Resources by Kwok Pui-lan

What do artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other new media arts have to teach us about the teaching and learning of religious worldviews, imagination, and symbols? To find this out, a small group of scholars in religion and theology, funded by a Wabash Center Grant, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in the spring of 2022. They met with Professor Rosalind W. Picard, the founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at MIT’s Media Lab to learn about her latest work. The design and organization of the Media Lab offers insights into the habitus of learning and innovation. The glass building is futuristic looking, spacious, airy, and full of light. It contrasts with the nineteenth-century and more traditional architectural designs of some theological schools. On the first floor is a display of the history of landmark scientific discoveries and advances relevant to the work of the Media Lab. Throughout the building, there are posters providing information and celebrating the research done in the various labs. Researchers are welcome to join a tradition of discovery, innovation, and exploring the future. The Media Lab facilitates the cross-fertilization of ideas by housing in one building labs that conduct research of different kinds: bioengineering, machine learning, sensors, cognition, environment, space, and computer science, etc. With glass partitions, researchers can see what is going on in other labs. They can visit other labs to consult their colleagues and learn about the latest developments in other fields.   To recruit the brightest and most talented students, MIT raises funds to provide scholarships for its graduate students. We saw students and researchers of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds working at the Media Lab. The physical environment and habitus are important for teaching and learning. In Educational Imagination, Elliot W. Eisner differentiates between the explicit and implicit curriculum. The explicit curriculum is the actual contents taught in the classrooms and labs. The implicit curriculum is the environment and ethos that includes the ways the teachers teach and interact with the students.  It is obvious that the building and design of the MIT Media Lab, i.e. its implicit curriculum, tangibly embodies its educational commitment to collaboration and transparency. It generates curiosity and new imaginations that lead to collaborative possibilities. It also encourages members to embrace a culture of transparency and communal thriving rather than competency and secrecy. When the explicit and implicit curricula of an institution and its teachers are in sync, it is easier to generate a positive learning atmosphere that benefits the students. Dr. Picard’s work on affective computing trains computers to recognize various human emotions. Picard’s team worked extensively with diverse people, including people with disabilities, to categorize human emotions in detailed and nuanced ways. Through this process, they have discovered how critical emotion is in the learning process. Positive affect such as awe, satisfaction, and curiosity contribute to constructive learning, while negative affect such as frustration, disappointment, and misconception lead to un-learning. Theological educators have much to consider about the affect we create in students. In After Whiteness, Willie James Jennings criticizes the plantation style of educational institutions. The plantation style is hierarchical and is run by the racial paterfamilias. It requires teachers and students to enter into the affective reality of white, Western institutional life. The educational space is a space of thinking, but not feeling. Students learn different disciplines but are not given the opportunities to build with the institutions. Racial minorities and people with marginalized identities often find it hard to inhabit such learning spaces. In a traditional classroom, the tables and chairs are arranged for students to listen to the professor’s lectures. Today, many professors incorporate the use of PowerPoint in their teaching. But students are still treated as passive spectators. Some professors rearrange the furniture of the room to facilitate small group discussions and interactions. What more can we do to encourage creative collaboration and co-learning? Education is about the whole person. Thomas Groome, a prominent Christian religious education scholar, calls this an ontological activity as it involves people’s ontos, their very being. Christian education includes knowing Jesus in a personal relationship through faith, but it accentuates this relationship with the pursuit of justice; that is, how one practices justice, mercy, and love. Through informative, formative, and transformative activities, education seeks to complement people’s whole way of being in the world, including questions about who they are and how they live. If we take this aspect of education seriously, our understanding of the curriculum, including its scope and context, will need to be broadened. MIT’s Media Lab stimulates us to think about an embodied model of learning in theology and religion.

