Back to School: Methodists and Education

How have Methodists approached education in the past? John Wesley was a highly educated Oxford don whose mother embedded the importance of universal education in him from a young age. How did universal access to education become a driving part of the Methodist mission, particularly in America? GUESTS: Dr. Linda Ryan is a graduate of […]

How have Methodists approached education in the past? John Wesley was a highly educated Oxford don whose mother embedded the importance of universal education in him from a young age. How did universal access to education become a driving part of the Methodist mission, particularly in America?

GUESTS:

Dr. Linda Ryan is a graduate of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History and author of John Wesley and the Education of Children: Gender, Class and Piety

Dr. Marco Robinson is an Assistant Professor of History at Prairie View A&M University and Assistant Director of the Ruth J Simmons Center for Race and Justice in Prairie View, Texas.

Dr Audrey McCluskey is professor emeritus of African American and African Diasporar Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of many books including A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

HOST:

Dr. Ashley Boggan D., general secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church.

Boggan earned her PhD from Drew Theological School’s Graduate Division of Religion, specializing in both Methodist/Wesleyan Studies and Women’s/Gender Studies. She earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, specializing in American Religious History. She has previously worked as staff at the General Commission on Archives and History (2012-2014) and the Connectional Table of The United Methodist Church (2014-2016). She was the Director of United Methodist Studies and Assistant Professor Christian History at Hood Theological Seminary (Salisbury, NC), an AME Zion Seminary, from 2017-2019 and was the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion at High Point University (High Point, NC) from 2019-2020. Boggan is a lay member of the Arkansas Annual Conference and the daughter of two ordained United Methodist ministers. She is the author of Nevertheless: American Methodists and Women’s Rights (2020) and Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality (2018).