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One photograph: a luminous dark body curved in upon itself, hands pressed to head. One photograph, chosen in haste and shown as part of a recorded lecture in theology class this spring. That’s all it took to bring me face to face with my own racism, and to trigger a torrent of shame. I offer the following reflections not to focus attention on myself, but to explore one particular experience of shame as a clue to what white privileged people might need to learn, in our bodies, about what it means to be human. I offer this as a testimony to what I am learning, dimly, in fragments, in my own body, about the pain we have inflicted on the bodies of others. I offer this as a snapshot of how shame might be an opening to the healing of racism. For the past 17 years, I have co-taught the two-semester introductory course in theology at Columbia Theological Seminary. Every time I teach on theological anthropology, I draw on a conceptual framework that I picked up long ago from Serene Jones to talk about the complexity of the human condition. There are four basic stories of humanity, I say to students, and all four are simultaneously true: we are created good in the image of God we are distorted (individually and collectively) by sin we are forgiven and redeemed we are drawn toward the future in hope for a day when all creation will be made new When we ponder the mystery of what it means to be human, it is vital to attend to all these dimensions to avoid major pitfalls in dealing with other humans. If we do not affirm that all are made good, in God’s image, we can invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. If we affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, we do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. If we confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then we have no hope. If we affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then we can lapse into complacency. We are complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Our theological anthropology needs to say at least this much. This is what I sought to remind students back in February, as we approached the week on the doctrine of sin. In my introductory recorded video, I repeated these four dimensions of humanity, each with an associated image to provoke reflection: an early mosaic of Adam and Eve in the garden (creation) a photograph of a (male) human being curved in upon himself (sin) a painting of the prodigal son welcomed home (forgiveness) a painting of the peaceable kingdom (eschatological hope) As you read this, you may already suspect the problem that emerged. But I did not. Not yet. Friday night, I recorded and posted the video, so that all the materials for the coming week would be available for students working ahead over the weekend. Tuesday morning, as soon as I turned on my computer, I discovered an email from a student naming the obvious racism in the images I had chosen as they were associated with the four stories of humanity: the images of Adam and Eve, the prodigal son and his father, and the little child in the peaceable kingdom all were portrayed as white. The only human being of color in the set of images was in the portrayal of sin. I had presented to my students the lie that white people represent goodness and forgiveness, while a Black person represents sin. Sick to my stomach, I could only shake my head in horror at my own blindness—my own sin. The student raised other concerns about the class as well, but it was the juxtaposition of images that was the trigger for their rightful pain and anger. That day and the days immediately following were a blur of conversations, confessions, and attempts to begin the long work of repair for the damage done. Nights did not bring much sleep. Over and over I replayed what I had done.             Why did I choose these images?             Why did I not see the implications?             I have used these same pictures before, and no one said anything . . .             Imposter. After careful consultation with colleagues, I posted a public apology and promised to try to do better. I listened as students described their pain. I tried, and failed, to focus attention on the harm I had done, rather than fixating on what I was feeling. Yet could it be that what I was feeling was itself an important clue to the harm I had done? The next day was Ash Wednesday. Lent came right on time. Almost immediately, I named for myself what I was experiencing with one word, in capital letters: SHAME. How could I have done this? How could I not have seen what my student saw? My grandfather spent a night in jail in 1930 to protect a Black woman from being lynched after she killed my five-year old aunt in a hit-and-run accident. My father worked in Selma in 1965 to register Black citizens to vote in the days following “Bloody Sunday.” My parents enrolled me in the first racially integrated preschool in the city of Tallahassee. I had been raised to protest all forms of racial discrimination. I knew better. I knew better. My knowing did not go deep enough. As I wrestled with shame, I sought wisdom from Brené Brown, who has spent years doing research on this emotion. Brown says that shame has two big tapes: “You are never good enough” and “Who do you think you are?” These are common tapes in my mental rotation, as I think they are for many women, including those in Black, AAPI, Latinx, and white communities.