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Besides screaming “Don’t do it!” or “Why in the (bleep) would you want to do that?” there are any number of tidbits people just don’t offer when it comes to moving from the classroom to administration. With any number of references to “going to the dark side” (of note: I take issue with any metaphorical use of “darkness” or “blackness” as pejorative), seldom does a professor stepping into administrative waters receive much of a verbal life jacket. After five years as Vice President of Academic Affairs/Academic Dean, I have decided to return to the classroom and “fully” dwell as a Full Professor of New Testament and Culture. After a handful of years and a pandemic, it is time. Yet, as I reflect on this transition, I want to share some tools, tidbits, and techniques that I discovered behind the dean’s desk. Perhaps these thoughts and (in some cases) lessons will prove beneficial to anyone considering an administrative role. I hope my meditations won’t deter any inclinations or cause too much fear and trepidation. Here are my ruminations: As dean there will be deluge of email. Some of the communication is important. Yes, you need to know if a professor can’t teach a class or if the registrar is out sick. You will be added to listserves simply based on your signature. Some of the notices give pause; others are quite questionable. Is it important that the dean provide input on the new hand sanitizer or toilet tissue distributer? You will need to (re)define classroom activity. The student-class engagement decreases. My first year as dean I did not teach so I could get acclimated to the shift in responsibility and learn the numerous accountability layers. As an administrator you will quickly discover that the Boardroom is now your classroom. The Leadership Team meeting is the lecture hall. Staff meetings are, yes, pedagogical sessions. There is the danger of demonizing students. The year of non-teaching was helpful in getting my sea legs under me. However, I soon began to see our wonderful students as plagiarizing pirates, hell-bent on circumventing class portals and graduation paths. Primary interactions with students were pejorative and positioned as “coming to the principal’s office.” Well, I was happy to return to teaching at least one class a term because our students deserved a better view from me. I knew they honored the institution by their enrollment. They were not the imps the “daunting dean” occasions always warranted. Yet, the nature of “go see or email the dean” was the bowl for such unfavorable engagement. On some days administrative work is purely gratifying. A letter of reference for a hardworking student or an on-the-rise staff member is food for the soul. Student award ceremonies give so much ebullience. Faculty promotions and publications are the stuff of good wine. Commencement is just filled with joy and jubilation. People don’t stay in administration long. I really didn’t know that, and yet it is very true. Administration is both arduous and awesome. However, some days I felt awful about what happened in a faculty meeting or with a staff member. Select meetings and email exchanges with students grieve me to this day. By the way, did I mention the excessive emails? Toilet tissue? Hand sanitizer? In the end: Do You! I had to learn to take care of myself, especially when the doctor told me my blood pressure was high. What the hell! There was so much I had internalized without realizing it. I thought my daily exercise regimen and morning devotion were enough. All of my efforts were off-balance and insufficient. I was taking in more than I was releasing. If the body keeps the score, my body was winning (the game of stress and anxiety) while my head and heart were losing mercilessly. I had to recall what my Granny said: “When you die, the church will roll on.” Institutions will say kind things to get you on board. Maybe a few folk will show up at your funeral, but in the end the train will keep rolling. And soon after your burial, a new dean will be sitting behind that desk or in that virtual space. At first I saw in a glass dimly, now I see clearly. You don’t have to tell me twice. Now that I know better, I owe it to myself and my sons to do better. In my five years as dean it was teaching students that really brought me back to my center. The one class a term reminded me of my vocational core. It was the mac to my cheese, the shrimp to my grits—I could go on. I dare not say I am done with administration nor that this work is not a part of my career calling. Ann Garrido’s work on the spiritual nature of administration proved quite helpful. I am finished, but not done. Nonetheless, there was—there is—something about preparing a syllabus, researching articles, planning course sessions, and inviting colleagues to share in my classroom via Zoom that gives me pedagogical pleasure. I need administrative work to stretch my manifold gifts and talents. I need to teach to get to the heart of the matter. I am grateful for these experiences and stand on the cusp of many more. May you continue to discern your teaching path and/or administrative portal.

