Questions for use to respond to the Invitation to Join in JEDI Reflections at REA 2025 Annual Meeting

Thank you for being willing to volunteer to reflect on our JEDI expressions during the REA 2025 Annual Meeting, July 7-11, 2025. Our conference theme is “Navigating Humanity: Technology, Ethics, and the Future of Religious Education”.

I am asking you to share your thoughts on how our guild relates with one another as we engage with this theme.

Before you attend the session on which you will reflect, you may find it helpful to review the section below, found in the Code of Conduct. If you have time, you may also wish to review Code of Ethics, to remember the values which undergird our conduct together. You can review these documents by clicking the links on this page under JEDI Resources.

Quick points for review before you answer the JEDI Reflection questions:

Code of Conduct: A General Guide (taken from REA Code of Conduct)

The co-creation of a welcoming space which honors human dignity requires commitments to the practices that are listed as follows:

1. As you engage in the REA space, be aware of, and work on examining and dismantling negative biases which might be influencing you and your peer community. Negative biases that can harm others include distorted assumptions, perspectives, and judgements around various human identities and embodiments; these include race, religion, gender expression and identity, sexual identity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, language, and socio-economic location.
2. Ask for people’s names and identifier pronouns, and make an effort to use them. Avoid assumptions about gender expression and gender identity.
3. Use expansive language, understanding that different cultural and religious expressions are part of how the REA engages diversity. Do not discount the diverse and varied cultural and religious expressions which co-exist.
4. Utilize explicit consent. That is, use consent when sharing personal information, including names, contact information, images, stories, or experiences that are not personal. Consent is required in all physical conduct. As a multi-cultural and multi-religious organization, the REA recognizes that different cultural, religious, and personal understandings around physical boundaries between people are not to be crossed without explicit consent.
5. Embody anti-violence in the interactions in which you are involved, including postures that are anti-racist. Understand that violence occurs in many historical, physical, and verbal forms. For example, verbally racialized violence can seem innocuous to the person who perpetrates it, but can feel intensely violent to the one who survives it, due to histories and compounded experiences of racism. What is a “micro” aggression to one person is “macro” to another.
6. Listen to one another’s experiences and perspectives with respect, but understand that respect does not mean that one’s concepts or ideas will go unchallenged if they harm and deny the human dignity of others.
7. Remain open to an exchange of dialogue, including opinions and expressions of belief systems that stem from different life experiences, cultures, global locations, and religious traditions.
8. Operate in collaboration with other REA members whenever possible.
9. Imagination and creativity are pillars of the REA. They are an active part of the lives of religious educators everywhere. We celebrate how our guild and its members imagine and activate new teaching and learning modalities; they are creating and sustaining communities globally and locally, and courageously moving into spaces of disruption, renewal, and collective futures. We encourage members and participants to engage in meetings in-person and online in ways which harness and emphasize imagination and creativity, in a guild that is multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and inter-religious.
10. Resist passive by-standing when witnessing harm, both in spaces that are in-person and online. Silence and inaction are choices that people often make in moments of crisis. Understand that silence and inaction may also exacerbate an injury that was initially catalyzed by explicit violence. Mutuality means accountability, so instead of passive by-standing, disrupt violent and harmful discourse individually and collectively when they occur.

JEDI Reflection Questions

With these principles in mind, in one of the sessions that you attend, please respond to the following 5 questions. If you wish to practice this reflecting on more than one session, your additional feedback would be very welcome.

1. Did you witness conference participants using “expansive language”, recognizing persons’ diverse experiences, cultures, disabilities, and backgrounds, including clarifying their colleagues “personal pronouns”?
2. Did you notice persons refraining from divulging personal and confidential details about the individuals in their work, research, or writing, thus, ensuring that they had permission to share this information?
3. Was respectful listening of others’ evident in the session you attended?
4. Did you see differences of opinion or understanding being shared without harming or denying others’ dignity? Did participants demonstrate tolerance for ideas that were new to them, or correct others that presented as unfounded?
5. Did REA members challenge passive by-standing when micro-aggressions or violence was expressed? Did they promote accountability toward one another?
6. Add any other comments you wish to bring to my attention regarding promoting JEDI values in the work of our guild here.

Please email your completed reflections to the JEDI officer by August 31, 2025:

• Sheryl Ann Metzgner
  JEDI Officer
  

  Sheryl Ann Metzgner

  Public Constructive Queer Theologian

  Alumna - University of Birmingham, U.K.

  Kitimat, BC, Canada

  jedi [at] religiouseducation [dot] net

  • REA Board, Ex Officio
  • REA Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Officer
  • REA Board Steering Committee