[1] These refrains reinforce my deeply held fear that in spite of the fact that I am trying my best, someone is going to find out that I am really inadequate to the task. I know these messages are harmful to me and they contradict my own theological teaching — that I am also good, made in God’s image, and am forgiven, justified, and free. The day I was confronted with my own racism, the Shame Tapes were all I could hear. I curved in upon myself, like the image I had chosen to represent sin. Never good enough. Who do you think you are? These loops stand in stark contrast to what scholars like Kerry Connelly describe as the story that many white Americans tell ourselves: that we are basically “good” people.[2] “Good people” do not intend to harm others. They mean well. More insidiously, as Connelly describes it, good people are “nice and never disruptive, and they value peace and comfort and the status quo.”[3] This tape, too, is well played in my head; though I rarely if ever describe myself as a “good person,” I often say it about others, to highlight their positive intentions even if a particular behavior was harmful. “They’re good people,” I might say, “They did not mean any harm.” This monolithic insistence on the goodness of the race one identifies with is obviously problematic, for many reasons. It reduces “goodness” to “niceness,” which has gotten twisted into “whiteness.” It confuses fundamental human value with nondisruptive human behavior that conforms to the status quo. In addition, it fundamentally masks the complexity of who we are as human beings—yes, created good in God’s image, but also deeply warped into patterns of behavior that harm ourselves, one another, and the earth. Despite Connelly’s focus on the tendency to see myself as “good,” on that day in February, and on the days following, it was hard for me to see any kind of “goodness” in myself. Instead, it was the shame refrain: “I am bad.” This is where Brené Brown focuses attention in her own research on shame. She points out that shame says, “I am bad,” while guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame becomes a totalizing narrative enclosing a person in an identity as “bad,” while guilt focuses on a particular action as bad. Brown urges people to move from shame, which immobilizes, to guilt, which can motivate a person to change and do better. Brown has much wisdom here, rooted in years of research with people whose narratives of shame have prevented them from thriving as healthy human beings. Shame can be debilitating, even deadly. Too often, shame is connected with sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality. Young women are particularly vulnerable to being “shamed” for the way they dress or for engaging in sexual behavior. Shame in this sphere of life is surely problematic, reinforcing unhealthy views of gender and sexuality that need to be healed. Shame is also destructive in the world of addiction. My friend Jenn Carlier effectively documents the power of shame in her work on addiction and atonement theory. “The paradox of having some sense of agency and yet feeling compelled to keep drinking creates a space for the tremendous shame and self-loathing that perpetuate [drug] use. [One writer] says of her behavior, ‘I’m sick. I’m responsible.’ It is this combination of being sick and yet feeling the shame of moral failure that makes it so difficult for those struggling with addiction to get help.”[4] In the case of people suffering from addiction disorders, the experience of shame often becomes the driver for continuing to abuse substances, and the continuing abuse then feeds the cycle of shame. The constant reminder of being “never good enough” keeps people mired in patterns of self-destruction, preventing them from seeking help. Shame can clearly be destructive, especially when it is imposed by an external community that repeats the messages, “You are not good enough. You are a failure. Who do you think you are?” When these are the only messages that we hear, we hide from others. We curve in on ourselves, refusing to admit our need for help. It is especially problematic among marginalized communities, who often internalize messages of shame for “failing” to live up to societal expectations of financial success, behavior, physical appearance, or ability. This kind of shaming is not what I want to endorse. Yet I am convinced that the shame I experienced taught me something vital about myself, and about race and racism. While Brené Brown advocates moving from shame to guilt, I think that at least in some cases, and especially for those of us who carry privilege, shame is what we must face. Shame as a deep-seated, embodied encounter with my own failing is still the best word I can summon to describe what I experienced, and it revealed something I need to know. To call this simply “guilt” would be to reduce the problem to a single incident, an example of an action that I needed to confess, make amends for, and move on from. “Shame,” on the other hand, signals the depth and endurance of a problem in which I am implicated, for which I am partially responsible, and from which I cannot completely extricate myself. In this case, shame welled up as I confronted my own racist entanglement. It is precisely shame that reveals an important truth about who I am—and who we are. Wrestling with painful shame offered me a dim awareness of the horrific pain endured by members of the Black community—including the real pain of my own student, which I had exacerbated by my thoughtlessness thoughtlessness.[5] Further, shame does not have to immobilize us. A recent Rabbis for Human Rights essay offers this insight into the positive side of shame: “A remarkable teaching in the Babylonian Talmud (Nedarim 20a) reads: a person who has no shame, such a person’s ancestors did not stand at Sinai. I don’t read this as genealogical research, but as ethical teaching. To be heirs of those who stood at Sinai, to stand ourselves at the foot of the mountain, means not only to affirm identity. It means to take responsibility.”