James C Conroy

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South Australia CEO
Laughter in the Midst of Tears

• James C Conroy
• Dean of Education University of Glasgow

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Liminality

• Liminality from the Latin Limen (threshold) on
  the margins the in-between space
• Rites of passage resulting in the loss of status
• Catholic schools/parishes/groups at the threshold
• How is the experience of being at the threshold
  to be manifest?
• Heaney Seeing Things Claritas- beyond the
  hard edges of the stone building to its sinewy
  foundations
• Down between the lines
• In that utter visibility
• The stones alive with whats invisible

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The habitus of the Catholic institution.

• The habitus of the Catholic school may be better
  able to withstand the predations of post modern
  hyper capitalism than liberalism is since
  liberalism has never really been able to cope
  with pluralism.
• In what does that habitus consist?
• The Catholic institution as a liminal space

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Catholic Institutions in the 21st Century

• What is the Catholic institutions Mission?
• To be places of laughter
• To be places of joy
• To be places of hope
• To be places of grace
• To be places of truth
• To be places of welcome
• To be places of the heart
• To be Places of Discernment
• To be places of the Imagination
• To be places for the Next Generation religious
  literacy
• The underpinning of eros and virtue

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Joy and Laughter

• Places of Joy
• Cultivating the Teacher as a Trickster the first
  face of God (the Caves of Lascaux Coyote Maui
  etc)
• One prepared to play- to turn things on their
  head
• A Promethean Figure- Prepared to Sacrifice for
  the Truth/For the Children
• Schools as locations of laughter

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Laughter

• Laughter a troubling notion
• Plato/Hobbes/Descartes - Derision laughing at
• Kant - Incongruity displacement of our
  expectations Johns Gospel the woman about to
  be stoned
• Aquinas/Foot - Relief psychological
• Laughter is the ambiguous terrain of the
  embodied self
• Erasmus Laughter as a form of Action Matilda
• Imagine a school where the bullying teacher does
  not have an interesting array of nicknames!

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Places of hope

• The school as the repository of the hope of
  teachers, students, parents and church
• The capacity for realising the potential of
  students
• Hope is embedded in natality each new group
  brings fresh hope
• Our challenge is to sustain it and recognise each
  new possibility

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Grace

• Places of Grace
• What is it to talk of a Life of Grace- often
  confused with a faux sanctity.
• Grace as Graciousness
• Grace is the freely given gift this inevitably
  has implications for our treatment of the
  marginalised in our schools

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Grace and its Strategies

• Ensuring that the marginalised are central to our
  activity.
• I think that the Emmaus Centre was a way of
  saying, here we are, Catholic Christians.
  Christianity is to do with inclusivity, and what
  we were saying to our excluded students, and to
  our students on the point of exclusion was, You
  are not good enough to stay in the Catholic
  system That seemed to us to be utterly against
  what Christ had taught, so we felt that we must
  keep these students included, as far as
  possible.
• The Director of the Zacchaeus Centre quoted
  in Grace (2002)

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Truth

• Places of Truth
• Truth and Meaning are entirely different though
  often confused.
• Something may mean something but not be true.
• Modern Education too much concerned with the
  process of education/Too little concerned with
  the purpose of education

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Truth

• Zoë Pure raw brute force of life which leads
  to labour as its own end.
• Bios The individual life as a biography
  configured by natality and having a teleology.
• Meaning can be attached to a process
• Goodness can only be attached to a teleology
  (cf. Eichmann)
• This is why performativity can never govern the
  Catholic school or Church institution

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Welcome

• The theology of hospitality
• The practice of hospitality
• The welcome for the stranger
• How are we to deal with otherness? make them
  more like us?