As a toddler, the Grammy-winning musician esperanza spalding heard Yo-Yo Ma play cello on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and decided she wanted to play music like that. In an interview, she said it was Ma’s “total body activism during the music” that captivated her. A jazz-bassist, vocalist, and composer, esperanza moves with her music, which defies genres, and hopes to create a physical experience of resonance in her audience. As a professor of practice at Harvard, she hosts jam sessions at the studio at Harvard’s ArtLab so that participants can improvise and make music together. In her heart, she wants to be someone in “deep co-learning” with her students. How can our classrooms be spaces of co-learning that welcome creativity, collaboration, and even improvisation? How can we recognize the body as a valuable site of learning, so that the knowledge we gain would not be over our heads, but would speak to and touch our innermost yearning and desires? If this is difficult to do in an in-person classroom, is there any hope for online teaching via Zoom? Last spring, I taught an online course on Spirituality for the Contemporary World for Master students and community learners. I have learned so much about embodied teaching and learning: guided meditation, listening to music and poetry, art appreciation, rituals, Tai Chi, cross-cultural discussion, and much more. I want to reflect on a few memorable moments from the class. I invited Professor Cláudio Carvalhaes to speak on “The Pandemic and the Re-imagination of Rituals” because I knew him to be a creative teacher, preacher, and liturgist. Carvalhaes discussed the relation of ritual to our body and earth. He shared his experiences of leading workshops on liturgies on four continents of the world, which led to the book Liturgies from Below. At a time of crisis, he said, it is important to draw from the experiences of the community to craft liturgies and prayers that respond to the people’s needs. At the end of the presentation, he invited students to offer prayers with the movements of their bodies. He explained what he was going to do and invited students to warm up by standing, shaking loose, moving from side to side, and turning around. He demonstrated how to do these to ease the students. Then he picked up his guitar and sang four stanzas of a song. As he sang the first stanza on happiness and thanksgiving, he invited students to move to embody memories of happiness and joy. Similarly, he sang the second stanza on sadness and the third one on anxiety and invited students to imagine movements to express them. In the final stanza, he closed by asking God to hear our prayers, which were all in our bodies. During the pandemic, feelings of grief, helplessness, and uncertainty are stored in our bodies, as the book The Body Keeps the Score says. Acknowledging these feelings through movements of prayers helped us to connect with these emotions. Doing this together made us feel less alone. Students appreciated the time with Carvalhaes as they were given the freedom to experience the power of ritualizing through their embodied selves in their own ways.  I also invited Episcopal priest and artist the Rev. Susan Taylor to lead a class on spirituality and art. Some years ago, I invited her to speak in my class in person and she brought a lot of art supplies with her. She wanted us to try out and create a collective art project at the end and the process was inspiring. This time, I told her, the class was online and I would appreciate it if she could include doing art in the class. She told me to ask students to have their art supplies, such as painting and drawing mediums, brushes, pieces of paper, color, palette knives, etc., on hand. She made a presentation on how arts help individuals and churches during a time of pandemic and strengthen our relationship with God. She shared photos of her art and included a detailed explanation of the process of working through a 7’x 6’ painting entitled “Skyflowers.” Introducing the process of how we would make art together, she offered a lot of encouragement for us to explore and tune out the self-judgmental voice. On Zoom, we could see her painting in her studio, adding shades and layers of colors to her work. We spent some time creating our own art and afterward we shared our experience of making art and what this meant to us. We also discussed how to include art in our own spiritual life and ministries. The brief moment of creating art transformed us from spectators to participants. It was wonderful to see students trying to express themselves in new ways and hear what art evoked in them. Since the class met for an hour and a half in the evening, I decided to teach Tai Chi movements for several minutes in the middle of each class. I began by teaching simple Tai Chi exercises so students could understand the principle of balancing Yin and Yang in the movements. I also posted a video from YouTube so that they could follow the exercises if they wanted to practice more. After we practiced these exercises in several classes, I was able to teach them several Tai Chi movements by breaking down the steps. Even though we practiced only a few minutes in class, a student was motivated to learn further about the practice of Tai Chi. We easily succumb to Zoom fatigue in online classes when teaching is didactic, usually with a PowerPoint presentation, and students become passive onlookers. But there are many ways to expand the possibilities of sensory experiences, even in a Zoom meeting. esperanza spalding invites us to think about teaching as embodied adventures. I have been stretched and learned so much from my co-learners.                