[6] Shame then, rather than immobilizing us, can ignite responsibility. I am starting to think that “shame” is another way of naming what some Christians have called a deep awareness of original sin: the truth that human beings are infected by inexplicable tendencies to harm ourselves, others, and the world around us, to turn away from the holy and loving Mystery we call “God.” In my case, shame shocked me into recognition of my own complicity in the sin of racism, as well as offering a tiny hint of the destructive kind of shame experienced by Black people and other marginalized persons. Shame, in at least this case, can be an engine for empathy and change. Of course, this is not the end of the story, but just a beginning. Much as I hate to admit it, I fully expect to run up against shame again, to be faced with my failings again and again, to feel that sickness in the pit of my stomach. I hope, however, that having named it this spring, I will be better equipped to acknowledge it for the revelation it is, and to hear the Shame Tape not as a single voice in my head, but as one truthful voice among others that I need to hear. The real danger is not the experience of shame itself, but the experience of shame by itself, as the only story of who we are. Just as it is problematic to tell a single story of “goodness” without the truth of sin, so too it can be deadly to experience shame without also being told “you are forgiven. You are still beloved.” The courageous student who wrote to me back in February to call out my racism in the classroom has shown remarkable patience and grace in our ongoing interactions. In spite of exhaustion and pain in the wake of that week’s presentation, the student continued to show up to class discussions, alert and engaged, ready to discuss the readings and offer insights. They also offered forgiveness (accompanied by an appropriate call to accountability). In so doing, this student enabled me to see myself not as locked into the narrative of shame, but as someone who might be transformed by grace. Mine is not a simple story of sin moving to redemption. Instead, my experience this spring has deepened my understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. I am not just one story. Rather than telling a single story about ourselves, or simply moving from one story to another (with the corresponding risk of premature closure), I think it is more appropriate to recognize that we are complex creatures, living multiple stories. We are AT ONCE beloved and corrupted, forgiven and unfinished. Several years ago, one of my daughters shared with me the work of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, who gave a now-famous TED Talk in 2009 on “the danger of the single story.”[7] I’ve been thinking about this, too, in light of what happened this spring. Adichie reflects on her own experience of growing up reading British and American children’s books, which led her to assume that there was only one story of what books are, and what childhood is like. When she discovered African literature, she realized that there were other stories that could be told—stories that included people who looked like her and lived like her. Later, when she came to college in America, her roommate was shocked by Adichie’s elegant English because the roommate had a single story of Africa that shaped her perception of what all African people must be like. On her first visit to Mexico, Adichie confronted the danger of the single story in herself. “I was overwhelmed with shame,” she says, when she realized that she had assumed that all Mexicans were one thing: “the abject immigrant.” “I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.” If we tell a single story about other people, it narrows our understandings of others into stereotypical assumptions, usually based on stories told by those in power. Adichie illumines this point powerfully. And she has helped me to see the further point that we need multiple stories not only of other people, but also of ourselves. I have taught this before, but shame has shown me the truth of it in a new way. If I do not affirm that all people are made good, in God’s image, I invent division and hierarchy among different groups of humans, some imagined as more valuable than others. That is what my image choices conveyed. If I affirm that we are all made in the image of God but fail to grapple with the reality of sin, I do not tell the truth about the way that we wound each other, ourselves, and the world that God so loves. That is the truth that shame is teaching me. If I confront the reality of sin but do not also proclaim God’s forgiveness and transforming grace, then I have no hope. That is the possibility of transformation that my student and my colleagues are offering me. If I affirm that we are forgiven now but do not also announce the eschatological promise that God is not done yet, then I can lapse into complacency. This is where my work lies. We are, all of us, complicated, fragile, wondrous, beloved, and unfinished creatures. Thanks to the student who called me out, I am learning more deeply the truth of what it means to be human.   *Read the accompanied blog by DeNoire Henderson HERE   [1] Recent psychological and sociological research is exploring how shame functions in distinctive ways in different cultural communities, but with similar messages of not being worthy or good enough. [2] See Kerry Connelly, Good White Racist? Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice (Westminster John Knox, 2020). [3] Ibid., 11. [4] Jennifer Carlier, Finding God in the Basement: Addiction and Metaphors for Salvation, PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2021), 37. [5] Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo helpfully distinguishes between productive shame and toxic shame in a way that resembles my own hunch: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/4/18/18308346/shame-toxic-productive. In addition, many of the essays in On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency edited by Suzana Milevska (2016) are also working along these lines: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/suzana-milevska. [6] Michael Marmur, Rabbis for Human Rights email newsletter, 5/13/2021. [7] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-10322.

