Resources by Barbara J. McClure

In my previous post (the second in a series of three) I reflected on deep learning as part of the formative educational process. I explored what it might look like to focus on students and the world they live in rather than on teaching our own particular (and often narrow) expertise. I suggested that part of the responsibility of forming students’ selves and lives involves commitment to our own personal and institutional growth. My institution (Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University) holds out a vision of a world transformed by God’s love, mercy, and justice and names as its mission to educate and inspire people to serve God’s diverse world as leaders in churches, the academy, and public life. We claim to value “Scholarship that engages churches, the academy, and public life; Justice that enhances diversity, flourishing and wholeness; and Practice that enlivens intellectual, spiritual, and professional growth.” I resonate deeply with these values. I came to Brite, in part, because of these values. I long for any conversation among my colleagues about how we accomplish these in the classroom and in the lives of our students (and in our own lives, for that matter). I want to hear more about how they model careful listening, how they dignify diversity as a desirable norm, ways in which they manage to draw underrepresented voices out, and how they model effective conflict management in classrooms and hallways. How do they they help students learn to identify the implications of what they learned for engaging the suffering world? What skills and tools, what ways of being do they try to model? How do they enact justice and engage their work toward wholeness in the classroom and beyond? How do they enliven personal, spiritual, and professional growth? How do they teach toward cultivating a more flourishing world? These questions would likely sound ridiculous to many of my colleagues. “It is my job to teach them a discipline,” they might rejoin, “not teach them who or how to be.” Fair enough, I suppose. This is, after all, how most of us were trained. We learned to read, to dissect an argument, to analyze, and maybe to construct. Many of us never had a course in pedagogy, studying neither its purpose(s) nor effective practices. Our doctoral programs had us focused on content rather than process. We have gotten comfortable there and have had to continue the habits we learned as graduate students to have any chance of succeeding in the academy. I get it. I have done it, too. But I want to suggest that what we imagine our role as theological educators to be exposes how we think of our students and our responsibilities to them. Do we see them as students needing to learn biblical exegesis or history or psychoanalytic theory? To what end do we teach these? Would it change how we teach if we understood that our students are the future, the potential embodiment of God’s work in the world, a potential source of resistance, hope, and healing? Surely even those of us who have not studied pedagogy have heard of explicit curricula (what we claim to be teaching, what we focus on) and implicit curricula (what we teach by being ourselves, by the choices we make in the classroom; what we include and do not include on a syllabus; how we engage students and the teaching and learning community, etc.). Perry Shaw asserts that students learn more through the ways schools function—and in the way they experience the classroom—than they do from any verbal or written content they receive. Shaw quotes pedagogical theorist Robert Ferris as saying, “the faculty are the curriculum” (Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning [Langham, 2014] 10, emphasis added). If Ferris is correct, then many of us have some serious unlearning to do. Most of us are not training future academics; rather, we are teaching students who will soon be parish ministers and other religious leaders, leaders of not-for-profit organizations, community organizers, and activists. They are or may be parents, partners, neighbors, and leaders. And yet many of us (myself included) teach the way we were taught. We teach the way(s) we are familiar with. We teach as professional scholars. But our students need something different. They need something more. They deserve something more. So does the world we all share. If the faculty are the curriculum, then our students are watching. They are absorbing our ways, our values, and our commitments. They are being shaped by the outlines of our own lives. I won’t speak for you, but my life as an academic is often pretty narrow, focused, and insular. As noted above, it has had to be, in order to gain and keep any status in the academy that I have “earned.” I am comfortable in my habits, the rhythms of my days, and in my heady work. But if Ferris is correct, I should be alarmed by what I am modeling. The academy can be a competitive, self-absorbed, and zero-sum place. The coin of the realm is critique and challenge and jostling for distinction. Is this what we want our students to take from their time with us? If we played out Kant’s categorical imperative, what kind of world would we be helping to create? Such a question invites us teacher/scholars to ask ourselves why we do what we do and to what we want to contribute. It calls us further than that, though. It invites us to ask what kind of being human we are modeling for our students, what we want to be modeling, and what hard and intentional work it will take to close the gap. I am a trained psychotherapeutic clinician, so the idea of sitting with someone to explore the stuck places in myself, to engage my potential areas of growth and change, and to face the wounds I carry does not hold stigma for me. Others will find their own way, and I support that—as long as we can all arrive at the same place: understanding theological education as a formative endeavor, whether we are clear and intentional about the ways we are forming ourselves, our communities, and our students or not. Deep learning is usually referred to in positive ways, but I worry about the kinds of deep lessons our students are taking with them without our intention, our consent, or even without our awareness.

