Resources

Neutrality is a lovely fiction.There is no such thing as a teacher who enters a classroom empty of convictions, untouched by history, or free from assumptions about the world. We arrive carrying beliefs—personal beliefs, communal beliefs, inherited beliefs, hard-won beliefs. Some have been examined with honesty and care. Others are so deeply woven into us that we mistake them for common sense.Our beliefs are baked in. Sown in. Poured into us long before we stand at the front of a classroom. They become the hidden rebar beneath our teaching, reinforcing the moral architecture of our decisions, our judgments, our dreams, and our expectations for ourselves and for our students.Teaching is never merely the transfer of information. Teaching is the revelation of a way of seeing the world.Whether we acknowledge them or not, our beliefs shape every decision we make. What do we believe about human beings? Are people fundamentally worthy? Capable of growth? Deserving of grace? What do we believe about failure? About power? About justice? About intelligence? About the purpose of our lives together?These are not abstract philosophical questions reserved for late-night conversations or higher education classrooms. They sit beside us while we write syllabi. They whisper while we grade papers. They accompany every conversation with a struggling student and every faculty meeting.Our beliefs teach long before our lesson plans do.Sometimes the greatest challenge is not that we lack beliefs but that we live contradictions. We profess one set of values while practicing another. We announce that every student can learn, yet quietly decide that some are beyond our reach. We proclaim that mistakes are opportunities for growth while responding to errors with disappointment or dismissal.To be human is to live with inconsistency. None of us embodies our deepest values perfectly. Yet the work of teaching asks us to seek greater integrity—to bring our practices into closer conversation with our convictions. Students notice the distance between what we say and how we live. They also notice when we are striving toward wholeness.Our deepest beliefs rarely begin with us. They are handed to us around family tables, in neighborhoods, in houses of worship, in schools, and in communities that loved us as best they knew how. We inherit ways of understanding the world long before we have language to evaluate them.My father gave me one such inheritance.Dad believed in redemption.Not simply second chances. He believed in second, third, fourth, and fifth chances. He believed that broken things deserved another opportunity to become useful again. He believed in repair. In restoration. In refusing to abandon what others had given up on.My father spent his career as a school psychologist in the Philadelphia public school system. He was also a reading specialist and, on weekends, a piano teacher. Early in his career, colleagues discovered that he possessed an unusual gift: he could recognize when children had been misjudged.Part of a school psychologist's responsibility is to evaluate students and recommend educational placement. Too often, particularly in under-resourced communities, marginalized children were incorrectly labeled and assigned to special education programs. Those labels carried consequences that stretched far beyond the classroom. A mistaken diagnosis could narrow opportunities, diminish expectations, and hasten a child's journey toward exclusion rather than possibility.When families appealed those decisions, my father often conducted the reevaluations. His careful work corrected many mistaken placements. His expertise restored educational opportunities to children who had been underestimated. Long before people regularly spoke about systemic inequities or educational justice, my father quietly practiced both.What I remember most is not his expertise.I never heard him criticize the colleagues whose judgments he corrected. I never heard him delight in proving someone wrong. He simply believed that if a mistake had been made, then his responsibility was to help make it right.That was his way in schools.It was also his way at home.Our family owned a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a large apple, painted in bright reds, greens, and yellows. The jar sits on a shelf in my television room today. The lid had a tiny stem for a handle. For two small children with little hands and developing coordination, that tiny stem was an impossible design. My brother and I dropped that lid over and over again. Sometimes it landed safely. Often it chipped. Occasionally it shattered into several pieces.Over the years, I suspect we dropped that lid twenty times.Every single time, my father gathered the fragments.Every single time, he glued it back together.We were never scolded. Never shamed. Never called careless or clumsy. The broken lid was never treated as evidence that something was wrong with us. It simply became another opportunity to practice restoration.More than sixty years later, that repaired lid still rests on the cookie jar, bearing the visible evidence of its history. Veins of glue run across its surface like the rings of an old tree. Every repair tells a story. Every scar witnesses to someone who believed that brokenness did not have to be the end of the story.That cookie jar reminds me that my father believed repair was the holy work of teaching. He believed that preserving was better than discarding. That correcting was better than condemning. That restoration was more faithful than replacement. He trusted that what appeared broken might still hold beauty, purpose, and possibility. Those beliefs shaped his life. They shape my teaching.Teaching asks for our whole selves. We do not leave our beliefs outside the classroom door. They accompany every lecture, every assignment, every difficult conversation, every act of encouragement, and every moment when we decide whether to see a student through the lens of deficiency or possibility.The invitation is not to become perfectly consistent. The invitation is to become more conscious.When we courageously examine what we believe, we become more capable of teaching with wisdom, compassion, and integrity. Our students deserve more than our expertise. They deserve teachers whose beliefs have been lovingly questioned, thoughtfully refined, and generously lived.Perhaps the deepest work of teaching is not simply asking, "What will I teach today?"Perhaps the deeper question is, "What do my students learn about humanity because they have encountered me?"Reflection QuestionsWhat beliefs about human worth quietly shape the way you prepare for class, respond to students, and evaluate learning?Who first taught you what it means to repair rather than discard? How does that lesson appear—or fail to appear—in your teaching?Think about a student who challenged you. What assumptions about that student were you carrying, and what new possibilities became visible when those assumptions were questioned?Where do your classroom practices faithfully reflect your deepest values? Where is there a gap between what you profess and what you practice?If your students remembered only one thing about the way you saw them, what would you hope it would be? What evidence do you offer them of that hope?Imagine your teaching as an heirloom passed to the next generation. What convictions, habits, and stories would you want future teachers to inherit from you?If your classroom became a place where redemption was practiced as intentionally as knowledge was shared, what would change—for your students, for your colleagues, and for yourself?