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Welcome
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Welcome
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Heart

• Places of the Heart
• Not to be Confused with sentimentalism
• Augustine distinguishes Cupiditas from Caritas as
  forms of Love As the Psalmist says Like a deer
  that yearns for running stream
• Perhaps here more than anywhere the Catholic
  school needs to re-imagine itself
• Pressures against the heart may have to be
  resisted

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Children

• Our imaginings about childhood too tainted need
  to recover the joy of the child and where it is
  absent attempt some restoration
• Childrens capacities to reason are not always as
  straightforward as adults imagine. Recent
  research (Conroy, Boland and Davis 1999) on moral
  cognitive dissonance has demonstrated that the
  particular problems faced in the upper
  primary/lower secondary are a function of
  development and need to be understood in this
  context.
• Transitions bring all kinds of problems
  (Mathieson and Price, 2002) not least the
  confusion about authority.
• It is a confusion in which we all share

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Discernment

• Much is made in the Christian tradition of
  discernment but what in what consists this
  particular capacity?
• Indeed, is it a capacity?
• Etymologically rooted in the greek, dia kriasis
  from which of course we also get crisis.
  Logically we would only need discernment where
  there are choices to be made. If there is no
  choice no anxiety about making the wrong choice
  and therefore no crisis. Consequently there is no
  need for discernment.
• Discernment only occurs where we listen to the
  challenge and have to make a decision.

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Discernment

• A way of being in the world
• Reflection
• Other directed

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Stat Crux Dum, Colvitus orbis

• What benefits and divine exultation
• the silence and solitude of the desert
• hold in store for those who love it...
• For here, men of strong will can enter
• into themselves and remain there as
• much as they like, diligently cultivating
• the seeds of virtue, and eating the fruits
• of Paradise with joy. Here, they can
• acquire the eye that wounds the
• Bridegroom with love by the limpidity
• of its gaze, and whose purity allows
• them to see God Himself. Here, they
• can observe a busy leisure, and rest in
• quiet activity. Here also, God crowns His
• athletes for their stern struggle with the
• hoped-for reward a peace unknown to
• the world, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
• ST. BRUNOS LETTER TO RAOUL LE VERD

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A Catholic Response

• All of this must ensure that our schools restore
  wholeness and integration in the lives of
  children.
• Suggests we need to do this for ourselves
• The teacher as provider of the still centre for
  the mystery of God

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Imagination

• Contemporary anxieties around efficiency and
  performance represent a substantial failure of
  imagination
• The poetry of the religious imagination v the
  poverty of randomised controlled trials
• The irony of educational altenatives

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The Star Tribes

• Look among the boughs. Those stars are men.
• Theres Ngintu, with his dogs,
• who guards the skins of Everlasting Water in the
  sky.
• And theres the Crow-man, carrying on his back
• the wounded Hawk-man. Theres the serpent,
  Thurroo,
• glistening in the leaves. Theres Kapeetah,
• The Moon-man, sitting in his mia-mia.
• And theres those Seven sisters, travelling
• Across the sky. They make the real cold frost.
• You here them when youre camped out on the
  plains.
• Aboriginal oral trad (related by Fred Biggs)

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Religious Literacy

• Religious Education participates in a
  disciplinary economy predicated precisely upon
  the delegitimation of organised religion as a
  zone of human flourishing, leaving it, uniquely,
  an oxymoronic subjectpossibly the only subject
  in the curriculum the core concepts of which are
  regularly and relentlessly trashed beyond the
  boundaries of the school, and often inside them
  as well.
• An unresolved contradiction that disables the
  work of religious literacy and leaves
  emancipatory politics frequently mute and
  uncomprehending before the discursive practices
  of a religiously-motivated legal and political
  programme such as that of the Bush Whitehouse,
  with its openly-declared war on secularism and
  its covert erosion of the Establishment Clause of
  the First Amendment.