In my last blog on this site (the first of three parts) I reflected on what difference it could make if theological education institutions focused on formation of students rather than imparting information to them. That blog generated some interesting comments, questions, and feedback, so I thought I might dig a little further here. In my seasoning as a scholar and a teacher it has become clear that my focus is not on the students in my institution per se. It is not even on the material I want them to learn. As a pastoral theologian, I focus on the suffering in the world, and God’s longing for the wholeness and the flourishing of all that can only happen through justice, reconciliation, and the labor of peace. I think about my students concluding their time with us at Brite Divinity School and facing anew the world and all the impediments to the flourishing of God’s world. I want to empower them to see what those impediments are, to name them and call them out. I want them to leave Brite with the capacities to envision new possibilities, excite others about those possibilities, and get others involved. I want them to move forward with the knowledge and the tools to offer healing care, to lament and attend to suffering, both personal and systemic, to create genuine community. I want them to have grown and changed personally and to have become better integrated during their time with us. I want each of our students to have the chance to become more whole themselves as they prepare to contribute to the healing and wholeness of others and of communities, no matter where their lives take them. It became clear to me many years ago that no amount of reading Sigmund Freud (or his daughter Anna), no amount of systems theory, or object relations theory, or even narrative theory could accomplish these goals for them. Saying this does not negate the importance of those theories (and my syllabi continue to show my firm commitment to the idea of reading as fundamental to learning). But it does shift how I understand my work. I now ask myself how any course I teach will help students understand what wholeness can look like, what flourishing might taste like. I hope each course will help them understand better how to affect that, both for themselves and for others. Perry Shaw argues in Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning that good teaching invites students into deep learning (Carlisle: Langham, 2014). Deep learning, as Shaw defines it, is the learning that continues to affect people 5, 10, or more years beyond the classroom. Deep learning creates space for students to wrestle with the implications of Freud or Heinz Kohut for the world they are facing themselves and the world others are facing. Deep learning teaches students how to connect ideas with lives, practices with change, and gives direction to hope. Deep learning shapes the way students think, how they feel, act, reflect, and engage, more than it relates to what they know. Deep learning changes the way people live and move in the world. It dares to help people figure out what it means to participate in the life of God in the world, to discern what God-as-life-force is doing already, and to magnify that. This is a shift, Shaw asserts, from education-as-teaching to education-as-learning, -changing, and -growing. This kind of education asks less what we are teaching and more what students are taking with them. It teaches them how to assess what is valuable and what is “fake news” in a world inundated by “information.” It helps them sift through the noise to what is most important and meaningful, especially from a theological perspective. This kind of education-as-formation will still require some foundational knowledge, but less of that and more of the work of applying that knowledge to the challenges people and communities are facing. Formation focused education invites much more wrestling, struggling, and deepening than education-as-teaching might. Education-as-formation helps students understand how content relates to and can perhaps be used to change the worlds that they are in. It is funded by the conviction that the God of Life longs for the flourishing of all that is, and that our calling as theological educators is to figure out how to respond to that longing and to do the hard work of living into flourishing; understanding its impediments in ourselves, in others, and in our world; and developing practices (including teaching practices) that nurture flourishing. Deep learning, then, requires that we educators join students where they are and encourage them forward a step or two and much deeper than learning for information does. It invites us to listen to them and the challenges they and their communities are facing. It requires that we faculty get out of our heads on occasion and into our own hearts and souls. It means that we ourselves must be willing to enter ongoing processes of growth and formation, too, as we seek to live more fully into our own wholeness and lean harder into our own flourishing. Deep learning happens best in the context of institutions that understand their role in teaching the formation of effective community, where staff and faculty model growth and integration, and where students can experience a taste of what each of us ultimately seeks.