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh heavily on the students’ hearts. I sensed that this communal crisis would be an undercurrent in whatever we were going to discuss, and that students needed a space to process their thoughts and feelings. It turned out that several students lived close to one of the spas. One student passed by it almost every day. These students were particularly hard hit by the murders. [caption id="attachment_250943" align="alignright" width="476"] Students at Candler School of Theology held signs outside Gold Spa[/caption] The next day, two Asian and Asian American students in the class went to one of the spas to protest the shootings. One of them held a sign saying, “Stand with the Asian Community.” A New York Times journalist took a photo of them and wrote about their protest in the newspaper. Later that weekend, other students also visited the site to remember the victims and speak out against anti-Asian violence. Prompted by the students’ activism, I gathered the Asian and Asian American faculty of my school to find ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hatred in the country. We decided to organize a webinar and invited scholars and a local activist to address “Anti-Asian Racism and Christian Responses.” The response was beyond our expectations. More than 600 people of different racial backgrounds from across the US registered for the webinar and more than 430 people attended! During the webinar, some clergy and leaders of white churches asked for resources on the Asian American community and churches. I felt the need to educate the public about the long history of discrimination against the Asian American community and the people’s resilience. Living in the South, the discussion of racism usually follows a black and white binary, such that the oppression of Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans becomes invisible. Orientalized stereotypes portray Asian women as obedient, compliant, and hypersexualized. Popular media casts them as the long-suffering Madame Butterfly or the seductive Suzie Wong. During the Vietnam War, sex tourism flourished around American military bases in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Asian women’s bodies were exploited by American GIs for their “rest and recreation” during the brutal Vietnam war. Sex tourism created the myth that Asian women’s flesh is available and there for the taking. Robert Aaron Long, the white killer of the spa shootings, said that he has a “sex addiction” and that he thought the spas owned by Asians were “safer” than paying for sex elsewhere. A member of a Christian church, he has struggled with his addiction and lashed out at the spa businesses, which he viewed as sexual temptation. To provide opportunities to learn about Asian and Asian American women, I facilitated an online course on Asian and Asian American Feminist Theologies in the summer of 2021. I invited guest speakers from both Asia and the US to speak about feminist theology, interpretation of the Bible, Christian ethics and sexuality, interreligious learning, and leadership and ministry. The online short course attracted hundreds of participants from Asia and North America. It provided a forum for dialogue across geographical, racial, cultural, and religious differences. The pandemic forced us to shift our teaching online in the past years. While we lament the disruption and long for in-person contact, online teaching enables us to reach a wider audience. Millions are accustomed to using Zoom as a learning platform. My short course was truly transnational and the discussion was rich and riveting. The recordings of the course were uploaded to YouTube so that people can use them as resources. As scholars we have to begin thinking about the “community” we teach in a much broader sense. It is important to remember that Asian feminist theology emerged during the height of the Vietnam war. Some of the pioneering theologians, such as Mary John Mananzan from the Philippines, addressed the sexual exploitation of women, sex tourism, and militarism. Today, Asian and Asian American female scholars and activists continue to protest sexual abuses and harassment of Asian women by militarism, the police, and other powerful men. [caption id="attachment_250944" align="alignleft" width="425"] The altar created at the vigil service in the Cannon Chapel at Candler School of Theology[/caption] Close to the anniversary of the March spa shootings, I organized a vigil for the victims at my school’s chapel. During the vigil, we prayed for other victims of war and violence, especially those who died in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their families. When the Korean hymn “O-So-So” was sung by a student, I invited the community gathered to place Japanese peace cranes on the altar to symbolize their prayers and solidarity. On the altar were two paintings by a local Korean American artist, Connie LaGoy, who painted them in response to the shootings. She has sold prints of the paintings to generate funds to donate to the victims’ families. When a community tragedy disrupts our classes and teaching agenda, it opens a window for rethinking our teaching and vocation as a scholar.

I have always thought that a course on spirituality should take place in a supportive environment, and it is best done in person. But something happened that changed my mind. Last fall, I attended a webinar organized by Kosen Gregory Snyder at Union Theological Seminary. The webinar invited a Native American, a Buddhist, and a Christian leader to discuss the ways that religious and spiritual traditions can address our ecological crisis. This webinar was just what I needed, as I was over-stretched by work and speaking engagements. I was exhausted and depleted. I felt a sense of accompaniment as each speaker shared their spiritual wisdom and paths. So when I was asked to offer my spring online course “Spirituality for the Contemporary World” to the community, I accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. For over two decades, I have taught courses on various aspects of spirituality in Boston and Atlanta and have accompanied hundreds of students on their spiritual journeys. I saw offering this course to those who may need it during the prolonged pandemic as a vocation and a challenge. I had not taught a course on spirituality online, let alone taught it for both students at my school and members of the community. The first challenge was how to translate the practice-oriented pedagogy to an online format. I include meditation, breathing exercises, Tai Chi movements, singing, arts, and rituals in my spirituality courses. I emphasize learning by doing and not just listening! How could we do these things in a Zoom setting? As we know by now, even the simple thing of group singing is a challenge on Zoom. To learn how I might