Resources by Oluwatomisin Oredein

What Listening is NotIt will be obvious to some and painfully invisible to others, but it will lurk in quiet corners of the classroom. And it will grow and stretch and plant roots in many imaginations as being OK. Only some in the classroom will feel the discomfort and stagnation of its growing presence. Only some will notice this phenomenon hardening and forming a new wall that the privileged will be able to hide behind, marking it as their limit, as the end point of their journeys.Though teachers want growth in the classroom, I am not sure we want this type of growth; for this growth mislabels itself. It calls itself progress and progressiveness. It calls itself a sign of maturation and evolving, while what is actually unfolding is quite damaging.Listening as a practice of anti-racism or subverting one’s privilege, especially by white students (though this applies to all students with privilege), breeds a pernicious dynamic in the classroom – one of silence and thus of nonaccountability. It unfortunately encourages concealment. Students can take up a posture of “listening” to avoid the risk of addressing problems as they happen in the classroom.But listening is not silence.Silence is foe. It is not allyship. Silence dressed in the discourse of listening is clever avoidance. True listening is not stagnant; she is always active. She is not perpetually quiet. She emerges and course-corrects and grows into the right stance and posture. Listening is not a means of tapping out of the difficulty of a moment in the guise of passivity; it is to commit to addressing the awkward moments in the classroom in real time. It is a covenant to deal with difficulty.In its true form listening is quite loud.Silence has paraded around as listening too many times in progressive classrooms – and in the process it has harmed more moments and students than it has helped. There are No Silent ExemplarsIf change requires shift and movement, it is safe to assume that correction must be voiced. The right thing to do then, requires making a sound.Because of listening’s misinterpretation, the classroom can be a case study in how opportunities for change are missed. And these missed opportunities become cyclical.It is all too commonplace that a Black student’s white colleague consistently says the right thing about justice, oppression, racism, sexism, queerphobia, and so forth, when the intellectual moment presents itself in class. For the minoritized/marginalized student there is hope! The possibility that this classmate “gets it” first announces itself.But then something devastating happens. Another colleague or – if we are completely honest – sometimes the teacher, does not respond or react if something offensive, disturbing, biased, incorrect, assumptive, ignorant, or somewhat “off” is said or happens. People who are in the impacted group feel it. They feel compelled to correct the error. But they are also tired of defending themselves. They become apathetic, for they know this moment all too well. The silence is awkward; it is not productive but feels deeply regressive.But most importantly, it hurts. And the hurt grows. And grows.With each second that the articulate colleague or teacher allows to pass where the offense is not met with a pedagogical corrective, the wound burrows deeper, cementing itself in memory of the wounded: they will remember this the next time they have hope for those who boast the appearance of understanding in the guise of intellect. Listening as Weaponized IncompetenceWeaponized incompetence is not only a domestic dynamic. The push for majority students to “listen” to their minoritized peers in educational spaces has cleverly become the newest iteration of weaponized incompetence.Listening as a passive, benevolent act can do tremendous work for the moral appearance of change, transformation, and/or righteousness. The majority benefits from it while continuing to inflict harm on the minoritized persons in the learning space.Hearing transgressions and violations against another’s humanity, history, culture, aesthetic, tongue, way of life, or knowing, and settling into silence and inaction is not true listening.Listening must be redefined as practice oriented. It requires immediate and factual correction in and of moments where the incorrect narrative, perception, or action has been directed towards another. Listening demands activity; it means amending the error in real time no matter how challenging the moment.But the elephant in the room of this dilemma must be addressed: it is not only white students and students with privileged identities who employ silence disguised as listening over and against minoritized students. If we are completely honest, it is mainly teachers who do it.If teachers are serious about doing our jobs well with constructive results, we need to create and establish systems of correction and accountability within the classroom that take the pressure and responsibility off of our minoritized and marginalized students.Are we up for the challenge?What modes of accountability might teachers put in place at the beginning of each semester or term that ensures pedagogical challenge and expansion not only for our students, but for us?Might we model listening as active practice instead of a weaponized excuse?I hope we do. The future and efficacy of education depends on it.

