Resources by Cherice Bock

The title Listening to Teach caught my eye. When one imagines teaching, one might first think the student’s job is to listen, while the teacher’s job is to speak, or at least to organize activities geared toward a predetermined outcome. What does listening have to do with the role of teaching? Furthermore, for those teaching within the religious academy, what might a pedagogy of listening look like in the context of religious higher education? Although this book does not specifically target religion or higher education, undergraduate and seminary professors will find many ideas, which will inspire their classroom teaching. The various models of pedagogical listening presented in this text can also serve to challenge traditional teaching strategies that are still pervasive in many higher education classrooms: teacher-centered strategies that often rely on a banking model where content is transferred to passive students. Infusing religion classrooms with dialogical and student-centered approaches can create new forms of learning where students learn not only content, but also how to ask good questions and seek answers in ways that are personally and contextually relevant. For many teachers this requires a shift in one’s perceived role: rather than seeing the teacher as having all the information and students as receptacles for it, this approach recognizes that students enter the classroom with a wealth of experiences and perspectives the teacher may not share. Within listening pedagogy models, teachers serve as co-researchers, observers and documenters of classroom interactions, and interpreters who can help students grasp the meaning of the learning that has taken place. As teachers listen deeply to students and encourage them to learn the art of listening to one another, students are able to enter into the learning process in a way that holds their interest and results in learning that remains in place far beyond a content test. Part 1 sparks ideas for teaching strategies and discussion formats that, although predominantly geared toward children, would work at least as effectively in a classroom of college or seminary students. In these methodologies there are some strategies I have come to through trial and error, but like many teachers in higher education, I have no formal training in teaching. Therefore, learning educational theories and strategies others have found helpful provides a deeper level of intentionality in my teaching, and allows me to see how I might more holistically implement options other than didactic teaching. These brief chapters also provide lists of references that are useful for digging more deeply into any of the specific pedagogies outlined. Part 2 contains ideas of particular relevance for higher education religion classrooms. Chapter 8 focuses on a “pedagogy of discomfort,” which the author, Ashley Taylor, suggests as a way to approach teaching and learning about areas of injustice and oppression. Taylor draws together the cognitive and emotional aspects of learning, allowing learners to critically analyze their own emotional responses. A teacher’s role, then, is to listen intently to student responses and create a safe space in which to acknowledge and examine areas outside of our comfort zones. This approach could be quite helpful in facilitating conversations regarding the approach people of faith should take in the face of today’s many areas of social and economic inequity. Chapter 9 suggests a pedagogical model a religion teacher might find useful: curation as listening. Thinking of a religion teacher as a curator of a faith tradition, with particular emphasis on the Latin word curare, “to take care of,” what would it look like for religion professors to imagine our role as caring for the tradition and testimony of our spiritual forbears, closely listening to the voices (present and absent) in our tradition’s history, and the ways those voices speak to our present context? In content-based religion courses such as Bible, history, and some theology courses, how might the professor’s role shift by thinking of him or herself as a curator of the tradition rather than the all-knowing expert? How might the students’ experience change if they see themselves as co-curators, creating meaning alongside the tradition and their curator-professor? Other chapters also hold useful ideas, including the development of trust, the augmentation of uncertainty, and the ways that one transfers these listening pedagogies to an online format. Similar to the struggle experienced by many K-12 teachers regarding “teaching to the test,” many religion professors may wonder if students can learn an appropriate level of content based on these methodologies, and this is a valid critique. Engaging a pedagogy of listening invites academics to reimagine ways by which a discipline is passed on most effectively and meaningfully. For those recognizing the limitations of the banking model of education, pedagogies of listening offer alternative models to advance lifelong student learning.

