Introduction
The Challenge of Identity-Influenced Teaching
The day after September 11, 2001, I (Perry) walked into my social philosophy class at RUDN University in Moscow with a heavy heart. We had been reading John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, a philosophical classic about how a liberal democratic state should justify its political arrangements. That day, though, I did not feel like discussing abstract philosophical questions, and I knew my Russian students at this state-funded, public university would want to discuss recent world events as well. I also recognized from our discussion about Rawls and the moral foundations of liberal democracy that I had a mixture of students with various political views in class, some of them sons and daughters of Communist Party members.
Before coming into the classroom that day, I had experienced some of the same emotions that many Americans had: sadness, grief, anger, and yes, a desire for an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye form of justice. I am an American, after all, and in my view, terrorists had unjustly attacked American civilians. Still, I knew I needed to rein in the feelings associated with my American identity.
At that moment, however, I also knew that I could not restrain the passions this event might arouse in my students. Moreover, I knew that good teaching meant that I should not try to contain them completely. The emotions were too raw and the event too close. Still, I began the day’s discussion by controlling my own painful emotions related to my American identity that might lead me to impose my voice and perspective upon students. Instead, I began class by asking a question related to the topic of justice, about which we had been talking: “Do you think America deserved the attacks yesterday?”
I found it sobering, but also oddly invigorating, to encounter a whole range of responses among my Russian students: one-third expressed deep sympathy toward America and those killed, one-third said they were unsure, and another third defended the view that America deserved the
TheOutrageousIdeaofChristianTeaching. Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman and George Marsden, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190056483.003.0001
attack. I appreciated the first group’s sympathy as well as the latter group’s honesty. I had tried to create a space for this kind of openness by acknowledging every country’s strengths and shortcomings. Overall, my desire to create a space for thinking critically about justice in countries came fundamentally from my Christian identity and its intellectual tradition. In these conversations, I often said, “Just like families, every country contains cultural vices but also has certain cultural virtues. And just like families, there are some countries you would rather live in than others.” This was my attempt to encourage students to be honest about the sins and virtues of a country as well as to foster their critical thinking about justice.
So I reined in my desire to criticize the fault-finding students’ apparent lack of empathy about the civilian deaths, as well as a strong desire to convert them to a position originating solely from my American identity. After the opening question, we proceeded to have the liveliest discussion we had thus far in that semester. The conversation linked some of the profound questions of justice, virtue, and identity we had been discussing on a philosophical level. The experience provided me with a powerful reminder of how one’s identity influences one’s thoughts and emotions when teaching about a profound historical event. It also reminded me how our non-teaching identities can enhance or interfere with important teaching opportunities.
The Controversial Conflict
In this book we focus on this key controversy regarding the practice of teaching. The core point that we address is the basic truth that teachers are not solely teachers. They may also be spouses, parents, Democrats or Republicans, Jews or Muslims, environmentalists, feminists, or members of a particular country, ethnic or racial group, or sexual identity to name some examples.
All these identities orient us morally and metaphysically. As Charles Taylor observes, “[T]o know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what is not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”1 When a person becomes a mother or father, for example, she or he immediately inherits the moral tradition within our culture about what it means to be a good mother or father. The person may reject this tradition, but it still exists.
Furthermore, when we try to be good or excellent in any of our identities, such as being a good teacher, a good mother, a good citizen, a good environmentalist, or a good Christian, these identities and the moral traditions associated with them may come into conflict. In this respect, although our identities orient us morally within particular traditions of thought and practice, they also can cause moral problems. After all, we each have multiple identities. Many of these identities connect the individual to moral traditions linked to historical narratives and metaphysical metanarratives, from which the teacher may derive particular moral ends, virtues, rules, and practices.2 Thus, teachers interested in pursuing the good life in every dimension of their lives must not only try to figure out what it means to be a good teacher; they must also contemplate what it means to be “good” in each of these identities (e.g., being a good spouse, parent, woman, Muslim, Democrat), then prioritize their identities when moral conflicts occur.
