Resources by Jeffrey D. Meyers

When was the last time you had a student visibly start paying more attention because of something you said? What were you saying? What were you doing with your body? One of the things I do that most consistently causes certain students to perk up is reference other languages. When trying to define theology I compare it to the Spanish Dios, which is a lot closer to the Greek theos than the English “God.” Similarly, the Spanish iglesia sounds a lot like the Greek ekklesia (it derives from it via Latin), which is useful for helping students remember what ecclesiology is, even if the spellings are different. My students are used to teachers and professors introducing new vocabulary by referencing the roots of the words, and similar words, in English. Their bodies, the surprise on their faces, tell me they find it shocking to hear Spanish and other non-English languages used in the classroom. However, the bodies that make up my students reflect a need for a multilingual focus. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, sixty-six million Americans (21.5%) live in households where a language other than English is spoken. Most, of course, also speak English. This reality is reflected in our classrooms. In a recent term, my 130 students collectively spoke Arabic, Dutch, French, Gaelic, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. At one school where I taught, 26% of my students were multilingual to some degree. In a larger city, at another institution where I served, 49% of my learners claimed two or more languages. I don’t know how these numbers reflect the broader campus communities of the universities where I teach, or the percentages in higher education as a whole. However, language is central to learning. How can we teach well if we don’t consider what languages our students speak? How can we design curriculum if we don’t consider their cultural and linguistic backgrounds? How can we help them develop their proficiencies in their other languages if we are not open to incorporating other languages in our teaching? This is not just an issue of pedagogy. It’s an issue of justice. We invest a lot in helping white students learn a second language in school, but typically devote minimal resources to helping native speakers learn to read and write in their non-English languages. At worst, we bar them from using their native language(s) out of the utterly mistaken (so says the research) conviction that doing so helps them learn English faster. Believing that students who grew up speaking Spanish or Polish or Arabic should be able to read and write in those languages by the end of college should not be a radical or rare position. I imagine some of the surprise of my using Spanish and other languages in class is that, as a white person, I don’t look like I should speak them. They’re not wrong. I’m a product of the U.S. education system. A native English speaker, I am functionally monolingual despite having studied Spanish, German, and biblical Greek. That doesn’t mean I can’t find ways to signal that I know my classrooms are populated by multilingual students. This might mean making comparisons to words I know in other languages. Or, providing students non-English editions of required readings. Or, encouraging students to use their other languages when conducting research. The tongue is part of the body. Language is part of embodied teaching. If I want to embrace my students’ identities, using their languages is a good place to start. It is a counter-imperial gesture, one that challenges the hierarchy of languages that equates English with power.

We were halfway through the first day of class when a student started viciously criticizing a TED talk I had just shown. It wasn’t hard to determine where the student’s criticism was coming from. He was furious that I would consider a woman worth listening to. He was spewing misogynistic hate in a room that was 70 percent female. On the first day of class. I responded to the student’s misogynistic rant in my usual way. Trying to stay calm, I seized on something he was saying I could spin into a statement I agreed with, interrupted him with a “yes, and,” and proceeded to explain the value of the points made by the woman in her talk, being sure to emphasize how important and insightful they were. I never heard a misogynistic word out of him again. He never mistreated his female peers (I monitored closely) and by the end of the term was thoughtfully engaging with readings by female authors. It probably helped that he was surrounded—in my class alone—by thirty brilliant young women who were living proof of women’s intellectual capacities. It also helped that I was a white male, in a position of authority, who had not let him get away with saying misogynistic things unchallenged, even if I did use a strategy inspired by nonviolent conflict transformation techniques rather than direct confrontation and criticism. This story illustrates the power of embodiment, even in the form of a video. I doubt assigning a book or article by a woman would have elicited the same visceral reaction. Honestly, it usually takes me strategically getting a little angry in class to get students to stop routinely misgendering authors as “he,” despite my best efforts to ward off that habit, including through strategies like making cover pages for PDF readings that include a short biographical statement on the author. We often think of “embodiment” in teaching as referring to the kind of presence the teacher has in the classroom. Perhaps we also need to find ways to apply embodiment strategies to the authors we assign. Do we lose some of the power of a diverse syllabus when the authors remain just names on a page? In my classes, I try to use media to help highlight the diverse array of voices I hold up as worth listening to. Sometimes I assign a video or podcast or invite a guest speaker in person or on Zoom, but since most of the assigned readings are books, individual chapters, and articles, I also find other ways to help my students see our authors as real people. I often weave short videos or clips of lectures by our authors into my lessons. Lacking those, I’ll include a photo of an author alongside a quotation from their work in a slideshow. These aren’t complicated interventions; however, I fear that without them my students miss the diversity in my syllabi. This is perhaps most true of those students who most need to see it, those so steeped in patriarchal culture that even a “Barbara” or “Maria” becomes a “he.” Such interventions might not be the best idea if the message your reading list sends is that your field is dominated by cishet white men or that they are the only ones worth listening to, reading, or studying. Applying embodiment strategies to authors assumes that we’ve already done the work of diversifying our syllabi with the voices of those whose gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, nationality, language background, disability, age, religion, socioeconomic status, etc., both reflect the full diversity of humanity and affect their scholarship. As a white male, I don’t often deal with the kinds of challenges to my authority and expertise other educators experience, at least not from my students (as an adjunct, administrators and my tenure-track colleagues routinely devalue my expertise and experience). This means that my embodiment in the classroom is not particularly fraught. If anything, I have to take care not to be too intimidating lest my presence stifle participation. My identity and positionality also give me a platform and a responsibility to challenge worldviews that dehumanize and devalue those whose backgrounds, identities, and experiences are different from mine. Making the authors in my syllabi a little more real for students is one small way I pursue that goal.