RPL’s Approach to Education: A Critical Conversation with Jonah Canner and Hussein Rashid

Chloë-Arizona Fodor, MTS ‘25, CRPL in Journalism, and RPL’s Affiliate in Religion and Conflict with the Religion News Service, sat down to talk with Jonah Canner, RPL Education Fellow 2024-25 and Hussein Rashid, Assistant Dean of Religion and Public Life.

In this segment of their conversation, Canner and Rashid discuss Religion and Public Life's impact on their pedagogy.

Chloë-Arizona Fodor: Do you feel that the Religion and Public Life method has changed the way you design or implement your own pedagogy?

Hussein Rashid: I would say about 80% of RPL’s methods or thinkers I was familiar with before coming in. What was new to me was seeing it all put together. I was familiar with all these distinct theories—decoloniality, power analysis. It seems instinctive that they should go together, but I hadn’t seen it happen in practice. The idea that they could be layered in a systematically cohesive way: I think that’s been the greatest learning for me since I joined RPL. It’s easy to take one of those pieces, harder to envision what they look like operating together. We can analyze the different types of violence that operate in the world—direct, cultural, and structural—but what does the positive peace component of that analysis look like? How do you bring justice to someone who, up to this point, has not had that level of justice. Concurrently, am I denying someone else’s justice in trying to achieve this group’s justice? Trying to keep these overlapping questions in mind has been sitting with me these past couple of years.

Jonah Canner: I'm new to the RPL game here as this is my first semester in this role. I'm at a point in my life where the only things that are of any interest to me are in the realm of paradox. The way I would explain paradox is: if you’re doing something hard, you can either hold your breath and muscle through it or take your breaths and actually feel every bit of the pain. I feel like breathing deeply and walking through the thorn patch slowly is going to be better than holding my breath and muscling through.

HR: I would add that paradox is understanding that we don't sit in a binary, there’s multiple layers to things. But the kind of ambiguity that paradox brings can also pose the risk of analysis paralysis, especially in academic spaces. How do you work with paradox while also making sure that it doesn’t prevent you from taking a moral position?

JC: To your point, Hussein, I think that analysis paralysis is like holding your breath and muscling through. On the other hand, I think there’s the option to actually sit in discomfort and allow yourself to be undone. It brings a peace that is not just the absence of violence, but a real deep breath. When we talk about conflict, sitting in paradox means getting to a place where you can say “I stand by what I did, and I’m sorry for the way it impacted you, but I did it because I needed to. I see you, and here’s what happened to me, and we’re going to be able to hold the complexity of what happened, walk through it, heal it.”

HR: I'm just taken by the idea of sitting in discomfort that you talked about, investigating yourself. 

JC: Yeah, it’s not liberating to just hold your breath and push through discomfort. It is liberating to sit with the discomfort and to realize that you are growing through your ability to tolerate it. That’s the kind of liberation that I'm after.