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Have you ever asked a question in class for which you did not know the answer; a question for which you did not have THE one answer in mind? Have you ever planned an assignment or designed a learning activity that was so freewheeling that you did not know what was going to happen? What kind of teaching requires the teacher to be comfortable not knowing what will happen next or ever? I suspect it is teaching which is attentive to the personalities, dreams, capabilities, fears, and know-how, of each student in particular, and the entire class as a whole. Knowledge of each student allows for learning activities, group assignments, selected reading materials, and course aims which are sophisticated, risky, and precisely designed for the times at hand and the diverse contexts for which the students must be prepared to lead. My hunch is that we too typically create assignments for which the answers and outcomes are forecastable because we have not taken the time to know who is in our classroom. We have specific ideas, standards, and quantifiers for the student to “get it right” with little understanding of the student’s individual life experience or knowledge base. Students in turn, while navigating the current educational system are brilliant at analyzing each professor’s wants, then giving that and only that. Professors’ quirks are a text that is read, understood, and traversed as much or more as the content materials of our courses.  Hallway gossip and faculty reputations assure us that adult students are experts at studying the grading habits and personality types of teachers. In other words, teachers teach with strict disciplinary maps and scripts - a strict adherence to formulaic curriculum – a kind of one size fits all students. The questions and the answers are charted out and planned before gathering with students. Students strain as much to learn the formula of the prescribed script as they do to learn the content of the script. They ask, “Is this going to be on the test?” They say, silently or out loud, “Just tell me what you want me to tell you back?” Students learn the ways of gaming the system better than they learn the content of our courses. What if our prescribed assignments are a detriment to our student’s ability to be effective in the workforce? What if scripted outcomes serve only to further domesticate learners? What if the lack of open-ended exploration champions mediocrity rather than excellence? I suspect it will take creative bravery to reshape, rethink, reconceive our classrooms. And not just creative bravery in-general, but bravery which prioritizes learning our students, their uniquenesses and their potentials. The good news is that creative bravery is commonplace among artists and people who understand creativity as a way of life. The challenging news is that this kind of bravery is suspect and punished in the current educational system. A clip that went viral on social media depicted the ritual of an elementary school teacher meeting his students each morning at the doorway of their classroom. The daily ritual was to shake hands with each student each morning. Each student had a unique handshake for greeting the teacher and the teacher knew the unique handshake for each student. Some of the handshakes were simple – one or two gestures. Other handshakes were complex – looking more like a dance between student and teacher than a traditional handshake. It was clear to me that this kind of welcoming communicated to each student that he/she/they were seen and known by the teacher. This was a powerful expression of a teacher who understood the necessity of each student feeling their distinctiveness, being in relationship with the teacher, and knowing they were seen.   When students feel seen, known, and welcomed in classrooms, learning improves, deepens, and becomes more meaningful. The myth of teaching for one-size-fits-all is possibly the worse practice of our teaching craft. We must grapple with finding ways to identify and honor that which each student brings into the classroom because each brings uniqueness. In a jazz band, no one expects all the musicians to play the same instrument – that would be ridiculous. No one criticizes the drummer for drumming or the saxophone player for playing the sax. Each musician is expected, required even, to bring what they have in the way that they have it; in their own voice. Each instrument is required to make the sound of that instrument. Consider then, that each student should be expected to bring their unique voice and particular understanding to the collective composition of the classroom and that the teacher must welcome all the different kinds of voices. Creativity requires diversity. The band leader’s job is not to strip the musician of their uniqueness or their sound, but to blend, sculpt, highlight, spotlight and listen. The leader’s job is to know the many voices and create ways of showcasing each potential contribution.  One of my ongoing frustrations while I was on a teaching faculty was that by the end of my introductory course I felt as if, now, I knew my students well enough to teach them, but our time was up. It took time, a semester or longer, to learn to hear them, to be able to sense their concerns, learn their sensitivities and sensibilities, and to relate my expectations for their learning. By the last day of class, I knew their patterns, their vocabulary, their senses of humor and how to alleviate some of their fears. By the last day of class, it felt as if I could NOW shake their hands or ask them truly open-ended questions or give them innovative learning assignments for which I had crafted with each one in mind. Forming relationships with our students takes time that is so often not built into our typical models of education.  