Faculty Research Fellowship Program: Application for Summer, 2007 Catholic Social Learning: How to Educate the Faith That Does Justice A Book in Progress Roger Bergman, Ph.D. Director, Justice & Peace Studies Program Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology Abstract/Overview In the summer of 2006, with the support of a vFellowship from Cardoner at Creighton, I made a substantial start on a book to be titled Catholic Social Learning: How to Educate the Faith That Does Justice. The inspiration behind this project flows from three wellsprings: (1) my twenty-five years (since 1981) as a practitioner of justice education in various faith-related settings, (2) my awareness (for almost as long) that the tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST) itself has almost nothing to say about Catholic social pedagogy, and (3) my appreciation for and participation in (since 1993, when I became the founding director of the Justice & Peace Studies Program at Creighton) the commitment to justice in Jesuit higher education. I believe I have learned something from my own experience, that CST has much to learn about pedagogy, and that Ignatian pedagogy is a sure foundation for this enterprise. The table of contents with tentative titles: Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Chapter 4: Personal Encounter: The Only Way Ignatian Pedagogy and the Faith That Does Justice Teaching Justice after Alasdair MacIntyre Immersion, Empathy, and Perspective Transformation: Semestre Dominicano 1998 Chapter 5: Justice at Home: Service-Learning Chapter 6: Truth, Justice, and the Christian University Chapter 7: A Catholic Pedagogy for Justice: Models and Recommendations As of October, 2006, the first three chapters have been completed, if not finished. I plan to complete the fourth chapter during the current academic year. Three colleagues are reviewing the chapters as they are completed. With the support of a Faculty Research Fellowship, I will finish the entire book in the summer of 2007, which means researching and writing Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Chapter 3 has been accepted, pending minor revisions, for publication in the peer-reviewed Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. I have begun a promising conversation with a major academically respectable Catholic publisher, to whom I will present the first three chapters this fall. Bergman 2 I. and II. Statement and Significance of the Problem and the Project’s Purpose The particular question this book asks is, How do we educate (“lead out”) the faith that does justice? What pedagogy is needed to make Catholic social teaching (CST) no longer the church’s alleged “best-kept secret”? It certainly is not a secret by virtue of being kept. The U.S. bishops’ pastoral letters of the 1980s were front-page news even in the secular press and there are dozens of introductory books and plentiful pastoral resources on CST. It is rather because CST has not been received or perceived as valuable and important. It is instructive that of the approximately 600 pages of the “canon” of CST (O’Brien & Shannon, 1992), only one and a half pages are devoted to “Educating to Justice.” If what is lacking is definitely not the intellectual content that would nourish righteousness or commitment to justice or political holiness, how do we stimulate the “hunger and thirst for righteousness” named by Jesus as one of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:6)? How do we encourage the deeply rooted and creative crisis of Christian conscience which seems the only morally and spiritually sane response to the contradictions and conflicts of contemporary global reality? Although many justice educators in Catholic institutions practice at least elements of an effective pedagogy, such as will be developed in this book, no practitioner, researcher, or theorist, as far as I am aware, has adequately articulated the structure of this pedagogy in light of the pertinent psychological, philosophical, and theological literature. Books on justice education tend to duplicate what I describe as the “faulty default pedagogy” of CST itself: the official promulgation of ethical principles, the fitful filtering down of these principals to the faithful, and the occasional exhortation to implement them in one’s own life. For example, a 2006 book by long-time justice educator and Villanova University professor Suzanne C. Toton, Justice Education: From Service to Solidarity, treats justice pedagogy almost entirely as an intellectual process whose efficacy depends on better ideas about social structures, theology, the church, the university, and activism. It does not address the basic question, why would anyone care about justice in the first place? I answer that question in Chapter 1: “Personal Encounter: The Only Way.” Next, I propose that the “whole-person” pedagogy of Ignatian tradition offers a substantial glimpse of an effective vehicle of Catholic social learning (CSL). That is elaborated in Chapter 2. I further propose that CSL must be intentionally counter-cultural not only in its ethical vision, as offered in CST, but also in its pedagogy itself. I use the writings of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to