Lecturing at a TheologyCollege:
Masculine Morality and Feminine Forbearance
Allyson Jule
Senior Lecturer in Education
University of Glamorgan, Wales
DRAFT – Presented to BERA 2004 – British Educational Research, UMIST – Manchester
15th – 18th September 2004
Session #7 – 17 September, 17.00 – 18.30
Introduction
The feminist social critic, Camille Paglia (1992) discusses the power of American-style evangelical[1] Christianity in her essay, ‘The joy of Presbyterian sex,’ saying there are ‘Protestant looks, Protestant manners, Protestant values’ central in American society today, and that being a Protestant evangelical Christian is about being in and of a specific ‘tribe’ with a specific, strict code of behavior, behavior which includes particular language habits and patterns (p. 29). She goes on to suggest that all societies, including America, continue to need organized religions precisely because of the ‘austere, enduring legacy’ of them (p. 37); in fact, she sees it as a mistake for today’s American-style evangelical Christian ‘tribe’ to attempt to be anything other than strict because the demands of belonging and the rules of exclusion and inclusion are precisely why people, and women in particular, continue to choose it. That is, Paglia, a radical liberal feminist, believes the very austerity of religion is part of what drives many women to current expressions of evangelical Christianity. Because of the continual and rising popularity of evangelical Christianity in American public life, this paper explores one specific setting within it: life at an evangelical theology college.
Laurie Goodstein (2004) of The New York Times reports that religion has edged its way into the forefront of American life in the last twenty years in particular. Though American history has been woven with religious issues from its inception, the interest in religion and national concerns since the 1980s has risen to now hold at 53% of Americans citing religion as the key to how they vote (up from 22% in 1984—an all-time high at that point). It is now ‘a normal thing’ to discuss the role of religion in American society (Goodstein, p. 2). Because of Canada’s proximity to the States and the vast influence America has in the world in general, such sociological influences also impact on modern Canadian society (Stackhouse, 2002).
It is within this highly religiously-charged American era that I went looking for intersections of religion, gender, and language habits, specifically within the evangelical Christian community and women’s use of linguistic space as indicative of their role and place in a Christian community. My specific concern here is lecturing—the daily lecturing as happens in university courses. I locate my research in a Canadian evangelical theological graduate college because it allows for a discussion of religious identity and lived practice to bear on women’s silence in this setting and as part of currently experienced ‘Protestant manners, Protestant values’.
The Study
One of the most observable influences of feminism on North American Christianity is the increase of women in theological education (Mutch, 2003). However, their presence in co-educational lectures, such as the context examined here, reveals power discrepancies, even amidst these modern egalitarian times. Ways of being female include quietness as specifically demonstrative of morality. Historically, and until relatively recently, theology schools were the domain of men so that women in theological education have an unusual set of conditions if compared to those in the university experience in general where women’s place and equality are perhaps more solidly assumed.
Little more than a century ago women were not allowed into most college classrooms, let alone theology. When protesting in 1910 on the admission of women to the University of Michigan, the college president said, “We shall have a community of de-feminated women and de-masculated men. When we attempt to disturb God’s order, we produce monstrosities” (in Frazier and Sadker, 1973, p. 144). Gender and religion are connected, and much of ‘God’s order’ is seen in the preservation of traditional masculine/feminine roles. Any variation of ‘God’s order’ is viewed as a ‘monstrosity’. As such, taking sociolinguist scholarship into a theology college appeared to me an important place to explore how religion and issues of religious identity influence gendered language practices today.
Women enter theological training en route to ordination’ that is, en route to becoming ministers or pastors. However, many of today’s evangelicals see ordination as something still reserved for men, with women limited to supportive roles (Grenz and Kjesbo, 1995). The debates within evangelical Christianity concerning the ordination of women are vigorous and dynamic (Grenz and Kjesbo, 1995, are among a host of academics writing on the subject). Yet, in spite of these continuing debates, it is interesting to find more and more women pursuing theological graduate degrees. Regardless of the range of views on women’s roles at home or in the church, women today enroll and complete theological education and go on to careers in evangelical churches (Grenz and Kjesbo, 1995; Busse, 1998; Mutch, 2003; Hancock, 2003). There is also growing feminist thought within modern evangelicalism in spite of strong lobby groups on the religious right, such as Focus on the Family or Concerned Women for America, which promote and push ‘traditional values’ as central to being Christian (Coontz, 2003).
For one year, I worked on a research project at this post-graduate college. My project was to focus on the views of feminism among devout Christians living in the area. The results of the interview study are discussed elsewhere (Jule, 2004c, 2004d). However, as one trained in ethnographic methods and feminist linguistics, the year took on a slightly different focus for me, one that worked alongside the interview study. As a visiting scholar, I was able to sit in on any class of interest, either as a regular attendee or as a drop-in/on-off visitor. As such, what emerged was an ethnographic experience, one where I became a participant observer. What emerged quickly for me as a curiosity was the most used style of teaching at the theology college: lecturing.
