realm. If the Augsburg introductory course gives students an agency of authorship and the upper-division course gives students an agency of comparative analysis, the Senior Keystone course gives students civic agency, placing them in actual situations of interreligious conflict. A case study in the Senior Keystone course involves a threefold rubric: description, information, and resolution.

A first descriptive phase aims at a thick description of an actual situation of interfaith encounter. It is important to signal to students that these incidents need not be solely conflictual, but could be positive and trust-building. After reading over the case study, this descriptive assessment asks several questions.

• What is going on—and for whom? This question raises the structural dimensions of the case, race, gender, and class but focuses on religion. Students are invited to see the situation from various points of view, imagining themselves in different roles.

• What are the issues—and for whom? This question challenges students to inhabit multiple roles in the case.

A second, information-gathering phase demands that students attend to context and identify any additional information they need about any of the various dimensions identified in the descriptive phase. It also requires that students stop to gather information instead of rushing to judgment or action.

• Who are the stakeholders? This question asks students to look at the broad context, signaling that the various actors are also part of larger communities.

• Are there rules, policies, or standards at play that warrant investigation?

Finally, a resolution phase examines potential outcomes of taking particular actions. Students are also asked to regard doing nothing as a form of agency, often one with high stakes.

• What are possible courses of action and/or resolution?

• What might be potential outcomes of these courses of action or inaction?

• What are your takeaways from this case?

Having read and discussed several interfaith cases, students then write their own rudimentary case studies. They describe an incident they have experienced that involved religious diversity in a community they know personally. It can be a workplace, a school, an athletic team, a neighborhood, or a place of worship. Defining “community” broadly signals the range of arenas in which interfaith leadership might be needed. Students are then asked to follow the same threefold rubrics they used to analyze other case studies. Finally, they must examine how leadership was or was not exercised in the incident.

As students craft their own case studies, they wrestle with the task of thick description, the difficulty of objectivity, the importance of context, and potential outcomes and their consequences. They then present these case studies in class. Discussion focuses on the interreligious factors in the case study, attempting to disentangle them from other dimensions.

One case study involved an incident at a mall, a setting the student described as “public yet privately owned.” Seeking a less-crowded space to pray, a Somali Muslim woman laid out her prayer rug in front of an unmarked closed door and began to pray. The door turned out to access an office in the mall, which became apparent when an employee sought entrance. The employee interrupted the prayer and asked the woman to move. When the woman continued praying, the employee sought a security guard, who surveyed the situation and decided to wait until the prayer was complete. After the prayer the woman rolled up her rug, and the employee gained access. The next day the incident was reported to mall management, which decided to inform all mall tenants to allow people to worship wherever, however, and whenever they needed—without challenge and above all without creating a scene.

The student described the case as objectively as he could, then collected information on the population of Muslims in Minnesota, different cultural assumptions about public space and private property, and religious difference. In his leadership analysis, he noted that the management exercised minimal leadership, acting solely to avoid conflict, and “did nothing to help the larger community address the root issues of this conflict.” An interfaith leader, he concluded, would have convened a conversation between involved parties to achieve “greater awareness of how to blend conflicting ideas and assumptions.” In short, this student understood that interfaith leadership moves beyond merely avoiding conflict into the messy realm of building trust.

CONCLUSION

In our classrooms, we have found that narrative reflection helps students to gain appreciative understanding of themselves through another’s religious or nonreligious worldview. We have argued that different kinds of stories are appropriate at different levels of the undergraduate curriculum: spiritual autobiographies in the introductory course, comparative storytelling and story-listening in the upper-division course, and instructional case studies in the Senior Keystone course. Scaffolded into the arc of a student’s learning, these narrative pedagogies offer the possibility of transformative learning in the interfaith classroom.

We write from the academy, but we are not ivory tower scholars. We know we are training professionals, parents, and citizens, and we hope to equip them with tools for the workplace, home, school, and public square.

Interfaith work is neither a luxury nor an ivory tower endeavor.²⁵ People need interfaith awareness to be professionals, as they encounter workplaces that are increasingly religiously diverse. They need interfaith awareness to be parents, as they teach their children to engage with, rather than merely observe, religious diversity. Most important, they need interfaith awareness to be citizens, as they move into public spaces where religion can either create conflict or trigger transformation. Mutual witness sparks transformation, and witness happens when all parties risk speaking their truths, trusting that they will be heard.²⁶ Stories change minds and hearts more readily than arguments. Stories matter.