Resources by Leigh Greening

Usually, I do this activity the first day of my Introduction to Christian Theology class. We arrange all the desks in a circle. I then ask my students to get a piece of paper and write for a few minutes about one concrete experience they’ve had with Christianity that still impacts their view today. I ask them to write legibly, hinting that these will be read by someone else. Then, I ask them to crumple the page into a ball and throw their experience into the middle of the classroom.At this point, I usually get some confused looks on people's faces: You want me to throw stuff the first day of class? What's going to happen to what I just wrote? I count to three quickly, and just like that: we have a pile of crumpled pieces of paper, filled with stories that say a lot about the assumptions people carry as they enter into a THEO 100 classroom.We go around the room, with each student picking up someone else's experience and reading it out loud. These are completely anonymous contributions, but the energy in the room is heightened: people are waiting to hear their own experience read aloud, or they may be nervous to read the story on the spot. Sometimes it is difficult to read someone's handwriting. Sometimes, the experience is very emotional, and the reader feels nervous about representing someone else's life story with the respect it deserves. Other times, the experience describes a boredom so thorough with this religious tradition that they barely thought when they scribbled down a response.This activity is useful because it gives a safe space for people to express concerns about taking this class, either because of their lack of experience with Christianity or religion, or a painful experience of religious abuse or trauma. Sometimes, people share ecstatic moments of communion with the Divine, miracles, moments where they found their faith in a new light. Grandmothers, parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings join us momentarily in the circle as people share stories of those who have inspired, or stunted, their understanding of faith. The room gets filled with whatever experiential knowledge that students already have entering the theological classroom.I do this activity, and I share this exercise here, because it is a concrete classroom experience that actively demonstrates my own assumptions about transformative education and the sacred, expansive possibilities of a theological classroom. At its best, I believe the theological classroom can be a space of self-exploration. It should be a place of recovery from religious education that dismissed or even discouraged questioning. I tell students that this classroom can be a place to ask your biggest questions and think critically. We might not end up with clear-cut answers; I can almost guarantee we will end up with more questions. But this ability to go deep also makes the theological classroom a site of emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual growth.Deeply influenced by popular educators like bell hooks and dian marino, I believe that in a liberatory education, students and professors are both learners and teachers to every single person in the class. This is not to erase the power dynamic: I am still the one in charge of managing group dynamics, giving grades, and choosing the content to discuss. But it is an attempt to highlight how egalitarian classroom learning like this can honor the students and the professor as complex humans with meaningful experiential insights to share.This activity can be adapted for any topic when you want an in-the-moment survey of what assumptions and perspectives students are bringing with them at the start of the semester. You will notice that having a metadiscussion about what students felt, heard, and observed leads nicely into making classroom agreements. These were shared anonymously, but what guidelines would need to be in place for you to share your experiences?I have also adapted the activity for online courses. When sending out pre-course surveys, I have added this question about one experience that shapes your view of Christianity today. Then, I compile the answers without any names attached to them into an Excel spreadsheet, and we can analyze this data as a class, either synchronously by reading it out loud and then discussing, or asynchronously, as described below.This activity reminds each one of us that we are here to learn about ourselves and each other. Each one of us enters the classroom with valuable knowledge that is derived from our different life experiences. Assigned readings will present us with a variety of perspectives, but our task as co-learners is to explore how these topics show up in our lives and our classmates’ lives in different ways. Sharing our perspectives and hearing our classmates’ perspectives gives a more complex and nuanced understanding of religion and the world that we collectively inhabit. My hope is that we leave the classroom with a stronger sense of our responsibility to work to make life more livable, more just for each other—even if we don’t always agree with each other, we can understand why someone might think the way they do given their life experiences.Activity Description:Ask students to write about one concrete experience that still shapes their view of your class topic (Christianity, social justice, religion, death and dying, etc.) to this day. Ask them to try and describe just one instance, with specific details, rather than a broader summary. They may have multiple experiences, or very few experiences. Tell the students that it is okay—however partial or seemingly small it may be, for today, just focus on one.If it is in person, ask the student to crumple their response and throw it in the center of the classroom. If it is digital, make a format where students can anonymously view each other’s responses.Read aloud the anonymous Christian experiences with intention. If it is a classroom setting, make sure each student reads one. If it is digital, let students read them on their own. Encourage them to pause and digest the stories that their classmates are telling. Invite them to notice where their own story falls into this compilation. Celebrate the fact that we have a group of beautiful, complex, intriguing human beings gathered for this course!After hearing these stories/reading through this document, ask students to reflect on these questions and share in class/post their responses on the forum. Invite the students to pay attention to their classmates’ responses—they may be referencing their experiences in their own theological learning process already...Possible Discussion Questions:What did it feel like reading through this list? What was it like to read other people's stories? What was it like to hear/see your own experience in class/within the document?Which stories did you relate to the most? Why? Which stories were different from yours but made you want to learn more? Why?Which patterns, if any, did you notice in the responses? How might this impact the way our discussions happen throughout the semester?What did you learn by doing this activity? Why do you think we did this as our first activity for this class?These experiences were anonymous. What guidelines would need to be in place for you to feel comfortable sharing some of your life experiences in class? 

