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Our attempts to teach towards openness, towards possibility, towards new glimpses of an uncharted future mean that teaching can be demanding, even confounding. One way I learned to embrace this approach was by incorporating rituals in my course designs.The use of rituals in classrooms allows students an experience that moves them into realms where meaning-making requires imagination and vision. Rituals can provide provocative and creative ways for students to enter and inhabit course content that otherwise would go overlooked, under-investigated, or ignored. Rituals create space for learning through intrigue, encounter, and invocation.Below, I recount a class ritual I designed to coax students into claiming more power, agency, and voice in their own learning. Here is my key ritual.Ten graduate students and I went to a retreat center by the sea for an intensive 4-day course focused on the notions of mystery and imagination. At our first session, we gathered in a large room and sat on folding chairs arranged in a circle. The all-purpose room had a wall of glass windows with views east toward the Atlantic Ocean. From the circle, we could not hear the waves, but we could see the sea stretching out. The afternoon sun gently setting into the horizon was lovely and the perfect backdrop for our key ritual. It was a beautiful place to learn together.I sat in the circle holding a black, beaded purse.In preparation for the first session, I had collected an assortment of keys. My collection included skeleton keys, hotel room digital keys, metal house keys, roller skate keys, safety deposit box keys, padlock keys, piano keys, house radiator keys, clock keys, keys for maps, a thumb drive with Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”— as many kinds of keys as I could find. The black, beaded, drawstring bag with long strands of fringe on the bottom was a treasure I had since my junior high school days of boho fashion.  I was delighted when I found it in my closet. It was the perfect vessel for the ritual.Holding up the bag in front of the class, I jingled the contents so the learners would hear noise. Over the sound of clinking and tinkling, while using a suspenseful and serious tone of voice, “I am going to bring the purse to each of you. When I come to you, reach in and select one object. Just one—you cannot handle two!” I chided. “When you pull the object out, this object becomes yours. Its power will become your power. Do not let anyone else view your object. Keep it concealed in your hands. Hold it to your bosom. If you want, glimpse at it through your interlaced fingers or turn your back for a peek. Do not let anyone see your object.”Some students became reticent. Some looked a little hesitant. I was having fun.I passed around the circle taking the open purse in turn to each student. I held the purse high so the contents could not be viewed. Each student, following directions, reached in, retrieved an object that was some kind of key. As instructed, students took care not to show their key. Some students used both hands to keep the key from view.  Once everyone had a key – I asked, “Before we show what we have chosen, or more to the point, what has chosen us, does anyone want to give back what you took from my bag? Does anyone want to return their choice? Or does anyone want something different?”These questions brought a thick, full silence into the circle. I waited for their decisions. Everyone signaled that they wanted to keep what they had chosen.“Very good, then. You can reveal what is in your hand. You can reveal what has chosen you,” I said.Students unfurled their fingers revealing their gift, revealing their key.Some looked happy – had smiles on their faces.Some looked quizzical – had arched eyebrows and squinting eyes.Others looked confused – they looked at their key then around at the keys of the other students as if they had received something strange.I continued, “For the duration of our course you will carry your key with you. You will get acquainted with the power of your key. Remember—keys open doors, providing access. Keys also lock doors, providing safety and protection. This key will give you power that you already possess but have not accessed or for which you have not been disciplined. Your key will help you become more of who you already are. With your key you have the power to open and close at your behest. During this class get acquainted with your power and use it wisely.”I instructed that the next step was that each student would take their keys and a notebook to a quiet spot inside or outside of the retreat center. Each person was to find a comfortable and private spot to converse with their key. For an hour, each student will interview their key; contemplate their key; draw their key; write a story, song, or poem with their key in the starring role. Get to know your key and record what your key tells you about its purpose, power, history, and value.To my surprise, these instructions were met with eagerness.An hour later the group returned to the circle. Each student told a fascinating narrative about what they had learned from and about their keys. The reports were in the forms of drawings, lyrics, journal prose and poetry. Each was beautiful in its own way. For the rest of the course students explored the power of their own agency and imagination and how those attributes were symbolized and animated by their key. At the last session of the course, I brought the drawstring beaded purse back to the circle. I asked if anyone wanted to return their key to the bag. Everyone kept their power.This is what I learned. When courses are more than spaces where information is memorized then regurgitated, students who are unacquainted with self-reflection and possess little self-knowledge feel lost or are easily overwhelmed. When classes are spaces of wonder, curiosity, and deep deliberation students must be acquainted with their own power to question. They must be willing to bring their own agendas and to consider a wider way of being. Too many students are unaware of their capabilities and capacities as learners. They are unacquainted with their own genuine. Adult learners who enter classrooms with little self-knowledge are often skittish, suspicious, and ill-prepared for the challenges of classroom endeavors. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to teach.  It takes some modicum of self-awareness and clarity of purpose for learners to take hold of courses at a level of depth worth pursuing. Learning requires students to have agency – to have keys to their own power.Our job as teachers, in part, is to assist students with un-learning the ways which dampen their voices, and which keep them afraid of new learning. We must assist them with cultivating agency so they are less encumbered during their pursuits. Rituals in teaching can move students past their fears and into their power, courage, and commitments. Giving students keys was my way of ritualizing my expectations that they would use their power to learn, to come to voice, to tap into their own desires and yearnings. Reflection questions:What rituals can we lead so that students feel more themselves in our classrooms – i.e. empowered, voiced, and capable?What does it mean to teach toward possibility and how do rituals make the impossible possible?What rituals assist in creating a learning environment where students learn their own value and worth and dignity?

Imagine quickly stepping out for a coffee break between classes. It sounds simple enough: latte or mocha? But for international students, especially those with F-1 visas, that seemingly easy choice turns into a mental checklist: Am I carrying my passport? My I-20 form? Do I have a valid driver’s license—if that’s even permitted? Could today be the day I’m stopped and questioned?As theological education shifts into virtual and hybrid formats, many international students remain physically tied to campus to meet strict visa requirements. Dorms and seminary apartments become their main living spaces—where they eat, sleep, and study. Yet in a climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and possible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) visits, the usual rule—carry your identification at all times—can feel like a heavy emotional burden.When domestic students pick up their backpacks, they carry laptops, books, and perhaps a snack. International students carry something extra: proof that they belong here, documents that validate their right to study and exist in this country. A simple stroll to the campus café can trigger anxieties like: What if someone demands my papers? Do I have everything in order? Behind these immediate concerns lurks a deeper, more painful fear—do I truly belong in a place intended to nurture my spiritual and intellectual growth?Of course, it’s not only about paperwork. The possibility of being asked for legal documents at any time creates an ongoing stress that many domestic students may never feel. It can negatively impact their class interactions, making them cautious about speaking up or standing out. It’s hard to fully focus when part of you is always on alert.Additionally, international students often encounter explicit and implicit biases—messages implying they’re outsiders, job-stealers, or perpetual foreigners. I’ve spoken with students who describe exhaustion from continually navigating these prejudices, worrying about complicated reentry processes if they travel home, or feeling anxious about political shifts that could abruptly alter their visa status or employment prospects. While their peers confidently pursue internships and research opportunities, international students wrestle daily with layers of uncertainty.As graduation nears, the pressure piles on. Optional Practical Training (OPT) and finding a visa-sponsoring employer can feel like uphill battles in an already competitive job market. Whenever I talk with students about their futures, I sense the stress they carry around from potential bias or outright hostility—an unfair burden during what should be an exciting time.For those of us who teach or mentor—whether or not we’ve ever navigated immigration rules ourselves—that small question, Do I need to carry my F-1 visa papers at all times on campus? opens a window into their day-to-day experiences. It’s a reminder that institutions meant to nurture faith and scholarship can sometimes feel more like guarded checkpoints.Belonging isn’t cultivated by a single individual’s effort; it flourishes within communal care. If we pause to recognize the emotional toll our students carry, we can more intentionally practice radical hospitality. Instead of leaving international students to shoulder their anxieties alone, our campuses could provide accessible legal support and staff trained specifically to handle immigration-related encounters. In our classrooms, we can intentionally create opportunities for students to share global perspectives, fostering empathy and breaking down harmful stereotypes.Institutionally, we might consider advocating for clear campus-wide policies protecting students from sudden ICE interventions and providing ongoing training to equip faculty and staff with a deeper understanding of immigration complexities. Many schools already work hard to support international learners, yet it’s always helpful to ask: What does genuine safety look like here? How do we ensure no one feels compelled to carry the weight of constant legal anxiety?When we truly listen to the question—Do I need to carry my F-1 visa papers at all times on campus?—we’re challenged to see the campus through international students' eyes—a place where daily life in a place they call home can still feel uncertain. It invites us to imagine, create, and nurture educational spaces where every student can learn, engage, and thrive without having to endlessly prove they belong.Thus, this question is not just about legal documentation. It's about belonging, empathy, and our shared responsibility as theological educators to build communities where no student must carry the weight of constant vigilance alone.