Lecturing as Teaching Method
Lecturing is a major part of university teaching. My need to appraise the method emerged from my general interest in silence in classrooms and in silence as something uniquely and most often experienced by those born female. My previous work focused on a primary classroom and explored which speech acts teachers use to propel boys to speak up more than the girls during formal-classroom language lessons (2004a and 2004b). I identify this amount of talk as ‘use of linguistic space’ and highlight certain classroom teaching methods as legitimating participation of boys while serving to maintain silence among the girls.
Much research concerned with gender and its role in affecting classroom experience points to males as significant classroom participants and females as less so. Research, such as Walkerdine’s (1990), Bailey’s (1993), Corson’s (1993), Thornborrow’s (2002), and Sunderland’s (2004), settles on teachers’ lack of awareness of this linguistic space and of how teachers themselves overtalk in the education process and, in general, give more attention to their male students (Mahony, 1985; Sadker and Sadker, 1990; Jule, 2004). Girls in particular are seen as often ‘passive, background observers to boys’ active learning’ (Spender and Sarah, 1980, p. 27). Other feminist sociolinguistic work suggests that the linguistic space used by male learners signifies and creates important social power and legitimacy (Holmes, 1998; Baxter, 1999, 2004). That is, who speaks tells us something about who matters inside the classroom. That men at this college participate more in question-answer time while their female classmates largely serve in the role of audience members suggests larger expectations of the community around them. That is, men contribute; women support the contributions.
Teachers and college professors talk more to their male students, beginning in the first years of schooling and on into post-graduate work. In general, women are rarely called upon to contribute and often find it difficult to interact with their professors. Sadker and Sadker (1990) suggested that female college students are the invisible members of the class. They suggest that one of the ways this invisibility is reinforced is through male domination of speech and through continual female silence. Kramarae and Treichter (1990) suggested that the reason women experience a ‘chilly climate’ in most academic settings (the college/university setting in particular) is male control of the linguistic space. Women in many college classrooms are marginalized from discourse and their silent position demonstrates and reinforces their lack of significance. That women in theology may be further silenced because of belonging to a particular religious identity tells us something else, something more, about the relationship of religion and gender and the influence of religious views on gender performance—the manners and the values.
Lecturing is a common teaching method at the college level. However, lecturing is often used in non-university settings as well, such as public lectures held in neighbourhood libraries or art galleries. In any circumstance, lecturing is a formal method of delivering knowledge: an expert prepares the lecture well in advance, allowing for considerable research, study, and rumination as well as carefully thought–through ideas and organization. People attend such public lectures for a sense of shared experience—one shared with the expert-lecturer as well as one shared with others in the audience. Lectures in such places are called ‘celebrative occasions’ by Goffman (1981). Frank (1995) articulates his amazement that people will disrupt their daily lives to come and hear such a lecture because they have ‘self-consciously defined themselves as having emotional or practical needs; they arrive already prepared to be affected in certain ways’ (p. 28).
However, university lectures are part of people’s daily schedules; both the lecturer and the students are usually present for obligatory reasons. The lectures are meant to disseminate knowledge for the set purposes of fulfilling the requirements of a given course. Depending on the nature of the course material, whether the course is mandatory or optional, and the size of the student group, lectures may well constitute up to thirty hours of a given course in one semester (up to three hours per week for ten weeks of an undergraduate mandatory course—in most institutions). Such lectures occur with such frequency that much emotional involvement is limited and not often experienced as a ‘celebrative occasion’ but as a necessary practice in the university experience.
Roland Barthes (1971) considered the university lecture in terms of politics, belonging, and a location to rehearse performance discourse. While the lecturer is lecturing, the students are often silently attending to the ideas and often writing notes on specific new vocabulary or content pertaining to the lesson material. The ideas expressed are in the hands of the lecturer. Much freedom is allowed concerning his or her politics, his or her power/ego issues, and his or her ability at discursive performance. As such, the lecturer has enormous control over the mood and the dynamics of the room, as well as the significance placed on the material discussed. Lecturing as teaching method works by conveying information through summary and through elaboration—both at the discretion of the lecturer. The lecture is a gesture which presents the effect of universal truth. In these ways, it remains a ‘celebrative occasion’. During question-answer time, students have opportunity to publicly interact with the professor, briefly taking on the role of performer themselves by signaling investment, interest, and involvement.
