This document discusses using womanist biblical scholarship and digital storytelling as pedagogical exercises to create brave spaces for learning. It outlines the risks of using womanist thought instrumentally or in ways that close down meaning-making. The document examines how womanist scholars embody thinking through and by means of others in their work. Digital storytelling is discussed as a participatory practice that could invite transformative learning by empowering readers and challenging assumptions. The goal is to move toward witnessing and engagement with others through community discourse, though the context presents challenges to that.

1. Creating brave spaces at the intersection of
womanist biblical scholarship
and the pedagogy of digital storytelling
REA Annual Meeting
Reston, VA / 2 November 2018

2. outline
• situatedness
• a frame for seeing
• womanist thought
• digital storytelling as a pedagogical exercise

3. luther seminary, upper midwest, preparing pastors, predominately white school in a very diverse urban
context, reflecting on teaching is both an intimate and a vulnerable process, questions, evocative not
prescriptive

4. teaching / learning
• one goal I have is to help our
students learn how to be active
learners
• that goal demands a recognition that
pastoral formation be always “in
process”
• it also requires helping our students
to experience epistemic humility as
sacred and generative
• engaging womanist thought and
digital storytelling together holds
enormous potential for engaging this
process — but also clear risks

5. the risks include
• using womanist thought, and
the epistemological
commitments embedded in it,
as an instrument towards my
own teaching ends rather than
as an invitation to learning
• provoking students in ways that
close down their meaning-
making, rather than opening it
up (creating a “premature
ultimate”)
• reinforcing hegemonic
dynamics

6. • for me, Womanist scholars have invited me to consider how I “think through
others” — in both the negative way of “using” others, and the more
constructive path toward understanding how embedded I remain in
hegemonic discourses
• so what can it mean to “think through others”?
• in what ways might students be invited to do so?
• what are the promises as well as the contradictions?
• what paths emerge?
thinking through others

7. R. Shweder’s Thinking Through Cultures:
Expeditions in Cultural Psychology

8. thinking by means of
the other
“... is to recognize the other as a
specialist or expert in some
aspect of human experience,
whose reflective consciousness
and systems of representations
and discourse can be used to
reveal hidden dimensions of our
selves”

9. getting the other
straight
“... in the sense of providing a
systematic account of the
internal logic of the intentional
world constructed by the other”

10. deconstructing and
going beyond the
other
“... thinking one’s way out of or
beyond the other.... It is a third
sense, for it properly comes later,
after we have already
appreciated what the intentional
world of the other powerfully
reveals and illuminates, from its
special point of view.... an act of
criticism and liberation, as well as
of discovery”

11. witnessing in the
context of
engagement with the
other
“... representing the other goes
hand in hand with a process of
portraying one’s own self as part
of the process of representing the
other, thereby encouraging an
open-ended, self-reflexive
dialogic turn of mind”

12. how do Womanist scholars embody this?

13. thinking by means of
the other
“womanist biblical hermeneutics
prioritizes the communal and
particular lived experiences of
women of color as a point of
departure, a focal point, and an
overarching interpretative lens for
critical analysis of the
bible” (Smith, 2015, 8).

14. getting the other
straight
K. D. Russaw, for instance,
interrogates the “wise
individuals” found in literature of
the ancient Near East to offer a
different perspective on the
woman of Genesis 3 (2015,
222-234).

15. deconstructing and
going beyond the
other
“Part of rereading androcentric texts can entail
choosing not to read them at all. Breaking the
hold these texts have involves breaking the
cycle of uncritically retelling and passing down
from one generation to the next violent,
androcentric, culturally chauvinistic texts and
resisting where necessary the moral vision of
such texts… the bible can and has been used to
promote a vision of the world that silences and
further overlooks the oppressed. Its multiple
ideological layers and the multiple roles it has
played in both silencing and liberating
generations of readers forces readers to read
the bible with different eyes, from multiple
positions, and with a multi-layered
approach.” (Weems, 51)

16. witnessing in the
context of
engagement with the
other
K. Cannon’s “dance of redemption,” for
instance (which was built upon Beverly
Harrison’s earlier work), describes a circle
of learning that moves through
conscientization, emancipatory
historiography, theological resources, norm
clarification, strategic options, annunciation
and celebration, and then a return through
reflection and strategic action to
conscientization (Cannon, 1995, 130 and
Townes 2006, 1171).

17. conscientization
emancipatory historiography
theological resources
norm clarification
strategic options
annunciation / celebration
re-reflection and strategic action
K. Cannon

18. • the first of these ways remains
very centered in one space
• the second can get trapped in
an admiring moment that
creates no room for
transformative learning
• the third begins to open up
room for transformation
• but it is really the fourth which
is my goal for my students
note that

19. so how might digital storytelling function
pedagogically to invite such learning?

20. remember Weem’s words…

21. “As a womanist biblical interpreter and teacher my role is to
respect readers’ needs to view the bible as a collection of
sacred stories while at the same time challenging them to
understand their role as agents in the sacred act of preserving
stories and passing them down to the next generation. As an
agent in the task of preserving and transmitting stories from
one generation of women to the next, readers must be
empowered (1) to become a part of a story’s audience and to
feel free to raise questions of the author about his or her
assumptions about the world and people’s relationship to one
another; (2) to use one’s imagination to retell the story in ways it
was never meant to be told in order to get at hidden truths and
meanings embedded in stories; and (3) to take responsibility as
a reader/interpreter/storyteller for the impact the stories we tell
has on the lives of other women, men, and children who hear
them and try to live up to them.” (Weems, 53)

22. digital storytelling is a “workshop-based
participatory media practice focused on self-
representation” (Vivienne, 2016, 1).

23. some examples…
• Frank Rogers’ work
• Digital Storytelling as Faith
Formation
• photo voice work
• photography as a social practice
• photography as a spiritual practice
• visio divina

24. wishes...
• I yearn to move to this fourth place in
Shweder’s schema: “witnessing in the
context of engagement with others”
• but that place requires the kind of
deep engagement in community, as
well as epistemic humility, that is not
structurally or perhaps even
theologically fostered in my context
• I seek a community of discourse in
pedagogy to engage this
• womanist scholars have been
pointing the way for some time, and
have profoundly challenge the white
normatively of the academy

25. mhess@religioused.org
meh.religioused.org
storyingfaith.org