One of the most important life questions concerns how we prioritize, mesh, and draw boundaries among our different identities. The answer to this question lies in how we organize and mix the normative ideals associated with these identities and their associated moral traditions. There may be plenty of overlap among being a good teacher, a good feminist, and a good Muslim, but these identities may also produce conflicts. Consider how the female teacher with these three identities decides what to wear to class. Each of the three identities may provide her with particular ways of thinking about or expressing her response to this decision (“dress professionally” [teacher identity], “dress modestly” [Muslim identity], and “dress to express yourself and your voice” [feminist identity]).
We do not necessarily think teachers are unique in this regard. Individuals in any other employment or social role may seek congruence and consistency among their various roles. Still, there is something unique about being a teacher that conjoins and creates an unusual confluence of these elements. Teachers are not just performing tasks, as a dentist does; rather, their identities inform how they think about their teaching outcomes, the subject matter they present to students, their views of the students themselves, and the pedagogical choices they make. Moreover, young people will look to them as models (or examples of what to follow or not to follow) of how to be excellent not only in a particular field of study (e.g., biology, the visual arts, English literature), but also in other areas of life (e.g., marriage, citizenship, friendship). They likely do not look at their dentists, doctors, or bankers the same way.
One of the areas in which there is a wide degree of disagreement for teachers concerns the answers to the following key question: How can or should one’s other identities outside of being a teacher, along with their associated narratives, virtues, practices, and so forth, inform one’s teaching?
If one thinks that these additional identities and their moral standards can and should influence one’s teaching, other questions immediately arise: When and how should these various identities be combined? Should other identities sometimes supersede one’s identity as a teacher? If so, when? When should we maintain sharp boundaries between identities?
A common principle used to guide teacher conduct in the classroom, academic freedom, fails to help us answer these questions. Consider the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) “1915 Declaration of Principles” regarding this matter:
It is scarcely open to question that freedom of utterance is as important to the teacher as it is to the investigator. No man [or woman] can be a successful teacher unless he [or she] enjoys the respect of his [or her] students, and their confidence in his [or her] intellectual integrity. It is clear, however, that this confidence will be impaired if there is suspicion on the part of the student that the teacher is not expressing himself fully or frankly, or that college and university teachers, in general, are a repressed and intimidated class who dare not speak with that candor and courage which youth always demands in those whom it is to esteem. The average student is a discerning observer who soon takes the measure of his [or her] instructor. It is not only the character of the instruction but also the character of the instructor that counts; and if the student has reason to believe that the instructor is not true to himself [or herself], the virtue of the instruction as an educative force is incalculably diminished. There must be in the mind of the teacher no mental reservation. He [or she] must give the student the best of what he [or she] has and what he [or she] is.3
Although this description of enacted academic freedom suggests that the good teacher must be fully true to himself or herself, it does not answer the question of how to do that well. It also does not answer the question of how to adjudicate different identities that make up the self. What if offering the best of themselves means imparting general life wisdom that is shaped by their identities as Muslims, feminists, environmentalists, or atheists? What if it involves seeking to convert students to these identities? Alternatively,
what if “giving the student the best of what [we] have and what [we are]” as faculty members means using these identities as the primary lens for teaching critical thinking? Should a Democrat then organize an English composition class around learning to analyze Fox News—a classroom experience one student described to us? Alternatively, as another student shared regarding a former professor, should a Republican spend significant periods of class time in a soil conservation class criticizing the environmental policies of a more left-leaning, Democratic administration?
Some basic ethical advice has been offered by a few past scholars. Consider Stephen Cahn’s summary advice to professors in his book about the ethics of teaching: “[A] faculty member ought to guide students through a field of study, not seek to be their psychiatrist, friend, or lover.”4 Despite the clear boundary presented in this statement, the lines demarcating when one enters into these roles are not exactly clear. Moreover, others might restrict or expand these roles depending on the faculty member’s situation or environment. For example, the AAUP “Statement on Professional Ethics” claims that “professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors.”5 While both Cahn and the AAUP agree that the professor should be an intellectual guide, it is not at all clear that they agree about his or her role as “counselor.” Similarly, the claim that a teacher should not be a student’s friend is also a contentious matter. Although most faculty members would likely agree that friendship with a student could result in the corruption or undermining of their responsibilities to students within their specific teaching roles, it is not clear that these roles must or even should be exclusive.
