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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 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.

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.

Student course evaluations can be fraught. Many of my friends don’t even look at theirs, either because it’s so stressful/shameful or because they don’t think there’s anything to be learned in them. Course evaluations are, after all, only one (admittedly limited and often problematic) data point.I do look at course evals, and I tell students I look at them. I think it’s important to consider what the students—that is, the primary audience of and for our teaching—actually experience. That doesn’t mean students get the final say. That doesn’t mean we have to make every change they desire. But it does mean that I want to know how they experienced the course, and it’s a bit hard for me to know without checking.But it’s not often that anything surprises me. It’s usually the same old, same old. This class is a lot of work. Too hard for a required course. Picky grader. Great prof. Class is fun. She really cares. I love our community. I’ve read it all before.But, last semester, I received something new, from a student in my upper-level Religion and Disability class:Emily Gravett assigned course materials that allowed me to critically think about my views on religion and disability. However, as someone who is Catholic the way she explained course material did not align with what all people of that religion believe…. The way she portrayed religious people made it appear as if religious people had it out for people with disabilities. This takes away why people are a part of a religion…. By what I read about this class I thought we were going to go in further in depth about the beliefs of religions. Instead, we read content from opinion–based sources that bashed everything about the religion. I think the way the content was addressed was very inconsiderate for people that belong to a religious group. If the whole class is about accepting others and taking in other points of view, why is every positive view of religion being bashed? Overall more theology should be incorporated with the course instead of throwing opinions out in lecture. Now, this was just one comment. None of the other students said anything like it and I did have other religious (including Christian) students in that class, just like in any class I teach. Certainly, instructors shouldn’t focus overly much on the one-offs or outliers in our course evaluations, especially the more negative ones. Yet I felt this student was expressing something important, which I wanted to take seriously—something perhaps other students had felt, but had not dared to express.It’s certainly never been my intention to make anyone feel badly about their religious convictions. I don’t set out to dissuade anyone from their identities or commitments, just in the same way I wouldn’t proselytize. It should also go without saying that I certainly don’t represent religions as (very bad) monoliths—this is a key concept of the course, that religions are diverse—but clearly this student experienced the course as being very critical and negative toward religions, perhaps specifically her own. And, I have to admit, she may not be wrong. Religions (on the whole, and in the specific) haven’t been great on disability—and this was what the course reflected. The Bible often treats disability as something to be fixed/cured to demonstrate God’s great power. Disability is understood as the result of bad karma by many Hindus. The choreography of Muslim daily prayer is rough or even prohibitive for some bodies. In this class, we read a piece in which a well-known disability scholar critiqued the pope—the head of this particular student’s religion—for singling out a disabled man for a blessing. My guess is that this was the day I lost her.So, what responsibility do I have to how religions are represented or come across? Do I need to couple every negative portrayal, example, or opinion with a positive one? Do I need to make sure I am presenting rosy or complimentary views of religion, regardless of topic? Do I need to be very selective or cautious with the critical pieces I assign? I admit there’s a lot I don’t know what to do about this student’s concern. Here’s what I’ve tried to implement in my current Race and Religion course (which faces some similar issues, given the way that Christianity has influenced conceptions of race, in this country and globally):Added a statement to the syllabus, which I read aloud in class, that clarifies that I don’t agree with or endorse every single piece I assignForecast that there will be some critiques of religions in this class—and acknowledge this may be (understandably) unsettling or even upsetting if you are a part of that religionReminded students that learning can be uncomfortable and that exposure to ideas that you disagree with is an important (an essential??) part of development and lifeIntroduced the notion of meta-cognition and asked them to reflect on certain activities or materials in terms of what they were thinking and feeling during themContinued to reiterate that religions aren’t just one “thing” and that, of course, for all the bad, there’s also quite a bit of goodAssigned pieces on religion being both/neither good or bad, such as Appiah’s TED Talk as well as material demonstrating a range or diversity within traditionsClarified that much of what we discuss in terms of religious people’s behavior is also just human behavior—that is, that it’s applicable to everyone; religious people are usually not different or specialEmphasized to students that it’s okay to stick with values, beliefs, or groups, including the religious, that are imperfect/critiqued (because nothing is perfect)Continued to offer caveats when leading a session that was more based on criticism, such as “of course reasonable people will disagree” or “this may be interpreted differently within the community” or “obviously this doesn’t represent the whole”Assigned more companion (or both-side) pieces for every topic (e.g., “what is Critical Race Theory?” as well as a critique of Critical Race Theory)But I am still grappling with this issue. The reality is that religions aren’t all good (whatever we even mean by this). Robert Orsi, one of my favorite scholars, who grew up Catholic and has written extensively about the study of religion, has written powerfully on just how disgusted he is by the history of Catholicism, that “in the long perspective of human history, religion has done more harm than good and that the good it does is inextricable from the harm.” I think I would be doing students themselves a harm if I pretended otherwise.