As I head out to teach my off-campus Jan term class, Backpacking with the Saints, I look at my syllabus again and think about how I assess learning in an immersive experience. That is, how can I give a grade for things like hiking and praying and journaling? Am I grading how much the students were transformed? “You experienced a 100 percent transformation on this trip, so you get an A. But you only experienced a 75 percent transformation, so C.” We know that’s not right. So, what is it I’m doing? And how can we think about assessment in any of our immersive experiences, in any outdoor learning?This may also be a question for people who read Dr. Westfield’s recent blog about “running wild” in the classroom. When we make students the primary agents in their learning and get creative in the classroom, letting them “run wild” and have discussions or play as the means of their learning, how do we assess their learning? That is, how do we assess wild learning?First I think about what I want students to learn. What are my objectives? What are the things I want students to walk away with? Any particular content? Particular skills? If I’ve designed a good class, this was the first thing around which I built the structures of my class. If I don’t decide this first, then I can’t create a class with a direction. Each of the readings supports students reaching those objectives. Each assignment needs to be a learning exercise focused on those objectives. Each lesson and classroom or out-of-classroom activity is aimed at ushering students further into their understanding of the target ideas and skills.If I’ve done that well, then the assessment questions are simply, “How well did a student understand that idea?” and “How well does a student demonstrate that skill?” If one of my objectives for Backpacking with the Saints is that students understand the peculiarities of the desert saints and their reasons for searching for God in the desert, and my assignment is a presentation about a particular desert saint’s life and theology, I can assess how well they grasp that group of ideas. I can also assess that from the conversations we’re having. What are students bringing up in “official” discussions and in casual conversations over meals and while hiking?Another objective for Backpacking with the Saints is that students reflect on their own spiritual practices and formation. Will I assess that they have reached a certain level of sanctification? No. But I can assess how thoughtful they are being, how well they are engaging the conversations we have, how willing they are to be self-reflective. Moreover, self-reflection is a skill. I can teach students to be better at it, so I can assess how well they do it now and give good feedback to help them learn the skill.And that, really, is the purpose of assessment for students: Feedback that continues their learning. On my immersive trips I have the space and the luxury (and students who self-selected) to offer them lots of oral and written feedback about their learning without attaching a letter grade. Immersive classes are excellent for moving students away from focus on grades and toward focus on learning. Even indoors in a classroom where students are “running wild,” we can think of assessment as feedback (which sometimes is a grade telling a student, “You understand about 85 percent of this concept”).On the question of hiking, journaling, and praying, of course I am not assessing whether their prayers are “good enough” or whether they are the best hiker. I am giving them feedback about what makes a good hiker or pray-er as understood by various traditions and providing space for them to decide what kind of hiker and pray-er they want to be. For some, the best hiker is the fastest one. I offer that good hiking is about attention to the world and to others, which means that speed is not usually a great metric for assessment. I can assess how much they engage with the ideas. How much do they play with the ideas, even if they land where they were before, versus how much they resist incorporating anything new and think they know the answers already.In the end, the answer to “How will we assess?” is “Like we always do.” We are assessing student learning while they’re having discussion in class to see if we need to redirect and fill in gaps. We are teachers. We can tell when students understand and when they do not. Yes, it’s easier to assess whether they know how to put up a tent (it’s either keeping them dry or it’s not) than whether they can connect wilderness metaphors for spirituality with wilderness traditions, but we do know. The bonus is that when I focus on feedback over grades and force students to focus on it too, they actually tend to learn more. The more they run wild – whether in a classroom or in a canyon – the more they will learn because of the process, because of the structures I’ve set up for them, because of the space and attention and the people they’re with. Perhaps we simply need to think more wildly about assessment.