PAYING ATTENTION I try to work it in casually, inconspicuously, but of course it is glaring. Students notice it immediately – the emphasis on a student’s progress instead of grades, the focus on their and my mental wellness as the primary means to be sharpest in learning, the inverting of power dynamics and the undoing of traumatizing power relationships in how the classroom is run. My body notices it, too. Decolonizing the classroom is difficult work and wildly unfamiliar territory. It runs directly in the face of what we instructors and professors know the classroom to be. And it runs directly to our worst fears and insecurities and does an elaborate dance around it – but not in a taunting way. It dances freely in a spirit of welcome and joining. A decolonized classroom, this liberating means of being communal learners together, requires constant movement. And truth-telling, where everyone names their fears. Students locate themselves in the learned cycle of education where their performance is assumed to dictate their worth. And instructors and professors work hard to resist the shameful impulse to agree. For this uneven correlation is all we know: performance is worth. Worth is performance. But is worth the performance? Decolonizing work requires an intense amount of internal resistance, of re-narrating what we have been trained to recognize as true, as opposed to what we may instinctually know to be true. Education can be ruthless at worst, engrossed in its unmoving standards at best. Instructors and professors know this all too well: “How else, besides grading, are we supposed to measure progress?” “How else will students take us seriously?” “How do we ensure students prioritize their coursework?” “How do we make sure our assignments do not take a back seat to another’s class or to a student’s ministry or to the ups and downs of their life?” This is the academic-body’s response to fear: rhetorical questions willing to gently carry our insecurity, for we honestly do not know the answer to these questions. And we may never know until we experiment with inverting power in our course structures. And failure. We need to try failure – again and again. And once we are accustomed to failing, to feeling like we are losing our grip on the notion of rigor we were trained to recognize – by sight, or by the all-too-familiar tightness in our chest - we can ask what lesson(s) failure has been trying to teach us all along. We instructors and teachers must become disciples of our failures, insecurities, and fears. Because it almost feels unbearable to not be liked or to feel misunderstood or to sense disrespect. But a decolonial classroom asks the instructor/professor what the lessons are: What messages of community and communal learning are thrust to the fore when the body struggles with varying messages of acceptance? In actively shifting the purview, the how and who, of learning, what might be able to be seen and understood differently? In a world inundated by systems of dominion and domination, mastery and expertise, often ignorant of the fullness or complexity of a person, what might a holistic form of respect look like? It has to be felt in the body. There is no way around it. We will only get pieces, as a common complaint is that we cannot be everything to every student. This much is true; but even in recognizing this expansive truth, expanding our sense of resisting strictures is still a lesson well-learned.   HOW TO GAIN TRUST IN THE CLASSROOM Dear instructor/professor, How do you feel? It is only from here, the space of feeling, that decolonial possibility in the classroom can be born. It is not method. It is not strategy or project. It is a return to humanity, it is still-unfolding fullness. The process of learning happens to occur in the midst of a collective space where humans are learning how to be appropriately human together. Your decades of study does matter; but what matters most is your decades of living. Does your living have room in your classroom?  This is decoloniality; it is a (means of) living into. To be decolonial means treating people like humans - not objects, or projects, or cogs in a machine - but like their life is beautiful and important and lovely. When instructors/professors begin to get a hold of this – first by addressing our fears, and next by allowing space for our pedagogical dreams to blossom and run a bit freer, then and only then can we broach the conversation and winning students’ trust.