How does my teaching connect the learning in my seminary classroom with congregations? As an historian of Christianity in the United States, I am aware that theological education has primarily adopted a trickle-down approach to answering this question—a trickle that flows from professors to students to congregations such that the students are the conduits connecting faculty like me to the many persons and messy challenges in their churches. The traditional method entails professors equipping students to take what they learn and apply it as religious leaders in their churches or church-related agencies. This model relies almost entirely upon students. The professor has one task whereas the student has at least two. Professors are responsible for teaching their subject matter with lectures, discussions, assignments, and exams. Yet, students must first demonstrate comprehension of the subject matter in the given coursework and then discern how to utilize what they have learned in their present and future ministries. The way that professors help to produce congregational transformation and social change in this paradigm is through their students. Professors teach their students well and these students then lead their congregations with the analytical tools in biblical interpretation, pastoral care, and theological ethics they acquired in the classroom. In other words, the instruction of the professors reaches a multitude of congregations through their students. When the semester is complete, it feels like the professor says to the student, “I can’t go with you to your congregation, but you have my lecture notes, required textbooks, and commentary on your research paper. All this, along with the grace of God, will be sufficient for you. And I guess we can stay in touch by email.” When I was a seminary student, the process of synthesizing and applying my theological education to my congregational ministry was entrusted to me to figure out by myself. The faculty at my predominantly white seminary conveyed little interest in my personhood as an Asian American and my ministry in a multigenerational, bilingual, and immigrant congregation. In some courses, I felt as though I left my personhood at the door before walking into the classroom to learn about the supposed superiority of theological frameworks and doctrinal formulations shaped by an assembly of white men in seventeenth-century England. Even in the courses in which my personhood was welcome into the classroom, there were not opportunities to integrate what I was learning there with the congregations I had come from and was headed to after graduation. Like my faculty colleagues in theological education today, I am committed to avoiding the mistakes of my past teachers and forging a better pathway for my students. None of us declare that we are going to do things exactly like they have always been done. And yet, how does our teaching directly and effectively connect the learning in our classrooms with the congregational contexts of our students? In the first few years of my teaching, I devoted time in every class session to prompting students to share about both their congregations and how the subject matter at hand would be received in their congregations. These discussions were insightful, raw, vulnerable, and generative. In recent years, I have made this kind of congregational synthesis and application more explicit in my pedagogy. In addition to discussions, I require students to reflect deeply about their congregational contexts and offer precise analysis connecting our lessons and assigned readings to their contexts, along with the opportunity to express moments of either detachment or potential division. For example, one prompt calls upon students to present a thick description of their past, present, or future congregation. The subsequent prompts ask students to first construct specific ways they would apply what they have learned from the assigned readings and lessons within such a congregation and then identify the promise and peril of their applications to uncover what is at stake for both their leadership and their congregation. My teaching confronts the long histories and ongoing legacies of racial prejudice, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, and LGBTQIA+ exclusion in American Christianity because I believe it is necessary for seminary classrooms to grapple with, rather than gloss over, past sins and present consequences. I am also convinced that my teaching must employ collaborative pedagogical processes in which my students and I work together to develop strategies and refine skills to help foster incremental change in congregations. Some of our congregations are committed to intersectional justice and social change whereas others are fiercely resistant to Christian approaches that disrupt familiar systems and theologies of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, and American exceptionalism. Bringing our congregations into the seminary classroom is therefore a sobering enterprise that is sometimes more dispiriting than inspiring. But too much is at stake to leave our congregations at the door.