make this argument in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 describes and analyzes, in light of Lawrence Hoffman’s seminal work, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (2000), but also in light of Ignatian spirituality (Brackley, 2004), one model of justice pedagogy, Creighton’s own Semestre Domicano, for which I was accompanying faculty in the spring of 1998. Chapters 1-4 will be finished by the end of the current school year. Chapter 5 will develop an understanding of the contribution service-learning (SL) can make to justice education as developed in the first three chapters, especially since the study abroad or intensive immersion model developed in Chapter 4 will not be possible for all students. I have taught two SL courses myself (in several iterations), served on Bergman 3 several university committees on SL, and under the Hewlett Grant in 2001-2002, directed a semester-long faculty development seminar on SL and justice, in four iterations, for twenty professors. Chapter 6 will place the educational vision of the foregoing five chapters in the context of historical and contemporary understandings of the Catholic and Jesuit university, from Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century to Pope John Paul II and Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 7 will provide a concluding and integrating discussion of the vocational vision and pedagogical strategies developed in the preceding six chapters, with special attention to practical models and recommendations. III. Summary of Pertinent Literature The doctoral research I completed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Ph.D. awarded May, 2005) was in the psychology and philosophy of moral development as related to moral education, and is thus relevant to this project. The dissertation was titled “Educating the Moral Self: From Aristotle to Augusto Blasi.” The “lay abstract” gives some idea of the literature reviewed: In the fields of psychology, philosophy, and education, increasing attention has been paid by researchers and theorists to the concepts of “the moral self” and “moral identity.” Although the more familiar terms “character” and “conscience” have not disappeared from academic discourse, these novel terms provide a fresh start for thinking about the personal dimensions of morality. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a theoretical perspective on the moral self and to explore its ramifications for educational practice. Principal sources for this study include psychologist Augusto Blasi and the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offers an analysis of the challenge Aristotelian virtue ethics presents in our current context. Philosophers John Dewey and Nel Noddings, respectively, offer modern pragmatist and contemporary feminist perspectives on the formation of the moral self. The moral self may be thought of as all the dimensions of the human person that enable us to live a moral life [the “whole person,” as we would say in Ignatian pedagogy]. Moral identity may be defined as how I think about myself as a moral agent and what kind of person I am committed to being [the vocation question]. My theory of the moral self addresses these themes: how moral identity develops from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood, especially among exemplary persons; the relation of moral identity to motivation; the role of moral understanding in forming identity; the relationship of choice, will, and identity; the centrality of habit; the integration of affect (emotions, feelings) and cognition (perception, thinking); the relationships between concern for the good, for the self, and for the other; the self as relational and dependent on community and tradition; and the importance of having an idea of the truly moral person as an ideal or goal of human development. Bergman 4 My hope is that a better understanding of the moral self will help us, parents and teachers and citizens, to be better educators of our children, students, and of one another, and that this might contribute to a more just and peaceful world. The bibliography is fifteen pages long, making it impossible to summarize “the pertinent literature” in this space. However, I can provide some idea of my scholarship by summarizing two of the most pertinent chapters. Three of the chapters have been published in peer-reviewed journals, a fourth has been accepted, pending minor revision, and a fifth is presently under review. 1. “Why Be Moral? A Conceptual Model from Developmental Psychology,” Human Development, 45/2 (2002), 104-125. This paper is concerned with the relationships among moral reasoning, moral motivation, moral action, and moral identity. It explores how major figures in developmental psychology have understood these relationships, with attention to schematic models or conceptual maps. After treating Piaget, Kohlberg, Rest, Colby and Damon, and Blasi, I argue that Blasi provides the crucial elements of a critical synthesis, a conceptual model of how developmental psychology might best answer the question, Why be moral? I conclude by suggesting that this psychological model of moral functioning challenges conventional notions of what constitutes our greatest moral challenge. When this paper was first presented at the Jean Piaget Society in Montreal in June, 2000, the president of the Society described it publicly as “the best review of the literature we have available.” It is now frequently cited in the literature. Upon the invitation of two of the leading scholars in the field of moral psychology, this article was subsequently extended and published as the second chapter, “Identity as Motivation: Toward a Theory of the Moral Self,” in Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez (2004). 