Dilemmas in Providing Hospitality to Others in the Classroom: A Story of One Christian Religious Education Teacher

Abstract

This paper aims at rethinking the relationship that exists between White teachers and the religious/cultural/racial Others they teach about in terms of host/guest relations. It engages Derrida’s analysis of hospitality to highlight tensions that exist between laws (or rules) of hospitality and the law of unlimited hospitality. The paper discusses how this tension impacts upon the capacity of teachers to talk through and teach about Others in ways that maintain the integrity of their own cultural and religious traditions, and a tradition which is always Other to them. It takes a case of a White Christian religious education teacher in Adelaide, South Australia, who attempted to teach about Buddhism in a way that did not subordinate Asian religious Others to the dominant tradition of the school. The discussion highlights this teacher’s willingness to engage with difference on its own terms and to also engage with the ‘modulations’ of her own otherness. The paper concludes by arguing that the contradictory obligations teachers have to act as ‘hosts’ to Others and as ‘agents of the Host/s’ must be restlessly and endlessly negotiated.