It doesn’t sound nearly as poetic when I try to recount Louis Armstrong’s famous line about authentic self-expression after I return home from the week-long Creative Writing Roundtable hosted by the Wabash Center for a group of fourteen professors, preachers, and researchers. We spent the time deeply immersed in ourselves and each other—learning, chatting, eating, writing, and revising at a utopian biophilic retreat house in the Chattahoochee Hills of Georgia. Donald Quist, one of the writing mentors, had played us a recording of Louis Armstrong in a morning session on Style and Voice, sharing this line—“You Blows Who You Is”—while encouraging us to lean into narrating our visions of how the world works. The intimacy of being coached on the genre of creative nonfiction is inescapable; you are trying to hone skills in writing, “true stories well told,” and this means narrating the moments of your own life that have made the biggest impressions on you.[i]“You blows who you is” becomes “blow yourself” in my partial recall of the feeling the phrase evoked in me. I can’t remember the AAVE grammar structure of Armstrong’s words, and my translation sounds crude, sexually suggestive, maybe even like an insult. I laugh as the words come out of my mouth, tired from the plane ride back home after an intensive week. My spouse’s eyes widen with a smile as they turn their head. Their eyes say, “Oh, really!?”My foible transgresses a structure of dialect and a politics of sexual respectability; in this way, it is sort of like jazz, playing with form and exploring beyond the confines of racialized purity culture. This is not to say that my rendering conveys anything close to Armstrong’s original wisdom. But it does demonstrate a real-time example of how the same universal idea can pass through the fleshly vectors of another tongue, showing more ways of being while resonating with something much larger than a single speaker. This mistake made me reflect on some of the most powerful takeaways from a week of mentorship that helped a room full of academics recover their voices from the confines of academic writing in vulnerable, poignant, messy, and creative ways. I can only imagine how these skills may bleed into our classrooms, encouraging our students to find their own air flow and creative voice as we model more fully finding our own.Louis Armstrong’s sentence helped me clarify my own struggles trying to complete my PhD a couple years back. My own style of swirling storytelling that wanted to draw connections between anything and everything crashed against the dialect of linear, argumentative, academic writing. I frequently felt an intensifying squeeze in my throat being in conversation with Roman Catholicism, especially as someone who started identifying as queer and non-binary during my degree program. Writing against can sometimes reinforce the walls you’re trying to break down: women, be silent + same-sex attraction is a sin + the trans and non-binary people you are attracted to don’t exist + you don’t exist became an equation that loudly sent the message: be silent, sinner, you don’t exist. Adopting an academic voice to gain legitimacy was tempting, but something that I seemed unable to measure up to. I felt like I was shooting arrows in the dark, trying to hit an undefined target that others in my field seemed to perceive without the same struggles. During this week, I wrote about my partner’s gender transition, the magic of writing words that spark through the body, as well as witnessing a conflict with counter-protestors at a pride parade in San Salvador. The writing workshop helped restore my trust in my own voice, and gave me confidence to speak, even when such words might challenge the very norms of legitimacy we must navigate in the church, academy, and society.One of the great joys of this workshop was getting an intimate window into the air streams of other participants, seeing their creative writing voices emerge through vulnerable storytelling, hilarious observation, and heart wrenching reflection on themes that touched universal experience through the particular. Birth, death, grief, loss, illness, family feuds, leaving home, returning to a life that was once familiar, now different were themes that resonated deeply with me. One of the first things I wrote down from the workshop was Sophfronia Scott’s invitation to play with words through this creative writing genre. My colleagues shared their life wisdom through playful experiments of the written and spoken word, all the while encouraging each other to grow in our own unique forms of self-expression. On the final night when Lynne Westfield, Stephen Ray, and Rachel Mills joined us to hear people’s work in a final performance set up, we got to see each other blow who we are.I think of one time a few months ago when my bandmates were laughing about a scene from the movie I Heart Huckabees. One of the main characters repeats over and over, “How can I NOT be myself?” in an existential breakdown—or breakthrough. In academic writing, in the classroom, in our creative writing, it is important to remember that even if we are trying to sound different than our souls, or maneuver our air through instruments not designed for us, there’s a way that we actually have no choice but to blow ourselves, so to speak, if we are to attempt to show up and create in this world at all. This goes for our students as well: though we may give them formats, resources, or frameworks, when the deadline hits, we receive the resounding echoes of someone searching for themselves through the avenues we have made available. After a week with the Wabash Center, I am encouraged to open those avenues wide, for myself and my students, to make space to hear who we really are amidst the music of life’s swells and silences.Notes & Bibliography [i] Lee Gutkind, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up (Boston, MA: Da Capo/Lifelong Books, 2012), pp. 60.

Welcome to the Common Questions, an exciting initiative brought to you by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. In this series, we bring together some of the most esteemed scholars and educators in the field to engage with a central, thought-provoking question. The goal is to challenge and inspire. By exploring these questions, we hope to create a dynamic platform for scholarly dialogue, illuminate complexities in education, and enhance our understanding of the transformative power of teaching and learning in these vital disciplines. Featuring a diverse range of perspectives, this effort is a means of expanding the borders of academic rigor with profound spiritual and philosophical inquiry.This time, we asked…“We are all born with medicine inside of us: unique traits and attributes that contribute to healing humanity on this planet. How is your medicine utilized in your teaching?”Gathered here are responses from:Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi, Iliff School of TheologyRebecca Makas, Villanova UniversityCarol B. Duncan, Wilfrid Laurier UniversityHaruka Umetsu Cho, Santa Clara UniversityLeigh Greening, Loyola University ChicagoLaura Carlson Hasler, Indiana UniversityFred Glennon, Le Moyne CollegeIf you are interested in sharing you response to this prompt or future Common Questions, please reach out to our blogs editor, Donald E. Quist at quistd@wabash.edu.