Discerning Critical Hope is a continuation of the work of Paulo Freire, whose famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) formed a basis for critical and liberation pedagogy. While his early work included hope, he reiterated the importance of that portion of his framework in Pedagogy of Hope (1992). A small but growing literature on critical hope is extant in the field of pedagogy, but this idea has not yet made many inroads into the published works of theologians, despite its connections with liberation theology and the other contextual and critical branches of theological discourse and activism. (Works on critical hope in the religious education and theology literature include: Bock, “Climatologists, Theologians, and Prophets,” Cross Currents; Kim, “Seeking Critical Hope in a Global Age,” Religious Education; and Kuhne, “A Community Pedagogy of Critical Hope,” PhD dissertation). Many readers of the Wabash Center’s publications will undoubtedly already teach in a way consistent with the critical and liberative themes in Freirean thought, critiquing oppressive social structures and advocating for a world grounded in God’s justice and love. After deconstructing oppressive systems and our complicity in them, however, it can be difficult to provide hope in the theological classroom. I personally find it challenging to move students beyond critique and not simply leave ministry students and seminarians with the task of reconstructing their shattered beliefs and worldviews on their own. Critical hope provides a way forward. Within this framework, critique and hopefulness cannot be separated: the point is that we need both. We need to be able to critique the world as it is, while retaining hope for a different future. Within this framework, the educator engages history with a critical lens, invokes students’ imaginations, envisioning a different way, and provides space for practical steps to enact that vision. Discerning Critical Hope includes chapters by a number of scholars, educators, and practitioners. The authors distinguish between critical hope, naïve hope, and false hope. Naïve hope is optimism without a sense of personal responsibility: expecting that things will turn out alright even if one puts forth no effort to make it so. False hope refers to the idea that working hard will result in one joining the oppressing class, a personal rather than systemic release from injustice. Several chapters critique neoliberal education and other forms of supposedly equality-based educational practices that promise merit-based successes, while in reality supporting colonial and patriarchal systems of power. These can serve as cautions for those who teach religion as well. Which of the forms of hope offered in classrooms are naïve or false hopes? Are faculty willing and able to be drawn to a deeper level of hope that can handle the paradox and mystery of critique, of looking in the face of real suffering and injustice, and struggling ­– hope-filled – toward a better world? Although each chapter has its helpful points, I found chapters 2, 5, and 10 most useful. Chapter 2, “Teaching for Hope: The Ethics of Shattering Worldviews,” by Megan Boler, provides hope for my own teaching. Boler recognizes the real difficulties in engaging critical hope in the classroom: intentionally invoking a pedagogy of discomfort is, not surprisingly, uncomfortable for students and educators alike. Boler states that, when utilizing this pedagogical method, about a third of students will be receptive, about a third will be vocally and angrily resistant, and another third will be numb or apathetic. She shares a difficult classroom experience, including her fears and other feelings as she navigated dealing with resistant students. It gave me courage to continue practicing this form of teaching. Chapter 10 provides a brief history of thinkers who have written about hope, from the Greek myth of Prometheus to Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ernst Bloch, and Paulo Freire. This provides a helpful entry point into different explications of hope throughout history, especially since many of these philosophers had such a major impact on Western culture and on theology. This chapter delineates how and why critical hope differs from previous understandings of hope. Chapter 5, “Plasticity, Critical Hope and the Regeneration of Human Rights Education,” by André Keet, explains critical hope through the lens of deconstruction, bringing Derrida and other philosophers into the conversation. Keet describes critical hope as that leftover form present after deconstruction occurs, that kernel of truth or “trace” that remains when one strips away all the systems and structures that get layered on top of that essential form. Forms must be physical, must be enacted: these traces cannot remain metaphysical or theoretical, but must be lived. For theological educators, as we critique and deconstruct, we hope and trust there is an essential kernel there for our students to discover, a trace, a divine encounter or transcendent truth, a knowing that goes beyond the laws and organizational structures with which we so often burden our faith. As we critique, we also hope: we sense something there, something infinite, personal and universal, a never-changing essence and a dynamic Spirit of creative transformation. We can never pin it down; it is always a process of becoming. Hope is a means and an end, a way of being and a goal to strive for, but we cannot know for what we hope without critiquing the present context and imagining a different world. Nor can we truly hope unless we embody that hope in praxis, naming the problem, developing a solution, enacting it, reflecting, modifying, and trying again in a constant cycle of transformation. Though the authors of this text do not often discuss religion or spirituality, these topics do come up at points, and the struggles to name injustice and enact a truly just and hope-filled form of education will be recognizable to many religious educators. I recommend this book to educators in the religious academy who want to enact a form of education that goes beyond the banking model, who want to challenge their students to engage in critical thinking, who need courage and a sense of solidarity from knowing they are not alone in this struggle, and who also sense a deep undercurrent of hope in taking one step, and then another, toward that imagined future.

Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia does not immediately relate to theological education. However, it does cover interesting and thought-provoking topics of potential use for those working in the theological school classroom. Yearnings for utopia express a desire akin to awaiting the Kingdom of God. Therefore, looking at ways the trope of utopia is formulated in the fields of education and the arts can provide interesting parallels for the theological school classroom. The core question is what would a better world look like? Roberts and Freeman-Moir take the reader through a sweeping survey of topics. In one section, John Dewey and William Morris’s utopian philosophies provide a backdrop for the discussion of utopias as places where each person can practice skilled craftsmanship, developing a craft to the point where it becomes artisanal. In chapter 2, visual art as a dystopian tool is regarded as something that can evoke true sympathy. The authors invite readers into various imaginative spaces to consider how imaginative sympathy can propel us into action, or at least into moral discomfort caused by the difference between the present world and imagined utopian dreams. Chapter 4 discusses the role of images, showing their power as pathways to action that open the imagination to craft a space of deciding and reflecting. This is similar to the praxis-theory-praxis loop championed by many theologians and seminary educators. For the theological educator, perhaps the most à propos chapters are those concerned with the liberation pedagogy of Paulo Freire and the literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Hermann Hesse. The chapter on Freire’s liberation framework provides a useful overview of his life and work with a focus on his utopian realism. The chapters on Dostoevsky and Hesse provide interesting analyses of their theologies and philosophies. I have two main critiques of this text. First, the authors spotlight too few female utopian visionaries. Chapter 3 focuses on writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, but this is by far the weakest chapter in the book. The authors are clearly aware of feminist (or at least female scholars’) viewpoints in the various fields they describe. The book would have been stronger had they chosen at least one compelling female figure’s utopian or dystopian vision to unpack and describe. My second criticism is that the chapters are fairly disjointed, each chapter representing a different topic and field, and there is no final conclusion that draws all the themes together. The authors put forth education as “utopian curiosity” (107), where each opportunity for knowledge-building provides entry into a world larger, more spacious, and more creative than the one in which the student previously lived. Allowing these alternate worlds to wash over faculty imagination may provide ways to take critical looks at the contemporary roles of theological educators and to invite questions such as: What are the aims and purposes of theological education and how do they compare to utopian and dystopian visionary aims and purposes? What is the role of the theological educator in this process? What does pedagogy look like if faculty seek to go beyond simple information sharing to something more complex and critically reflective?