Boyung Lee, Ph.D. Pacific School of Religion & Graduate Theological Union blee@psr.edu November 5, 2016 When Critical Pedagogy and Engaged Spirituality Meet: Generating and Sustaining Hope for Social Change Abstract Hope as hopping in expectation involves both external and internal actions of those who hope for a better world. Changing hopeless conditions can generate hope, but staying hopeful in hopeless situations requires more than external changes. It calls for a pedagogy that nurtures both spiritual strength and social change. This paper explores a pedagogy of hope by intersecting critical pedagogy, philosophy and praxis of education that seeks deployment of emancipatory knowledge, and engaged spirituality that nurtures people in their deepest sense to enable them to engage in social justice actions. I. Introduction How one can stay in anti-oppression work while one is being discriminated against due to one’s race, religion, sex, economic status, gender identity, and other forms of oppression? How one can sustain hope for oneself and generate it for others at the same time? These are the questions that many of my students and I have wrestled together in my Spiritual Formation for Leadership class and the Changemaker Fellowship Program, a year-long tuition free program for social change agents that I direct at my own institution. Particularly the changemaker fellows, who come from various NGOs, healthcare services, legal communities, higher education, hightech industries, and other social justice sectors and plan to go back to their work with hopefully deepened spiritual and theological foundations for their work, challenge traditional seminary students in the class how they as spiritual leaders will not only generate hope but also sustain hope in many hopeless situations. These questions and challenges from my fellows when juxtaposed with grim statistics that 35-40% of ministers leave the ministry within the first five years due to burn-out and the feeling of hopelessness (Helopoulos 2015, 201) command religious education scholars and practioners to be more explicit and intentional about the formational and transformational dimension of our work and the discipline. Sustaining hope when life and the world seem hopeless requires spiritual depth and strength of those who engage in generating hope for others. In other words, a pedagogy that generates and sustains hope invites religious educators to think deeply about spiritual formation as a core nature of our discipline and practice. This paper explores a pedagogy of hope that nurtures both spiritual strength and social change actions by intersecting critical pedagogy and engaged spirituality. Specifically, using my own teaching context/class as a case in which we try to foster spiritually rooted leadership for social change, I will present the contents and the format of the class based on engaged spirituality framed in critical pedagogy, and my learnings from teaching this class that may offer insights for other contexts. II.
Engaged Spirituality for Generating and Sustaining Hope
A Teaching Context for Engaged Spirituality Every fall I teach a class called Spiritual Formation for Leadership, a required class for entering students in M.Div., CMF (Changemaker Fellowship), CSSC (Certificate in Spiritual and Social Change) and MAST (MA in Social Transformation) programs at Pacific School of
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