In the last several years, I have been pondering the purpose of our work as theological educators. This seems especially pertinent because many mainline churches which both send and receive our students are dying, theological education institutions have found it difficult to attract new students, most of these institutions are in budgetary crisis, and more schools are closing every year. I have wondered what is important about theological education, what value it adds, and what about it lasts. In the process, I have considered my own experience in seminary and graduate school. It has been 29 and 26 years, respectively, since I entered those programs and I have been reflecting on what has stuck, and what made the time, money, and effort worth it. I admit that I don’t remember many specifics unless I scan my shelves for the books that I read in those programs; they are old friends and evoke a difficult season when I was undergoing a major gestalt shift—a time when old paradigms were losing their power for me. These books remind me of a time when I began to understand more deeply something I had been struggling to clarify. They are old friends who introduced me to new horizons and opened new possibilities in my thinking and doing and being. I have kept these books not because I ever imagine using them in a classroom myself or because I need them for a writing project (they are too outdated for either of those): I keep them because they represent significant—even lifechanging—moments of my life. I remember my professors, my classmates, our discussions, the papers I wrote, the meetings in faculty offices where I engaged the ideas in these books. I think about the arguments I wrestled with, developed, let go of. I remember wrestling with my own understandings, and with teachers and peers, as I felt myself changing, growing, emerging. I don’t value these books and the memories of my time in seminary and a doctoral program so much because of the career they have afforded me; I value them for who they helped me become. I have been playing with the idea that perhaps the benefit of theological education is less in the information we educators impart or the professional training we provide, and more about the kind of learning and experiential communities we build together. Perhaps our value in the world as theological educators is less about the preparation for a particular ministry, the ordination process, or further schooling, and more about the kinds of opportunities we afford students to be formed, to be changed, to grow as people, no matter where they end up or what they do in their professional lives. Students will be formed by all the new information they are exposed to, of course, but also—and maybe more importantly—students are formed by the relationships with people and ideas they develop while in our programs, by the ethos of curiosity and the room to ask gnarly existential questions, by the freedom to interrogate life and the world and themselves and God. The goal of formation emphasizes who people are becoming: how they think, how they behave, how they treat others, what they value, their level of emotional intelligence, the ways they respond to God in and for the world. What if theological education institutions had as their mission to be sites of exploration toward the formation of people so that they—and those they engage—can flourish? Willie Jennings’ book After Whiteness (Eerdmans, 2020) is one of the most important books on teaching, learning, and organizational leadership I have read in recent years, and I want to be a part of what he is imagining. I want to see what could happen if theological education institutions come to be seen as places to belong, to grow, to change, to be creative, to think hard, to come alive in one’s own faith, hope, and love. What would it take for them to become places that explore formation as good people rather than primarily to impart knowledge or deconstruct embedded theologies? Jennings assumes—and I agree—that all human beings yearn for a place to belong and a place to learn how to flourish, and to have that modeled for them. What if theological education institutions became those places? What if they were places people came to first to explore rather than pursue? In the process of this work, of course, we must name what is going on in the world, what is wrong, what impedes flourishing. As Jennings notes, this requires the difficult and painful work of understanding our current condition(s), exposing and decentering and deconstructing the dominant (white, often male) view. This is something divinity schools like mine excel in. But people yearning for flourishing need to understand something else, too. We need to lean into hope, love, faith, grace; to understand all people as beloved, as having the imprimatur of God, as having voices that need to be heard, that deserve to be heard; to have the tools to enact justice. Theological educators in this model would need to have an explicit vision of flourishing, a sense of what could be, of what surely the Divine Urging is calling all of us toward. Those of us teaching theology and religion have an opportunity and, I think, an invitation to hold out such a vision, a creative imagining of who and what God is, and for what that God longs, for her creation. So many of our students live fragmented, trauma-filled lives. They come to our programs from homes, schools, communities, and jobs that are toxic, stressed, and struggling and, often, oppressive. What if we invited them to join us in seeking something more grounded, more life-giving, more whole, and helped them, for example, resist the neoliberal impulse for mastery, control, organization, ownership, separation, and possession (even of ideas)? What if we not only taught such a way but modeled it ourselves as well? Would that change our focus and our practices in the classroom? Would that shift our criteria of “success”? In this playful imaginary, theological educators and the administrators of our institutions would be normative, prescriptive, and committed to their own formation and growth as well as that of students, and of the communities of which we are a part. We could do this while also being critically analytical of the ideas we promote. We might ask explicitly, for example, what the sacred texts tell us about flourishing. We might examine what various religious/faith/philosophical traditions have to say about the good life. We might wonder aloud what is the story of the Good as witnessed in the sacred texts. We might inquire how to sift through all the broken humanness in the sacred texts to get to a message of hope, love, grace, redemption, care. If a deep understanding of flourishing and formation toward such a life and world became the goal, I wonder how that would change how we teach our students to read sacred texts, and whether it would influence how we teach the histories of Christianity. Would such a goal change how we teach pastoral care in our complex world? Would the flourishing of ourselves and our students as the goal influence how we teach ritual and religious practice? Would it change how we teach theology? Would it change how presidents and deans lead the institutions of which we are a part? Would it change whether and how we create community together? I am not suggesting we become proselytizers: I want to retain and exercise my critical thinking, even in relation to the commitments I hold dear, but I sense that a shift in our mission and focus might change some of the ways we do things, moving the emphasis from production to exploration. I yearn for more conversations among ourselves as theological educators and with our students about what we might do differently that might help heal ourselves, each other, our institutions, and maybe even our particular corners of the world. These kinds of conversations take work and intentionality, to be sure, and it would take effort to alter our emphasis from education as information to education as formation toward flourishing. For starters, we would want to develop some shared understandings of what flourishing looks like, what it requires, and how theological education could contribute to it. And, of course, formation and information are not so distinct; it is more a matter of alterations to emphases and processes and outcomes I am pondering. How/would an emphasis on formation to enable flourishing reconfigure our curricula, our faculty, our teaching practices, and the students who might be interested in joining us in that exploration? We might continue to attract fewer and fewer students seeking ordination credentials, it is true, but it is also true that we may spark the desire to join us in people who don’t know exactly what they will do with their time with us, people with tangled existential questions who are looking for a place to belong and explore and grow. And if they joined us in these efforts, who knows what old friends they might take with them?