This book does not claim to address all the difficult matters that arise from the dilemma of how our various identities interact with the identity of being a teacher. Instead, we focus primarily on the relationship between two particular identities—being a Christian and being a teacher—and answer the following questions: (1) How does being a Christian change one’s teaching? and (2) How should being a Christian change one’s teaching? While addressing the latter question, we also deal with the following related questions: What forms of expression or integration are appropriate in different university contexts? By what or by whose standards do we judge?
We think the answers to the first, empirical question are best discovered by interpretive research about how Christian professors actually claim to incorporate their Christian identity into their teaching practices. Since the answer to this question will vary by situation, the first context in which we
explore answers to this question is the Christian college or university. We choose this focus because Christian teachers in a Christian context have the most freedom to explore the answer to this question in depth. These institutions also provide their faculty members with a great deal of incentive to engage in these types of conversations. In particular, we examine the answers from professors at a set of Christian institutions that claim to give primary attention to the integration of faith and learning. Once we understand the range of ways these Christian professors answer this question, we can then better explore the implications of these findings for our second, normative question in both the Christian context and the pluralistic university. It is especially in the latter context that one encounters the most polarized arguments regarding the answer to our question of whether one’s Christian identity should influence one’s teaching. Consequently, we think it is important to gain some understanding of the current conversation regarding identity-informed teaching in this context.
Ordering Our Identities in the Pluralistic University: The Two Sides of the Argument
Two types of arguments represent the various answers to the normative question at the heart of this book. First, although Stanley Fish does not address this matter specifically in Save the World on Your Own Time, his general argument clearly answers the question in two ways. If professors are teaching within faith-based contexts, Fish sees no problem with the integration of their religious identities into their teaching practices.6 In contrast, for a pluralistic university context he sets forth a position that requires teachers to prioritize only one identity: the professional professorial identity their institutions have hired them to fulfill.
We can identify ends associated with any identity that help us evaluate what it means to achieve excellence in that specific role. Fish argues that when teaching at a pluralistic university, professors have two ends: “(1) Introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before; and (2) Equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so.”7 When administrators evaluate the job of a teacher, according to Fish they should do so “on the basis of academic
virtue, not virtue in general.”8 Specifically, teachers should be evaluated according to the following commonly agreed upon standard that Fish describes: “Teachers should show up for their classes, prepare lesson plans, teach what has been advertised, be current in the literature in the field, promptly correct assignments and papers, hold regular office hours, and give academic (not political or moral) advice.”9 As the words in the parentheses indicate, teachers should not become advocates for political and moral beliefs and values that derive from nonacademic identities. Fish argues, “Neither the university as a collective nor its faculty as individuals should advocate personal, political, moral, or any other kind of views except academic views.”10 According to this stance, integrating one’s other identities and moral commitments into one’s teaching role invites extraneous moral commitments and traditions into the classroom. Fish applies his argument to all teachers, whether they are feminist, Muslim, environmentalist, or libertarian faculty members.
Fish recognizes that teachers inherit or adopt various identities over the course of their lives, although it should be noted that he characterizes these as “formative beliefs” and not identities. He insists that while these beliefs are important, we do know how to adapt ourselves to certain conventions that allow us to operate solely within one set of identities, beliefs, and behaviors. To this end, he notes, “We understand, for example, that proper behavior at the opera differs from proper behavior at a ball game, and we understand too that proper behavior at the family dinner table differs from proper behavior at a corporate lunch. . . . [W]e are perfectly capable of acting in accordance with the norms that belong to our present sphere of activity, even if our ‘take’ on those norms is inflected somewhat by norms we affirm elsewhere.”11 Fish goes on to point out that we also learn how to refrain from expressing religious or political opinions in certain contexts, and those who do not learn these things are often the object of ridicule and satire. Most important, Fish claims that professors are being “unprofessional”12 when they act in this manner.
The key behavioral distinction that Fish makes between professional activity and moralizing is “academicizing” and “recommending.” Recommending a particular point of view, Fish claims, “is what you do when you are a parent, or political activist, or an op-ed columnist.”13
Academicizing is what professors do. Faculty members take a topic and “detach it from the context of its real-world urgency, where there is a vote to be taken or an agenda to be embraced, and insert it into a context of
academic urgency, where there is an account to be offered or an analysis to be performed.”14 One can see how the importance of particular identities functions in Fish’s argument. Possessing certain identities, such as that of parent or political activist, allows a person to engage in broad forms of moral argumentation or persuasion, since different overarching ends are pursued. Fish insists that professors must limit themselves to a particular type of activity that largely excludes this broad form of moral advocacy. His argument hinges on the important claim that the activities associated with these additional identities often pose a threat to the ultimate goals of teaching that must guide professors in a pluralistic university context.