Continuing on themes from the last blog in this series, another antiracism pro-tip for classroom teaching comes both from a story an early-career mentor of mine told me, and then directly from the mouths of my own students: for the love of God, always assign groups in class! If you want students to talk to anyone else in class, tell them precisely who they’re talking to and give them a specific question or two to work on together. Why is this an antiracist practice? In short, students have a strong tendency (sometimes conscious, sometimes not) to self-segregate in classes. Assigning groups disrupts this tendency.For this wisdom, I was allowed to stand on the shoulders of another teacher rather than waiting until I screwed things up profoundly enough that I actually noticed it. In one of my first years of teaching, a mentor in our new faculty circle talked about her past practice of telling students to just “pair up!” to discuss class material. She saw no issues with this practice, apart from a few quiet students, until one day when she was teaching a course with two Black male students among a much whiter cohort. These students didn’t sit near each other, or seem to know each other; but when she instructed everyone to find a partner, neither of them even bothered to look up to their nearest neighbors. Instead, a beat after everyone else had started chattering, the young man in the front row slowly lifted his head and made eye contact with the young man seated in the back. Both had assumed, rightly, that they would not be tapped by their white classmates to be partners; both knew that whether or not they were friends, they were “other” in this classroom, and that made them de facto partners.The obvious shame that my mentor felt in articulating this story stuck with me, and so assigning groups has consistently been part of my practice. However, I didn’t realize that I was doing something particularly different until I held an Antiracism Learn-Along event for students at my school where I opened space for them to discuss experiences around race and belonging at our college. Many of them immediately agreed that the school can quickly become “cliquey” and that racial groups tend to stick together unless prompted to do otherwise. Some students of color reported getting “dirty looks” when trying to join into a pre-existing group of white women, but even more said that they simply wouldn’t bother trying – they’d been burned before, often in high school, when attempting to be friendly to white people. They weren’t going to risk the same rejection here if they had the option of staying with people who looked more like themselves.Despite these experiences, the students said that professors requiring a mix-up of the room really did help over the long term, both in making friendly connections and being able to learn from other perspectives. I have endless ways of sorting students: making them “speed-date” in pairs that only have to converse for one minute, grouping them based on where they sit, grouping them by order on the roster, grouping them by alliterative first names (one of the unique joys of teaching at a women’s college in 2024 is being able to call out “Kiley, Kya, Kayleigh, and Caitlin” followed by “Haley, Hailey, Bailey, and Kayley” in rapid succession. I’m not even making these examples up). Sometimes I craft groups before class, and other times I sort it out when I see who came for the day. Some days I let students stay with their friends, and other days I make them talk to someone who sits across the room. I put my most boisterous people together and my shyest people together to see what happens, then try to balance the talkers and listeners on another day. Because my students are so used to being mixed up, they don’t even notice that some days I ensure that no student of color is alone in a group of white learners, or that some days I put all my Latina students together when discussing something relevant to Latinx culture, so that they don’t have to re-explain their heritage to others. Usually within four to six weeks in the term, students are comfortable enough with this apparent unpredictability that discussion starts flowing easily regardless of what group they’re in.Students may not notice how this practice can serve an antiracist commitment right away, if ever—it’s not as obvious as visually diverse representation on slides, or including authorial racial identities on an LMS—but assigning groups every time can very quickly disrupt the usual patterns of self-segregation in a classroom, and contribute to a more effective learning environment overall.