We all craft a syllabus for each class, but honestly what is a syllabus and for whom is it written? I hope to expand our vision. The quick and typical answer is: A syllabus is a plan for how we hope to engage students with content and practices of our field of study. Of course, a syllabus is a covenant of learning between teacher and student about the outcomes students might expect from the class. Yet syllabi have many other audiences, and their construction is a daunting task. Over the last two years, I have reviewed nearly a hundred introductory syllabi in my field (Christian religious education). By completing a content analysis of them, I hoped to discover what is at the heart of our shared discipline. I learned that two emphases usually guide classes in my field: attention to the art of teaching and to the congregation as a context for learning. I thank the colleagues who entrusted me with their commitments. As I read them, I was in awe of the quality of teaching. I honor their integrity. Despite this, many of these colleagues expressed anxiety with the way we often think of syllabi. They offered a challenge: We need to make a difference! That means, they said, we need to significantly change the way we construct classes. Above all else, they argued, syllabi are a plan for a journey that impacts lives and the wider world. That is not an overstatement. Person after person told me that “business as usual” could no longer be the case. Classes had to change! The COVID pandemic, the rush of classes online, the inequities revealed, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the continuing violence in the public square against people of color revealed challenges that have redirected the whole class-planning process. We write syllabi for students. We make our expectations and our commitments clear. We write syllabi for our colleagues, often following a prescribed form, to demonstrate how a class fits into a school’s curriculum. Moreover, we write our syllabi for colleagues in our guilds to show how each of us stands within the traditions of a field of study. But my colleagues told me that syllabi need to be more – much more. They have a wider audience and impact. Syllabi are a concrete and sacred expression of our vocation of teaching. They embody hopes for the future. Syllabi are our efforts to connect students, fields of study, a curriculum, and outcomes that make a difference in the world. Through our teaching, we want to influence the ways students live their vocations and interact with the wider worlds of church, faith, ministry, and public service they touch. We each make choices. We include some foci and ignore others. We emphasize some practices of learning – reading, study, analysis, creative projects, oral presentations, or written papers, to name a few. We seek to embody the wisdom and practices of a field of study. But more! From wherever we are located, from the wisdom of academic traditions in which we are embedded, and from faithful efforts to live a vocation, we join with our students on a journey. We choose what we will emphasize. We choose who we will serve. We choose what difference we will make. It is obvious, isn’t it? A syllabus is a concrete reflection of our hope to make a difference. Syllabi are filled with our passion for our field, with the liveliness of the worlds our students inhabit, and with our best efforts of teaching. Teaching is not the replication of what we did before, nor honestly what the authorities in our fields say it is. Teaching is our calling, and the syllabi, our promises.  By reviewing over a hundred syllabi, I saw similarities that define a discipline, I saw practices of good teaching, I saw colleagues struggling, but I also saw a passion to make a difference in a world that needs teachers and great traditions of hope and wisdom. Just as books and articles shape dialogue and influence policy, even more so do syllabi. Teaching cannot be “business as usual.” What difference do you hope to make?

