Towards Personal Integration in Higher Education Religious Studies: an autoethnographical approach

This thesis is my story. It is an autoethnographic exploration of the dissonance between my life experience, my experience as a student and as a teacher of theology and religious studies in higher education. It documents the challenges of integrating academic perspectives with my own experience and the transition from disassociation to integration.On the way I challenge the use of critical reflection as a tool to enhance self-awareness, highlighting the limitations of objective-rational approaches. I explore the potential and limitations of insights from theological reflection to offer a more personally integrating approach, to balance intellect and emotion in religious studies in its broadest sense.I suggest an additional methodology, an autoethnographic three-fold framework of learning, based on the goal of personal human flourishing, which situates the learner’s own context and experience at the heart of the learning process. The framework proposes that freedom to learn in personally meaningful ways, developing critical self-awareness and sharing stories of learners’ experiences as part of the academic process, can help develop a more integrative approach to learning in the context of religious studies.It provides insight into my own journey to find an authentic autoethnographical approach to robust academic research which begins with the learner and then explores theoretical perspectives through an ongoing conversation between experience, academic resources, interviews with peers, poetry and novels.The purpose of this particular stage of the journey: to find a place of learning about religious studies in higher education that thrives on complexity and unknowing.