I have been learning over the last several months that transition is not the same thing as change. Change is something I live with every day as I battle the side effects of diabetes—not ever knowing if my feet will betray me or my hands remain cold all day. Change is a part of my life and living as I see new things from the folks I work with everyday, but then there is a quirk of phrase, the sidelong look, the slight roll of the eye that I had not seen before. Change is something I am trying to make my peace with as I age and get closer to the ages that my parents died, and worry, what this will mean for my spouse and my only sibling, my sister, who is managing mental illness in magnificent ways. Who will be their confidante? Who will be their big sister? As I prepare to leave the deanship at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I am very aware that this transition thing is a whole ‘nother thing altogether. Because it means that I can’t just react to my disease and try to stay on top of it. I can’t just acknowledge that there are some physical acts that I used to do with ease and now, if I can do them at all, they do not come easily or look slightly askew. Transition means that I am leaving something I’ve done and loved but realize that it is time to move on. It is bitter and it is sweet. And there are large parts of the future that I do not know about but have a dim awareness that they are out there. There is only so much I can know about what the full textures of this transition will be. So, I make to-do lists in my head, in print, and then talk about them with the folks in my life and I say over and over again that I am looking forward to what this transition will mean. But I suspect that a part of me is really only doing this as a profound exercise in hope. Because I do like control and order and there is simply the unknown until I walk into this transition each day, hoping that it will be alright and that I do lead well until I no longer carry the marvelous responsibility of my school in ways that only the dean can. And what little I am sure of is that I am looking forward to full-time classroom teaching after a long sabbatical but it will be like learning to ride that bike again. Only this time it’s electric.

Museums were a significant aspect of my childhood education. Living in Philadelphia, we were a family who regularly visited museums and historic sites. Saturday family activities, summertime daytrips, and adventures when out-of-town relatives visited, would typically involve museum excursions. The spring field trips by George Washington Carver Elementary School, funded in-part by monies raised by the parents’ organization, were, joyfully, to the museums. In the 5th and 6th grades, respectively, my parents enrolled me and my brother in Saturday enrichment classes at the Franklin Institute. By high school, we had regularly visited the: Philadelphia Art Museum, Franklin Institute, Please Touch Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Betsy Ross House, Academy of Natural Sciences, Carpenter’s Hall, the African American Museum, and several neighborhood museums. All this is to say, museums were an integral part of how I learned as a child. Then, in college, graduate school, while serving local churches and while on the faculty of a theological school, I only sparingly incorporated museums into my teaching or research. Yes, I planned the occasional field trip, but museums were not vital to my teaching. Museums were not part of my pedagogical repertoire.  With delight! - museums have returned to my awareness.   I have had the good fortune to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, twice within the past six weeks. These two visits have given me a renewed appreciation for museums and the ways they can and do nurture our curiosity. While visiting the museum, I experienced the power of exhibits to interpret the stories of people. On both visits, we were hosted by Eric Lewis Williams, Ph.D., Curator of Religion at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. Dr. Williams curated the exhibit, “Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism, and Popular Culture.” The exhibit brilliantly and provocatively suggests the myriad of ways in which religion is a part of the cultural fabric of African American experience. As Dr. Williams designed, the viewer’s imagination is captured through photographs, objects, and depictions which makes the exhibit a marvel.  With Dr. Williams’ help, I experienced a kind of magic and majesty in the stories told by the artifacts.  I viewed, and sometimes handled, objects, relics, remnants, and fragments. Being able to discuss the exhibit, and its design, with the curator - was riveting. The exhibit prompted new perspectives for even the most familiar cultural story. It was fun. It was intriguing. I was wowed and was led to epiphanies! How, rather than planning courses, might we design learning experiences for our adult learners? Since returning to my desk, I have continued to dialogue with Dr. Williams. I am curious about the ways religion and theological classrooms might be strengthened through partnering with museum educators, curators, and administrators. I want to know more about curating, archiving, conservation, and material culture so I can improve my own teaching. I want to better understand collecting, and the ways storytelling through artifacts might be added to adult classrooms. Dr. Williams and I are thinking together about ways the Wabash Center might engage these kinds of questions: What would it mean for the Wabash Center to support faculties to explore ways of incorporating museums into their undergraduate and graduate level curriculum? What could be the role of museums in theological education for the preparation of congregational leadership; for teaching religion in the public; for more interactive educational experiences? In what ways could religion scholars assist museums in their interpretation and presentation of exhibits? What does it mean that, increasingly, critical interpretation of religion and theology is encountered by the public in museums? What if the work of critical interpretation employed in our classrooms is enhanced and enriched through the storytelling approaches of museums? In what ways can we learn to incorporate archiving, curating, conservating and exhibiting into our course design? What can be learned from museum pedagogies to strengthen religious and theological education? Given the prospects of enhancing teaching through museum education practices and visits, and since many professors spend their summers involved in course planning, I encourage you to consider spending part of your summer in museums and historic sites to: get to know museum educators get acquainted with museum curators and administrators enquire about exhibits scheduled for display in the fall and spring semesters plan for certain artifacts to be brought to your classroom during the semester enroll in a workshop offered by the museum learn the ways museums educate the public on your scholarly interests take notice of the many ways that museums make use of digital interaction in order to tell stories rethink and redesign an upcoming course imagine learning activities, student assignments, and excursions that invite students to become curators, archivers, and create exhibits Find the museums on your campus, in your town or city – and have fun!

