IST1001-2-WI14 - Identity, Power and Difference

Course Description

This course cultivates students’ ability to engage in social and theological analysis and critique, particularly about social structures, ideologies, and embodied practices that lead to domination or oppression. The course helps students think critically about their own social locations, their power and privilege, and what effect these have on their professional and vocational contexts (as pastors, ministers, educators, and religious and non-profit community leaders). The course takes the perspective that this sort of analysis is crucial to serving effectively in today’s complex social environment. It encourages students to deepen their commitment to dismantling privilege and oppression at individual, institutional, and societal levels. It seeks to help students move within their varied levels of awareness about matters of power and difference to action.

Course Description

Identity, Power, and Difference cultivates students’ ability to engage in social and theological analysis, particularly about social structures, ideologies, and embodied practices that lead to domination or oppression. It facilitates critical thinking about social locations, power and privilege, and what effect these have on students' professional and vocational contexts (as pastors, ministers, educators, and religious and non-profit community leaders). The course takes the perspective that this sort of analysis is crucial to serving effectively in today’s complex social environment. It encourages students to deepen their commitment to dismantling privilege and oppression at individual, institutional, and societal levels. It also seeks to help students move within their varied levels of awareness about matters of power and difference to action.

This course embodies Iliff’s core commitments to respect difference and foster just relationships both in this context and beyond the school in the communities and institutions in which they are called to serve.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, the student will by able to:

• Critically identify their social location and its shifting, contingent nature; move from individualistic to structural conceptualizations of the nature of identity, power and difference.
• Consider the ways in which social structures, systems, and institutions (impersonal forces) are real and have real effects on human bodies; interrogate how we exercise power through our entanglements in a web of oppression and privilege.
• Deploy theological, personal, and social tools to recognize and respond to the dynamics of privilege, oppression, and power playing out intrapersonally, interpersonally, in ministry/work contexts, and in the larger world.
• Grapple with what it means to engage this analysis and action as life-long commitment to effectively and intentionally implement the work of justice and peace.
• Struggle with the demands of being in solidarity/allyship across multiple axes of difference in various contexts of power and privilege in which we are connected historically and communally.

Degree Learning Goals

This course contributes to the following degree learning goal for the MASC, MAPSC, and MDiv programs:

Personal and Professional Formation (PPF):  develop strategies for spiritual formation and self-care, demonstrate an awareness of their social location and an enhanced commitment to social justice, embody an effective prophetic and pastoral presence, and enact self-aware and collaborative leadership within a specific vocational context.

Evaluation

Like all other Personal and Professional Formation courses at Iliff, IPD is offered only as a pass/fail course. We have found over the years that students are freed to move more deeply into the kinds of self-reflection and critical engagement with the content and processes required by PPF courses if they are not concerned about how their developmental trajectory will affect their grade. However, the pass/fail grade should not signal that the work of this course is less rigorous or somehow less important than other courses for which you receive letter grades.  Indeed, it is because of the commitment to the learning within this course and its impact on your professional vocational development that this teaching and learning choice has been made.

This class depends heavily on experiential learning through the interactions and discussions within the class. Therefore, regular attendance and thoughtful engagement with the classroom activities are essential to passing the course.  By Masters Student Handbook policy, missing more than one class in a ten week quarter may result in a failing grade in this (and other classes that only meet once a week).  Should dire circumstances arise (such as hospitalization or family disruption), we may make exceptions for this policy, but otherwise students should make an effort to be present and prepared for class each week.

There are two written assignments for the class, a mid-term and a final project.  Passing work on both projects and on your participation grade will be necessary to pass this class.  For the most part, if you engage the work of the class and give sincere effort and professional concern to your own learning and growth within it, you should not have to be concerned about passing the class.

Your instructors will take your written work seriously and attempt to give constructive evaluative feedback that takes your vocational development seriously. We hope that you honor our commitment by submitting work that demonstrates your best thinking and efforts as well.