Race Matters in the Classroom

Wabash Center Blog Series: "Race Matters in the Classroom"

Posts from 2014 to 2017

This blog was started in response to the need for a forum on race and teaching theology and religion in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests and police response in Ferguson, Missouri. We have purposively framed the blog more broadly than this single incident.

Teaching for racial and social justice, dismantling the structures of white privilege in academia, and diversifying the faculty, the students, and the canon, are abiding concerns of the Wabash Center and many of our colleagues in the WabashNation.

See as well: "Race Matters Teaching Tactics" -- Published by ARTS Online
Nine contributors to the Wabash Center's “Race Matters” blog contribute short teaching tactics they have used to help students engage difference in meaningful ways.

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Posts

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I am on sabbatical this year. When the shooting in Ferguson occurred, it got me thinking about the last course I was teaching before I went on sabbatical. I pulled out the syllabus and began taking notes on this event as a “living document.” As a practical theologian, “the situation” ...

In my “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” syllabus, a couple of sessions are reserved for the Exodus story: its claims about liberation; the use of official “war gear” against civilians; the dread of nightfall; legislative debates; witness accounts to the sights and sounds of violence; the importance of memory, etc. “...

Silence, guilt and fear are obstacles to justice and democracy.  My white brothers and sisters, we have often let the fear of breaking the rules of certain types of discourse trap us.  Too often we let fear immobilize us and we remain silent. Let’s take for example the fear ...

One of my earliest experiences was my first day at school in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in The United Kingdom. Sitting in what was the equivalent of the reception or the beginner's class, I suddenly felt an intense pain in my right arm. I turned around to find that I was ...

One day in 2009 after President Obama took office, I walked into my Greek exegesis class at Ashland Theological Seminary in Detroit and one of two white male students asked, “Dr. Smith, don’t you think we live in a post-racial society given we have elected a black President and here ...

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