This book explores the possible role and impact of teachers' and students' faith in the English language classroom.

The legacy of English teaching and Christian missionaries is a flashpoint within the field of English language teaching. This critical examination of the place of Christianity in the field is unique in presenting the voices of TESOL professionals from a wide range of religious and spiritual perspectives. About half identify themselves as "Christian" while the others identify themselves as Buddhist, atheist, spiritualist, and variations of these and other faiths. What is common for all the authors is their belief that values have an important place in the classroom. What they disagree on is whether and how spiritual values should find expression in learning and teaching. This volume dramatizes how scholars in the profession wrestle with ideological, pedagogical, and spiritual dilemmas as they seek to understand the place of faith in education. To sustain this conversation, the book is structured dialogically. Each section includes a set of position chapters in which authors explain their views of faith/pedagogy integration, a set of chapters by authors responding to these positions while articulating their own views on the subject, and discussion questions to engage readers in comparing the positions of all the authors, reflecting on their own experiences and values, and advancing the dialogue in fresh and personal directions.

The field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) stands at an active crossroads – issues of language, culture, learning, identity, morality, and spirituality mix daily in classrooms around the world. What roles might teachers’ personal religious beliefs play in their professional activities and contexts? Until recently, such questions had been largely excluded from academic conversations in TESOL. Yet the qualitative research at the core of this book, framed and presented within a teacher knowledge paradigm, demonstrates that personal faith and professional identities and practices can, and do, interact and interrelate in ways that are both meaningful and problematic. This study’s Christian TESOL teacher participants, working overseas in Southeast Asia, perceived, explained, and interpreted a variety of such connections within their lived experience. As a result, the beliefs-practices nexus deserves to be further theorized, researched, and discussed. Religious beliefs and human spirituality, as foundational and enduring aspects of human thought and culture, and thus of teaching and learning, deserve a place at the TESOL table.

Ideological and educational-political aspects of the link between language and faith—especially between Global English and Christianity—is a topic of growing interest in the field of English language teaching. This book explores the possible role and impact of teachers’ and students’ faith in the English language classroom. Bringing together studies representing a diversity of experiences and perspectives on the philosophies, purposes, practices, and theories of the interrelationship of Christianity and language learning and teaching, it is on the front line in providing empirical data that offers firm insights into the actual role that faith plays in various aspects of the language learning/teaching experience. By adding a data-based dimension, the volume contributes to the cultivation of valid research methods and innovative ways to analyze and interpret studies of the intersection of Christian faith and the practice of teaching and learning language. .

This collection of 16 reflective accounts and data-driven studies explores the interrelationship of religious identity and English Language Teaching (ELT). The chapters broaden a topic which has traditionally focused on Christianity by including Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and non-religious perspectives. They address the ways in which faith and ELT intersect in the realms of teacher identity, pedagogy and the context and content of ELT, and explore a diverse range of geographical contexts, making use of a number of different research methodologies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers in TESOL and EFL, as well as teachers and teacher trainers.

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education. Authors not only examine how Christianity – the historically dominant religion in American society – shapes languaging and literacies in schooling and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism and homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian sub-cultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning. This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others.

This volume critically examines how English language teaching professionals wrestle with ideological, pedagogical, and spiritual dilemmas as they seek to understand the place of faith in education.