Taking Up Faith

Abstract

Greater attention to methods and methodologies when studying writing in religious contexts is needed to help researchers navigate ethical issues specific to faith communities and religious practices; to improve knowledge regarding the relationships among writing, religion, and faith; and to encourage respect for religious and nonreligious beliefs. To that end, I present findings from a study based on interviews of 14 scholars who have published results from their empirical studies on writing and religion or faith. Specifically, interview data show, first, researchers’ religious positionalities acting as terministic screens and promoting identification with participants, and, second, researchers’ efforts to fairly represent participants’ beliefs and the methods they use to do so. The article also offers a heuristic, based on findings from the interviews, for maintaining a reflective position when conducting research on writing and religious contexts.

Keywords

feminist methodology religion composition researcher positionality

When Andrea Fishman was an English professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, she received a sabbatical to study reading and writing in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Philadelphia. Prior to applying for sabbatical, Fishman received approval from the community to conduct her research. In fact, community members knew her well, given that she had a child living there. Yet just before she was to begin her research, they changed their minds. Five years earlier, a researcher had pretended to be interested in becoming an observant Jew in order to enter the community and to conduct her research. Fishman said,

These people, who took her in . . . felt so abused and misused and . . . betrayed because she was living in someone’s home under false pretenses. It just left such a terrible taste in the community’s mouth that, even though they knew me, they decided they couldn’t have another researcher in. (interview 8/7/14)

Fishman’s experience indicates distrust on the part of people of faith toward academics’ abilities to understand and fairly represent them and their beliefs. I argue that this distrust also relates specifically to a lack of attention to methodology in research in religious contexts. My goal in this article is to use interviews with scholars who have published empirical research on writing in religious contexts to offer both methodologies and methods specific to studying writing in religious contexts.¹ My interviews with these scholars were guided by the following two research questions: (a) What types of decisions did they make regarding representing participants’ beliefs? (b) How did they reflect on and negotiate the effects of their own background with or attitudes toward religion on their research?

The lack of explicit discussion of methodologies when studying writing in religious contexts is related to religious rhetorics’ marginal status in rhetorical studies (see DePalma & Ringer, 2014, pp. 273-277). Most discussions on the intersections among writing and religious faith have occurred in the past decade. Without much published research, when religious discourses have surfaced in composition classrooms or research situations, they can seem unexpected. For example, in 1998, Amy Goodburn conducted ethnographic/teacher research in three college writing classes that were based on critical pedagogy. Goodburn said,

There wasn’t any literature on religious identity in the public college classroom. . . . So religious identity wasn’t on my radar initially. . . . As I spent the semester in my own and others’ classrooms, though, religious identity surfaced . . . particularly via discussions and writing about the social issues of difference. (interview, 8/24/14)

Goodburn did not set out to conduct research on writing and religious faith, but when immersed in the research, “religious identity surfaced.” This seems to be a fairly common occurrence: Four other researchers I interviewed (Engelson; Moss; Muhammad; Nowacek) also did not intend to focus on religion or faith in their research, and a number of publications have originated from composition instructors’ struggles to make sense of their encounters with religious students in the composition classroom (Anderson, 1991; Downs, 2005; Smart, 2005). When writing about an unexpected “surfacing” of religious identity in the composition classroom, attention to systematic methods and research design is sometimes not the highest priority.² While such writing has resulted in thoughtful insights and greater pedagogical tools, it has also resulted in some reductive portrayals of religious groups and students and on, as Heather Thomson-Bunn (2014) argues, rhetorical studies’ reliance on the experiences of one or two religious students to frame discussions regarding religious rhetorics and composition.

I believe that concern with research methodologies indicates a concern with building relationships and with understanding others and their literacy practices. Moreover, expanded methodological approaches can result in broader perspectives of religious rhetorics (see Thomson-Bunn, 2014) and in complex and relational portraits of those who use them (see Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015). Ultimately, explicit discussions of methodologies for studying religious discourses are important for generating additional knowledge about the relationships among writing, faith, and religion and for navigating ethical issues specific to studying writing and religious faith.

My Methods and Methodology: A Multiple Approach

First, I offer some discussions of my own positionality and methods in conducting this study. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also called the LDS or Mormon church), which I believe is often misunderstood and viewed as monolithic. I therefore have a personal stake in promoting research methodologies that lead to increased understanding of religious literacies and their complexities.

My particular interest in the methodologies used to study writing in religious contexts emerged from my own ethnographic research on the literacy practices of an online LDS community (Pavia, 2009, 2011) and from my corresponding study of feminist research methodologies, which serve as the theoretical background for this research.

Theoretical Background

By feminist research methodologies, I’m referring to feminists’ explorations of key ethical and ideological issues that researchers encounter in multiple situations, regardless of whether their research overtly involves feminism. In doing so, I’m making the same kind of move that Powell and Takayoshi (2012) do in their effort to honor and to build on the research practices of feminist researchers while acknowledging that it’s not possible to understand feminist theories of research practice separated from gender.

I turned to feminist scholars for background theory for my study because their concern with the relationship between ideologies and methodologies in general and with the importance of subjectivity and agency in research in particular fit well with my own questions regarding religious scholars’ negotiation of multiple subject positions and scholars’ efforts to value the agency of religious participants in their studies. Moreover, I share feminist scholars’ goal of more transparent scholarship, particularly in reflecting on lessons learned from dilemmas faced in the research process.

Feminist and postcolonial researchers before them insist on reflexivity, which is the systematic process of being methodologically explicit (Powell & Takayoshi, 2012) and discerning patterns (Kirsch & Royster, 2010, p. 659) by analyzing and reflecting on the research process (Fonow & Cook, 2005, p. 2218).³ Reflexivity should include collaboration with research participants to allow for participants’ own reflections and representations of self and data (Kirsch, 1997; Kirsch & Royster, 2010; Powell & Takayoshi, 2012; Reinhartz, 1992; C. Williams, 1996) and examination of one’s own positionality and motivations in order to increase transparency and accountability (Kirsch, 1999; Mortensen & Kirsch, 1996; Powell & Takayoshi, 2012; Presser, 2005; Takayoshi, Tomlinson, & Casillo, 2012).

During my reading of theories of feminist research methodologies, I generated a list of potential ethical issues involved in any qualitative study, which I summarize in Table 1.

Table 1.

Ethical Issues Discussed in Literature on Feminist Research Methodologies.