In my early Caribbean childhood of the 1960s and 1970s after leaving England, the country of my birth, stories surrounded us. Often, they were whispered and overheard in partial, redacted fragments, or they were spit out into the air with force, the words ricocheting off the walls and buildings of our individual and collective histories and rebounding in fragments to listeners in myriad shapes and patterns. At other times, the stories were gently ladled—soft, soothing, and nourishing in the recollections of elder women and men who chose their words with care, deboning the sharp bits while maintaining the flesh of the experience for young listeners. As children, my brother and I were often reminded never to eat fried fish while simultaneously carrying on a vigorous conversation because the slipperiness and sharpness of the fish bones made them more likely to shift from between our teeth and lodge sharply somewhere between the first bite and the swallowing of piquant deliciousness. Fairytale horror always got our attention. I regard the silence of eating fried fish as one of the crucial lessons of conversation because it taught us how to listen carefully. Now while fish bones were discarded, the bones of chicken and other meat were often ground to a powdery mass—“down to the marrow”—the chewing of which was an enjoyment of the meal. In this way, eating bones were both cautionary as well as savoured metaphors about speech, listening, and enjoyment. We grew up with grandparents, people born at the turn of the last century, descendants of the enslaved, on small islands of the Eastern Caribbean in what was then a far-flung shore of Britain’s imperial project. At one time in the late eighteenth century, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his soldiers were stationed there in Antigua, at the naval dockyard built by enslaved folks on the south coast looking over the waves at Guadaloupe. Sitting on the front stone steps of our grandparents’ home, too young for school, we too were sentinels who drank in salt air. There were a few cars and trucks, but mostly we watched people; they embodied the world beyond garden gates, doors, and louvres (windows). We saw children in their freshly pressed uniforms going to and from school and grown folk walking by and calling out their greetings, selling their wares with snatches of song, including fish, ice wrapped in burlap, and salt peanuts. And if there were praises and curses belonging to dramas that began long before they walked by, we heard those, too. My brother and I traveled through the centuries, daily. We walked by structures, including the Anglican cathedral that we visited each Sunday, built and rebuilt over the last few centuries. Nothing was designated a historical site. I do not recall any plaques or markers. There were gravestones and cannons and cannon balls, material evidence from a colonial past. A woman selling fruit around the corner from our house greeted my grandfather in his mother tongue, Antillean French Creole, every day as he took his constitutional walk after lunch. I imagine her saying “Sa kap fet?” (How’s it going?). The scales on which she and other market women confirmed the price of her goods, accurately pre-weighed by her touch, were heavy dark metal forged before our time. When we returned to the house with longer shadows in tow perhaps my uncle would be there, his car parked outside and the gentle tick tock of his wristwatch marking modern time. We learned to move between these various eras. We were travelers seated on the front steps of the house, books and words and stories for fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere from which we took deep garden-perfumed gulps, sunglasses a barrier protecting our eyes from some alternate sun. After flying to Canada in the early 1970s in a giant version of the red plastic plane from the cereal box, we felt the shift and change, jarringly, in the unaccustomed motion of escalators and elevators and trains and buses and another English language. But the stories, we remembered the stories, and we learned to chew and spit and talk and write them. In my teaching and design of Caribbean and African Diaspora religious and cultural studies courses, these storying practices contribute to imaginative pedagogies. They are especially useful when engaging students in the study of topics which are potentially difficult and traumatic. Storying as a teaching method has the capacity to both disrupt and challenge as well as to protect. Storying invites multiple vantage points and critical assessment. Finding the story bones is a process of meaningful engagement with the past and holds the potential to connect our various worlds of being as teachers, scholars, and learners.   Photo by British Library on Unsplash Enslaved people cutting the sugar cane on the Island of Antigua, 1823. Download this photo by British Library on Unsplash unsplash.com

