First Response!

Good Morning,
How exciting to see a comment posted to this blog! Thank you Janis, both for your time and your thoughts. I agree that a critical next step is to bandy these ideas about with the students. Their insights will provide the map to method.
This morning I came across the following description by Alberto Manguel in his "A Reader on Reading". In the passage he discusses his early experiences reading Alice in Wonderland : "When I was eight or nine, my disbelief was not so much suspended as yet unborn, and fiction felt at times more real than everyday fact. It was not that I thought that a place such as Wonderland actually existed, but that I knew it was made of the same stuff as my house and my street and the red bricks that were my school."
This level of 'knowing', this degree of conviction about a thing 'unproven', is what is so difficult for the non-believer to accept. In turn, it suggests to me that the believer has the right (?) to decide what constitutes knowledge (in the same way that a reader determines meaning). Perhaps another question (which I am clearly better at asking that answering) is whether the authority for determining truth currently resides in the correct place (the academy). How do we authentically reposition this authority? Grounded research? In doing so, what does the scholarly process relinquish?

More later, and thanks again Janis.