1	Issues involving research/participant relationship	1. Researcher positionality: representation of self in the text (Fine, 1996; Kirsch & Royster, 2010; Powell & Takayoshi, 2012; Presser, 2005; Trebilocot, 1991) 2. Power differences (Driscoll & McFarland, 1989; Harding & Norberg, 2005; Kirsch, 1999) 3. Conflicting loyalties (Kirsch, 1999)
2	Issues of representation/interpretation	1. Issues of collaboration with participants (Brueggemann, 1996; Kirsch, 1999) 2. Honoring voices of participants and representing research findings (Fonow & Cook, 2005; Kirsch & Royster, 2010; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000) 3. Need for dialogic and dialectical representations (Kirsch & Royster, 2010)
3	Issues involving the research process	1. Research questions (Takayoshi et al., 2012) 2. Broadening range of participants and sites, including institutional and historical contexts (Kirsch & Royster, 2010) 3. Reflexive examining of conclusions—deferring closure of arguments (Fonow & Cook, 2005; Kirsch & Royster, 2010) 4. End goal of responsible rhetorical action (Fonow & Cook, 2005; Harding & Norberg, 2005)

Given this theoretical background, I developed the following two research questions to guide my inquiry: (a) What types of decisions have researchers made regarding representing participants’ beliefs? (b) How have researchers who have studied writing in religious contexts reflected on and negotiated the effects of their own background with or attitudes toward religion on their research? (I argue that a researcher’s positionality in regard to faith/religion includes affiliation with agnosticism, atheism,⁴ or any organized religion, as well as attitudes toward and beliefs about faith and religion.) I focused on these two questions not only because of their persistence in the literature, but also because they seemed the most applicable to studies of writing in religious contexts: Because faith and religion are so intertwined with identity, representation of participants’ beliefs can be difficult to negotiate, as can the influence of a researcher’s own religious or nonreligious beliefs.

My second research question on researchers’ religious positionalities builds on discussions in special issues of the Journal of Communication and Religion (March 2004) and of Rhetoric and Public Affairs (Winter 2004) that show how scholars’ religious commitments inform multiple aspects of their rhetoric and scholarship, from invention, to integration, to application, to teaching. My study furthers these discussions by looking at scholars’ reflections on their religious or nonreligious positionalities in relation to specific studies they conducted.

Data Collection

To collect data that would address these questions, I searched for articles based on empirical qualitative research on writing and faith in the following major journals in composition studies: College Composition and Communication, College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Written Communication, as well as book-length studies, using the keywords “faith and writing” and “religion and writing.” I chose these key journals in rhetoric and composition because I wanted to find studies that focused primarily on writing and rhetoric within a religious context, rather than studies that foregrounded faith or religion itself. I found 27 studies in my search (see Appendix A). I first read these published studies closely, noting any mention of ethical issues addressed in the literature on feminist research methodologies (see Table 1) and cataloging each individual study for what could be learned about researchers’ religious or nonreligious positionalities and representations of belief systems.

After obtaining institutional review board approval from my university, I then emailed the authors of 25 of these articles and books to request an interview. (I could not find correct contact information for Anderson or Kapitzke or for Juzwik’s coauthor McKenzie.) Fourteen scholars (Amber Engelson, Andrea Fishman, Lauren Fitzgerald, T. J. Geiger, Amy Goodburn, Mary Juzwik, Mark Montesano, Beverly Moss, Gholnescar Muhammad, Rebecca Nowacek, Chaim Noy, Jeff Ringer, Heather Thomson-Bunn, and Bronwyn Williams) agreed to participate in an interview, conducted either via email (four interviews), over the phone (six interviews), or via Skype (four interviews), per their preference. All allowed me to use their names because I believe their reflections carry weight because of their ethos in the field. I am extremely grateful to these participants for their time and their insights.

I asked each participant the same four questions (see Appendix B), plus two or three additional questions specific to their own research. Although I had decided to focus on religious positionality and representation of beliefs due to my reading of feminist research methodologies, I was open to adding to that focus or changing it, had other issues been more pressing to the researchers. Therefore, Question 1 asked about ethical issues in general, whereas Questions 2 and 3 specifically reflected my research questions. Question 4 was meant to develop the heuristic I offer because it elicited discussion of specific methods researchers used or thought they should have used, given the ethical issues they encountered.

Data Analysis

To begin data analysis, I transcribed the interviews with the interview questions framing participant responses and used the interview questions to generate categories and starter codes. For example, Table 2 presents my catalog of starter codes for ethical issues that participants encountered, based on Question 1.

Table 2.

Ethical Issues Mentioned by Participants.

Category	Code	Example
Decisions about representing beliefs of participants	Definition issues	Resisting imposing definitions on participants (Juzwik; Ringer; Thomson-Bunn)
	Struggles with representing specific, individual participantsRepresenting participants’ experiences in general in a socially just way	Portraying participants positively when feeling dislike for their rhetoric (Juzwik)
		Not including info that might embarrass participants (Moss)
		Avoid Othering (Williams)
		Honoring their voices and avoiding overessentializing or stepping beyond own knowledge (Engelson; Fitzgerald; Muhammad; Williams)
		Avoiding overidentifying (Ringer)
Researcher’s positionality	Religious	Dilemmas about inclusion of researcher’s religious or nonreligious background or about researcher’s conflicted relationship to faith (Juzwik; Ringer; Williams)
		Working against overidentification/overstating of religious connection (Ringer)
Relationship with participants	Power/authority issues	Participants’ interpretation of researcher (Engelson)
	Prior relationship	Not wanting to exploit friendship (Fishman)
	Loyalties	The need to be critical yet respectful of institutional participants (Noy)

Philosophy of ethics in general and of how a researcher’s ethics must be culturally specific and medium specific (Noy).

Same ethical issues as found with other studies (not a faith/religion issue) (Montesano; Nowacek; Williams).

Although I had compiled a list of three general potential ethical issues, based on my readings of feminist methodologies (see Table 1), participants discussed only the first two of these potential ethical issues in their responses to Question 1—issues involving researcher/participant relationship and issues of representation/interpretation. Furthermore, while multiple participants mentioned religious positionality, the other coding categories (power/authority issues, prior relationships, loyalties) that I had earlier included with issues involving researcher/participant relationships (see Table 1) were mentioned by only one participant each (see Table 2). I therefore felt justified in my focus on representation of beliefs and on researcher positionality after developing categories and codes based on Question 1. There were two outlying responses to Question 1, as seen in the bottom of Table 2. Two of the three researchers who said that they didn’t experience ethical issues unique to studying writing and faith/religion then went on to discuss issues of religious positionality or representation of participants’ beliefs.⁵

Once my focus on these two issues seemed justified, I expanded the categories and coding in relation to them. I began by cataloging the existence of each as an issue in the published texts based on close readings of the texts and then added data from the interviews. For example, as can be seen in Table 3, for religious positionality, I coded for mention of it and reflection on it in the texts. Interview data not only provided information not found in the texts but, more importantly, allowed researchers to reflect on the significance of religious positionality to their particular study and allowed me to see commonalities and differences in the effects of researchers’ religious positionalities on their research.