I am often asked some version of the following question: “How has it been teaching online now?” For those of us who teach at schools with in-person learning, I imagine this is a common query from friends, family members, and colleagues. Initially, I gave answers that highlighted the sensations of newness, uncertainty, and adventure. Over time, I either expanded my answer to share what I was specifically learning or shortened my answer to a succinct summation like “it is going okay,” or “it is what it is,” based on the context of the conversation. For example, I opted for the latter replies, despite their triteness, at the beginning or the end of virtual meetings. What else is there to say when awkwardly waiting for other participants to join a Zoom call? Now, after approximately ten months, my answer is that my transition has not been from in-person to online education. Rather, I am continuing to adapt to pandemic education, which is occurring in an online environment to ensure safe conditions for productive learning. Pandemic education and online education are not synonymous. As someone who is new to fully online instruction, I have certainly benefited from consultations with educational design experts at my seminary and engaging resources in the forms of best practice summaries, advice guides, podcasts, and more. Fortunately, wise counsel and practical guidance are a few clicks away on my web browser. At the same time, I cannot escape the multiple pandemics we are experiencing across public health, systemic racism, white Christian nationalism, and political polarization. When so many people are suffering and dying, and so much hate and falsehood infects our civic life, it feels small and strange to invest my energy in making a weekly online forum more accessible and interactive. Therefore, I find it more generative to center the notion of pandemic education in my planning. As a theological educator, my students and I are constantly engaged in a collaborative learning process that seeks both comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter and concrete inquiry of why the subject matters in everyday congregations and ministry contexts. Teaching amid multiple pandemics has sharpened my focus on cultivating a pedagogical environment that thoroughly and precisely interrogates how the content in the syllabus intersects with what is actually happening in our churches and neighborhoods. One example in my teaching as an historian of American Christianity is to trace with students the legacies of racism, sexism, nativism, and heterosexism within some of our denominations and traditions. If my students and I only study the best of the past, exclusively reading the theologies and testimonies of those striving for justice and equality, we would be ill prepared to face the hard realities and complex challenges of Christian witness and leadership today. It is not enough to express perpetual shock at what actions, whether political insurrections or public health dismissals, bear the name of Jesus Christ. We must be able to identify origins and construct counternarratives. Some counternarratives will be rooted in the past, others will be adapted from the past to meet present conditions, and yet others will emerge as new creations. I have found transitioning to pandemic education also requires a heightened awareness of the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health of my students. One of my teaching principles, which I share freely and often with my students, is to exhibit compassion without compromising academic integrity. I do not hesitate to grant extensions, seek creative solutions to problems with assignments, and offer as much pastoral care as I can. Yet, I also strive to fully honor the contributions of students who meet deadlines with meticulous attention to requirements and expectations. The context of theological education, with its wide diversity of adult learners, some carrying significant congregational, familial, or other personal responsibilities alongside their academic coursework, makes this principle necessary but sometimes complicated to practice. Pandemic education has certainly stretched this principle of practicing compassion without compromise. I have witnessed students produce remarkably brilliant work and experienced invigorating synchronous discussions abounding with insights over the past ten months. Yet, I have also encountered deep pain, loss, doubt, exhaustion, and hopelessness in my classroom. Not only in my interaction with students, but also in myself. In these dark moments, I am especially reminded that pandemic education is not the same as online education.