Abstract/Description:
Abstract: Studies have shown a correlation between religious ideologies and racist beliefs. Less is known about how people are bringing their religious ideologies to make sense of and participate in discussions about racism and other systems of oppression. In this paper, we analyze the discourse used a small set of White prospective and practicing mathematics teachers in response to a question about how their religious beliefs influenced their perspectives on race. This analysis reveals that current White discursive frameworks may not reveal important components of discourse used by Christians discussing race, racial differences, and racism. Therefore, we turn to Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective on language and discourse to make sense of the participant data. We explore the religious teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints focusing on how the meaning of “we are all children of God” is developed through church curricula, the scriptures used by its members, and the teachings of the Church’s leadership. In other words, we unfold the possible dialogic relationships among contexts, speakers, and words associated with derivations of the phrase “we are all children of God” in The Church and its members. We use this unfolding to show how the ventriloquation of “we are all children of God” operated in contexts about racism to illuminate messiness in prospective and practicing teachers’ use of their religious ideologies in making sense of racism.
Presenters:
Kate Johnson and Emma Holdaway, Brigham Young University and Amy Saunders Ross, Montana State University - Billings