Table 3.

Mention of and Reflection on Religious Positionality.

Researcher	Religious positionality	Reflections on religious positionality
Engelson (2014)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
	In interview: Grew up “nominally Christian/Protestant. . . . If pressed, I would currently call myself an agnostic humanist” (6/2/15).	In interview: “I went in with more questions than answers because of my own religious background (or lack thereof), which I think helped me keep an open mind” (6/2/15). This positionality and her ethnographic approach led her to conduct extensive secondary research on Indonesia’s sociohistorical postioning, including its religious heritage.
Fishman (1988)	In text: “urban, white, Jewish, college-educated, middle-class” (p. 3).	In text: none.
	In interview: Born and raised Jewish, “my parents were cultural Jews” (8/7/14).	In interview: Allowed her to identify with participants as she focused on religious similarities. Affected her comfort level with the Amish ways of worship and her perception of normality: “that didn’t strike me as the least bit odd because Orthodox Jews do that too”; “I was used to . . .”; “It made sense to me”; “It was very comfortable to me”; “very familiar to me”; “I didn’t find that the least bit odd” (8/7/14).
Fitzgerald (2005)	In text: “An outsider” at Yeshiva University (p. 141).	In text: none.
	In interview: Christianity, grew up in the Bible Belt, but “my family was not religious” (5/22/15).	In interview: Influenced her reading of “at least one student’s writing as a kind of conversion narrative” (5/22/15).
Geiger (2013)	In text: “a rhetorician and a heterosexual Christian ally in LGBT struggles” (p. 249).	In text: none.
	In interview: “A confessing Christian, . . . a person who is called by Jesus to do work that he called us to do, to be witnesses for love, to be a voice for marginalized and disenfranchised people” (5/5/15).	In interview: “It means that you look at a variety of evidence . . . a diversity of positions . . . and how they interact with each other. . . . It’s not about looking at just one side of the issue” (5/5/15).
Goodburn (1998)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
Goodburn (1998)	In interview: Raised Catholic with a Catholic education informed by Jesuit priests, but hasn’t practiced for over 30 years (8/24/14).	In interview: “A lens” that directed her reading of and responses to students’ work and her initial reading of her student Luke as “Other” (8/24/14).
Juzwik (2015)	In text: “evangelical Christian by heritage,” but has “distanc[ed] herself from evangelicalism for nearly 20 years” and now practices Christianity and attends an Episcopal church.	In text: none.
	In interview: Episcopalian; Evangelical Christian upbringing, “person of faith” (5/19/15).	In interview: Affected her identification with participant: “our stories intertwine” (5/19/15).
Montesano (2005)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
Montesano (2005)	In interview: “I don’t belong to a religious community” (5/14/15).	In interview: none.
Moss (2003)	In text: “who I was—an African-American woman who can normally be found in church on Sunday morning” (p. 2).	In text: “The participants in the study were never far beneath the surface once I came to understand that I am one of them” (p. 14).
	In interview: She was attending one of the churches (8/25/14).	In interview: She was able to conduct her research because of her religious positioning. Also, because she knew people at each site, she felt a responsibility toward them (8/25/14).
Muhammad (2015)	In text: a Muslim woman who is African American (p. 10).	In text: Gave her familiarity with community’s cultural norms (p. 10-11) and practice using writing to make sense of her own religious identity (p. 11).
	In interview: She felt that she was “also representing a woman in Islam” to the participants (6/23/15)	In interview: Resulted in her “gravitating towards the community” and in an open, “transparent” relationship with participants (6/23/15).
Nowacek (2005)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
	In interview: Raised Lutheran, now attends Unitarian universalist church (9/23/14).	In interview: Affects her “feeling that we should be respectful of people’s faiths. That was a lens” (9/23/14).
Noy (2015b)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
	In interview: “I define myself in Israeli terms as secular, which means that terms such as religiosity, faith, spirituality, I don’t see them as relating to me” (6/17/15).“I’m Jewish because, according to Jewish law, if your mother is Jewish, you can’t do anything to avoid that. . . . Also, I’m Jewish because of tradition” (6/17/15).	In interview: “I studied the Florida Holocaust Museum because I felt convenient in sites that related to Jewish culture or even Jewish religion without me being religious. . . . I felt more at home there” (6/17/15).
Ringer (2013)	In text: “given my own evangelical background” (p. 271).	In text: “I could appreciate. . . . I knew firsthand the difficulties associated with trying to make sense of one’s faith in a secular academic setting. I knew, too, how difficult it was . . .” (p. 271).
Ringer (2013)	In interview: Grew up with an Evangelical Christian background (Pentecostal). Episcopalian now (8/7/14).	In interview: He identified with Austin, the student participant. “That was one way I was really able to understand or to appreciate Austin” (8/7/14).
Thomson-Bunn (2014)	In text: none mentioned.	In text: none.
Thomson-Bunn (2014)	In interview: “I am both a Christian and a composition instructor” (5/12/15).	In interview: Source of understanding of participants and of constraint of perspectives. Familiarity and point of connection, “likely bias toward students who have felt discriminated against for their Christian beliefs” (5/12/15).
B. Williams (2005)	In text: raised a Quaker (p. 107).	In text: Resulted in his own resistance to his student’s writing because they saw ultimate religious authority in different places (Quakers = free expression and an “individual seeking the light,” Muslims = the Koran) (p. 107).
B. Williams (2005)	In interview: Quaker, grew up with a Presbyterian mother and a Quaker father, “I’m a pretty secularized person overall” (5/13/15).	In interview: Affected his sense of “how religion manifests itself, the role of texts in religion” (5/13/15).

This cataloging of the researchers’ mentioning of religious positionality and their reflections on its effects then allowed me to code and compare the studies for ways in which religious positionality affected the research in general and in different stages in the research process, as can be seen in Table 4. The results of this coding and my discussion of them are presented in the findings section of this article.

Table 4.

The Effect of Religious Positionality on the Research Process.