In striving to craft a trauma-informed pedagogy while teaching about social justice, my reflections have often circled around a central question: When is it appropriate to use tragic and traumatic current events as examples of injustice in the classroom? I’ve been pondering this question for the last few years, while teaching undergraduate courses at a predominately White, Catholic institute. The majority of students take my classes to fulfill a General Education requirement. Most students are from Christian denominations at varying levels of personal faith commitments, and few might elect to take a theology class if it was not required. On the one hand, making connections between course content and the world in which students live is effective. Tethering discussion to an event that every person in the classroom knows about (e.g., the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021) is an attention-grabber. When a well-known event, like the Atlanta spa shootings, affects a particular community more significantly than others—in this case, the AAPI community—discussing it in class signals to students that I take the trauma seriously and care about how they’ve been impacted by it. It can also be time during which my White-identifying students—especially those from predominately White communities—may be more open to learn a much-needed lesson about the reality of White supremacy and White privilege. On the other hand, I worry about retraumatizing students from communities affected by the event. I’ll never forget how a few years ago, after a 2-week unit on racism in my theology and social justice course, a Black male student told me: “I have to think about racism almost every minute in my life. I always have a target on my back. I drive to school with my wallet on the dashboard, just in case I get pulled over. When I get to your classroom, I want a break. I just want to talk about Jesus.” This student did not need me to cater to White students, in trying to convince them that Black lives really do matter. And it clearly added to his trauma when I did. This question of how often to bring traumatic current events into the classroom came to a head while I was teaching about theology and justice this spring, in an undergraduate class entitled “Just Theology.” My class is constructed around several modules, each analyzing a theme of injustice prevalent in US society, through a theological lens. Modules center around topics like poverty, war and weapons, global warming, sexism and patriarchy, racism, immigration, and homophobia and transphobia. My students were predominately White (around 10 to 15 percent BIPOC-identifying) and fairly gender balanced. In my 24-student undergraduate classes usually no more than one student (if that) openly identifies as trans or non-binary. In some classes, I’ve had up to 30 percent disclose to me in written work that they identify as LGBTQ+, but not all are open on campus. This last semester (Spring 2021), I had no shortage of options for bringing current events into our classroom discussions. But I was also deeply aware of how my students were living in a permanent state of instability and uncertainty, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Capitol attack, the US-Mexico border crisis, ongoing police brutality and murders, record high unemployment rates, and frequent mass shootings. Introducing students to disorienting dilemmas with conflicting theories and positions, as I usually tried to do in other semesters, almost seemed insensitive in a context already so unstable and polarized over these same issues. After chatting with some colleagues about this struggle, I came to articulate and adopt a pedagogical principle: discussing traumatic events in the classroom, in such an unstable time, necessitates a stabilizing scaffold to frame the events, that is, a theory or intellectual framework that is responsible to course content and objectives.[1] Remembering my former student’s words about wanting to “just talk about Jesus” in my class, I decided to include in my syllabus a piece by Kelly Brown Douglas which makes connections between the stand-your-ground murder of Trayvon Martin and the crucifying murder of Jesus.[2] Of course, in requiring reading like this, appropriate trigger warnings and alternative assignments need to be offered to students, especially during traumatic times. But the reading assignment seemed to help several students connect my class to the world around them in a personal way. By reading, discussing, and writing about Douglas’s connection between Jesus and Trayvon, most of my White students, who needed to, gained some awareness of White supremacy and White privilege. Some of my students of color commented on how they had never been introduced to a liberating reading of Jesus and appreciated this one that connected deeply to their current everyday struggles. The piece provided nearly all of the students a concept to evaluate—a stabilizing intellectual scaffold around which to consider disorienting and nonsensical tragedies and traumas. Teaching through 2020 and 2021 has been difficult, to be sure, but my students helped me to see how many of them necessitate and yearn for critical thought even more during times of tragedy, uncertainty, and trauma. [1] I am particularly grateful to my colleague and conversation partner, Dr. Kristi Law, Director of the Bachelor of Social Work program and Associate Professor at St. Ambrose University, for helping me think through this idea. [2] Kelly Brown Douglas, “Jesus and Trayvon: The Justice of God,” in Stand your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015), 171-203.  

