can be expanded to include questions like, “What was your initial impression?”; “What was your process for working through the dilemma?”; “Did your ideas change during the encounter?”; and “What resources (prior experiences or knowledge, modelling by instructor or peers, relationship) helped you work through the experience?”
We notice that these are questions of reflection; indeed, the reflection and resilience are related. If we consider reflection to be a flexible, responsive action-in-practice, this concept meets another part of Waters’s and Sroufe’s articulation of competence. They continue, writing, “Competence . . . is identified with the ability to mobilize and coordinate these resources in such a way that opportunities are created and the potentials or resources in the environment are realized; again, for a good developmental outcome.”13 This idea of “coordination” reminds us of metaphors used to describe artists or jazz musicians. In addition, coordination itself is a practice. That is, students can identify the components of coordination (identifying resources, applying ideas, evaluating their success, reflecting on the outcome), practice them, and share their practice with others.
Coordination is also a positive attribute (in the sense that it is a skill one possesses, unlike precursor ideas of resiliency that sought to describe how a person should have been failing to thrive, given the conditions surrounding them) in addition to being a practice. In “IQ and Ego-Resiliency: Conceptual and Empirical Connections and Separateness,” Jack Block and Adam M. Kremen note both that competence is a practice and that it is also rooted in outward engagement with others. First, Block and Kremen write, “Within a single life, too, it will be observed that at times a person is much more resourceful and adaptively effective than at other times.”14 With this in mind, we move from the idea of “an invulnerable person” whose resilience allows her to overcome all manner of obstacles to the sense that all of us are more or less resourceful and adaptive at different points. This is good news for those of us who would seek to develop resilience as a capacity in education. Similarly, we find another part of the capacity that can be taught in Block and Kreman’s connection between resilience and engagement. They write, “ego-resilience is expected to predispose individuals not only to an absence of susceptibility to anxiety but also to a positive engagement with the world, as manifested by positive affect and openness to experience.”15 And here again is a practice; learners can practice a posture of openness to experience. This also can be deliberately included in direct instruction and modelling in inter-religious classes and settings. Below, we shall explore more deeply how “positive engagement with the world” supports a kind of resilience that might support deeper and longer-lasting student engagement.
Longer-lasting engagement with the materials, settings, and encounters of inter-religious education is necessary because inter-religious learning requires movement, over time, through several ways of being; this theory of development is described both formally by inter-religious scholar educators and by voices in our participant interviews. For example, imagine the time involved in practicing and becoming more masterful at the kinds of learning Judith Berling describes, writing, “Learning in a diverse world requires not merely mastering some set of information but also learning to understand and negotiate areas of human difference, envisioning new ways of being and new possibilities.”16 To learn how interfaith education actually happened—and to identify best practices—I interviewed ten practitioners in higher education settings across the United States. I asked them to reflect upon the qualities they saw in themselves and their students, and to describe interfaith learning at its best. While at least one interview participant noted that, at some level, her role does require her to give students enough new information—particularly about new traditions or religions—mastering mere information takes some time. Learning to understand difference can be for many of us a life-long practice, and becoming visionary in the way one regards conflict and possibilities may rarely be possible in academic time parcels.
In fact, each one of these categories of learning can be broken apart into smaller tasks or realizations that inter-religious educators try to facilitate. F. is a Jewish professor of religion in both a rabbinical school and a large public university; he also serves on several large inter-religious non-profits and facilitates Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim adult educational events. F. describes the kind of beginning reflective work that students and participants often encounter earlier in their learning processes. He began by asserting that initial introductory knowledge about other traditions should lead to more substantial developments. When asked about the outcomes of one of his classes, he began by stating,
A student is able to—there are a couple of different levels I think—the student is able to be literate in some of the concepts, practices, and language and vocabulary of the other religious traditions (and we are talking only about three and that is, right? We are talking about Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.) So people, everyone who leaves the class has to know, because I ask them on a quiz, on a midterm or a final what—they have to know the words “Surah” and “Hadith” and “Ayat” and what this “Quran” actually means.
What does “Islam” mean? And I don’t—these are just real basics, but they have to know that, same thing about “Torah,” “Talmud,” stuff like that. It is a little bit less problematic in the Christian world because we live in such a Christianized culture, that kind of vocabulary and assumption is there.
So there is that—another outcome is a, I think, is a deeper respect for a scripture and [the] religious sensibilities of another religious, at least two other religious communities with the expectation of the hope that transfers beyond . . . creates a kind of attitudinal development.17
After a pause, F. moved to describing a kind of “learning to negotiate human difference” continuing,
And flexibility in thinking that is really important, we spend a lot of time on reading, what is the reading process, when we read things, not just words on a page but when we read people, when we read people’s clothing, when we read architecture, how are we actually processing the information that we are getting, how much are we looking objectively of the material and to what extent are we inserting our own history into our processing, all of that is really, we are very content about that, we are very, what is the word for it?18
F. was encouraged with a question prompting, “But it’s deliberate,” and F. affirmed, “Deliberate, we are deliberate.”19 When asked about challenges to students making that move from learning content to learning practice, he answered,
I think the overwhelming one is getting beyond the—, and [then to] acknowledge stereotypes, I think that is the issue because it creates, I think, real barriers from the very beginning that people aren’t really aware of, it’s a kind of preconceived notion, prejudices, pre-judgments that we have that we are really unaware of . . . They are not intentional—that color our ability to see the phenomenon that we are looking at in a way that is, I don’t want to use the word “positive” but in a way that is more real, right.
Or a way that that phenomenon is associated with something, a phenomenon that is associated with, let’s say religion or culture—where the observer sees it in the way the presenter would like it to be seen or sees it himself or herself.20
By identifying the ability of a learner to see from her co-learner’s point of view, F. echoes here classic foreparents of inter-religious dialogue, including Raimon Pannikar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Leonard Swidler; interfaith theologian Judith Berling also captures this interpretive process when she declares,
Unraveling, naming, and describing the threads of the learning process offer an interpretation of that process. The five threads are 1) encountering difference or entering another world; 2) one’s initial response . . . ;21 3) conversation and dialogue on several levels; 4) living out what has been learned; and 5) internalizing the process.22
Again, we see that what can be phrased succinctly can take years of practice and engagement. For those who see inter-religious dialogue as personally