Goffman’s (1981) ideas on the lecture differentiated between ‘aloud reading’, which is often perceived as more scholarly, and ‘fresh talk’, which is often perceived as more informal though not necessarily more engaging. Barthes (1977), Goffman (1981) and Frank (1995) all recognized the lecture as a multi-layered performance. Of course, students reading the lecture material would be faster, more time efficient than attending class and listening to a fully performed lecture. (Perhaps listening to a cassette of the lecture while driving or cleaning the house would also be more time efficient.) Nevertheless, the university lecture persists as a marker of scholastic participation—both attending lectures and performing lectures are parts of the academic experience. Spoken delivery is also taken as candid and dynamic, more ‘real’ than listening to a lecture on tape or reading the notes of a lecture silently at home. Reading A Room of One’s Own is one type of experience; sitting in Girton College’s lecture hall in 1928 and listening and watching Virginia Woolf present it would be quite another. A valuable academic lecturer is certainly one to be encountered if at all possible. As a result, the pedagogy of the lecture is ‘intensely personal’, even if it is personal in precisely impersonal, academic ways (Frank, 1995, p. 30).
Lecturing as Power
A lecture presents a text which somehow appears to be independent of the lecturer but instead reveals the value of the lecturer’s personal presence; it is a mark of the lecturer’s authority. What fascinates me is the way the participants themselves also play the role of performers as well as the role of audience members. This performance is briefly seen during the question-answer time of the lecture—a time students pose questions to the lecturer. Lacan (1968) and his work on ‘the other’ as the one observed with ‘the subject’ as the observer influence my understanding of power relations in classrooms. His ideas propel these questions: Who is observing? Who is being observed? Which action signals and evokes power? Feminism offers various responses to these questions but it may be fair to say, in light of the vast feminist scholarship concerning pedagogy, that power largely lies in the teacher’s hands. The teacher observes and the teacher speaks; both signal power. Holding the floor is the teacher’s prerogative and is something which demonstrates the room’s point of reference; that is, power is revealed in and created through the language practices of the lecturer. The lecturer is the subject or, for Lacan, the lecturer is the ‘presumed-to-know’. The lecturer is perceived as knowing and the audience members are the ones seeking the knowledge; they are the observed. What is said in lectures implicitly and explicitly hints at the personal: the lecturer’s views, the lecturer’s opinions on a host of issues, the lecturer’s personal life and choices, including religious and moral ones.
Lecturers in a theology college also reveal the particular context. I here suggest that lecturing, followed by question-answer periods, as is the pattern in this college, alienate the female students at this college because the feminine/masculine tendencies in classroom settings are validated and condoned by feminine/masculine patterns of behavior within evangelical Christianity itself. With the steady increase of female theology students, it seems worthwhile to reflect on the continued high prevalence of lecturing as common teaching method in a theology college and position it as a masculinist pedagogical tool, one that rehearses female students in feminine patterns of silence. At the same time, lecturing rehearses male theology students in masculine tendencies to dominate linguistic space. That is, the use of lectures in this theology college works to reinforce hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995; Swain, 2003); a masculinity which insists on feminine subservience and ‘reverent awe’ (Gallop, 1995). Because of the transference of information/knowledge that lecturing presupposes, the silence of female students during question-answer time (a time they could speak) affirms the possibility that women behave quietly as a way of performing a specific and understood role of feminine devout behavior: women are quiet in such a setting because their religion values their silence.
Morality as Gendered
In 1982, Carol Gilligan wrote In a different voice which explored various ideas of gendered language patterns: a woman’s place in society, gendered patterns in dealing with crisis and intimacy, as well as gendered patterns of expressing morality. To Gilligan, morality is closely if not entirely connected with one’s sense of obligation and views of personal sacrifice. She goes on to suggest that masculine morality is concerned with the public world of social influence, while feminine morality is concerned with the private and personal world. As a result, the moral judgments and expressions of women tend to differ from those of men. In light of Gilligan’s ideas, it may be reasonable to suggest that students of theology invite the suggestion that masculine behavior is particularly connected to public displays of influence with feminine behavior not concerning itself with public displays of participation, such as use of linguistic space. Women are rehearsed into silence for moral reasons; their silence demonstrates to others and to themselves their devoutness to God: their silence is their way of being good. Out of respect for others and for God, women are quiet. (I think my suggestion is also supported by the extensive work on silence by Jaworski, 1993.)
The current increased presence of women, the rise in feminist theology, and the growth of women’s ordination have significantly changed the nature of theological education. Recent research into the lives of evangelical women who chose theological education indicates that the lived experiences of these women are often painful and confusing ones (Gallagher, 2003; Ingersoll, 2003; and Mutch, 2003). With various other religious experiences possible, some women remain in their evangelical subculture because they also experience support and solace in their church involvement. Women who study theology say they are often dismissed as feminist for pursuing theology and are marginalized as a result. Others feel marginalized and limited and nervous about their possible or future contributions; they anticipate problems though have no experience yet (Mutch, 2003). Canadian women in theological education largely report that being a woman in ministry requires ‘commitment of conviction’ which is carried out within the ‘context of challenge’ (Busse, 1998). Most cite loneliness and stress as part of their career choice and part of their theological education experiences. Nevertheless, women continue to enroll and to graduate and to go on to seek ordination in various evangelical denominations.