do some of these in my class, I consulted my colleagues at school who have expertise in digital learning. They have given me a lot of encouragement and sound advice and the school will provide production help and equipment if needed. I welcome the challenges of teaching this class as a growing edge of my teaching. I have taught this course in person numerous times, and I am eager to find out what I can learn by teaching it online. The pandemic has disrupted higher education and its impact will last for years to come. According to a study by Instructure, the company that created the online platform Canvas, the demand for online and hybrid courses skyrocketed, even as in-person learning resumes. Thus, scholars in religion and theological educators need to be better prepared so they can teach these courses well. I know that many seminaries and divinity schools have already used online and hybrid learning for some time and the learning curve may not be so steep. When the pandemic closed my school and forced our classes to go online, the school has provided training and support for the faculty. One of the challenges was learning how to use the Zoom platform, which was originally designed for business, to create an interactive and participatory learning environment. I learned from my colleague Sarah Bogue, who offered useful tips and exercises for building community through online learning. I intend to use some of her suggestions in my spirituality class. Since the community participants in my class do not have access to the school’s academic teaching technology, I decided to create a website for the course. At the beginning of the pandemic, when everything shifted online, I helped the network Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry update our website, open Twitter and Instagram accounts, and create a YouTube channel. I feel good that I can transfer what I have learned in my community work to my online teaching. The course website has a blog. I posted the first blog, explaining why I am teaching this course at this time. Many Facebook friends posted prayers and thoughts about the new year in the first week of January and I asked for permission to share a New Year prayer and photos taken to show nature’s beauty on the blog. Participants in the class will be invited to contribute blog posts to share with the class. The course will have its own Facebook page. I will post the questions to be discussed each week. I plan to use this space for participants to share their practices, such as photos of home altars, places for meditation, and nature walks, as well as spiritual poetry and writing. While my students have their assignments, the posts on Facebook will allow me to gauge community participants’ interest and engagement in the course. An altar I created To avoid Zoom fatigue, I will not give long presentations and will minimize the almost routine use of PowerPoint in Zoom teaching. We must justify why we need to have synchronous meetings at all if the meetings are not interactive. Instead, I have invited guest speakers and artists to lead a range of activities, including Notes of Rest, artwork, and learning to write poetry. Some of them have taken my spirituality courses and they are delighted to help as I offer this course to the community. As a seasoned teacher, trying something new in teaching stretches my pedagogical imagination. We have been in the digital age for decades, and teaching can’t remain the same if we are to catch up with the digital natives, who are well versed in digital technology. Two weeks before the course, I began setting myself in the spirit of teaching this course. I paid attention to my daily rituals (the design of daily life) and practiced Pilates for seniors. I always enjoy teaching spirituality courses because I need them as much as my students do!

Academics trained in different fields are sometimes at a loss of how to conduct research in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Does SoTL have its particular methodologies different from those of other fields? Who are the audiences of SoTL and how can one join the conversation? Is there a quick guide, which introduces the diverse approaches with illustrations? Can we learn from the experts, who can provide advice and point out the pitfalls? This book is helpful for beginners to think more clearly of the scope and research in SoTL, and it also provides insights for seasoned scholars who want to learn from others in diverse disciplines. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 focuses on the foundations of SoTL, including discussion of the origins of SoTL projects, ways of identifying research issues, the relationship between educational research and SoTL, and the alignment of research methods with purpose. In Part 2 contributors offer examples of specific research methods with examples. These methods include questionnaires, classroom observation, conducting interviews, close reading of student artifacts, and the use of think-aloud protocols developed by cognitive psychologists. Part 3 focuses on making impact and touches on writing and reading SoTL and participating in SoTL conferences. In putting the book together, editor Nancy L. Chick does not want to introduce SoTL in the abstract, but wishes to illumine critical moments in practice through vignettes and examples. Each chapter is like listening to a colleague reflecting on a particular issue in SoTL, drawing concrete examples from classroom practice and research. In the chapter on using questionnaire, for example, the author does not provide a step-by-step guide to creating a questionnaire. Rather, the author shows how he reflects on the big-picture conceptual issue questions related to SoTL when designing the questionnaire. Each chapter includes a helpful reference pointing to further readings. The discussion throughout the book is engaging and shows the authors’ commitment to teaching and to SoTL. It motivates us to become better teachers through engagement with the literature in SoTL. It is encouraging for those of us not trained in social-scientific methods to see that classroom observation and closing reading of student artifacts can also produce SoTL. The chapter on classroom observation explains the process of involving other colleagues to observe teaching in action. The chapter on close reading explains the difference between closing reading for SoTL and grading assignments. While the examples given are helpful, the book would be more useful if it attended to the challenges of doing SoTL research in diverse classrooms, taking into consideration race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture. It would be more up-to-date if it included discussion in SoTL on teaching generation Z students and non-traditional students, and teaching online and hybrid courses, as they are becoming more common in higher education.

