Modern teacher education has usually ignored or downplayed matters of identity in the quest to find effective and objective educational methods applicable to all. Public school teachers, in this modern view, should teach only facts, common information, and general critical thinking along with basic skills such as reading and writing, without allowing their own identity or the stories and worldviews connected with that identity to interfere with these tasks. A teacher who is Latino, a Pentecostal, a woman, a Democrat, a member of a two-parent family with five siblings, or a product of life in the American southwest should not allow such factors to influence how she educates children. Instead, she should teach in the same way she would conduct a controlled scientific experiment (Glanzer & Talbert, 2005).
It is unrealistic to expect public school teachers to divorce their identity from their teaching. Neither teachers nor students are objects within a scientific experiment. Asking public school teachers to distance themselves from their various social identities (e.g. faith, gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) may lead to students to feel alienation and the loss of moral guidance and bearings (Glanzer & Talbert, 2005). Attempts to separate teachers and students from their particular identities and the cultures associated with them actually leads to the impoverishment and even death of character. It is the particular moral content of distinctive worldviews that gives them vitality, focus and force in the lives of those who adhere to these worldviews. Teachers cannot separate their own moral character and the professional self from each other (Glanzer & Talbert, 2005).
The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment as prohibiting endorsement of a particular religion or of nonreligion. Therefore, it is a given that the public school classroom may not become a teacher’s personal forum for espousing religious...