Resources

for Rebecca Badertscher What’s your superpower? The question is playful. It invites imagination. It flirts with the extraordinary. It asks us to consider who we might be if we were not so bound by the ordinary limits of time, fear, gravity, or flesh. It is a contemplation of freedom. Common answers come easily. Flight. Speed. Mind reading. Super strength. Time travel. Invincibility. The question suggests that we long for capacities beyond ourselves. It suggests that we are weary of constraint. It suggests, too, that power is something we add on, something we acquire, something that dazzles. We yearn to be more. But some superpowers are not imagined. They are practiced. They are learned early. They are honed in ordinary spaces where fear lives quietly and persistently. Invisibility is one of those kinds of real superpowers. The ability to make oneself invisible is often imagined as magical. A sudden disappearing. A body present then vanished—moved to the unseeable realm. In classrooms, invisibility is neither magical nor sudden. It is deliberate. It is disciplined. It is a survival strategy.I learned invisibility in elementary school. I do not remember a single lesson on how to do it, yet I mastered it quickly. I learned to still my body. I learned to avoid eye contact. I learned to quiet my breath and fold myself into the smallest possible version of who I was. If I did all of this well enough, the teacher’s gaze would pass over me. I would not be called. I would not be exposed. I would not be required to speak. This invisibility protected me. I was shy. I was anxious. Speaking felt risky. Answering incorrectly felt dangerous. I learned that when another student answered a question wrong, the room changed. The air tightened. Time became prickly and slowed. Mistakes lingered longer and thicker than they should have. I learned that invisibility could carry me safely through those moments. I could disappear until the tension passed.This is how classrooms teach. Not only through curriculum and standards and objectives, but through atmosphere. Through tone. Through what happens when someone gets it wrong. Through what happens when fear enters the room and no one names it or ushers it out. We often mislabel invisibility as disengagement. As lack of interest. As laziness. As absence. As passivity or disinterest. But invisibility is effortful. It requires attention, control, and constant monitoring of the environment. It is hard work. Frequently it is exhausting work. For many adult students in our classrooms the practice of invisibility is their work. They sit in seminar rooms, lecture halls, and Zoom squares, perfecting disappearance. They keep cameras off. They speak only when required. They offer safe answers. They avoid drawing attention. Like me, they learned invisibility early, and like me, they learned it because learning spaces did not feel safe. Too often learning spaces were harmful, painful, even violent. A superpower is needed for survival. Educators often misread student silences. Silence is wrongly judged as deficiency. Quiet becomes lack of preparation. Invisibility becomes a problem to be corrected rather than a strategy to be understood. We ask students to participate without asking whether participation feels dangerous or is an invitation into violence. We celebrate visibility without interrogating the conditions that make invisibility necessary. Participation is not politically neutral. Visibility is not innocent. Who can risk being seen, heard, corrected, or misunderstood is shaped by race, gender, class, language, past schooling, and accumulated harm. Some students speak because they trust the room. Others disappear because they do not. Many classrooms are not trustworthy. Invisibility, then, is not a student’s failure. It is intelligence. It is the body remembering what it needed to do to survive learning spaces. When we label it as resistance or apathy, we miss the story it is telling. We miss the work of teaching all the students in the room rather than simply teaching the complying students. Good teaching requires listening for what is not said. It requires noticing who disappears and when. It requires asking not Why won’t they speak? but What makes silence feel safer than voice?If we are serious about education, we must teach against invisibility—not by forcing students into the light, but by changing the conditions of the room. We must slow down. We must treat mistakes gently. We must create multiple ways of being present. We must make fear discussable rather than disciplinary. I suspect it is a superpower of the highest caliber to invite students to reappear. Making learners visible again is worth the effort. Perhaps the better question for the teaching life is not What superpower do you have? but What powers did you develop to survive classrooms? And then, more importantly, What would help you no longer need that ability?Teaching is not about exposing students. It is about making it possible for them to reappear. At their own pace. On their own terms. In rooms where invisibility is no longer necessary.