There is an intimacy that occurs between learner and professor that only happens in the relationship of teaching. It is a profound experience to be seen by a respected teacher and told that, as a learner, you have what it takes. These relationships are potentially life giving and life changing. These relationships are not formed when classrooms operate on a factory mentality where student needs are relatively inconsequential to the teaching. The intimacy shared between teacher and learner makes vivid the humanity of each. Classrooms are spaces where the vulnerability and openness of the adult learner can be met with hope, empowerment, reinvigoration of curiosity, and healing imagination.  This pedagogical intimacy was made vivid to me the first time I read a letter of recommendation written for me by my graduate school professor, advisor and mentor. The letter described many of the attributes and capabilities I knew I possessed. It also discussed his vision for my potential, my promise, my likely successes as a scholar and religious leader. Much of the budding possibility that he described - I was unaware of. And, until reading his letter, I was unaware that he had seen me so well. My mentor, for the three years of study, had paid attention to me in our courses and as I worked as a research assistant. This letter humbled me and set an expectation for which I have been striving.  In contrast, as a reader of applications for jobs, grants, or other high-level projects, I have read letters of recommendation which demonstrate the writer has no passion or knowledge of the applicant. The letter is perfunctory – a kind of mechanical formula which might fit any person who sat through a course and for which, now, there is an obligation for recommendation based upon an exemplary grade.  I have actually read the same prose in a letter submitted by one recommender for two different people (oopsie!). It is clear that the writer of the letter did get to know the student and cannot earnestly recommend the applicant. Many awards have been denied based upon the weakness of a flimsy recommendation by a person who wrote a one-size-fits-all recommendation. If we do not get to know our students, we cannot recommend them for anything. Teaching at a distance during quarantine has strained and taxed our teaching communities in ways we have not yet fully lived. I suspect we have lost intimacy with our students. The physical separation of teaching synchronously or asynchronously coupled with the lack of casual interaction in the hallways, cafeterias, and school assemblies has frayed our relationships and weakened our educational communities. The content of our courses is paramount, but without deep relationships with our students, teaching rings like a hollow bell.  There is something intangible and irreplaceable about being face-to-face with students as they learn and grow. What would be needed to get to know students who are enrolled in your course before planning the course? What exercises might you plan for the first weeks of a course which would enable you to see, feel, and hear the potentials of our students so that lesson planning might be more precise? What learning activities can be tailored to the uniquenesses of each student?  What would it mean to plan a syllabus which can be refined as students become more vivid to you throughout the semester?  What kinds of community activities will need to be designed for those who entered degree programs during the quarantine resulting in only being known through online mediums? If you are teaching huge classes, what strategies will enable you to get to know students? The risk of  getting to know our students is, I suspect, well worth it.

In Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking, an integrative core class which explores the history of tolerance, intolerance, and interfaith efforts in the United States, one of the core texts we use is Eboo Patel’s Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Experience (2018). Central to Patel’s argument is that America needs new, more inclusive civil religious narratives. His book chronicles some of the ways in which Americans have expanded civil religious narratives in the past, however imperfectly, through the invention of the phrase “our Judeo-Christian heritage” in the mid-twentieth century as well as through expanding notions of whiteness. According to Patel, we are at a pivotal juncture in our nation’s history. We need new narratives. Without them, whole swaths of people will continue to feel unwelcome and alienated, and since the health of our civil society depends on civic participation from all of its citizens, our failure to create new, more inclusive stories of who we are could have disastrous consequences. In Out of Many Faiths, Patel focuses on the Muslim-American experience in particular, highlighting ways in which Muslims have been excluded from American society, not unlike what Jews and Catholics experienced at other moments in our history. He also highlights ways in which Muslims are working to expand our civil religious narrative. The somewhat off-color and yet unexpectedly unifying SNL monologue delivered by Aziz Ansari the night after Donald J. Trump was elected president is, according to Patel, one such example. Towards the end of the semester this year, I invited