How are you doing with taking chances? Are you engaging the wonder in your students, or are you still grading participation posts? If you read part one then you know what I’m talking about. For today’s episode of what Miss Frizzle teaches us about teaching, we learn about making mistakes. Not learning how to make them per se (because let’s face it, we all have plenty of experience) but what to do when we make them.Mistakes are inevitable. They will happen. Part of the reason we fear them so much is because we are still recovering from the trauma of unrealistic expectations from our graduate programs, or from our education in general (I’m looking at you formerly “gifted and talented” students). It may seem redundant then to be told to do the thing that you have already done and will certainly do in the future. But the advice to make mistakes isn’t about intention, it's about adaptation (cough…taking chances…cough).  In a world where failure and risk are old friends…If I had to choose one thing that scientists and entrepreneurs have in common, I'd say it's that both understand that failure is information. Scientists have revolutionized their fields by using information gained from failed experiments. Think of the countless medicines that didn’t work for the illness they were intended for, only to produce an outcome that changed the medical field. In the same way, entrepreneurs are learning about trends, marketing, supply, demand, and a whole host of other things when they start something that doesn’t work out. If you are going to be a person to take risks (go ahead honey, take a chance!) then you will have to embrace making mistakes. But wait, you say, a failure and a mistake are not the same thing! A failure is when you do something and it doesn’t work out, while a mistake is doing something wrong. And you’d be correct. A failure focuses on the outcome, while a mistake focuses on behavior. This is why you can make mistakes but you cannot be a failure (go ahead and read that again). And while mistakes made along the way can aid to the result of a failed outcome, several other factors, many beyond your knowledge and control, makeup that failed attempt.  Let’s play a game… Where it's all made up and the points don’t matter.So, how and why would you be intentional about making a mistake? Remember, the lesson isn’t about intentionality per se, it's about adaptation. Being intentional about making mistakes means being intentional about taking chances and risks. One of the best and easiest ways to do that is through the act of play. Playing a game is about creativity and knowing which of the rules you want to keep, bend, or break (every UNO player understands this). You are willing to push the boundaries or cross them to meet the games’ goals creatively, or to make a better play experience. One of the best examples of this is improv. Improv thrives on making mistakes. Nothing is wasted, and the space feels limitless. You can say the wrong word, or get caught off guard by another’s response, or even fall off the stage, and there will be someone there, not necessarily to catch you, but to use your “mistake” to continue the time of play. This communal act of play creates a kind of generativity that encourages you to make mistakes. So, what does this have to do with Theological Education? Much of our objectives in theological education feel daunting. We want our students to say something meaningful about the divine, or about implications on our world. We train them to lead others in matters of the heart, mind, and spirit. We do deeply meaningful work. This is the kind of work where mistakes matter. Where we are held accountable for the implications of our theology. Our theological intentions land somewhere, usually in the lives of other people. I recognize that asking someone to make a mistake in this context is no small thing. But that is exactly why we need to encourage it in our classrooms. I approach all of my classrooms as part of a grand experiment. Students are encouraged to “say the weird thing” (IYKYK) then work-out what that means in community. If I didn’t encourage my students to make mistakes, then how am I preparing them to lead? Preach? Teach? How can I teach them to adapt if I attempt to create a space with no obstacles for them to adapt to? If students say or bring up concepts about God that cause tension, we work through it. I help them understand the implications of their theological actions. And yes, they make “mistakes.” So do I. But because we do not forsake play in the classroom we learn to adapt. Taking chances means making mistakes. And like scientists we learn from the outcomes. We discover the ways theology can help us change the world, especially in ways we didn’t originally intend. We do this because we’ve learned that mistakes do not automatically end in failure. They create a possibility to open up a new pathway we didn’t originally plan. They generate new lessons we didn’t know we needed to learn. And for that, they will always be worth making.

