Teaching for social impact: integrating generational goals and concerns into religious education
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Teaching for social impact: integrating generational goals and concerns into religious education Kevin Sandberg1
© Australian Catholic University 2020
Abstract Claims of everyone a changemaker and calls for social and environmental responsibility resonate with today’s young adults. Less religious than preceding generations, they tend instead to draw their values and purpose from consumer, cultural, and employment affinities. They also rely on their connectivity, digital or otherwise, for the ability to make an impact in the direction of social change they deem necessary. Yet they are less connected than previous generations to some of the most fundamental means that support change, especially faith, family, and institutional leadership. To have a hand in shaping their generational desire for change, religious educators can design curricula to achieve not just traditional student learning outcomes, but social impact outcomes, too. Toward this end, the article proposes that religious educators approach students of religious education as engaged practitioners of change on a contemporaneous basis as well as in anticipation of their future agency. Doing so would instantiate teaching for social impact as a particular form of the praxis already prevalent in religious education. The article explores this potential through a survey of the cause–concerns and desires of young adults in Australia and the United States; a conceptual analysis of the engaged practice that is grounded in studium, or the zeal for coherence; and a description of what it might look like for religious education to integrate social impact outcomes into curricular considerations on the basis of such studium. Keywords Young adults · Engaged practice · Studium · Social impact · Praxis
1 Introduction The Vatican hosted its first hackathon in March 2018. Though it sounds like computer security was being breached, VHacks, as it was known, was instead a social innovation pitch competition. Its goal was to recruit young adults to forge new tools of social inclusion and interfaith dialogue for the care of migrants and refugees—issues and a population close to the Pope’s heart. One of the 120 university students to participate was Lucy Obus, an undergraduate studying communications, culture, and technology at Georgetown * Kevin Sandberg [email protected] 1
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
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University in Washington, D.C. She described her experience as “a cool and impactful opportunity,” noting “I learn best from experience and get frustrated doing a lot of talking (about stuff) but not doing (the stuff)” (Georgetown). How can religious education address pedagogical and curricular preferences like those of Obus and her generation? Could it reshape aspects of itself so that, like VHacks, it might more completely harness the enthusiasm of a generation for a new ecology of change, one that manifests social as well as interior transformation? Religious educators are accustomed to turning to the concept of prax
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