Resources

My friend Kenneth Ngwa and I have ongoing conversations about impossible questions concerning the current malaise of education. How do you make your way and guide others when there is no clear direction, when what is next is unclear? How do you do what is needed when you do not know the sure pathway or route? In a world where change is constant and the future feels unrecognizable—what does it take to find/make your way through the shadows, past scary monsters in spaces without light? When traditions are no longer relevant, when established paradigms are no longer dependable, when infrastructures are shifting and crumbling, causing more uncertainty—which way should we go?  In our attempt to answer these kinds of questions, my discussions with Kenneth are often saturated with stories meant to illuminate possibility and point toward our building a new future.In a recent exchange between me and Kenneth, I told him this story…When my brother Brent was in the 5th grade (I was a 4th grader), he announced at our family dinner that his homework assignment was to look at the stars. My father was intrigued. Dad asked Brent what he was supposed to look for. Dad was asking which constellation or planet, or star pattern was being studied and observed. My brother reported that he was just assigned to “look at the stars.” Dad looked suspicious. Brent said that after dinner he was going outside to look up. My father, in an impatient tone, said, “You won’t be able to see the stars.”“What do you mean? I’m going outside to see the stars!” my brother insisted.My father said, “There is too much light in the city to see the stars at night. You can only see the stars when there is enough darkness.”My brother looked quizzical. So did I. We did not understand what my father knew.After dinner, with Dad, we put on hats and coats, took flashlights, and headed to our front stoop. Standing on the stoop of our rowhouse in North Philadelphia, we looked up. All there was to see was dark sky. No stars. Or so we thought.Dad drove us to Fairmont Park—about 3 miles from our house. We drove past the reservoir, past the playground, past the baseball field—all familiar places. We drove another mile then Dad pulled over on the lawn and turned off the engine. We were in a remote part of the park that I had only seen from the comfort of the car window. It was not a location where we played. Dad got out of the car. He said, “Come on.”  My brother and I were hesitant. We had been taught that isolated spaces in the city were unsafe. We had been taught not to venture too deep into the woods or away from the known spaces. Brent and I were fearful. With hands tucked into our pockets and our breath freezing in the cold air, we had less excitement about this adventure. Dad told us to look up.Shocked! We could see stars! It was amazing. There was a sprinkling of stars in the sky that were not evident at our house. Then Dad said, “Follow me.” With our flashlights turned on, we followed. We walked across a meadow, ducked under the low hanging branches of Weeping Willow trees then down a short, rocky path. As we walked, without talking, the chilly air stilled and the noise of the city quieted. We were still only three miles from our house, but it felt like a different world.Dad walked over to a downed tree, sat down and turned off his flashlight. So did we. Dad looked at us then without saying a word pointed to the sky. To our astonishment the night sky was dazzling with stars!Dad pointed out the north star, the big dipper and the little dipper. We learned about Earth’s place in the solar system and that the moon is as critical to our life as the sun. He told us about constellations, comets, planets and meteors. This was the first time the story of Harriet Tubman making use of the north star to guide herself and others to freedom made sense.On the way home we stopped for a half gallon butter pecan ice cream. When we got home, mom dished up the ice cream. Brent and I recounted to her all that we had been shown. Dad was pleased.Kenneth’s pristine insight of my story:Connecting the search for the stars with the wisdom of the trusted savant who is not reduced to a "tour guide" (which I often felt my colonial-type education was at its best) but rather is respected as a companion for whom the stakes for the journey are as high as the sight to be seen—the stars and constellations might be a way to rethink our educational system.The question that bedevils the teacher in the classroom is whether the current stakes and questions of the learner are compelling enough to get the instructors out of their comfort zones and on the road to see/show the stars. Can we teach beyond our current constellations? Can we let the questions (and even the desires) of the student guide our journey? Are the stakes high enough that even when the students ignorantly (in a neutral sense) assume they can see the stars in a highly lit space, they won't be dismissed and instead be taken on the winding journey to the place where they can see the stars?To teach effectively, we must move to the courageous position where the hermeneutic of distrust (well earned) is turned around by a hermeneutic of trust. When dad turned out the lights, you and your brother did not panic. What is more, you also turned out yours. Why? Because of the trust that held the journey together. There is something more powerful and lasting than the lights that brighten our pathways, and that is the lights that brighten our imaginations - the lights that connect us to constellations. Some lights must be turned off to see other lights. But and I think this is the critical epistemological and pedagogical line, we must be the ones who decide it is time to turn off the flashlights.  Our liberation and educational freedom are found not just by overcoming the darkness of isms that limit our minds but also in recognizing that sometimes the hindrance to our thriving is our focus on the smaller lights. To see the bigger lights, we must not be distracted, not even by the smaller lights. We need to learn how, when, and where to turn off the smaller lights. And that is something only the ancestors can teach us. That is how education connects story to imagination. Why? Because the best kinds of education bring us to encounter the big lights where we see constellations but do not feel lost.Who among us knows that just three miles from home lay a different world of stars, right past the playgrounds and familiar spaces? Whoever has this kind of knowledge, let them be our teachers. Henceforth, let those with this knowledge teach so that we come to know how to see the galaxies and the biggest lights necessary to uplift a community that has been trying to see the stars with the flashlights turned on. Let us trust the teachings of those who are trustworthy. Indigenous epistemology may yet save us. Impossible questions feel less daunting when friends, ancestors, stories and stars guide the way. Our responsibility as committed teachers is to meet the challenge of becoming better teachers by learning how “to go and see” while at the same time learning to turn off the light. Onward through the fog!