For Stanley Fish, boundaries between identities and their associated practices are vitally important. In fact, Fish goes so far as to insist that the other identity roles that a faculty member inhabits can have little influence on teaching. He claims that “teaching is a job. . . . [W]hat it requires is not a superior sensibility or a purity of heart and intention—excellent teachers can be absolutely terrible human beings, and exemplary human beings can be terrible teachers—but mastery of a craft.”15 We agree with Fish that teaching is a craft that requires the same type of work to master as other crafts. Our concern, however, is whether other aspects of one’s identity and the moral traditions associated with these identities matter.
It is helpful to compare Fish’s view to a very different argument from Parker Palmer, a scholar who claims: “[G]ood teaching comes from good people.”16 In The Courage to Teach, Palmer makes this assertion because he ultimately thinks that the key to good teaching has less to do with the “tips, tricks, and techniques” of the teaching craft and more to do with the connections between being a teacher and our broader human identities.17 He sets forth this view in his central thesis: “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique: good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”18 This outlook differs substantially from conventional education that “strives not to locate the self in the world, but to get it out of the way.”19
Palmer wants to emphasize the importance of connecting one’s whole self—not just one’s professional self—to one’s subject and one’s students. In this vein, Palmer unpacks what he means a bit more:
[I]n every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood—and am willing
to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning. . . . Bad teachers distance themselves from the subject they are teaching—and in the process from their students. Good teachers join self and subject and students to the fabric of life.20
Palmer’s definitions of “selfhood” and “identity” relate to the other parts of our humanity that go beyond an individual’s professional identity. In fact, Palmer defines identity broadly as “an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in the ministry of self: my genetic makeup, the nature of the man and woman who gave me life, the culture in which I was raised, people who have sustained me and people who have done any harm, the good and ill I’ve done to others, and to myself, the experience of love and suffering—and much, much more.”21
This broad definition includes all the other parts of ourselves and our environment that encompass the various aspects of our identity. In other words, Palmer’s understanding of identity includes our experiences as sons and daughters, members of particular social groups, and much more than Stanley Fish’s more-limited focus on the sole professional role that teachers fulfill.
Palmer continues by describing Alan, his ideal model of what it means to be a good teacher. One of the things that makes Alan a good teacher is the way he connects his teaching to what Palmer calls the “sense of craft.”22 Palmer recalls: “Alan taught from an undivided self—an integral state of being central to good teaching. . . . In the undivided self, every major thread of one’s life experiences is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connections on which good teaching depends.”23
While Fish insists on drawing boundaries between one’s other identities and associated moral traditions and fears their corrupting influence, Palmer advocates doing the exact opposite. He maintains that good teachers know how to connect themselves and their various identities to the subject and their students. Indeed, Palmer spends little time talking about the proper boundaries teachers should draw with their students (e.g., “do not be a lover, counselor or friend”; “do not bring in outside moral traditions”) and devotes much more time to providing insight into how to connect with both a subject and students. For Palmer, knowing is a relational task. Therefore, good teachers must establish intimate, loving
relationships with both their subjects and students, since the “origins [sic] of knowledge is love.”24 Where and how we should place appropriate boundaries around this intimacy is not as much a concern for Parker Palmer as it is for Stanley Fish.
The Focus of This Book
Overall, we find ourselves agreeing and disagreeing with both Fish and Palmer. We think the power and popularity of each of their arguments stem from their simplicity. Yet we also think that this austerity is ultimately their weakness. The relationship between our various identities or parts of ourselves and the practice of teaching is much more complicated than these works suggest.