I spent my first week as an assistant professor contending with what I have deemed the “Dropocalypse.” My Introduction to Judaism class was full before the ink on my contract was even dry, and I was eager to teach students at a new institution. I posted the course website several days before classes began. As I checked the roster the morning of my first class, I was disconcerted to note that four students had dropped. Had my course site frightened them? Was my workload unreasonable? I shoved these questions aside as I walked nervously to the classroom, putting on my friendliest face. After what I thought was a good class, I vowed not to check the roster until the add-drop period had concluded. My next course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had similar positive energy on the first day.Despite my resolution, I checked the roster that evening. Two more students had dropped my Introduction to Judaism class, and one had dropped the other class. By the end of the week, ten of the thirty initially-enrolled students had dropped my Intro to Judaism class, whereas only two had dropped my other one. No other teacher in my department had more than three students drop.When I saw my chair in the hallway on Friday, I nervously confessed that a troubling number of students had dropped my class. Was I in danger, he asked, of falling below the minimum number of students? Thankfully, I was not. He tried to comfort me, reiterating that students drop classes for countless reasons and that it wasn’t a reflection on me as a teacher.As I spent the weekend refreshing the enrollment page, scared that if I averted my gaze for too long more students would escape, I replayed the classes in meticulous detail. What had I done, I wondered, to alienate students? What could I have done differently that would have kept them enrolled? The colleagues I asked for advice, sensing my rising panic, reiterated my chair’s perspective: students drop for inscrutable reasons that are not a reflection on the instructor.Despite these kind words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the preponderance of drops was my fault. If I gained a reputation of alienating students, I wouldn’t last long at my institution. The fact that I had so many drops in one class but only a few in the other class helped me to pull back from the despair of the Dropocalypse. It was clear that many students who enrolled in Introduction to Judaism claimed Jewish heritage and, consequently, might believe that they would have a head start in the course. If that expectation was shattered, perhaps they would leave? In contrast, students who enrolled in a course on Abrahamic religions might have less of an expectation that the course would be easy for them. Or, it could have been that the Judaism class was at 10 a.m. whereas the Abrahamic class began at noon.Whatever the answers, a fundamental question remained: Did my actions, while preparing the course or during the class, alienate them? If so, how could I improve? This gave rise to another question: Is it a bad thing for students to drop my class during the first week? I had assumed that it was, feeling the institutional pressure for high enrollments. But if students would have a bad experience, it was better for them and for me for them to find a more suitable class.I weathered my first semester and, despite the turmoil of the first week, received generally positive student evaluations. In subsequent semesters, I continued to try to make the first week of class fun and intriguing, hoping to show students that the academic study of religion was worth their time and effort.This experience showed me that checking the enrollment vicissitudes would be deleterious for me. At best, I would feel the relief if no students had dropped. At worst, I would feel creeping panic if students had dropped. The difficult truth is that I’ll never know why those ten students dropped my course and why future students will, inevitably, switch out of my classes.As instructors, we need to balance the ability to be self-critical while not letting perceived concerns about student satisfaction guide our practices. No matter how many students drop, my job is to teach the students who stay in my class; worrying about the ghosts of students who dropped does a disservice to them.

I received feedback on the manuscript of my textbook, Studying Religion and Disability. The two peer reviews were generally supportive and also offered important suggestions that will make the book better. I was grateful for their careful engagement. Reviewer 1 was also clearly aghast at my use of online sources, noting their “concern” with, in particular, my citing Reddit posts as evidence—as I do when I, for example, describe and quote how a disabled Sikh reached out in this online forum for support related to various difficulties with his disability. It made Reviewer 1 “a little nervous as a professor, who is always trying to get students to use credible scholarly sources.”I certainly understand the purposes behind “blind” (a bit of an odd word in this context) peer review—although it’s also a problematic practice—but boy do I wish I could have had the chance to talk to Reviewer 1. I would have loved to talk pedagogy. A blog post, where I talk to myself (ha!), will sadly have to do.This reviewer’s sentiment is one that other professors may share and, since it’s a textbook—which is intended to appeal to and be assigned by other professors—it was an important reservation to disclose. It may also reflect deep-seated differences among academics, which my book, or this blog post, won’t easily be able to resolve. But I want to say a few words about my use of *gasp* materials from the world wide web, including Reddit.First, I think it’s important to note that there are whole academic fields/areas of specialty