On election night last year when Donald Trump won the presidential election, I was traveling in Greece visiting the historical and religious sites. Several days before the election, I visited the Acropolis and climbed up Mars Hill where Paul delivered his sermon to the Athenians (Acts 17:22-31). The fact that I was in Athens, the cradle of Western democracy, prompted me to think about the development of democratic institutions and their relationships to an empire. The word “democracy” in Greek combines the elements dêmos and krátos, and means literally, “people power.” However, only adult male citizens who owned land could participate in Athenian democracy. Women, slaves, children, and lower-class people were excluded. Athens once had the strongest military power among the Greek city-states and harbored imperialistic impulses. The Delian League, created by the Athenians in the 5th century BCE, captured cities, colonized and enslaved peoples. Athens suppressed revolts among the League’s members and collected dues from them in exchange for protection. In our modern day, democracy has not prevented countries from turning into imperialistic powers. The British once ruled an empire so vast that the sun never set on the empire. While British subjects enjoyed democracy at home, colonized subjects did not have self-autonomy and had to obey British rule and laws. In the US, Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” appealed to deep-seated American imperialistic desire, especially among non-college educated white men. I began teaching a class on liberation theology shortly after Trump’s inauguration. My reflection on the relationship between democracy and empire prompted me to find ways to heighten my students’ consciousness about the image of the US and the impact of American policies abroad. During our first class, we discussed the changing political and social contexts in which we studied liberation theology. There were a significant number of international students from Asia and Africa in the class. I invited them to share reactions to Trump’s election from news reports from their countries. I also asked them to share their thoughts on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” A number of them said that the US is already the most powerful country and has a major effect in their own countries. They were concerned about how Trump’s presidency would affect global stability and foreign policies. After Hillary Clinton lost the election, some commentators discussed what Clinton’s loss would mean for the future of feminism. Others wondered why her coalition of women, racial and ethnic minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people could not pull off a win. I discussed with students Columbia University professor Mark Lilla’s widely read essay “The End of Identity Liberalism.”[1] He warns that American liberalism has focused too much on identity politics and diversity issues, such as race, gender, and sexuality. This focus is disastrous for democratic politics for it fails to provide a unifying principle. Instead, he argues that we have to engage more in conversations about class, war, political economy, and the common good. Lilla’s essay has created a lot of debates, and some said that “identity politics” addresses real problems of discrimination. In our class discussion, I helped students to see two important points. First, we have to take an intersectional approach and see the various forms of oppression as mutually constitutive. Second, we have to avoid the tendency of focusing too narrowly on identity issues in the US, without paying attention to larger social, economic, and political forces shaping the world at the macro-level. Commentators outside of the US have taken the election of Donald Trump and raised it up as an example of how democracy can become dysfunctional. Some of my students were shocked when Trump was elected, and his first 100 days in office have created chaos and presented us with “alternative truths.” When my students felt depressed by the current political situation, I reminded them that democracy is a project and it requires vigilance in protecting it. We should not think that American democracy is the best institution, for it has been polluted by big money and big donors. Trump said during his campaign that he was free from Wall Street’s influences. But his cabinet and close advisors include many billionaires and people from Goldman Sachs. His currently proposed health care policy and tax reforms will benefit the rich and take away from the elderly, the sick, and the poor. I reminded students that democracy has been used as an ideology to further the cause of empire. In the 19th century, the spread of Christianity was part and parcel of the “civilizing mission” of the West. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the protection of democracy has been given as a reason for military intervention and regime change. In the name of democracy, the U.S. has supported military coups, toppled governments, and created regional animosity and instability. Democracy has taken several centuries to develop in Western countries, and cannot be superimposed by power and might from without. Within the course of one week, Trump ordered a military strike in Syria and the U.S. dropped a 22,000-pound bomb on ISIS forces in Afghanistan. It is vitally important to educate students to become global citizens who understand the consequences of US actions in the wider context of the world. A good beginning is to understand how democracy and populism can be used to serve imperial interests. [1] Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html.

Kwok Pui-lan, William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School What if you were to stage a debate on the black Christ, instead of giving a lecture on James Cone’s black theology? If you...