In a previous blog, I surmised that the diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. One reason that theological institutions comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education is access. Comparatively speaking, theological schools have fewer barriers to enrollment versus other graduate schools in terms of acceptance rates and tuition costs.In 2023, the average acceptance rates for Master of Divinity and Master of Arts admissions across all member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools was 68 percent and 72 percent respectively. In the same year, the average acceptance rate for law school admissions in the United States was roughly 42 percent. Some law schools, such as Yale and Harvard, had acceptance rates under 10 percent. The cost of theological education is also significantly lower than many other graduate programs. For example, the annual tuition of Harvard Law School ($77,000) is more than double the annual tuition of Harvard Divinity School ($31,000) and more than triple the annual tuition of Columbia Theological Seminary ($22,000), the school where I teach.Theological schools therefore enroll students of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and nationalities. Over the past twenty years or so, many theological institutions have also taken further steps to include a wider range of students through the implementation of additional learning modalities, such as fully online degree programs, alongside in-person education.I have witnessed several evolutions in my seminary classroom over the last dozen years. The first change largely consisted of more diversity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and denomination. Straight cisgender white Presbyterian students comprised the majority, but I was teaching more students of color, more LGBTQ+ students, and more students from various Christian traditions.The second change entailed increasing generational and vocational diversity alongside the ongoing demographic shifts due to the first change. There is now no one clear and discernable identity marker that represents the majority student population in my classroom. In terms of age, some students are in their twenties and thirties and others are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Some will preach their first sermon at my seminary whereas others have been preaching for years. Some are working full-time in congregational ministries and other professions as they study at my seminary. Some are from the United States and others are from Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and other nations. Some belong to theologically liberal and progressive denominations whereas others worship in conservative and fundamentalist churches.These differences present rich opportunities for mutuality and reciprocity as well as potential pitfalls of misunderstanding and conflict in theological education. I plan to further engage these matters in future blogs, but I want to conclude this reflection with one aspect of diversity that I find simultaneously inspiring and perplexing: The rise of multivocational students who are pursuing their seminary education while also working full-time as well as caring for their families and fulfilling other important obligations.I am grateful that these students are in my classroom, and many have joyfully shared with me that my seminary’s commitment to greater access has made it possible for them to enroll. Because these students carry multiple responsibilities, some understandably struggle to complete assignments on time and adequately prepare for class sessions. Nearly all my students take three or more courses in our fall and spring terms because my seminary’s most generous scholarships covering the entire cost of tuition (and the entire cost of tuition and fees for African American students) are not available with part-time enrollment.When encountering unsteady student performance, it would be immature and harmful for theological educators like me to respond with petty expressions of anger and annoyance. Yet I also feel that it is my pedagogical imperative to effectively manage class participation and course engagement. I am keenly aware that a good number of my students, including some with the busiest schedules, are faithfully doing their work, and they are rightly discouraged when some of their peers are ill-equipped for face-to-face discussions and absent or perpetually tardy in online forums. Small group activities are probably the most dismaying and frustrating when there are varying levels of student preparation. I continue to grapple with how to lean into access and compassion without compromising my standards of academic integrity and excellence.