Fear is the anxiety that you are about to lose something you love, need, have rightfully earned or deserve. Fear will make you hurt yourself, silence yourself, edit yourself in ways that contradict or disavow your own best pursuits. Since we teach who we are, showing up afraid will only serve to distort your teaching, raise the apprehension in your classroom and model a sense of distrust. While I understand the impulse to be afraid, we must choose to live unafraid, especially in our own classrooms.Uncertainty has been weaponized. Random acts of callousness have been normalized. Scarcity is being orchestrated. Universities are being pressured in strange and unpredictable ways. The enterprises of education are being guillotined. If there was ever a time that provoked fear, anger, and confusion for those of us employed in higher education — now is that moment. Even so, my hunch is that it is shortsighted to expect that preemptive acts will rescue anyone from the strategies of demolition and anarchy. It is not likely that the fight can be avoided—particularly for those trying to skirt it. While cowering from the fight is an option, we would be foolish to think that cowering from the attack will lessen the challenge. Fear will drive you to attempt ineffective strategies.The other day a colleague emailed the Wabash Center asking that we remove their syllabi from our online collection. They were afraid the contents of their courses would be read as diversity, equity and inclusion materials and did not, given the political climate, want to risk being castigated. I can understand their desire to avoid worry, but removing syllabi from the internet, at best, is misguided. The fact-of-the matter is that nothing is ever actually removed. Why would the colleague think that hiding materials would make them safe? In this climate, compliance has not been met with a cease fire. I recognize that the fearful colleague is following suit with many prestigious universities who have performed an audit of their own websites, purged language of welcome and belonging, then re-languaged their program descriptions for public consumption.  I suspect our safety will depend upon the capacities of our intellectual leaders to decide not to be intimidated. Harvard is leading the way.Today, a colleague teaching at a state university reported that their department chair announced that she had recommended to the provost a 60% cut in the department’s budget. The department chair stated that she hoped that by volunteering the massive budget cut that she would avoid the impending budget fights. Once colleagues were clear that this recommendation was made to preempt the department head from having to fight for their department’s budget, the startle of colleagues shifted to rage. They felt betrayed. When the faculty pressed the department head for a rationale, the department chair explained that because they were close to retirement they were entitled to choose “peace” and avoid the impending university wide budgetary conflicts. Now, the department is waiting in fear. They are afraid that the department head’s wanton actions communicated to the university the lack of importance of the entire department. Wittingly or unwittingly, the timid department head chose to conspire in her own demise. She had not considered the welfare of the community over her own fear-driven impulse to preemptively concede—or maybe she had. Evil takes advantage of self-absorption and is intensified.We do not have the luxury of being afraid if it allows avoidance, silence, or being untrue to our central aims. Values which are easily discarded to avoid a fight might need to be reassessed, but now that crisis is upon us, conceding seems reckless. Safety is not ensured. We must know where we stand before the fight comes.If we are doing our jobs of good teaching, teaching religion and theology inherently cultivates voiced students who critically and imaginatively critique the status quo.  We know there are no dangerous thoughts; to those who would squelch wonder, imagination and freedom, thinking itself is dangerous. If in this moment we waffle on this rudimentary aim of teaching — why did we choose teaching in the first place? And why do we remain in higher education classrooms? Certainly, the individual and collective answers to these questions will matter as we decide our engagement in the vitriolic challenges of this moment. May our fear not become our hallmark. The worst thing we can do is panic and allow our fears to be the guiding force. This morning, I emailed my Associate Directors a copy of Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. Lorde's speech sheds light on the factors that may cause, in times of trouble, some people to remain silent while enabling others to speak an act. At our next director’s discussion, I am going to begin the dialogue with this Lorde quote:“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."Together, we will discuss the ways Wabash Center will stand firm in our commitments, and the ways we will steadfastly emphasize our mission of improving teaching, knowing that the aim of good teaching is to provide radical hospitality, to create space for open dialogue and to encourage creativity and imagination for future building. Reflection Questions for Leaders in EducationWhat do you do when you do not know what to do and you are afraid to do anything?What habits and practices (sacred or otherwise) will calm you during extended crisis?Who is your wise counsel in the season of doubt and distrust?How do you work through experiences of unprovoked or unforeseen change?What if the challenge is bigger than your capacity to lead, to teach, to serve?