Consider our opening story. When I (Perry) restrained the emotions I felt due to my American identity in the classroom, why did I do it? Did I simply feel the call to be a dispassionate, objective teacher? I knew the weaknesses and ultimate futility of that approach and rejected much of what it entailed. Yet I still held back, not simply from a desire for selfprotection or due to my academic socialization but because of my sense that underneath this vision still lay a valid desire to promote student learning and enact justice in the classroom. Perhaps most beginning Christian teachers should focus on the various moral admonitions that Fish and Cahn provide and not fret as much about how to integrate their Christian identity into their teaching. As Fish argues, simply doing their jobs would keep beginning faculty members very busy and even likely help them be good, and possibly even great, teachers.
If this argument is true for professors who are “just starting out,” then why should we talk about the other, more holistic dimension that Parker raises? We also agree with Palmer that integrating one’s identity is the key to becoming a great teacher. Consider again the opening story. I (Perry) held back integrating one identity (American) for reasons related to another identity (Christian). This kind of moral reasoning is not uncommon among Christian teachers.
Here the crucial point is that we contend that Christian professors must undertake the endeavor to connect and merge identities thoughtfully, ethically, and for Christians, “Christianly.” A great deal of sloppy thinking
exists around this topic that often reduces the options to simplistic dichotomies: discipleship or indoctrination versus true teaching. William Perry has long noted that simple dichotomies are what we should expect of early undergrads; however, we should not expect such things from professors who are supposed to be expert teachers or from the universities.25 Yet consider the experience of Catholic literature professor Chris Anderson, who teaches in a pluralistic university setting. He observed, “The university either ignores my faith or sees it as a potential problem.”26 He notes:
When I first read Palmer urging teachers and students to live “divided no more,” to act with “integrity,” no longer disguising their real identity and commitments, I said, “yes, of course,” in a general way. But for a number of reasons “congruence” like this didn’t seem to apply to me as a Catholic Christian in a contemporary university. In my case, congruence seemed more dangerous and problematic than for a feminist, or an environmentalist or a person of color. 27
As this quote reveals, Anderson experienced the tension between Palmer’s admonition to teach from one’s whole self and Fish’s guidance to draw boundaries. Not surprisingly, many educators believe that particularly when it comes to religion, we need to make sure these teachers draw strong boundaries between their identities. What makes Fish’s argument somewhat refreshing is that he thinks that all teachers—the feminist, environmentalist, and Christian alike—need to think about drawing clear boundaries. Still, we want to suggest that the relationship between our teaching identity and any additional identities in a pluralistic setting requires both the courage to find congruence and boundary drawing between these roles. As can be readily seen, this requires a complex approach.
We believe that the basis for this approach involves recognizing three claims. First, we maintain that our identities consciously and unconsciously influence our teaching. As professors develop, they should become conscious of how their identities influence their teaching. After all, part of being a critical thinker is learning how to order the priority we place on our specific identities in particular situations. The first part of this book uses empirical examples from Christian faculty members at institutions associated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and examples from the growing literature on this
topic to help us understand the multiple and complex ways this applies in a Christian context.
Second, the role that those identities should play in our teaching depends on the identity of the institution. We believe that maximally advantageous and proper integration will look different in different environments, Christian and pluralistic alike. Navigating different institutional terrains requires understanding both the unique forms of integration and the important boundary markers required at each institutional type.
Third, what we need is a clear ethical understanding of how this integration (or lack thereof) should happen. Unfortunately, professional standards simply do not provide enough guidance or persuasive power to assist faculty members in these matters. Moreover, many people believe the moral traditions associated with their other identities should inspire and inform their teaching practices. Thus, one question that we explore and answer concerns the way teachers can and should go about integrating the moral traditions associated with their other identities with a more general ethical tradition of teaching.
We wrote this book with two audiences in mind. First, we wrote this for Christian teachers who want to learn from Christian faculty members who draw upon their Christian faith to animate their learning. We hope that this will inspire this group of readers to think more deeply about what this practice may mean in denominational, generally Christian, or more pluralistic higher education environments. Second, we wrote this book for those who are doubtful that Christianity can or even should influence teaching, particularly in a pluralistic context. We want these readers to understand the complexity of identity intersection in this particular case.