Stage of research	Specific reflections on effect of religious positionality
Preliminary research	• Own faith affiliation affected ability to enter the site (Moss)• Affected general assumptions about relationship between faith and intellectual work (Thomson-Bunn; Williams)• Directed attention to the research problem (Nowacek; Ringer)
Data collection	• Led to identification with participants because of similarities between or familiarities with religious or faith background (Fishman; Juzwik; Muhammad; Ringer; Thompson-Bunn)• Mandated respect, open mind, and inclusion of multiple perspectives (Engelson; Geiger; Nowacek)
Data analysis and interpretation	Influenced the understanding of and reading of participants’ writing through directing and deflecting attention (Fitzgerald; Goodburn; Thomson-Bunn)
Presentation of findings	Resulted in discomfort when presenting findings and in difficulties knowing how to talk about own religious positionality (Juzwik; Williams)

To address my research question involving representation of belief systems, I began by cataloging specific word choice and metaphors used in the texts to represent religious rhetorics. However, none of this coding related significantly to the data gathered from interviews. Instead, participants focused on their struggles to fairly represent beliefs through definitions, through portrayals of individuals, and through focusing on understanding (see Table 2). These commonalities emerged as I coded the interview transcripts for mention of issues surrounding representing participants and belief systems and for methods used in relation to those issues. Interview data were therefore much more anecdotal and specific regarding researchers’ actual experiences, rather than my perception of the issue based on the textual data.

For both research questions, then, interview data provided much richer data than those found in the published texts and proved the importance of reflexivity on research methodologies. My cataloging of the published texts told about the existence of the issue, but interview data were crucial to really understanding the methodological dilemmas faced by researchers and the methods that could be used to address those dilemmas.

Because one of my goals was to offer methods for negotiating ethical issues when studying writing in religious contexts, I also analyzed interview data in order to compile methods researchers used or wished they had used in their efforts to represent fairly their research participants and their religious beliefs and to examine the effects of their own religious or nonreligious positionalities. Table 5 summarizes this analysis, which I discuss throughout the article and which I used to develop the heuristic presented at the end of each of the two discussions of findings.

Table 5.

Methods Used to Fairly Represent Research Participants and to Negotiate Effects to Religious Positionality.

Method	Researchers who mentioned method
Using participants’ words as much as possible	Goodburn; Nowacek; Williams
Collaborating with participants	Geiger; Goodburn; Juzwik; Moss; Muhammad; Nowacek; Noy; Thomson-Bunn; Williams
Soliciting interpretation from other researchers	Nowacek; Ringer
Asking how the participants themselves understand and interpret their beliefs	Engelson; Fishman; Moss; Nowacek; Noy
Using secondary sources to move beyond generalizations	Engelson; Fitzgerald; Goodburn

Last, in order to encourage participants to clarify or correct my use of their words and representations of them, I sent copies of this article to participants for confirming consent. This correspondence and feedback was an important part of my own learning and research:⁶ not only did some offer further clarifications and help with the article, but some also expressed feeling vulnerable about the possibility of being judged morally and professionally due to their participation. This possibility has weighed on me as a researcher because my intent is to learn from these scholars rather than criticize them.

In the remainder of this article, I focus on the following two findings: (a) the need for examining the ways in which researchers’ attitudes and beliefs about religion act as terministic screens and (b) the need to examine decisions regarding representations of belief systems and the implications of these decisions.

At the end of the discussion of each of these two findings, I present a heuristic with questions that researchers might ask themselves in each stage of the research process to encourage reflexivity of the principle discussed. As Heidi McKee and James Porter (2009) argue, heuristics are needed to help researchers design studies and manage the complexity of ethical decision making. I recommend researchers write responses to the questions in the heuristic, both at the beginning of research and throughout as part of a self-dialogue, which is what Takayoshi et al. (2012, p. 116) propose.

Although I acknowledge that the research process is both linear and recursive, breaking the process into commonly viewed stages is helpful not only for organizational purposes but also to emphasize that reflexivity regarding these ethical principles should be constant throughout a research project. The questions are meant to encourage deliberation and awareness and are not meant to suggest that research can be objective or neatly organized into simple steps. As Thomson-Bunn (2009) said when reflecting on her study of religious rhetorics, methodology cannot eliminate the effect of personal beliefs on research, but it can restrict them “so that they are merely guides and not dictators” (p. 33-34).

By offering a heuristic, I am not suggesting that research ethics should be universal, a point brought up by Chaim Noy in my interview with him. Noy has conducted ethnographic research on visitors’ writing activities in Jewish heritage museums in the United States as well as at national and commemorative sites in Israel.⁷

Because museum visitors’ understandings of the visitor book space as personal and public differ, depending on the culture, what’s “ethical” for him as a researcher is dependent on the culture and context. Noy explained, “I feel that if we universalize ethics, then it’s being insensitive to the differences of cultures or to the different contexts of research. . . . I think that ethics are universal, but that they’re universal in the way that they’re cultural” (interview, 6/17/15). I hope that using questions in the heuristic rather than directives encourages reflection instead of demanding universality or objectivity.

Findings 1: Researchers’ Religious Positionalities Acting as Terministic Screens

Of the 14 studies I reviewed in my research, only 7 mention the researcher’s religious positionality in the published text and only 4 go beyond mentioning it to reflect on its implications. Despite its absence in the texts, interview data show religious positionality acting as a screen and a catalyst for identification (see Table 4). In the following discussion, I focus on religious positionality, first, acting as a terministic screen (Burke, 1966) and, second, affecting identification with participants (Burke, 1950).⁸ I then discuss methods for addressing religious positionality in research on writing and religious contexts and present the first heuristic.

Religious Positionality as a Terministic Screen and a Point of Identification

As I cataloged and coded interview data, I noticed that some participants reflected on their religious positionality as an element that directed their attention and their interpretations or that deflected initial interpretations, both of which are addressed in scholar Kenneth Burke’s (1966) concept of “terministic screens.” According to Burke, the terminology a person uses simultaneously mirrors reality and deflects reality (p. 45). The particular terminologies researchers use, whether deliberate or not, affect their observations by directing attention toward certain questions, behaviors, and interpretations and away from others (Burke, 1966, p. 46, 49).

Interview data show that religious positionality directed researchers’ attention to religious discourses in general and to specific concerns in interpretation of data and deflected understanding of possibilities for participants’ religious rhetoric. For example, during Rebecca Nowacek’s ethnographic study of writing in interdisciplinary contexts at Villanova University, her experiences growing up as a Lutheran who attended a Catholic school directed her attention to religious issues, despite the fact that she didn’t set out to research issues of faith. As she said, “I think that’s why I noticed it more in this research, that I felt more tuned into some of the students I was writing about because it had become such an unexpectedly powerful issue for me as a student” (interview, 9/23/14). Amy Goodburn’s Catholic upbringing directed her attention to critical pedagogy and also deflected her ability to connect evangelical students’ discourses with academic discourses, specifically with critical pedagogy. Goodburn said that she initially saw her student Luke’s responses as “Other” and that “the lens” of her religious background “informed how I did—and did not—understand Luke’s response to the texts and ideas that we raised in class” (interview, 8/24/14).