WHAT DIVERSITY IS DOING If you are on the underside of it—on the wrong end of the seeming hospitable invitation—you are likely surviving diversity. Diversity is hardly a cordial experience. It is tolerated, lived through—sometimes agonizingly. To understand this sentiment, we must center the recipient of such an invitation—the one whose presence is absent and thus summoned to right the longstanding wrong of a monochromatic existence, institutional or otherwise. Minorities of all stripes know the damaging diversity dynamic all too well. A majority community’s desire for minoritized presence, voice, stories, or sharing of experience is merely ornament to the core of a preexisting context. The desire for diversity is not organic, but reactive. To process one’s being desired as an afterthought is frustrating at best. And it is so because diversity veils the reality that so many name without truly naming it at all: we all need each other. We all need each other. In many cases, the marginal person needs basic human recognition from the majority community because, whether or not they want it to, this recognition and basic respectful treatment means something to them. Marginalized people do not want to feel like additions to an environment already established, adornment on the exterior of a vocalized ambition to be “diverse.” In many instances the majority person simply wants to do the right thing, for doing the right thing implies that they are the right thing—that they are being good people. So, they arrive at a place where they want to “survey the land,” they do so, and decide it is too bland or monolithic. It needs people that don’t look like them; said people are subsequently invited into the space in order for it to not be bland or monolithic anymore because again, this is the right thing to do, and good people do the right thing. So, in the midst of parsing out what this diversity thing even means, we have people who long to feel like people and people who long to feel like good people. “Needing the other” is present in both camps. These deep-seated feelings of desire are genuine, complex, and even serpentine. Surviving another’s moral mission in order to conjure your existence in this world is a twisted venture. These desires are coded, tortuous, and agenda-ed, but I wonder if they are brave, for I believe that to broach a diversity conversation honestly, we need brave people.   BRAVE PEOPLE Brave people not only recognize that an imbalanced practice of desire is at work in diversity work, but they ask why: why do we need each other? They ask the hard questions and expect real answers. And when they don’t get them, they are not afraid to tell it like it is: we need each other because power structures and systems have designed social life in such a way that one group’s need is material and the other’s need is moral. Brave people ask how the moral and material are entangled—how one’s goodness is tied to another’s corporality, how right moral standing to one is signaled in basic human recognition of another. (The answer is connected to the religious, but that’s for another conversation.) Brave people see the connections others simply cannot acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge, for they are a little too close to the foundation of the life they’ve worked so hard to build. Brave people in the academy upon hearing the question, “How do we begin to tackle diversity in the classroom?” respond that it is the wrong question. They answer slowly explaining that it only is so because we have not even figured out how to acknowledge what the term “diversity” alone might do in people of the institution, students, staff, and faculty alike. Brave people ask questions assuming that we are all human—and thus we want human things like recognition, and thus do human things like avoid what is hard. Diversity in the classroom, they answer, begins with the teacher, a representative of the institution. What the teacher feels, what they emote, is what the students will feel. Look at the teacher; there is information there. Is the teacher surviving, too, or are they intellectually intrigued by this diversity charge? Do diversity initiatives tear away at their bodies, too, or are they energized and excited to be around something new? Is diversity draining to them, too, or entertaining to them? Do not look away: what is happening within the teachers reflects what lives inside the institution. Brave people ask: what is inside the institution? And, do we want it?   MASKS AND MAGIC To be clear: brave people can come from either group – more likely the diverse persons diversely “hosted” and not the majority persons “hosting” diversity—but they distinguish themselves by taking their line of questioning a step further than naming “what is.” They risk their voices to ask why what is has continued to exist, what it is propping up. Then they ask if we need that structure at all to live well in this world. Other brave people will say no, we do not this structure. Fearful people wearing brave people’s attire will worry about how to exist in this world without some kind of structure in place. Though they want to call themselves brave by agreeing diversity the right thing, their bravery is a mask. Since diversity is survived, we in the academy, especially the theological academy, need brave people. We need to empower them with influence like presidencies, deanships, VP positions, majority board demographics, abundant resources, and decision-making abilities. We need to let them live in a structure different than the conditions that warrant diversity in the first place. We need to take a step back (for several years—probably for decades or centuries) and see what magic their bravery can conjure. Maybe, then, we can be magic, too.