that focus on various forms of communication and media. At my university, we offer a course on “Feminist Blogging” out of our School of Communication Studies, for example, and “Digital Storytelling” out of our Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program. These aren’t only topics that “they” teach “over there” in those “other” disciplines. At every SBL and AAR annual conference, there are sessions devoted to Religion, Media, and Culture and the Bible and Popular Culture. I’m personally sad to have missed the session on “From Tweets to Tiktoks: Reimagining Religious Influence through Women’s Social Media Use” in 2024.Especially now, I think it’s no longer fair to assume that legitimate information can only be found in OUP monographs or the JAAR (as much as I love both), that it cannot be found on the internet, or that online sources are inherently inferior or suspect. (To be a bit facetious, I read the New York Times exclusively online these days!) Educators are missing out if they aren’t looking in a wide variety of places for interesting ideas, primary sources, important debates, and provocative controversies to use in their classroom. Many of us incorporate blog posts, tweets (er, I mean posts on “X”), YouTube videos, and more into our classes, to encourage students to interact with “lived religion” and to motivate them to learn (motivation that we know depends on students perceiving value in our course content and being able to make connections between what they learn in school and the rest of their lives). The other day, I showed this tweet about “Islamophobia” in class. I don’t care who this guy is. His scholarly credentials—or lack thereof—don’t matter to me. What mattered is that this post, in popular and pithy form, conveyed an important, and common, critique about the concept that I wanted students to consider. It was an easy launching point for a rich in-class discussion.But fine, some of us don’t want to “give in” to these baser impulses or pressures; some of us don’t want to be “edutainers.” I have more serious concerns with this approach to teaching. Some religious traditions (mainly Christianity, which has whole universities and university presses, like Baylor, backing it in the U.S.) have yielded a lot of scholarship—in areas like disability, and more generally too. But some haven’t, at least in the English that I and my students all read. This is but one example of the Christian bias in the field I actually spend time describing in the textbook. I don’t think that I should be prevented from writing about other religions if/because they don't have (enough, any) “scholarly” sources. This would simply reproduce inequities that have for so long plagued the field. Certainly, scholars have much to contribute to knowledge production, but they do not have a corner on it, nor are their contributions… infallible. I note, for instance, the widespread replication crisis, journal retractions, shifts in paradigms, expert “blindspots” (another funny word here), or simply routine scholarly debates and disagreements.Relatedly, and crucially for my particular topic, not all people with disabilities can or do attain advanced degrees (in large part because higher education was built to exclude them), become scholars, and produce the sort of work that would appear in peer-reviewed journals or books published by reputable presses. Yet, I would strongly argue, these people still have important things to express about disability, including, of course, their own. I don’t believe we should be in the business of elitist gatekeeping—a common critique of the professorial ivory tower, actually, and one I think we would do well to avoid, especially in this political climate.Better would be to teach students what certain sources of knowledge might be able to tell us and what they might not. Better would be to practice fact-checking and lateral reading. Better would be to make students aware that and how knowledge is produced, authenticated, and circulated (which I borrow from David Chidester’s Empire of Religion). Better would be to discuss that slash / in Foucault’s “power/knowledge” and how these two concepts are inextricably intertwined. Better would be to teach students about the biases that every person holds (including them, including us) and how to leverage their own meta-cognition to become aware of and adjust for those biases. Better is not to avoid, censor, or condescend, but to expose, as widely as possible, and to teach students how to navigate. This is what they will have to do for the rest of their lives, after all.The other day, I had students in my Race and Religion class read three sub-Reddit threads on caste, Hinduism, and India. (In response to this task, one student laughed and said, “I love this class.”) I also asked the group, with Reviewer 1 in mind, why reading Reddit might be a good idea. Students said it allows us access to real people, giving their unfiltered opinions, on topics that might not make it into scholarly sources. (Of course this also led us to talk about how some stuff written on Reddit—or, uh, elsewhere—can be exaggerated or even made up.) It can show us a range of perspectives, opinions, and experiences, which is a core principle of studying religion that I am constantly trying to convey.All sources are limited, biased, or irrelevant in some ways or in some contexts (even scholarship). If a point I want to demonstrate is that disabled people of a specific religion sometimes turn to and cry out for community in online forums, a polished chapter in an edited collection by a person with a PhD writing about the phenomenon—if I can even find such a thing—isn’t, in my opinion, as good of evidence as an actual post by a real disabled person in the throes of that experience. If I have to go online to find it, so be it.