REA seeks proposals that expand to the possibility of the guild as demonstrated and expressed in this poem. The guild needs bold co-imagining from its membership. If our work is to matter for the future, we must go courageously together. In order to broaden the imagination of our collective voices, first we must know a few things about ourselves. Therefore, the conference committee encourages proposals addressing the following three questions:
- The question of who: In your research and practice, who is religious education for? Who benefits from religious education? Be specific, explicit, and do not assume the rest of the membership knows who your work is for. We are an international guild with many different stakeholders from different types of institutions — places of worship, faith-based institutions, colleges and universities, NGO, and non-profit organizations. In this moment in time, who does religious education seek to serve? How does it transform local communities? What research is the most pressing for your context?
- The question of why: Why does religious education exist in your context? SImilar to who does the guild serve, why does religious education and the membership in the guild matter in your context? Why will it matter in the future? What is at stake if religious education is no longer the guild for your work? Why religious education and not another category of inquiry and practice?
- The question of the future: The year is 2100 and not a single one of us is an active member of the guild. What is the nature of our work? How do we gather? How do we share knowledge? What role does REA have in broader society? Be creative. Drawing inspiration from Octavia’s Brood, we spend our meetings, journal entries, papers, and time with colleagues imagining better worlds together. Take this opportunity to imagine boldly the future we have yet to live into. Take creative risk by not just engaging the who and why questions of the guild, but how! What forms will REA be celebrating in that moment?
These topics may seem broad. They are intentionally so. Here are a few considerations for your proposal.
- Co-Create. The committee will look favorably at submissions that are written by teams. They can be teams with partners you are very familiar with, or they could be written by someone from very different perspectives on the questions above.
- Make. Be creative. We are accepting proposals that are creative in their approach to research interest groups, collaborative papers sessions, and poster sessions. Plays, short fiction, art installations, liturgies, curriculums, articles, and other forms are encouraged for every level for every type of session.
- Poster Sessions: For 2022, we will be curating an art installation. Creative poster ideas will be part of that installation. If you have gifts or practice — related to REA — leveraging visual, mixed-media, performance, digital, three dimensional art, then we strongly encourage you to apply in the poster session category.
- Be bold. While the theme and suggested prompts are creative and broad in nature, be bold in your proposals. Empirical, theoretical, pedagogical, and artistic proposals are all strongly encouraged. We hope to celebrate bold visions of REA’s members.
- Honor ancestors. In your bold proposals, have a sense of what came before. Do your best to honor those who have laid the foundation upon which you now stand. Do not assume we know who your ancestors are or from what context your work generates from, and do not presume your context is the center of the guild. When we gather, our ancestors will meet and rejoice in our gathering.
- Resilience in dialogue. As stated in the poem, the guild seeks scholarship that creates boldly and generatively together. As a guild the stakes are high for very different members for a lot of different reasons. Please take this opportunity to celebrate your efforts to the guild, but do not presume they are the only valuable efforts among your peers. We have a variety of methods, approaches, and expressions of religious education within the guild. The theme is meant to be expansive enough to celebrate that diversity, as opposed to narrow its scope.
Through examining the who, our collective why, and imagining into the future, let us become good ancestors together.