It’s a relief to some professors to find that making their course antiracist is not simply about introducing heavy and sometimes politicized topics into class discussion. I find that moving one’s course further along the antiracism spectrum can, and should, start with the syllabus!None of the below suggestions can magically turn a course antiracist – my experience is that antiracism is a lifelong journey, consisting both of moments of inspiration and, perhaps more often, moments of face-palming as you realize the way you’ve done something for years is problematic, but you literally never noticed it until right now. This is part of why I think many professors shy away from explicitly naming their own journey in antiracist teaching – it requires you to feel embarrassed about the way you used to do things and then using that embarrassment to fuel something better. But the glorious thing is that it does produce something better!The first thing to do with your syllabus is to take stock of the racial representation of your authors. If you use one or a few textbooks, this will likely be easy. If you rely on a variety of resources, it’ll take longer, and often require a bit more research. When you tally up who students are primarily hearing from, what voices are most prominent? Do white men win the day? Or is there substantive authorship from people with other racial identities?In my department, we calculate these totals every semester based on course days. Basically, what days are students only hearing from white people, and what days are they hearing from people of color? (It could be advantageous to do this in a more granular way too – examining how Black authors compare to Latinx authors, etc., but unless your percentage of authors of color is fairly high, you may not have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions). We submit our percentages every term, and part of our annual assessment is examining if we’ve met our minimums and if we’ve increased racial representation or lost ground overall. The fact that we can work in hard numbers here also tends to encourage something of a gamification of our syllabi – seeing if we can beat our last “high score” is motivation to make our authorship more racially diverse each semester. A single replaced reading feels like a victory in this context – and it is!Once that work is completed for the term, the next step is to ensure that it’s visible to students and that they understand why it’s significant. I do this in two ways: including relevant expertise and identity markers, including race, along with the link to the course readings, and telling my students directly about what I’m doing with authorship in the course. The first involves setting up Canvas (or whatever LMS) with more than just links to required text. I include the link, and then provide context after it about the writer. For example, “______ is a Black woman and a seminary-level professor of Theology,” or “______ is a white male journalist who primarily writes on religious topics.” This is part of an overarching lesson that people’s context is always relevant, and that nobody writes without bias. It’s also a practice I royally screwed up the first time I tried it – I only included the racial identities of authors who weren’t white and didn’t mention race for white authors. You know, because white is… normal? White default bias for the fail. Thankfully I caught that one halfway though the semester and worked feverishly to remedy it on the day that awful realization struck me.Finally, I like being transparent with my students about the “why” of my teaching – it makes them feel trusted and included, and it helps hold me accountable for doing what I say I will. On the first day of class, I show the students our hard numbers for the course and explain that the field is historically and currently white-dominated, but that our program values students learning from a variety of perspectives and voices, so we’ve made a particular effort to use and highlight authors of color. For whatever reason, this is the moment on day one when students will actually take their eyes off their syllabus and look at me directly. I find that there’s power in critiquing your own field, and doing it right away – it helps students feel more able to offer critique and criticism when they feel it necessary.So, there you have it – if you want to be a more antiracist teacher and aren’t sure where to begin, start with your course authorship and make your choices explicit to your students. It’s far from perfection, but it’s a starting point for the journey.