Interview data also showed that researchers’ backgrounds with and attitudes toward religious faith can allow for identification (Burke, 1950). Burke’s concept of identification is closely related to his concept of terministic screens because Burke (1966) argues that terms combine things, resulting in identification, or that terms separate things, resulting in disassociation (p. 49). For example, a researcher’s religious background might act as a terministic screen that posits her differences with research participants as a matter of degree rather than a matter of kind (Burke, 1966, p. 50). That researcher is then more likely to identify with participants rather than letting differences lead to disassociation. Identification occurs when two people’s or two parties’ interests are joined, when they are assumed to be joined, or when the two people or parties are persuaded to believe that they are joined (p. 20).

As can be seen in Table 4, five participants described their religious positionality as affecting their identification with their own research participants. One example is Jeff Ringer’s reflections on his case study research on the relationships among evangelical identity and academic writing with student participant “Austin.” Ringer explained that because he grew up as a Pentecostal Christian in Massachusetts, he understood Austin’s feelings of “being embattled.” Ringer said that his own faith has also “morphed” since his freshman year of college. These experiences affected Ringer’s focus on and identification with Austin’s struggle to negotiate his evangelical identity in his college writing class. Importantly, Ringer recognized that his positionality acted as a terministic screen and that his shared religious background carried with it the risk of overidentifying with participants. As he said,

There’s always the tendency . . . if you come from the same background as your participants, to sort of filter their experiences through your own, to not really listen as closely or to come to too-quick conclusions about what they really might be saying. . . . That was a big ethical issue for me. Still is as I’m working with this data, . . . to force myself to be aware of the fact that my perspective is only one of many that exist within evangelical culture. (interview, 8/7/14)

Ringer is therefore engaged in the work that Burke advocates, given the inescapable nature of terministic screens: Burke (1966, p. 47) argues that it’s the job of every rhetorician to uncover the types of observations inherent in his or her terminology.

While it’s easy to see why identification might take place when a researcher shares a religious affiliation with research participants, it can also occur regardless of shared faith backgrounds because, as Burke (1950, p. 22) explains, identification begins from proclaiming unity. Even when two people have different interests, one might identify with the other by assuming or being persuaded that their interests are joined (Burke, 1950, p. 20).

For example, in my interview with Andrea Fishman about her experiences researching Amish home, community, and school literacies, Fishman described multiple similarities she saw between Amish culture and the Jewish culture of her heritage. These included perception by the community of itself as a persecuted minority, gender division in church services, and the use of different languages for church services and prayer. In finding these common concepts, images, and ideas (Burke, 1950), Fishman identified with “Anna,” her Amish friend and research participant. Fishman said, “I saw enormous connections between their community and mine. How that affected me, I don’t really know. It made me comfortable. It made sense to me. I didn’t think it was strange. . . . I felt like I got it” (interview, 8/7/14). Fishman’s identification with Anna might initially have occurred because they were friends before (and after) their researcher/participant relationship, which gave impetus to identification.

Given, as these examples illustrate, the importance of reflecting on religious positionality, why is it missing from half of the published studies I found? Two possibilities emerged from my interview data: First, some researchers do not have a religious positionality. As Mary Juzwik said, “Belief systems are not the de facto epistemological ground for all people” (interview, 5/19/15). For example, both Mark Montesano and Chaim Noy did not claim any religious positionality in regard to their published article. When I asked Montesano how his own attitudes or views about faith affected his research, he said, “I don’t belong to a religious community. My main interest is more of a philosophical view: . . . How can you maintain your own center of faith and yet live with others and be open with others, even if you disagree with them?” (interview, 5/14/15). Chaim Noy related his being Jewish to Jewish law and to tradition, but not to “words like religiosity or spirituality or faith” (interview, 6/17/15).⁹ Noy’s comments illustrate that thinking about and discussing religious positionality itself can involve careful distinctions because religious affiliations and cultural affiliations are often called by the same term, yet a person might claim only the cultural aspects.

A second possibility that emerged from my interview data for the lack of reflection on religious positionality is that discussing religious positionality is not comfortable, in part because there isn’t a precedent for it or a knowledge of how to address it. For example, when Bronwyn Williams wrote his article based on his struggle with his student Mohammad, he grappled with knowing how much to disclose about his Quaker faith. Williams explained, “I’m a pretty secularized person overall. But when I really began to think about it, . . . I thought, I’ve really got to go into that. But . . . that’s an uncomfortable position. You sort of think, how are people going to respond to it?” It’s notable that Williams struggled with this dilemma even though his faith had always merged well with academia, which might not be the case with other researchers. As Williams said, “I do think outing yourself as a Quaker is sort of low risk in the academy. It doesn’t have the cultural baggage that being an evangelical Christian does” (interview, 5/13/15).

Mary Juzwik can attest to the truth of Williams’s comment. She described struggling with discussing her own journey with evangelicalism when writing up her research on the cosmopolitan dialogue of two evangelical men:

A lot of my issues have been about how much to disclose, how much to bring myself and my story into it, . . . how to talk with people from a place of authenticity from really different worlds with respect to religion and faith. . . . I feel like . . . the research community doesn’t have a real clear grasp about how to talk about issues of faith in ways that are open, open-hearted and open-handed. (interview, 5/19/15)

Juzwik’s difficulty with knowing how to talk about issues of faith and the extent to which to implicate herself in her research contradicted my belief that the more recent scholarship would reflect an increased comfort level with talking about religious positionality. As scholarship on religious rhetorics has recently begun to expand (see DePalma & Ringer, 2014), I hoped that so too would models of how to talk about religious and nonreligious positionalities and their effects. But my data do not support this: Three of the seven pieces from 1988 to 2005 mentioned religious positionality and two of those reflected on it, and four of the seven pieces from 2013 to 2015 mentioned religious positionality and two of those reflected on it. From my limited data, then, and from anecdotal data like Juzwik’s comments, it seems as though scholars still need more models of how to present religious positionalities in their research.

Methods for Addressing Religious Positionality

The following methods for reflexivity in regard to religious positionality emerged from my interviews: (a) critically reflecting on own biases (or terministic screens) (Engelson; Ringer) and (b) getting additional perspectives from other researchers (Nowacek; Ringer) and from participants (Geiger; Juzwik; Nowacek; Thomson-Bunn).

First, researchers can specifically reflect on which of their terministic screens have come into play, how those terministic screens have directed attention, and what has been displaced throughout the process of constructing research problems and questions, gathering data, interacting with participants, and analyzing and writing up the data.

Second, researchers can solicit co-interpretation from other scholars. Jeff Ringer worked to balance the ways in which his religious terministic screen directed and deflected his attention throughout the research process by bringing passages from interviews and student texts to other graduate students and professors to try to get different perspectives (interview, 8/7/14).