As I said in my earlier blog in this series, it can be a relief for teachers to know that making a course more antiracist isn’t only about introducing fraught topics and crossing one’s fingers that students have the self-awareness to handle them; antiracism can be present structurally, in much the same way that racism can be present structurally. In this blog, I will explore two practices I use in my own teaching to help promote a more antiracist learning environment, neither of which involve staging contentious debates or calling out individuals to speak on their experiences. While neither practice can suddenly create a perfectly antiracist classroom, they can help move one’s overall teaching farther along that spectrum.The first place to start is examining imagery usage in one’s class. I personally came late to PowerPoints in my teaching (only really becoming proficient in slides during remote-synchronous learning in the pandemic when writing things on the board was no longer an option), so imagery for me was initially confined to my online course structure in my LMS. I dislike “plain” pages with nothing but text, so I was habitually using stock images on assignments and pages to offer some visual breaks – close-ups of water, forest photos, and so on. This continued until I was slotted to teach Women in the Bible and started exploring imagery for the Biblical figures I planned to focus on. Initial Google Image searching yielded everything from cartoons to Renaissance oil paintings and everything in between – but the enduring theme was that most representations depicted Bible characters as white, white, white!This was irritating on multiple levels. Historical accuracy was certainly a factor, but even if we could all agree that nobody really knows what Ruth and Naomi looked like, why do so many artists seem to assume they were pale-skinned and fair-haired? (The answer, in short, is white supremacy and Eurocentric Christian bias, but if you’re reading a blog like this one, you probably already knew that). I was saved in that course by discovering James C. Lewis’s Icons of the Bible artistic photography series, a project that depicts Bible figures more accurately with models who are exclusively people of color. Sweet relief!Once slide decks became a more typical staple of my teaching techniques, then, I already had some experience realizing that the way I depicted people and communities on these slides would affect my students’ imagination. I teach at a women’s college, so I started by ensuring that my stock images included far fewer men than women, and then aimed to depict a wide range of racial diversity in each slide series. In teaching my class on Bodies in Christian Theology, I also learned to emphasize size diversity, visible disability, and visible queerness to continually enforce the implicit curriculum that Theology is for everyone and is done by everyone. For those who mostly use slides for text, I encourage you to experiment with the color and liveliness that comes with human images – and to use two or three stock photos rather than just one at a time. PowerPoint’s Design function can help you work them in tidily, and you have another subtle antiracist practice in your toolkit.

I was the only Hispanic student in my elementary school. In high school I was always in some kind of conflict because I was still the only Hispanic. My whole life I have had to learn to navigate a culture in which I stood out for various reasons. This in-betweenness has characterized my life since then. It is like living in the hyphen between Hispanic-American.[i] I have studied and gained my education where I was a minority. I have dealt with microaggressions and full-out aggressions of various sorts since I was a child. So now that I have a PhD and am a Director at the institution where I am employed, have things changed?No. I am now the “Hispanic Professor.” Some students come to my class guarded and assume that I am “liberal” just because I am Hispanic. Some people have the audacity to think that I am a “token” professor and am here although I really did not earn my place. As Hispanic/Latin@ my point of view is not the same as theirs and naturally, since Hispanics do not have education and are not educated, my viewpoint carries less weight than that of other professors. As a corollary, my judgment as a program director is faulty since Hispanics don’t think. People come to my office and are surprised that I am “tall for a Latino.” I have been asked “Are you really Hispanic?” simply because I speak English relatively well. However, the question I am most often asked is, “Where are you from?” Like, “Where are you ‘really’ from?” It is as if people just want to pigeonhole me, label me, and keep me in their neat little place in their social constructs, especially that social construct that sees Hispanics as wetbacks, illegals, foreigners, and not truly American.I read The Merchant of Venice in High School. The lines I remember most in this play are when Shylock the Jew states,Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?[ii]Shylock was making an important self-discovery. Was he a villain just because of his Jewish heritage? Did he not also have feelings, passions, and senses and live like everyone else? These lines help us understand Shylock’s posture throughout the play. But for me, they point to something that I have longed for since childhood. At some point, I want to be known by everyone as a fellow human being. I do not wish to be limited by my bronze skin, ethnicity, or the nationality of my parents and grandparents.I am always mindful of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.”[iii] Please do not misread me, I have not faced any of the cruelties that he or those in the Civil Rights struggle did. Nevertheless, his speech is a constant reminder that our mental schemes need transformation. What hits home with me are these lines: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”This is the cruelty of our own society. We assume all kinds of mental and social constructs based upon the mere outward appearance of a person. The outward appearance is but one of the many dimensions of a human being. It does not account for the mind, the psyche, the spirit, or the soul of a person. It does not take into account the personal story of that individual and the experiences that have shaped him or her. It does not take into account the spirituality and faith of these people and the beauty and creativity of the Black Church, or the Latina Church.[iv] While a person’s phenotype may reveal some things, a common history, a common ancestry, it does not in and of itself define the totality of that human being. And as those who study humans know, humanity has a powerful soul that dares to dream, that challenges the status quo, that questions the way things are, that invites the divine to enter their lives to rearrange our brokenness into the image, likeness, and goodness of God.So, I am one of the most educated Hispanics/Latinos in my community. I still am reminded on a daily basis of the need for humility and patience with my fellow human beings, who, having much less formal education than me, have pigeon-holed me into the mold of “the Hispanic professor.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Sarah Menkedick, “Living on the Hyphen,” October 14, 2014,https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-86-fall-2014/living-on-the-hyphen. See also Justo González, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 79.[ii] William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 3.1.57-66. References are to act, scene, and line. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/3/1/#line-3.1.57.[iii] National Public Radio, “Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in its Entirety,” https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.[iv] Church in Spanish is iglesia, a female term, hence “Latina.”