CREATIVITY IS… Learning in the theological academy needs to be liberated. It has been held hostage by standards of appropriateness authored by voices and ideologies long gone yet holding on. They can be quite static and unmoving. The solution? Creativity. But I’m not sure if theological institutions are truly ready for her, for she asks for too much. Within theological education, Creativity needs honesty. She requires both desire and attention to possibility as well as a sense of duty to hold failed systems of current practices accountable. She is bold and voluminous; veracious enough to name when she does not have the appropriate room to thrive. She will, without hesitation, mention how crowded institutional elephants can make a room (no offense to elephants, they are simply not spatially conducive to a healthy theological education environment). Creativity does not hold her tongue, for limit might deter her potential. She announces how holding on to ill-fitting things and anachronistic ideas takes space away from her truest emergence. And theological education is, unfortunately, a space unaware of its spatial misappropriations. Colonial roots can do that to you. Well, what can faculty do to welcome her into their classrooms? “Faculty in theological education,” Creativity would say without pause, “are captives to the institutionality of teaching.” That’s not the answer we were expecting. “I can’t work well, here,” she would continue. “Here, I need the opposite, a spirit of the apophatic. I can tell you where something is by naming where it is not, how it is by how it is not. Here, I need partners who understand the beauty of this refusal—of crafting the necessary in the midst of a mantle of negation. I need dreamers willing to be anti-institutional within their institutions. This clash, of refining through refusing, is where I am.” We can ask her for elaboration: “What does it mean to be anti-institution?” “It means to be me,” she will answer with nonchalance. “But how can an anti-institution institution exist?” we will surely press. “Have you checked the margins?” she will rhetorically inquire.   ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL Check the margins. What will you find? Who will you find? Those who have historically been made the least of these. By virtue of their existence, many know Creativity and her bold requirements quite personally. To be creative in the theological academy means to actively resist the lure of traditional institutional priorities: maintaining the status quo financially and otherwise, re-enforcing institutional standards of rigor and knowledge, and continuing in the practice of institutional “speech-acts,” as Sarah Ahmed brilliantly calls them, where institutions claim their worded hopes of inclusion, diversity, and innovation as actual truth, though the world is aware they are not.[1] Creativity is naming where God is by illumining where God is not; remember, an apophatic spirit. To be sure, Creativity can exist within institutions; she has for years, but has she existed well? Freely? Is she permanent dweller or occasional guest? Is it possible, let alone desired, to make her host instead of hosted? To give her full reign of an institution? No. She is too risky. Total creative power would mean granting room for the ways of being and knowing that have always been in the room but have only known suppression. It would mean granting those who have been forced to make the margins their homes shared space in the center. And no one with institutional influence and say is interested in giving up the center. Creativity considers the historical pawns the priority instead of laborers towards the bottom line. The bottom line of budgets are amenable foes but not the only ones. The bottom line of certain standards of academic rigor, the bottom line of grades as the only means of intellectual analysis, the bottom line of fortifying academic structures created for the white men for whom theological education was created. Creativity wants—no, needs—not only the space of the classroom to leave a deep impression, but say over the entire structure of the theological educational system. Unprepared to acquiesce to such a demand, institutional heads will ask if it’s OK if she appears in the individual efforts of underpaid doctoral students, job-insecure adjunct educators, and exhausted minoritized faculty persons. She will reluctantly agree, or more like make do, but never stop asking in a nonchalant, rhetorical, inquiring tone, “Have you checked the margins?” There is a message in the margins: the classroom could be a space of influence—influence not synonymized as power, but a space where relationships between students and teachers, different forms of knowledge, and measures of intelligence can be reimagined. It can be a space where students’ experiences are taken seriously and where teachers do not have to take themselves so seriously. “Have you checked the margins?” How can the classroom become a platform for the periphery? What must be undone so that there is room for better? Many theological institutions still believe they must keep academic tradition for a church traditionally understood; Creativity instead asks, “What happens if minoritized students were the center in the classroom and institution as a whole? Do institutions want to learn their students? Do they trust marginalized experiences to be a true expression of the church universal?” “Have you checked the margins?” then is another way of asking, “Have you asked yourself?” [1] Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism,” Meridians 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126, especially 104.