Often more important than getting colleagues’ perspectives is getting participants’ perspectives. A key concern of feminist methodology is honoring the voices and views of all participants through collaboration (Kirsch, 1997; Kirsch & Royster, 2010; Powell & Takayoshi, 2012; Reinhartz, 1992; C. Williams, 1996). Collaborating with participants makes room for them to represent their own beliefs and to speak for themselves, both in the details of their experiences and in the interpretations of those experiences. Collaboration is also important for obtaining a larger perspective on data. In an interview T. J. Geiger said,

Sharing my own writing with the students and getting their feedback and incorporating that into my writing about the experience was critical to me. It was invaluable. . . . Four years later, I got to hear from them about what they remembered, why it mattered to them, if it still did in any way. (interview, 5/5/15)

Collaboration was mentioned in only three of the published studies of writing and faith/religion that I reviewed. This absence could be due to lack of space, given genre expectations (i.e., data over process) and other publication constraints (McKee & Porter, 2012). It could also reflect participants’ lack of interest or time. For example, when I asked Andrea Fishman if the Amish family in her book read what she’d written or made suggestions, she said, “Eli didn’t want to read what I wrote. [He said,] ‘Why would I want to read that?!’ Anna was interested in what I wrote about her children. . . . Nobody was interested in the analytical chapters” (interview, 8/24/14).

Collaborating with participants needs to be systematically planned into the research process from the beginning in order for it to actually occur, a point emphasized in interviews with Williams and Goodburn. Goodburn said,

I regret that I didn’t have a process for cycling my representations of students to them in a way that I could get their perspective. . . . By the time I had drafted chapters, I had lost touch with most of the students, some had graduated, I didn’t have current contact information. (interview, 8/24/14)

Based on the methods discussed by my research participants in this section, Table 6 offers a heuristic for maintaining a reflexive position on religious positionality when conducting research on writing in religious contexts.

Table 6.

A Heuristic for Encouraging Reflection of Religious Positionality.

Ethical issue/principle	Stage of research
Ethical issue/principle	Preliminary research	Research design and approval	Data collection and analysis	Writing it up
Researcher’s religious positionality	How do my experiences with faith/religion and my attitudes about faith/religion affect my purposes and motivations for conducting this research?What are the terministic screens through which I approach this project?	How do my experiences with faith/religion and my attitudes about faith/religion affect my recruitment of participants?	How do my experiences with faith/religion and my attitudes about faith/religion affect my identification with and representation of participants?	How do my experiences with faith/religion and my attitudes about faith/religion affect what I’m choosing to include and exclude in my final presentation of data?

Finding 2: Representing Participants’ Beliefs: Dilemmas and Methods for Addressing Them

My interview data also provided portraits of dilemmas that researchers faced as they made decisions regarding representing participants and their beliefs. Three of the researchers I interviewed described the difficulty of defining religious beliefs, as most religions are more complex than popular and media representations of them acknowledge (see Cope & Ringer, 2014; DePalma, 2011; Nowacek, 2005; Pavia, 2009). For example, Goodburn admitted that, given the diversity of evangelical religious beliefs in her study, “I wish that I had drawn upon more students’ texts, particularly students who identified with fundamentalist beliefs but were less hostile/resistant in the ways that I identified with [my student, Luke]” (interview, 8/24/14).

Representing this diversity and complexity requires careful attention to participant selection; increased participant collaboration, from research design and throughout the process of writing up the data; and the perspectives of multiple outside readers on research data and written drafts. For example, Emily Cope and Jeff Ringer (2014) hoped to complicate the view of “evangelical,” so they designed their studies so that they might recruit students who would not lead to narrow or stereotypical depictions of evangelicals. This task was difficult because, as Cope and Ringer explain, even though students follow evangelical practices, they might not identify as evangelical (p. 106).

As Cope and Ringer argue, researchers need to take care when using contested terms, which are plentiful in religious contexts. An ethical approach to a contested term is to thoroughly research the term and its history before using it so that when using it, researchers can do so “descriptively and explicitly,” keeping in mind its fluidity (Cope & Ringer, 2014, p. 118).¹⁰ Thomson-Bunn (2009) said she resisted labeling the Christian students in her study because the adjectives used to do so often have negative connotations and because the students didn’t use labels to describe themselves.

Researchers can also discuss and negotiate such terms with research participants in order to better understand the definitions to which participants ascribe. As rhetorician Michael DePalma (2011, p. 239) argues, because individuals’ belief systems do not simply reflect the institutions with which they affiliate, relying on knowledge of the “official” beliefs of religious institutions to represent individuals’ beliefs is problematic. Such investigations of religious definitions and labels can therefore increase the understanding of diversity within belief systems, which, in turn, can open up greater possibilities for future research on writing in faith communities and religious practices.

Another ethical dilemma mentioned by the scholars I interviewed was deciding how to best represent participants’ beliefs to an academic audience that may not understand or may even be resistant to those beliefs. Researchers specifically used the phrase “take [participants’] faith/beliefs seriously” as they described their overall goal in representing participants. For example, Mary Juzwik said that she and her coauthor McKenzie struggled with portraying “Charlie,” the evangelical student in their study “who really made us cringe a lot of the time, yet we wanted to represent him a way that would evoke sympathy or would move people to . . . take his faith seriously” (interview, 5/19/15). Ringer also struggled with including data that he felt might lead an academic audience to not take his participant Austin’s beliefs seriously. Ringer explained that Austin mentioned numerous times that “the devil was trying to keep me from writing.” Ringer felt that if he wrote about how Austin “felt like he was going through spiritual warfare and how Satan was attacking him,” that an academic audience might not take Austin seriously. In addition, Ringer said,

I also didn’t want to get into having to explain all of that because I felt like it would just be a rabbit trail. . . . I’m not beyond critiquing these students. I certainly do that . . . but I wanted it to be a sensitive reading and to really take these students’ beliefs and writing seriously. (interview, 8/7/14)

Methods for representing participants fairly that emerged in interview data include a comment from Ringer about “really trying to see from that frame and see from that perspective,” a method he attributes to composition scholar Peter Elbow’s “believing game.” The believing game encourages researchers to separate acceptance of idea from belief of an idea in order to attempt to experience the meaning of the idea (Elbow, 1973, p. 165). The process of doing so, Elbow (1973, p. 163) explains, eventually results in greater understanding of an idea’s strength. Elbow (2008, p. 1) advocates using the believing game as a tool for analysis and experimentation because it involves looking for hidden virtues in positions and beliefs. Techniques for practicing the believing game include reading, discussing (rather than arguing), and writing, in other words, using words, images, body movements, sounds, and even silence in order to “enter into ideas” or invest in understanding (Elbow, 2008, p. 8). The believing game therefore is a method that encourages sensitivity when representing others’ faith or religious practices.