When utilizing embodied pedagogy, I am constantly aware that my own experience and positionality is limiting. I am a white woman from the southern part of the United States who is currently living in Denver. I have traveled some and have lived in several cities around the United States, but I have never lived abroad. I teach seminar-style classes where dialogue is prioritized and my students speak often. When creating my syllabi, I assign readings that represent a diversity of scholars, and which are mostly academic in focus. But even though I prioritize these things, it is impossible to represent all voices and perspectives in one course. I want to bring in stories and experiences of people from around the world, though, and I want these voices to enter the classroom, to be part of our dialogue. One way that I attempt to do this is to assign novels. Through these readings, fictionalized bodies enter the space of the classroom and allow us to broaden our view of various topics. Last quarter, I taught an introductory level course called World Christianities. One of the course objectives was to outline how Christianity grew from a small group of Jesus followers in a specific region of the world into a global religion with devotees around the world. A second objective was to acknowledge how this transition happened through violence, missionary work, colonialization, enslavement, and various forms of manipulation. To cover a topic like this in a 10-week quarter felt overwhelming at first, and I began to think of authors that I could include who could speak to the distinctiveness of Christianity in a part of the world that is distinct from my own teaching context. The novel I chose was A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The story is set in Kenya in the 1950s and 60s, during the Mau Mau rebellion and the fight for Kenya’s independence from Britain. The main character, Mugo, spends time in a detention camp run by British colonizers, and he struggles inwardly with his interactions with colonizers, even though his village views him as a hero. Through this fictionalized story that is based on historical events, Ngũgĩ reveals the complexity of his own experiences living in a colonized place like Kenya. As Ngũgĩ discusses in this piece, choosing to write in English, the language of the colonizer, is itself a political decision. Ten years after writing A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ decided to only write in Gikuyu, his mother tongue and the language of his community. I encouraged students to read this novel throughout the course, and we discussed it together during two of the final classes. During one session, we focused solely on the experiences of the characters in this novel. We used the narrative to imagine their experiences and also the ways that Christianity impacted their lives. On the one hand, many characters in A Grain of Wheat were impacted negatively by the impact of Christianity, especially as it was entangled with colonialization. On the other hand, some characters embraced aspects of Christianity and were empowered by certain biblical stories. For example, Kihika (who becomes a martyr after his death) carried a Bible with him and underlined passages of importance to him. After his death, the Bible is passed along to his family and friends who reread the passages he underlined. The text becomes a source of hope to the community. I assign novels in other classes as well. In a course I teach called Women, Gender, and the Bible, I give a list of possible novels that the students can chose from in order to follow their interests. For this class, I include novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Parable of the Sower, and The Color Purple. When we discuss the novels, I put the students into discussion groups according to which novel they chose. I then dedicate a class session for the groups to introduce their novel to the rest of the class. The goal of their presentation is to “convince” the other students to read this novel. At the end of the class we have a vote as to which presentation was the most convincing. Similarly, when I taught a course on Jesus in Text and Traditions, I assigned The Book of Longings to provide an imaginative view of the ways in which women could have been involved in Jesus’s life and ministry. Assignments like these have been beneficial additions to my syllabi, and they illustrate my pedagogical goal of creating classroom spaces that include a variety of perspectives as a way of encouraging dialogue. Fictional characters are embodied characters. The experiences they bring into the classroom enhance the content of the class in a number of ways. Returning to the example of Grain of Wheat, the students in World Christianities brought this novel up in their final presentations/projects and also in the course evaluations. They appreciated the inclusion of a story from another part of the world. This one novel provided them with multiple viewpoints of how Christianity impacts a community. In the space of the classroom, these fictionalized bodies came to life and spoke to us about their experiences. In a way, characters like Mugo and the novelist Ngũgĩ joined our classroom and dialogued with us, sharing their experiences and listening to ours.