Recently I attended the Wabash Center’s Curiosity Roundtable, where we heard from Dr. Iva Carruthers in one session. Her presentation was titled “AI and Ubuntu in the Age of Metanomics.” She had us thinking about what it means to be human and how we talk about humanity in this new age of AI—in all its forms—and what theology has to offer and how different sources of knowledge, different intelligences, all contribute to our being. Is being human about knowledge or about wisdom? About thinking or about relationship? It was a rich conversation that didn’t once bring up how we deal with issues of students using ChatGPT in class.As I thought about our prompt—what do I do with this conversation when I return to my institution?—my initial response was: resist the AI! And then I thought more deeply. The question is really how to ground ourselves more deeply in what it means to be human. The short answer is that we engage more in the world and with each other, but how do I do that? How do I help my students to do that?Unsurprisingly, my answer is to spend more time outdoors together. So now I have another reason in my backpack to use evangelizing for outdoor teaching. Hear me out.The best teaching happens outdoors because it’s a broader sense of teaching than mere lecture content. It’s the things I’ve been talking about in this blog. Students are more likely to play outdoors because they feel a freedom in the wind and the sun and “getting away with” not being “in class” as they’ve always understood classrooms. Play is a deeply important part of learning to be human. Children play at being adults long before they are adults, and the play, which is about imitation and experimentation in spaces of controlled risk, develops the skills of adulthood in the child. It’s similar for students. They play with ideas—imitate and experiment in a low-risk space—and so, grow into their understandings.In addition to content, they play with, students play with each other more readily outdoors. The freedom of movement makes getting into groups easier as well as interaction with group members. They sit closer together and find themselves more present to one another when they only have to focus on each other and the space—with its greens and blues, its warmth and wind—is calmer and less distracting than any video screen. Longer immersive classes do this even more (see my previous posts on the way immersive classes facilitate presence and community), but even shorter classes outside the normal environment will help students see one another as humans and create bonds.Play is also, as I understand it, an important part of learning to be an animal (see this chapter by Kay Redfield Jamison: “Playing Fields of the Mind” in her Exuberance: The Passion for Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004]). So, we learn to be more human and at the same time become more connected to other animals who also play, being reminded that we are part of creation. Along with this, when they are outside students are more immersed in the material world, and their phones are less attached to them. They are distracted by more interesting and more real things than whatever is on their screens. When people have a greater immersion in the real world, they gain more ability to discern the fake aspects of AI because they know the real thing.When students have to work together, especially in an immersive trip where they depend on each other physically (like on a wilderness trip), they learn what real friendship and connectedness look like and perhaps can distinguish the real from the fake in virtual worlds. In a good outdoor class—or a good indoor class that requires students to work together to create something—they learn what humanity looks like in all kinds of forms beyond what AI with its implicit biases is telling them. They learn empathy and compassion and relationship, the stuff that makes human beings human and which AI can only “know” about, or at best imitate. These are the things teaching outdoors and prioritizing interactions with the material world and with real people unmediated by screens does. My version is outdoor teaching, and I won’t stop evangelizing for it, but we can just as easily think of this as out-of-the-classroom teaching. Any place where we can encourage (or require) students to engage their worlds and the people in them is a place we are saying that our AI world is not the final word. Requiring some community engagement as part of the class or a museum visit or a technology fast or a group project that must be done only in person—all of these encourage play and presence and learning to distinguish reality from virtual reality. And if our clergy and theologians were trained this way, what a real world we might have. May it be so.