Five of the participants I interviewed (Engelson; Fishman; Moss; Nowacek; Noy) emphasized focusing on understanding beliefs rather than evaluating them, which relates well to Elbow’s believing game. Andrea Fishman described her experience as a keynote speaker at a conference when an attendee accused her of being “an apologist for the Amish and an apologist for child abuse” because he believed that the Amish were preventing their children from getting an education that would allow them to be independent. Fishman reacted by explaining,

I worked very hard to present what they were doing in terms of their understanding. In fact, I tried really hard not to judge it. . . . The central question that I was taught to ask was not what I think they’re doing but what do they think they’re doing. Because everyone does what they do for a reason. (interview, 8/7/14)

Beverly Moss similarly emphasized that “especially a faith-based community, . . . [it’s about] respecting what is sacred to people. . . . And ask them, what’s the connection between a, b, and c and what’s the significance of that. And that’s very different from trying to do evaluative work” (interview, 8/25/14).

One technique for focusing on understanding and avoiding evaluation that emerged in the interview data is writing as though the research participants are the primary audience. As Moss said, “This has been a major struggle in writing it up. . . . I want to write for the people I’ve done the research on as my major audience. And that tension I’ve never been able to figure out” (interview, 8/25/14). Moss’s comment emphasizes that researchers can avoid many issues surrounding representation of participants’ beliefs by worrying more about how participants themselves might respond to representations of their beliefs than about how an academic audience might respond. Nowacek tried to focus on research participants as her audience by putting their pictures on her wall: “I made myself look at them a lot as people that I had to answer to,” she said (interview, 9/23/14).

Table 7 presents another heuristic for maintaining a reflexive position on representation of participants’ beliefs in research on writing and religious contexts. This heuristic also effectively summarizes the methods found in interview data and discussed in this section.

Table 7.

A Heuristic for Encouraging Reflection on Representation of Participants’ Beliefs.

Stage of research	Representation of belief systems
Preliminary research	What religious terms, definitions, and labels, specifically in regards to faith and religion, are used? How will I use and define these terms?
Research design and approval	How might I recruit participants to account for different understandings of terms?How might I recruit participants to promote greater understanding of this religion/faith?How and when will I solicit participants?
Data collection and analysis	What do the participants think they’re doing in their combined use of writing/religion/faith?
Writing it up	How might I represent beliefs/faith differently if I use Elbow’s believing game?What might change in my presentation of this belief system if participants were my main audience?

Implications for Future Research on Writing in Religious Contexts

In this article I have examined the ways scholars have reflected on and negotiated ethical issues, particularly religious positionality and representation of participants’ beliefs, in their research on writing in religious contexts. Based on scholars’ reflections, I have offered heuristics to guide future research on writing in religious contexts. For true reflexivity, however, it can also be helpful to revisit research done in the past, as Bronwyn Williams did. Williams said, “I do think the distance, the 10 years . . . was really important. . . . I had to grow up a little. I had to get a little distance to think about it. And I think the things that happened in the intervening years . . . gave me another set of perspectives” (interview, 5/13/15).

In addition, based on my catalog of the published studies I found in my initial search for empirical research on writing in religious contexts (see Appendix A), I argue that more types of methodologies are needed. Of the 27 studies I initially found, 15 involved teacher research (see Appendix A). More data-driven analyses are needed that code data rooted in participants’ experiences rather than researchers’ experiences. Examples include grounded theory approaches or more multimethodological and collaborative inquiries such as those suggested by Nickoson (2012). Because each methodology has unique strengths, a variety of tools can lead to multiple and complex portrayals of discourses and can increase knowledge and theory-building. Clearly, there is much to be done in rhetoric and composition that will help not only increase knowledge of the relationships among writing, religion, and faith, but also improve relationships as we do our best to understand each other’s experiences.

Ultimately, research of writing in religious contexts is needed that allows researchers, as Joanne Addison requests, the ability to perceive the research’s affect on them in addition to their affect on the research (as cited in Powell & Takayoshi, 2012, p. 4). True reflexivity means commitment to spending the time necessary to grapple with methodological concerns and attempting to understand rhetorics and their participants so that researchers themselves might be transformed.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Catherine Matthews Pavia is a writing instructor at Brigham Young University and a parent of four young children. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include digital literacies, religious literacies, and archival research on rural women’s literacies.

References

Anderson

(1991). The description of an embarrassment: When students write about religion. In Chappell

V. A.

Buley-Meissner

M. L.

Anderson

(Eds.), Balancing acts: Essays on the teaching writing in honor of William F. Irmscher (pp. 19-27). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Brayboy

B. M.

Deyhle

(2000). Insider-outsider: Researchers in American Indian communities. Theory Into Practice, 39(3), 163-169.

Brueggemann

B. J.

(1996). Still-life: Representations and silences in the participant-observer role. In Mortensen

Kirsch

G. E.

(Eds.), Ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy (pp. 17-39). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Burke

(1950). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Burke

(1966). Terministic screens. In Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method (pp. 44-62). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carter

(2007). Living inside the Bible (belt). College English, 69(6), 572-595.

Cope

Ringer

(2014). Coming to (troubled) terms: Methodology, positionality, and the problem of defining “evangelical Christian.” In DePalma

M.-J.

Ringer

J. M.

(Eds.), Mapping Christian rhetorics: Connecting conversations, charting new territories (pp. 103-124). New York, NY: Routledge.

Daniell

(2003). A communion of friendship: Literacy, spiritual practice, and women in recovery. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

DePalma

M.-J.

(2011). Re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching: A pragmatic response to the challenge of belief. College Composition and Communication, 63(2), 219-243.

10.

DePalma

M.-J.

Ringer

J. M.

(2014). Charting prospects and possibilities for scholarship on religious rhetorics. In DePalma

M.-J.

Ringer

J. M.

(Eds.), Mapping Christian rhetorics: Connecting conversations, charting new territories (pp. 262-287). New York, NY: Routledge.

11.

Dively

R. L.

(1997). Censoring religious rhetoric in the composition classroom: What we and our students may be missing. Composition Studies, 25(1), 55-66.

12.

Downs

(2005). True believers, real scholars, and real true believing scholars: Discourses of inquiry and affirmation in the composition classroom. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 39-55). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

13.

Driscoll

McFarland

(1989). The impact of a feminist perspective on research methodologies: Social sciences. In Tomm

(Ed.), The effects of feminist approaches on research methodologies (pp. 185-197). Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

14.

Elbow

(1973). Writing without teachers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

15.

Elbow

(2008, April). The believing game: Methodological believing. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of College Composition and Communication, New Orleans, LA.