2. “Teaching Justice After MacIntyre: Toward a Catholic Philosophy of Moral Education” has been accepted, pending minor revisions, by Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice,” the premier academic journal in the field. This is a revision of chapter 4 of the dissertation, and is the only portion of the dissertation that I plan to use in the book project. An abstract follows: How is the commitment to social justice sustained over a lifetime? This question would seem to be a matter of character, and that calls attention to the Aristotelian tradition in ethics [“Aristotle for Contemporary Moral Educators,” a revision and extension of a dissertation chapter, has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal; it makes use of much contemporary scholarship on Aristotle’s ethics]. No one to my knowledge provides as much insight into the challenge of the contemporary appropriation of this tradition as does Alasdair MacIntyre. Although a moral philosopher rather than a moral educator, MacIntyre’s critique of the failure of the Enlightenment project to construct a rationallybased universal ethic, coupled with his critique of the modern nation-state of liberal capitalism as antithetical to the practice of virtue for the common good, provides a Bergman challenging if controversial context in which moral educators might think about justice pedagogy today. Upon invitation, I have submitted a proposal based on this paper to a conference on MacIntyre to be held at London Metropolitan University in the summer of 2007. IV. Research questions/hypotheses when appropriate Addressed in previous sections. V. Design and Methods (as appropriate to a project in the humanities) A¹. Major sources to be used for chapter 5, “Justice at Home: Service-Learning” Astin, Alexander, et al. How Service Affects Students. Los Angeles: UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, 2000. Eyler, Janet, and Giles, Dwight E., Jr. Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Jacoby, Barbara, and Associates. Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 1994-present. Rhoads, Robert. Community Service and Higher Learning: Explorations of the Caring Self. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Weigert, Kathleen Maas, and Crews, Robin (Eds.), Teaching for Justice: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Peace Studies. Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 1999. Youniss, James, and Yates, Miranda. Community Service and Social Responsibility In Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. A². Major sources to be used for chapter 6, “Truth, Justice, and the Catholic University” Beirne, Charles J. Jesuit Education and Social Change in El Salvador. New York: Garland, 1996. Buckley, Michael. The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998. Duminuco, Vincent J. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Ganss, George. Saint Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956. Hassett, John, and Lacey, Hugh (Eds.) Towards a Society That Serves Its People: The Intellectual contributions of El Salvador’s Murdered Jesuits. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998 Langan, John P. (Ed.). Catholic Universities in Church and Society: A Dialogue on Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1993. Modras, Ronald. Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the 21st Century. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004. 5 Bergman 6 O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Sobrino, Jon; Ellacuria, Ignacio, et al. Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. D. Schedule for completing the project 1) As previously noted, chapters 1-3 have been completed, subject to revision to be finished by the end of the spring semester, 2007; chapter 4 has been presented in an early version at the 2006 conference of the Association for Moral Education at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and will be revised and extended by the end of the spring semester, 2007. Chapters 5-7 will be completed during the summer of 2007. 2) The entire manuscript will be revised and ready for submission by the end of the calendar year 2007. 3) I do not foresee the need for further support beyond the summer of 2007. As noted, I have begun a conversation with a major Catholic publisher and am hopeful that the book will be published in 2008. VI. References (and see above, V. Design and Methods) Brackley, Dean, S.J. The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola. New York: Crossroad, 2004. Hoffman, Lawrence. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lapsley, Daniel, & Narvaez, Darcia, (Eds.) Moral Development, Self, and Identity. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004. O’Brien, David, & Shannon, Thomas. (Eds.) Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Toton, Suzanne C. Justice Education: From Service to Solidarity. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006. Appendix: Biographical sketch of principal investigator I emphasize here, in addition to what has been noted previously, my role at Creighton as a leader in justice education. I began teaching theological ethics as an adjunct in 1989 at the invitation of Fr. Richard Hauser, S.J., who was then chair of the Theology Department, and taught two or three courses a semester until 1993, when I was appointed the founding director of the Justice & Peace Studies Program by Dean Michael Proterra, S.J., in the College of Arts & Sciences. I had proposed such a program to the Dean, and he had asked me to design the curriculum. Sixty-six students have since graduated as JPS co-majors or as Justice & Society majors (the JAS major is offered in cooperation with the Department of Bergman 7 Sociology & Anthropology, which explains my recent appointment to a tenure-track position in that department, although I am neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist). In 1999, when three Jesuit university presidents issued a call for a national conversation on “the commitment to justice in Jesuit higher education” on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Society’s 32nd General Congregation in 1975, which committed the Society to “the service of faith and the promotion of justice” in all its ministries, then Academic Vice President Charles Dougherty appointed me to lead Creighton’s participation in this national project. (In personal conversation, he referred to me as the “go-to-guy” on justice education at Creighton.) With the assistance of a university-wide committee, I co-authored and edited “Education for Justice at Creighton University Since 1975: A Self-Study,” a 41-page report that was presented at the Midwest regional conference at University of Detroit-Mercy. I then led the Creighton delegation to the national conference at Santa Clara University in 2000, where Fr. Kolvenbach gave his famous address on “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education.” I was also a Creighton delegate to subsequent conferences at Loyola University Chicago and John Carroll University in Cleveland. I have presented at all these conferences on topics of the book project. Shortly after my appointment as director of the JPS Program, I began doctoral work at UNL in education. I began attending and presenting at the conferences of the Association for Moral Education in Minneapolis, Glasgow, Vancouver, Chicago, Krakow, Dana Point (CA), Cambridge (MA), and Fribourg (Switzerland). I am presently in the final year of a three-year term on the AME Executive Board, for which I am chairing two committees. I have also presented on moral psychology at conferences of the Jean Piaget Society in Montreal and Vancouver and at the International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at Cambridge University in England. In addition to my seventeen years at Creighton, I have six years of justice education experience in non-academic settings prior to and immediately after my two years at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, where I earned a Masters of Theological Studies, emphasizing social ethics. That is, I have a total of twenty-five years of practical, professional experience in social justice education in varied faith-based settings. My doctoral work in moral psychology and philosophy of education has given me the necessary theoretical background to do the serious analysis of justice pedagogy already underway in this book project. My deep commitment to Jesuit higher education and Ignatian pedagogy (I am currently a member of the Jesuit Seminar) provides the necessary grounding to ensure that the book will indeed be of value to colleagues at other Jesuit and Catholic universities. In the summer of 2005, with the support of Cardoner at Creighton, I made a six-day retreat at Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House in Sedalia, Colorado, with the express purpose of discerning my relationship to this book project, given some lingering doubts about it. I came away from that retreat with a full head of steam. Bergman 8 One of my outstanding JPS graduates recently visited campus to participate in the postgrad volunteer fair as the new director of a volunteer program. She also sat in on one my classes. Here’s what she wrote in a card subsequent to that visit: “Being in your class reminded me of just how important education for justice is, so as I struggle to find my way in this work, I know I’ll be calling on your for help. I’m glad to say that I know THE EXPERT on educating for the faith that does justice. I mean, you will be the one who ‘wrote the book.”! I will do my best to live up to her generous words. Although Catholic Social Learning will not be my last research and writing project, it is indeed seem a vocational watershed for me. I have been teaching the faith that does justice for twenty-five years. The book is my attempt to articulate what the teacher has learned.