LAUSR

Each year, we set aside one issue of Religious Education to look back on the last Religious Education Association (REA) meeting. A committee selects a set of the presented papers for publication. They are included in the journal alongside the presidential address and sometimes one or two of the other plenary addresses. This annual issue serves as one kind of public record of what happened at the meeting alongside our web-based publications and the conference proceedings. In “settled times,” the conference issue’s contents offer a chance to look back on a weekend of work together, often with fondness for our association, for the chance we enjoyed to renew long-cherished relationships and form new connections with each other, and for positive inspiration from conversations with colleagues about new ideas or resources in the religious education field. The November 2018 meeting took place in what unarguably must be recognized as “unsettled times,” however, as the conference focused on the theme “Beyond White Normativity: Creating Brave Spaces.” While I would not presume to claim that everyone attending the meeting experienced it in the same way, it does seem fair to say that the 2018 REA meeting definitely involved a more overt level of discomfort, anger, and conflict than usual. Perhaps it would be more realistic to say that, in this meeting, conflict within the REA moved into the explicit curriculum from its more ordinary location in the implicit or null curricula of the organization (Eisner 2002). This happened as the REA, while attempting to take a step, made many missteps toward having authentic conversations about race. It is important to underscore that people had a range of experiences at the meeting: what was for some merely new, confusing, upsetting, or “more of the same as most other days in the academy,” was experienced by others—particularly by colleagues in the meeting who are people of color—as deeply painful. Eisner’s categories of the three curricula that are present in any educational experience— explicit, implicit, and null—have often served religious educators well as a resource for recognizing multiple levels occurring simultaneously within teaching and learning. A number of the essays in this issue cite Eisner as a helpful resource for understanding how racism operates in religious education. In addition to Eisner, I am finding useful the perspectives of James C. Scott (1990) looking for cultural patterns of domination and subordination, both in the 2018 meeting and, more broadly, in the religious education field’s efforts to deal (or not deal) with racism. Scott helps me to think beyond Eisner’s naming of distinctions between the explicit, implicit, and null, to an analysis of what happens when what is normally hidden from view becomes public. Scott writes about the difference in what he calls public and hidden transcripts of interactions between those in dominant positions and those subject to systematic forms of social subordination. His contention is that both groups misrepresent their actual feelings and thoughts about the other in the ways they engage in public. The “public transcript” refers to social interactions performed out in the open between these groups. It references the normatively authorized forms of relationships and discourse, which in situations of domination generally reflect the desires and interests of the dominant group. This public