16.

Engelson

(2014). The “hands of God” at work: Negotiating between western and religious sponsorship in Indonesia. College English, 76(4), 292-314.

17.

Fine

(1992). Disruptive voices: The possibilities of feminist research. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

18.

Fishman

(1988). Amish literacy: What and how it means. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

19.

Fitzgerald

(2005). Torah U-Madda: Institutional “mission” and composition instruction. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 141-154). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

20.

Fonow

M. M.

Cook

(2005). Feminist methodology: New applications in the academy and public policy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(4), 2211-2236.

21.

Geiger

T. J.

II . (2013). Unpredictable encounters: Religious discourse, sexuality, and the free exercise of rhetoric. College English, 75(3), 248-269.

22.

Goodburn

(1998). It’s a question of faith: Discourses of fundamentalism and critical pedagogy in the writing classroom. JAC, 19(2), 333-353.

23.

Harding

Norberg

(2005). New feminist approaches to social science methodologies: An introduction. Signs, 30(4), 2009-2015.

24.

Henze

R. C.

Vanett

(1993). To walk in two worlds: Or more? Challenging a common metaphor of native education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 24(2), 116-134.

25.

Juzwik

M. M.

McKenzie

(2015). Writing, religious faith, and rooted cosmopolitan dialogue: Portraits of two American evangelical men in a public school English classroom. Written Communication, 32(2), 121-149.

26.

Kapitzke

(1995). Literacy and religion: The textual politics and practice of Seventh-day Adventism. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

27.

Kirsch

(1997). Multi-vocal texts and interpretive responsibility. College English, 59(2), 191-202.

28.

Kirsch

G. E.

(1999). Ethical dilemmas in feminist research. The politics of location, interpretation, and publication. New York: State University of New York Press.

29.

Kirsch

G. E.

Royster

J. J.

(2010). Feminist rhetorical practices: In search of excellence. College Composition and Communication, 61(4), 640-672.

30.

McKee

H. A.

Porter

J. E.

(2009). The ethics of Internet research: A rhetorical, case-based approach. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

31.

McKee

H. A.

Porter

J. E.

(2012). The ethics of archival research. College Composition and Communication, 64, 59-81.

32.

Miller

K. D.

Santos

J. M.

(2005). Recomposing religious plotlines. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 63-83). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

33.

Montesano

Roen

(2005). Religious faith, learning and writing: Challenges in the classroom. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 84-98). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

34.

Mortensen

Kirsch

G. E.

(Eds.). (1996). Ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

35.

Moss

(2003). A community text arises: A literate text and a literacy tradition in African-American churches. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

36.

Muhammad

(2015). Iqra: African-American Muslim girls reading and writing for social change. Written Communication. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0741088315590136

37.

Nickoson

(2012). Revisiting teacher research. In Nickoson

Sheridan

M. P.

(Eds.), Writing studies research in practice: Methods and methodologies (pp. 101-112). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

38.

Nowacek

R. S.

(2005). Negotiating individual religious identity and institutional religious culture. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 155-166). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

39.

Noy

(2008). Mediation materialized: The semiotics of a visitor book at an Israel commemoration site. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(2), 175-195.

40.

Noy

(2015a). Thank you for dying for our country: Commemorative texts and performances in Jerusalem. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

41.

Noy

(2015b). Writing in museums: Toward a rhetoric of participation. Written Communication, 32(2), 195-219.

42.

Pavia

C. M.

(2009). Literacy and religious agency: An ethnographic study of an online LDS women’s group (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest. (338003)

43.

Pavia

C. M.

(2011). Literacy sponsorship of the “My Online Friends” discussion board: Competing and complementary relationships. Computers and Composition, 30(2), 132-145.

44.

Perkins

(2001). “A radical conversion of the mind”: Fundamentalism, hermeneutics, and the metanoic classroom. College English, 63(5), 585-611.

45.

Perkins

(2014). “Attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible”: Teaching composition with Bernard Lonergan. In Vander Lei

Amorose

Daniell

Gere

A. R.

(Eds.), Renovating rhetoric in Christian tradition (pp. 73-88). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

46.

Pogue

T.D.

(2015). Finding the written in unexpected places: Literacy in the maintenance and practice of Lukumi rituals and traditions. Written Communication, 32(2), 174-194.

47.

Powell

Takayoshi

(2012). Revealing methodology. In Powell

Takayoshi

(Eds.), Practicing research in writing studies (pp. 1-28). New York, NY: Hampton Press.

48.

Presser

(2005). Negotiating power and narrative in research: Implications for feminist methodology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(4), 2068-2090.

49.

Reinhartz

(1992). Feminist methods in social research. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

50.

Ringer

J. M.

(2013). The consequences of integrating faith into academic writing: Casuistic stretching and biblical citation. College English, 75(3), 270-297.

51.

Seidman

(1998). Interviewing as qualitative research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

52.

Smart

J. M.

(2005). “Frankenstein or Jesus Christ?” When the voice of faith creates a monster for the composition teacher. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religious faith in the composition classroom (pp. 11-23). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

53.

Smith

L. T.

(2005). Building a research agenda for indigenous epistemologies and education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(1), 93-95.

54.

St. Pierre

Pillow

W. S

. (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory in education. New York, NY: Routledge.

55.

Takayoshi

Tomlinson

Casillo

(2012). The construction of research problems and methods. In Powell

Takayoshi

(Eds.), Practicing research in writing studies: Reflexive and ethically responsible research (pp. 97-121). New York, NY: Hampton Press.

56.

Thomson-Bunn

(2009). When God’s word isn’t good enough: Exploring Christian discourses in the college composition classroom (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

57.

Thomson-Bunn

(2014). Empirical hybridity: A multimethodological approach for studying religious rhetorics. In DePalma

M.-J.

Ringer

J. M.

(Eds.), Mapping Christian rhetorics: Connecting conversations, charting new territories (pp. 125-140). New York, NY: Routledge.

58.

Trebilocot

(1991). Ethics of method: Greasing the machine and telling stories. In Card

(Ed.), Feminist ethics (pp. 45-51). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

59.

Viera

(2011). Undocumented in a documentary society: Textual borders and transnational religious literacies. Written Communication, 28(4), 436-461.

60.

Williams

(2005). The book and the truth: Faith, rhetoric, and cross-cultural communication. In Vander Lei

Kyburz

B. L.

(Eds.), Negotiating religion faith in the composition classroom (pp. 105-120). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

61.

Williams

(1996). Dealing with the data: Ethical issues in case study research. In Mortensen

Kirsch

G. E.

(Eds.), Ethics and representation in qualitative studies of literacy (pp. 40-57). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.