Resources by Haruka Umetsu Cho

To recap our context, we have been working on our Wabash-sponsored project on trauma, religion, and pedagogy and have consulted with Dr. James Finley twice. In our first blog post, we reflected upon the importance of community building and reconceptualizing teaching outcomes from the perspective of trauma-informed pedagogy as cultivating intentions of life-long learning. In this second post, we delve into a possible classroom exercise focused on the practice of patience. “What is the gift you want to share with your students?” Teaching is giving ourselves away in and to Love—as mystics do to the ultimate “O/other” in their contemplation and writings. This was one of the important remarks we received from Dr. Jim Finley, a psychologist and mystic, in our consultation with him. To begin, we would like to remind ourselves that trauma-informed pedagogy aims to hold and foster the holistic being of each participant, including the instructor’s, encompassing their woundedness. Suffering and trauma are an inevitable part of our lived experiences. A trauma-informed pedagogy requires us to alter our attitude toward human limitedness: it is not something that should be overcome but a valuable opportunity for discernment. Our precarious, complex, and embodied experience of the world invites us to cultivate our sensitivities and responses to personal issues and social injustice. If we borrow spiritual language, mystery, and even emptiness, can be a locus where deep awakening may take place. Such a holistic attitude toward limitation also reaffirms the importance of teaching humanities. The death of humanities discourse is no longer a surprise and many of us have been urged to rethink pedagogy after the appearance of ChatGPT, which brought sweeping changes in student learning and writing. To acknowledge the significance of empirical science, however, is also to recognize that human experience consists of more than inventions and uses of technology. We should allow ourselves to ask unanswerable questions about the unknown and unstable dimensions of reality that both fascinate and intimidate us. Trauma is one of the very loci where we can tap into a space of the unknown, where we have an invitation to form deep intimacy within ourselves and, in some cases, with others (only if they are respectful, nonjudgmental, and can hold confidentiality). One of the important assumptions of a trauma-informed classroom is the sense that we must practice patience, gentleness, and compassion when tender experiences arise. Therefore, we need assignments and practices that help us cultivate this compassionate stance when it comes to our reading and writing. Dr. Finley suggested adapting the ancient contemplative practice of Lectio Divina as a way to approach the assigned readings. We further propose that this practice can be extended to enable a close and spiritual reading of texts, especially difficult ones about human suffering, which can empower students toward intellectual and internal growth in their reflections. This in-depth reading starts with listening to, “taking in” texts. The result of this discursive, meditative reading must be recorded in the form of ungraded journaling. In this step of the assignment, it is important for instructors to acknowledge students’ fear of writing. (Often, if not always, undergraduate students’ problematic use of technology or plagiarism comes from anxiety around making mistakes and receiving bad grades as punishment). The purpose of this ungraded journaling is to express oneself out—it is to recognize one’s own voice and to trust one’s own intuition as one listens deeply and openly to the text as well as to one’s own inner world. It is a moment when one tries to form intimacy with, be patiently present with, and gravitate toward oneself. It is also a moment when trauma might erupt unexpectedly and overwhelmingly. We acknowledge that such a moment would be the kernel of trauma-informed writing. If the student is ready, deep awareness and sensitivity toward the self and the world—and perhaps healing—can begin. Technology cannot and should not replace such profound, unpredictable, and humane learning moments. Since this exercise may invoke student anxiety, the instructor may tweak it depending on reading materials and pedagogical contexts. It could be modified into a timed writing exercise, or students may further reflect upon the writing exercise itself. Moreover, this journaling must entail editing (rewriting) processes. This is a chance for students to choose what they want to share for submission to the instructor or to the class at large: ensuring their consent and safety is paramount. As we noted in our previous post, it is extremely important to form a safe learning environment when encountering various forms of trauma in the classroom. In addition, in this writing practice students themselves are given an opportunity to actively create a safe writing space for themselves. Again, the instructor must remind students to slow down in their rewriting, since hasty editing can re-traumatize the writer: in the process, one may encounter their inner critic, a sign of perpetual violence that they have experienced and internalized. Sharing deep reflection with oneself and then another is, indeed, a courageous and possibly life-affirming act of giving ourselves to Love. Ultimately, trauma-informed teaching and learning could be a process where we learn to trust in the infinite love offered to wounded people, to borrow Dr. Finley’s expression. It is an endless process of forming intimacy with ourselves and others, trusting that we have the capacity to hold each other as broken beings. We hope that in-depth reading and writing exercises will assist students in gaining their own voices, however slowly. It is a practice built upon patience and mercy, designed to help us form nonjudgmental empathy for ourselves and extend it to others. Needless to say, this is reflected back on instructors since teaching is a mutual act (of course, there are always exceptions). Here, we return to our beginning statement, “What is the gift you want to share with your students?” We teachers are also infinitely loved and wounded beings who are invited to co-create classrooms of care and courage within imperfect institutions, circumstances, and a world in continuous motion.