One of the realities that the pandemics of the past eighteen months have brought home is how the different life situations of students change the impact of collective trauma on their bandwidth for learning. For some of our students, when the world ground to a halt, they found themselves with more space to focus, to engage with what they were learning, to connect with others. For many of our students, caregiving for children and sick relatives, loss of income and economic stability including access to safe housing, increased incidences of domestic violence, threats of racialized violence in public spaces, life-and-death struggles with mental health conditions, or the high rates of infection and death in their communities made focusing on learning nearly impossible. The dominant model of education that we work with in the United States is a factory model of schooling, developed within the shift to industrialization when we moved from a tutor/pupil dyad to a mass-produced improvement of worker skill. We put many bodies into a classroom with one teacher for efficiency, assume they all go through the same exposure to materials and activities for learning, and then grade the outcome on how well it measures up to some ideals set before we ever met the people who would enter our classroom. We started grading students at the same time we started grading meat and eggs, as products for consumption by the outside world. Those who don’t measure up are blamed for their lack of inherent ability or effort and failing them out is the responsible communication to the outside world of their individual deficiencies. It seems banal to have to name it, but this is a profoundly anti-relational and unjust mode of schooling. Again and again in working with early career faculty throughout the last year, we reminded each other of some basic realities: we had to focus on what is most important in learning; we had to respect where are students are in the moment and what they are capable of engaging given their lived realities; we had to remember that care for students as complex humans and getting through this season is as important as whatever we felt we owed some discipline, administration, or future employer in terms of measurable skill or knowledge outcomes. I have been reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ poetic marvel of a book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020). The collection originated as a series of online posts relating insights she had gained from learning about the colonizing classification and decimation of marine mammals in their encounter with white Western culture. She committed to becoming an apprentice to their wisdom in survival, adaptation, collaboration, and movement through the dangerous currents in which they found themselves. In a piece thinking about schools alongside marine mammals, Gumbs defines schools as “organizational structures for learning, nurturance, and survival, both intergenerationally and within generations” (55). When Gumbs reflects on the schooling behaviors of striped dolphins as they faced the decimation of a disease outbreak in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1990s, she notes: What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently. (55-56) I heard the community of scholars gathered in the Wabash early career digital salon asking similar questions. What if we turned this factory model on its head and instead asked how we could care for each other in the classroom and move together so that at the end of term people knew more about what was critical to know than they did at the start of the term, but did so in a way that honored the scale of care in the midst of a culture experiencing the concurring pandemics of novel coronavirus and not-so-novel systemic racism and wealth inequality? We learned a little bit about what it meant to “school” as a community committed to the survival and thriving of generations during a season of marked crisis. I don’t mean to romanticize this moment. Of course we did so in the midst of cultural calls for students to “go back to school” even as teachers at all levels were working tirelessly month after month to continue schooling despite enormous obstacles to learning. This public invisibility and cultural diminishment repudiated the ongoing schooling that was creating a “scale of care” for “learning, nurturance, and survival” from kindergarten to doctoral seminar. And, unlike Gumbs, whose work seeks to nurture emergent networks of activist belonging and communal resistance across and outside of institutions, in institutions of higher education faculty are embedded in late capitalist economies of exchange where investment and return, tuition and degrees, educational debt and faculty salaries are painfully and inextricably linked. To challenge the production models of social and economic capital in higher education for an organic model of caring for each other and moving together to adapt to existential threats is ironically to risk being called unprofessional, lightweight, irresponsible. However, developing such oceanic schooling may also be a revolutionary and adaptive response for survival in the midst of forces threatening to overwhelm the human species to extinction, from climate collapse to racism to economic inequality.