Jesus H. Christ: Be Aware of What Students HearI was walking into the Den at Le Moyne College when I was accosted by a colleague in the English department. He asked, “What the hell are you teaching in your religion classes?” While I often ask myself this same question, I decided to ask what he meant. He told me that a young woman in his class was also in my Introduction to Religion class. The students in his class were discussing Coleridge’s “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” and they came across this line:          Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye          Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earthHe asked the students what they thought Coleridge meant. The student we shared in our classes was quick to say she thought it was an allusion to Christ. Intrigued, my colleague asked her how she came upon that idea. She replied that Professor Glennon had said Jesus’ middle name was Howard and that Coleridge was talking about the comfort Jesus continues to give to us from heaven.I chuckled. I told my colleague that this notion came up in a discussion on the Gospel of Mark when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Of course, the question of identity is often related to one’s name and one’s family. With tongue-in-cheek I asked the students what Jesus’s last name was. While many admitted they didn’t know, others said it was Christ. I suggested that, while it is true that title, “Christ,” is connected to Jesus’s identity as his disciple blurted out, it was not really his last name. It is more likely that his last name was bar Joseph, son of Joseph.But I pressed them further. I asked if any of them had ever heard their parents or grandparents, in a moment of anger or frustration, say “Jesus H. Christ”? Many students had. So I asked, “What does the H. stand for?” As you might imagine, no one knew. I decided to enlighten them and told them that the H. stood for Howard. Warily, they asked how I knew that. I responded that it was right at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”Obviously, most students recognized that this was a joke. In case you are wondering, the actual prayer says, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” But somehow this young woman didn’t catch on and took me seriously. She stored this “fact” in the back of her mind. When a few weeks later her English class discussed Coleridge’s reflection, she was delighted by the insight she could offer; the tear came from Howard’s eye because he was the one who lifts those who die from earth.The student and I, and even her mother, laughed about this for the rest of her time at the school. She learned that it is always good to check the information she received for its reliability and trustworthiness. I learned to be sure that whenever I tell this joke in class, which I do at times, that after I reveal the middle name, I look to make sure the students know it is a joke, just in case.Driving the Bus: What is Hell Like?In my classes, I want to make sure that the religious and ethical questions students bring to the classroom find their way into our discussion. I use a strategy I call the Question Bag. The students’ first homework assignment is to anonymously write any religious or ethical question they have that they would like us to talk about during the semester on a sheet of paper. At the beginning of the second class, I collect the questions in a paper bag. Periodically, we draw a question from the bag to discuss at the beginning of the class period. The discussion can take a few minutes or even the entire class period depending on how important the question is to the class.In one introduction to religion class, the question we pulled from the bag was “What is hell like?” I asked students to say out loud what their responses were. Some had obviously read Dante’s Inferno and so talked about the terrible suffering sinners could expect at the hands of Satan’s minions. Others, feeling a bit more enlightened, said it was the experience of forever being apart from the presence of God. Still others suggested hell didn’t exist. When you die, you die.At this point I interjected a few thoughts into the conversation. A few times during the semester, I had referenced the adage, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I noted that some people who had religious and ethical disagreements with me declared that I was heading down that road; in fact, I was probably driving the bus. I mused that some people even say that we are living hell on earth. If so, I pondered aloud, is this really a terrible road to be on? After all, I was a tenured, full professor. I lived a relatively comfortable life, making more than enough money. As a department chair, I only taught two classes per semester with plenty of flexibility and free time. I even had four months a year to do the other things I wanted to do: travel, write, volunteer. I say things in class and people actually write them down!One student in the class, Becca, was a physically challenged and bound to a wheelchair. Although she had overcome many obstacles to get to where she was at the time, she faced them with courage, perseverance, and a good bit of humor. She was a young woman with deep faith and hope in the God she followed. She told the class that this was her question and she blurted out, “Fred, can I ride the bus with you?” Most students smiled but some eyes filled with tears. The students were very supportive of Becca within and without the class, and I would often see them talking with her, eating lunch with her, and encouraging her. Le Moyne students overall are really kind. They knew the challenges she faced and they offered help whenever she asked for it which, given her independent spirit, was very seldom.A year later, Becca decided to have surgery that, if successful, would allow her to become even more independent. She knew the risks, but she insisted on going through with it. Becca died on the operating table.When I think of her, which is often, I recall that classroom conversation and her response. A part of me wishes I had never come across as glib about this life being “hell on earth.” While we all have challenges in our lives, mine could never compare to hers. I never confronted what she did daily, nor have I faced the risk she chose with her surgery. Her faith in herself and in God was strong; I wish I had a fraction of the courage she showed.But one thought continues to give me hope. If the Christian understanding of God, Becca’s God, is a God of love and the promise of abundant life beyond death is true, I am certain that Becca is now living eternal life to the fullest, hopefully driving a bus down that heavenly road welcoming all on board. And, when my time comes, I hope to be waiting at the bus stop as she pulls up so I can ask, “Becca, can I ride the bus with you?”