How can we teach trauma and religion? If part of the human experience is the reality of imperfection, limitation, and wounding—if loss and grief are inevitable in our lives, how can we better address them in our classroom?  In this first part, we want to speak to the importance of recognizing the immense suffering which in so many cases is unresolvable yet integral to human experience. Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō calls life a “continuity of discontinuities”[i] which permeate reality itself. This sensibility urged us to reconsider the way we typically begin each semester with “learning expectations”: it asks us to instead cultivate a posture of “collective intentions,” especially when we address trauma in our classroom. In a sense, trauma-integrating pedagogy calls for a radical alternative pedagogical practice that propels us to reconceptualize teaching processes and outcomes in a longer time frame. We believe that this practice humanizes both instructors and students and moves us toward more holistic ways of relating.  According to Jim, the intention of a contemplative community can be known as modeling to each other “a sincerity of heart,” which is the doorway to spiritual growth in a person’s life. When our intentions guide us, it does not guarantee an outcome but rather gives a posture of receptivity to witness each other’s (often subtle) “awakening”[ii]—an experience of being interrelated with that which is beyond our own individual experiences. Together, the participants are invited to tap into the unknown. Spiritual awakening is a relational journey that requires intention, devotion, teaching, and community, and these foundations lead us into both the depths and beyondness of love itself.  Through an emphasis on collective intentions rather than expectation, we invite a more gentle and nurturing way to engage the intense materials of our classes, whether they are stories of violence in sacred texts, literature, and ongoing incidents, or the woundedness that Christian mystics often perceive as invitations to contemplate with a spirit of tenderness and to write down first-person narratives. Practically speaking, cultivating collective intentions invites us to read texts in a spirit of inner silence and deep listening, which allows the text to speak to the reader, not as mere information. Emphasis on interior listening guides students to share what arises in them, however subtly, through writing and class conversation. We then transition to community sharing which must be engaged nonjudgmentally in the class, even if higher education might frame this practice as anti-intellectual.  Herein, we are beginning to see the challenges that are birthed from an attachment to learning outcomes and evaluation processes, which are often required by institutions. We recognize that those may inadvertently reproduce classrooms that do not allow us to adequately address trauma. Of course, evaluations and outcomes are important. But how do we accurately “assess” learning as deep relational “awareness” which includes trauma, justice, and religion but is not bound exclusively to it?  Perhaps a trauma integrating pedagogy calls us to co-liberate ourselves a bit from our attachment to outcomes, which are part of the social norm of productivity. If we imagine our trauma-integrating classroom as a relationally accountable container, we also need to reimagine assessments and assignments, in order to find collective ways to encourage the interior movements of each other. While this may seem to be a challenging negotiation with our institutions, we believe that it is an essential update to a pedagogy, especially in teaching trauma in our times full of massive violence, forced migration, and climate intensity. A pedagogy of collective intentions allows us to respond to and think with the lives in motion—actual human beings—within our class, within ourselves, and in this rapidly changing world. It is a pedagogy of the continuous journey of learning to trust ever more deeply in ourselves, the O/other, and the uncertain process itself.  A pedagogy of communal intention has convinced us that building a nonviolent classroom is essential in approaching difficult topics such as trauma and violence, and in our classroom practice we learn to place high value on flexibility and receptivity. For instance, silence and contemplation can be a sign of active learning. Rather than focusing on dissemination and regurgitation of information, we want to encourage students to speak in and listen to their own authentic voices. Simultaneously, instructors must always remind themselves that we cannot control or impose students’ learning or “awakening”—rather, we are powerless to empower students to heal trauma, let alone to heal it within a semester. Perhaps nothing external will seem to result from our class other than students becoming sensitive to themselves and others. But perhaps in a time of massive collective trauma, this is one of the most important lessons of all.  As ones who are called to teach theology and religion, we do not want to abandon the hope that our learning, or awakening, may come alive within students, or for ourselves much later. In an age that constantly demands immediate results, we must remind ourselves that learning is a lifelong process, particularly regarding difficult topics. Over and over, we must return to a humble spirit of sincerity that we are all imperfect beings who are continually learning to take skillful action in a world that is unstable, unpredictable, and wounded. And saying yes, we are invited to be and become patient and persevering one step at a time. Part two of our blog will address this topic in further detail.   [i] See “Theory of the Historical World” at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/#TheHisWor. [ii] A term borrowed from James Finley, which he describes as the purpose of the contemplative life and details in The Contemplative Heart (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2000).