The Pandemic Amidst shelter-in-place orders and the hasty swap of physical classrooms for virtual learning spaces, it is clear that Covid-19 is being taken seriously by institutions of higher learning; daily, they are learning to re-shape themselves. Summer courses are going virtual as the duration of national isolation measures are still unknown. It is becoming more likely that a society in flux will delay the return of a “normalized” education system as distancing may continue well past the summer months.[1] Educators learn a number of lessons when thrown into pedagogical precarity and novel teaching circumstances. The first is not to master Zoom’s many features, nor protest the abrupt pedagogical transition,[2] but to closely examine what this moment reveals about their students.[3] This has been the case for me. The first week of teaching-online, the disposition of my class felt strong. Too strong. I questioned the fortitude emanating from many of them—the majority Black. I knew they were experiencing the same pandemic as the rest of the institution. Their tenacity was both admirable and alarming. Many of my students were ready to dive into the new format and keep going. This was their habit; they willed themselves to keep moving because they have always had to, because they have never had the choice of being considered “enough” to have a different response to crisis. No matter the circumstance, even a global pandemic, many had come from a culture of persistence and knew how to respond dauntlessly to tragedy. It was stitched into the fabric of how they knew how to be. The Predisposition This display of scholastic perseverance is racial, historical, unjust, and the aftershock of generational trauma. Many of my students have normalized being in a perpetual state of crisis. But the danger in this is that they rehearse how to feel and be; they do not quite let in what they actually feel, how they actually want to be in this moment. This barrier to them feeling the fullness of their personhood and humanity needs to be toppled. The truth must be named: teaching minoritized students during a pandemic is drastically different than teaching privileged ones. In my class’s case, all of my Black students had a "making a way out of no way" mentality. They assumed a pandemic could be added to the list of traumas they have experienced, witnessed, or accepted as their legacy. The idea of suffering towards one’s success has been concretized in their imagination as descriptive of what their lives should entail. Black students are used to trauma in every area of their lives, including education. Although this pandemic is significantly disrupting their lives, their mentality is to make it work, find another way, hustle, suck it up, and take it on the chin, rather than lament, rest, and most importantly, ask for the leniencies, grace, and benefits other peers are requesting. Though in class they argue passionately for equity, when it comes to tangible opportunities, many Black students do not feel it worth asking for what others are receiving; history has told them their asking is futile. This pandemic is uncovering how truly disturbing the disparities are. Historically privileged students unaccustomed to this level of stress exist on a completely different ontological plane than their minoritized peers. For them, extreme stress is the norm. For privileged students, extreme stress is a disruptor. Minoritized students adopt the “make a way out of no way” posture because hardship is not new, is not jarring. This should alarm instructors. For too many minoritized students, pandemic trauma feels no different in their bodies than the other traumas they have experienced on a normal basis. Responses from privileged peers can then be infuriating for weary-but-way-making-minoritized students. They have never had the option for an entire educational system to respond mercifully or so drastically to their fiscal, familial, or personal traumatic experiences. Mercy in the time of a pandemic, to some minoritized students, can look and feel like privilege.  A Counter-Response Educators need to encourage their students who have experienced historical neglect to allow themselves to feel the weight of this moment, to not tirelessly fight through it. We must grant them permission to reimagine strength and productivity. We must grant the humane treatment they have become resentful seeing granted to others and not themselves. We must help them understand that “success” is in the fullness of feeling the moment and letting our bodies, minds, and souls react how they want. We must, in our own respective platforms, change the metrics of achievement to focus less on succeeding, and more on simply arriving.[4] Our job is to impact how our students receive information; what greater place to begin than within. [1] Ed Yong, “Our Pandemic Summer,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-summer-coronavirus-reopening-back-normal/609940/ (Accessed April 17, 2020 [2] Rebecca Barrett-Fox, “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox (blog), Accessed April 17, 2020, https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/. [3] Nicholas Casey, “College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are,” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/politics/coronavirus-zoom-college-classes.html (Accessed April 17, 2020). [4] Paul Ollinger, “Your Only Goal is to Arrive,” Forge by Medium. https://forge.medium.com/to-survive-the-quarantine-change-your-metrics-e345d79be14b. Accessed April 17, 2020.