students to highlight other recent examples in the media of artists and performers and making efforts to expand our civil religious narrative. One student presented on Jennifer Lopez’s performance of “This Land is Your Land” at the Biden/Harris inauguration. He argued that Lopez’s performance of this important American folk anthem expands the civil religious narrative by linking a population of people who sometimes feel unwelcome—Hispanics—with a powerful and pervasive American symbol, suggesting that they are. Another student presented on the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 release of the song “Where is the Love?” featuring black and brown Americans against the backdrop of one of the most prominent of civil religious symbols, the American flag, to the tune of the powerful lyrics calling for unity and love. Just days after these presentations, I attended our university’s commencement in which a Jewish student was asked to deliver the invocation. Given that my university is Jesuit Catholic, this felt like an important moment. I was moved to tears by the eloquence with which she invoked a spirit of blessing upon our community. I’m not sure asking this student to deliver the invocation was an expansion of our civil religious narrative, given that Americans are already generally comfortable with prayers from Christian and Jewish traditions. It did, however, feel like a possible expansion of what it means for us to be Jesuit. Perhaps inviting students of various faiths to lead us in prayer is not a watering down of our Jesuit identity, but rather a truer expression of who we are. Or was it merely token, even exploitative? Did asking her to represent herself in this way cover up all the ways in which we have failed and continue to fail to build a more inclusive community? As part of a faculty reading group on Khyati Joshi’s new book White Christian Privilege (2020), several of us have been discussing the question, how is Regis Catholic? On a micro level, it’s the same question I have been asking my students to think about all semester, how are we American? In other words, what values hold us together? And can those same sets of values be used as a source of inspiration to build a more inclusive and religiously diverse community? My students in Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking struggled to answer this question. When discussing the narratives we tell about who we are as a nation, some identified with Nikki Haley’s speech at the 2020 Republican convention, where she argues that “America is not a racist nation,” or, as she describes, at least not fundamentally so. Other students found Zenobia Warfield’s (2021) story of America, “This is America,” more compelling. In it, Warfield argues that the white supremacist insurrection on the capital wasn’t un-American as many claimed; it was in fact emblematic of who we are as a nation, as “this country was founded on violence and desecration.” This was a difficult, emotionally-laden conversation to facilitate, the kind Khyati Joshi urges educators to engage with, rather than shy away from. For we all have different levels of investment in the systems that uphold religious and racial hierarchies and dismantling these systems requires emotional introspection (209). In the faculty reading group on Joshi’s book we reflected on our recent participation in our university’s commencement ceremony, discussing all the moments when we were asked to participate in both civil religion and the traditions of our Jesuit university. Not all of us were comfortable removing our hats, or standing for the national anthem, and though moved by the invocation performed by our Jewish student, some of us worried she had been used. We do not have consensus about what it means to be a Jesuit university, and thus how we should represent ourselves at such a ceremony. Nor is there consensus about who we are as Americans. If we want to expand our civil religious narrative, how do we go about doing so? Do we need to build consensus first? Does that begin in the classroom? Does it take place in the planning of commencement ceremonies? There is a lot of emotional investment in these questions. Fears will surface when we start to talk about changing the narrative of who we are at a national or collegiate level—fears that reshaping, or expanding, will result in something being lost. I would argue that neither our national identities, nor our religious identities (at the personal or college level), need to be lost in order for us to become more inclusive, but identities do need to change, and there will be growing pains that come with that change. It is my hope that Joshi’s approach, of foregrounding the emotional together with the intellectual, can provide us with useful resources as we navigate these growing pains. Image #1         Jason Leung @ Unsplash  Image #2         Lucas Alexander @ Unsplash  Image #3         Jordan Crawford @ Unsplash  Image #4         Koshu Kunii @ Unsplash 

As a writer and a teacher I am always looking for ways to inspire my creativity. This summer I have committed to a practice of getting out in nature. I will be visiting national parks, state parks and doing some cabin stays. The goal is to incorporate the sounds and sights of nature as I seek times of solitude, stillness and quiet as keys to my inspiration. The first such trip this summer was to The Getaway two hours north of Atlanta, with a stop by Chattahoochee– Oconee National Forest. The video below shares my experience. My hope and prayer is that you might be inspired to find the practice of being in nature, solitude, stillness and silence as a means to fuel your creativity as a teaching professor.  Photo 1: CHATTAHOOCHEE–OCONEE NATIONAL FOREST @RALPH BASUI WATKINS Photo 2: THE GETAWAY @RALPH BASUI WATKINS  [su_spacer size="20" class=""] [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuhjCWFrAic[/embedyt] [su_spacer size="20" class=""]