In this respect, we envision this book as a companion volume to George Marsden’s influential work, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. In that book, Marsden made the case that the pluralistic academy should welcome and perhaps even encourage scholarship from the perspective of particular religious traditions. Interestingly, a professor named Bruce Kuklick had a Stanley-Fish-like concern about Marsden’s proposed accommodation: “It is hard to believe that Marsden actually means what he says. . . . Does he think that at his university, Notre Dame, they teach a Roman Catholic chemistry? . . . Would Calvin College actually devote itself to a Presbyterian anthropology or worry that Episcopal psychology should get a hearing? Should historians of the Reformation be primarily identified as Protestant, French or female?”28 In contrast to Kuklick’s
position, Marsden held that an individual’s cultural, social, and religious situated-ness fundamentally shapes how he or she interprets historical events (e.g., the Protestant Reformation,) and how he or she understands certain phenomena (e.g., human nature). To this end, Marsden noted, “In fact, conservative Presbyterians and other Reformed Christians, such as those at Calvin College, do have a view of human nature (and hence of anthropology in both its classic and modern senses) that distinguishes their outlook from the more optimistic views of many other Christians and secularists.”29 Marsden’s vision for Christian scholarship and our vision for Christian teaching in this book certainly have much in common. Yet our argument differs from Marsden’s in that it focuses on a different aspect of the professor’s work: that of Christian teaching, as opposed to the scholarship that subsumes Marsden’s focus.30 Overall, we explore a slightly different set of questions: How does being a Roman Catholic influence how one teaches chemistry? and How does being a Presbyterian influence how one teaches anthropology? In other words, our focus in this book is on the ways professors’ Christian identity influences how they conceptualize and enact teaching
Surprisingly, even though most Christian colleges and universities are primarily teaching institutions, and faith-based institutions spend a considerable amount of time and energy promoting the integration of faith and learning, much of the writing about faith animating learning is focused on Christian scholarship. As David Smith and James K. A. Smith, the authors of Teaching and Christian Practices, remarked. “It seems remarkably difficult for Christian scholars to focus on the classroom for very long.”31 They also pointed out that in the whole area of scholarship devoted to faith and learning, “it seems that ‘learning’ is most often meant [as] primarily the kind of learning that makes faculty learned, rather than learning understood as the pedagogical experiences of students.”32 Even the broader subject of spirituality and teaching has received little attention. Elizabeth J. Tisdell has claimed, “With a few exceptions, only minimal consideration has been given to how spirituality can inform teaching.”33 Only in the past decade have additional works about this subject trickled out, and these works have largely drawn upon the individual experiences of specific teachers.34
This book helps expand this literature and the argument that faith does make a difference in terms of how faculty teach, and it provides concrete examples of how they do so. Regarding this latter point, another distinctive
feature of this book is that, unlike the few works addressing the Christian teacher and teaching, it relies on extensive empirical research from thousands of Christian professors. We draw upon the data from a broad national survey to unpack specific examples of Christian teaching from a wide range of disciplines.
Of course we must first answer a foundational question: What do we mean by the words teacher and teaching? A teacher is someone who engages in teaching. We define teaching as involving all the background thinking and practical work related to conducting a class in a traditional educational setting. Thus, our focus includes but is not limited to particular classroom strategies and practices. We also address how teachers perceive their students’ identities, understand their own motivations, formulate and create a syllabus, choose the curriculum, grade, interact with students outside of class, interact with the institutional expectations they encounter, and other compelling aspects of a faculty member’s teaching responsibilities. As this definition reveals, this book takes a view of teaching that is broader than other volumes addressing Christian teaching that focus primarily on pedagogy or classroom practices.35
The Roadmap of the Book
In chapter 1 we begin by outlining the origins of the tension that is purported to exist between being a teacher and a Christian, or more explicitly, we explore the moral tradition of teaching and the Christian moral tradition. The idea that teachers should somehow not integrate their religious identity is a rather recent development in the life of the university. It is helpful to know the historical origins behind this view and the reasons for its emergence. Furthermore, as represented by Palmer, the current counterargument for reintegrating one’s identity into his or her teaching role draws upon older ideals, but it also differs in important ways. The first chapter explores both the similarities and differences between the older arguments and newer arguments for integrating one’s whole identity with one’s teaching.
Chapters 2 through 4 explore the question of what difference being a Christian might make for being a teacher. Although many scholars have previously explored this question from theoretical perspectives or from personal experiences, most discussions about the difference Christianity
