Fashion Me A People A Critical Analysis - Essay Example

The essay "Fashion Me A People A Critical Analysis" provides a review of the Maria Harris' book, "Fashion Me A People". She calls it a book about "curriculum in the church" because she conceives of "curriculum" as the whole of the church's life. This concept of curriculum follows the expanded understanding of the field proffered by theorists like processes of education are also "curriculum." For Harris, this understanding of "curriculum" suggests the need to treat all components of the church's life as the curriculum of religious education.

In describing this "curriculum," she describes her entire vision of religious education. The bases for that vision are laid out in Part I of the book, in Harris' understandings of "church," "education," and "curriculum." She begins by addressing a teleological question: toward what end are we to live as the church? In response, she offers her concept of "pastoral vocation" as a way of life. Religious education then follows as the entire church's process of recognizing, developing and exercising vocation.

(Martin 1-2) Curriculum in this educational vision is the life of the church, given form. The curriculum task is to shape and reshape the entire church environment for people's lives, so they can live into their vocation. This sets up Part II of the book, which looks at the educational vision: the particular forms appropriate for the curriculum of religious education. Turning again to her ecclesiology, Harris finds five components of the curriculum.. ound koinonia, leiturgia, didache, kerygma, and diakonia What curriculum planning process is congruent with the broadened understanding of "curriculum" proposed The curriculum design process Harris proposes must be different from the Tylerian "design by objectives" model dominant since the 1940s's.

Instead of a mechanistic design process, she suggests a "religious and artistic " mode of planning. This "artistic process" occurs through the church's contemplation, engagement, form-giving, emergence and release. In Fashion Me a People, Maria Harris takes a step toward practically engaging the work of some curriculum reconceptualists; her explicitly broadened concept of curriculum is made practicable in Parts II and III of the book. At the same time, she offers a vision of religous education that is related to John Westerhoff's faith enculturation paradigms but proceeds in different ecclesiological ways.

There may be some problems with Harris' argument, even if the reader accepts her ecclesiological and curriculum assumptions. Much of what is proposed in the book seems to be a reworking of ideas Harris has already suggested in different contexts. The five-fold ecclesiological vision is the same as her structure for youth ministry in Portrait of Youth Ministry, and the process of curriculum design is the same as the process of teaching presented in Teaching and Religious Imagination. This overlap can be troubling in two ways.

First, while there is some benefit in the holistic coherence of all ministries as Harris' envisions them, there is also danger in everything being the same. If youth ministry is the same as religious education and teaching is the same as curriculum, then theoretically valid and practically valuable distinctions may be lost. Secondly, there may be a