At Nashotah House Theological Seminary, a crucial element of our participation in the seminary’s Anglo-Catholic tradition is the student body and faculty’s regular presence at morning prayer, mass, and sung even-song. In the seminary’s beautiful chapel, surrounded by stained glass and hand-carved wooden statues, we sit in the antique wooden choir stalls lining the chancel and join together in worship. As a junior faculty member, I quickly learned a Nashotah House tradition: your choir stall is not yours to determine. The seats are assigned based on seniority, and priority is zealously guarded. Where you sit matters. This tradition of established place carries its own ethical challenges and requires its own ethical interrogation. What assumptions regarding hierarchy and privilege in our tradition and amongst our student body and faculty does it underwrite? To provide one example, our tradition has come into conflict with our commitment to ensuring that students with mobility challenges have equal opportunity to participate in worship, requiring questioning and ultimately changes to our tradition. Teaching social justice in a tradition requires inviting students to engage in a similar (although broader) excavation of that tradition. Of course, a crucial part of this teaching involves learning alongside my students how to step outside the tradition to critically confront the moral and ethical failure of Anglicans, such as the use of Anglican theology at times to support slavery and colonialism. This critical engagement requires accepting that our seats often are gained at the expense of others, and may require change and even surrender on our parts. These moral failures have been well documented and extensively explored, so excavating the resources for critique has been fairly straightforward. An unexpected joy of this type of excavation, however, has been how many good and constructive resources for social justice remain to be uncovered in the tradition. The Oxford Movement which launched Anglo-Catholicism accompanied liturgical revision with a serious theologically-grounded commitment to working for social justice, spanning generations of the movement and manifested in many different forms. Excavating these resources provides the opportunity to invite students into a different form of engagement with the tradition. Students have become imaginatively engaged in questioning their own social assumptions and career aspirations by reading about the so-called “slum priests,” for example, whose commitment to “ritualism” was equaled by their commitment to working to challenge the economic, social, and political structures which created and justified the appalling living conditions suffered by the poor of British manufacturing cities. Students have learned how to connect social critique and advocacy for justice to Anglican theology through reading the works of the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. Of course, exposure to works of Anglicans such as Pauli Murray and Bishop Desmond Tutu have expanded their conceptions of Anglicanism’s work for social justice beyond Anglo-Catholicism and the British Isles. One of the most fruitful resources I have found for retrieval within the tradition are the editions of the British Critic—the journal edited by John Henry Newman in the early days of the Tractarian controversies. Along with discussion of history, doctrine, and liturgy, the pages of this Christian socialist leaning journal are filled with essays of social critique and challenge. One of the essays, written in 1842, which has engaged and challenged my students the most is a long theological critique of the practice then common in British parishes of renting pews to the social elite. The author describes how the poor, walking in and seeing the great boxed pews lined along the front of the parish church, are confronted with an image of the priority of wealth and privilege which runs exactly opposite to Jesus’s message of the priority of the poor in the gospel. Rather than encountering “the image and pattern of heaven” in the church, they see “the world, the flesh, and the devil apparently in full possession.” As part of the Anglo-Catholic liturgical revival, the author calls for the removal of these pews and the restoration of the parish to the poor and needy whom Christ intends to possess it. Through this image, students begin to encounter the connection between the Anglo-Catholic tradition of beautiful worship and architecture with the beauty of justice and service. Over my time at Nashotah, I have realized that our tradition of choir stall seating incorporates not only seniority, but also service. At every service, one of the sacristans (the student-leaders with the most authority in worship) always forgoes sitting in choir to sit by the back door of the chapel—he or she is placed there by the tradition to greet, care for, and assist any guests who might join in the service. My hope for my students is that they leave our seminary having learned that Anglo Catholicism not only provides choir stalls, but also provides models and methods to emulate, just like the sacristans sitting at the back of the church ready to serve and care for others. Where you sit matters.