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Religious Literacy

• What is religious literacy
• denotes an acquaintance with, an understanding
  of, the nature of religious language,
• religious concepts and practices
• some grasp of the complexities, contradictions
  and challenges of at least one religious
  tradition. Perhaps more than any of these,
  religious literacy is an engagement with
  religious language and its import

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Religious Literacy

• Within the parameters of the liberal narrative,
  the dramatic global resurgence of religious,
  often so-called fundamentalist, movements over
  the last two decades has caught many educators by
  surprise, since, according to the myth of
  modernization of which Western education is such
  a powerful element, religion was supposed to be
  doomed by the irresistible two-hundred-year
  advance of reason, secularization and
  privatization. This myth presented educational
  thought with several options for identifying the
  fate of religion in the modern world, but neither
  a return of religion as a public force nor its
  continuing capacity to shape people according to
  its own ethos and instill into them a new habitus
  was among them.

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Religious Literacy

• Religious illiteracy is apt to offer a kind of
  sanctuary to believer and sceptic alike, where
  they can indulge their hermetically-sealed
  ontologies and epistemologies, ensuring that the
  claims of the Other are not simply deemed wrong
  but are, in fact, radically declassified.
  Another, related concern is that the conversation
  concerning religion in both school religious
  educationand in the polity more
  generallytends to ignore those features of
  religion that appear, intellectually, emotionally
  and morally, to stand outside a normative liberal
  discourse.

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The Bookcase

• Ashwood or oakwood? Planed to silkiness,
• Mitred, much eyed-along, each vellum-pale
• Board in the bookcase held and never sagged.
• Virtue went forth from its very shipshapeness.
• Bluey-white of the Chatto Selected
• Elizabeth Bishop, Murex of Macmillans
• Collected Yeats. And their Collected Hardy.
• Yeats of Memory. Hardy of The Voice.
• Voices too of Frost and Wallace Stevens
• Of a Caedmon double album, off different shelves.
• Dylan at full volume, the Bushmills killed
• Do not go Gentle. Dont be going yet.
• Seamus Heaney

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The Good Life

• The man who shuns and fears everything and
  stands up to nothing becomes a coward the man
  who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up
  to every danger, becomes foolhardy. Similarly the
  man who indulges in every pleasure and refrains
  from none becomes licentious, but if a man
  behaves like a boor and turns his back on
  pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus
  temperance and courage are destroyed by excess
  and deficiency and preserved by the mean
• Aristotle The Nichomachean Ethics Book2 1)

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On Virtue

• Chief among all those things that might assist in
  the cultivation of virtue is courtesy
• In what does courteous behaviour consist?
• Are our classrooms always places of courtesy?
• Is this reflected in the language and discourse
  of the staff room?
• How are pupils spoken about publicly in the staff
  room?
• Does this have any impact on discipline / dignity?

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Virtues and the less obvious!

• It is not always obvious the virtue can be really
  quite mundane - in being so great things may be
  missed.
• One of these is the increase to in excess of
  250000 children now being prescribed Ritalin
  (When I first heard of the drug c. 1998 some 4000
  were being prescribed it).
• Why the increase?
• To what extent are the physical/material/
  cultural and culinary surroundings important here?

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On Virtue

• Too often we look for a set of practices to
  offset the slow deliberate evocation of a
  particular spirit. This evocation of a spirit
  issues out of the tradition of Christian
  philosophy that traces its roots through St.
  Thomas to Aristotle.
• It is manifest in the cultivation of virtue
• In the context of a school this takes many forms
• What 3 virtues should teachers display?
• What 3 virtues should pupils display?
• What would help each group most?

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Some Questions

• What are the practical manifestations in our
  schools of joy/laughter/hope/grace/truth/ The
  heart/ discernment/ imagination/our focus on the
  next generation?

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Keeping Going

• My dear brother, you have good stamina.
• You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor
• Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,
• You shout and laugh about the revs, you keep
• old roads open by driving on the new ones.
• You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes
• And then dressed up and marched us through the
  kitchen,
• But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.
• I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,
• In the milking parlour, holding yourself up
• Between two cows until your turn goes past,
• Then coming to in the smell of dung again
• And wondering, is this all? As it was
• In the beginning, is now and shall be?
• Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush
• Up on the byre door, and keeping going.