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In my previous post (the second in a series of three) I reflected on deep learning as part of the formative educational process. I explored what it might look like to focus on students and the world they live in rather than on teaching our own particular (and often narrow) expertise. I suggested that part of the responsibility of forming students’ selves and lives involves commitment to our own personal and institutional growth. My institution (Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University) holds out a vision of a world transformed by God’s love, mercy, and justice and names as its mission to educate and inspire people to serve God’s diverse world as leaders in churches, the academy, and public life. We claim to value “Scholarship that engages churches, the academy, and public life; Justice that enhances diversity, flourishing and wholeness; and Practice that enlivens intellectual, spiritual, and professional growth.” I resonate deeply with these values. I came to Brite, in part, because of these values. I long for any conversation among my colleagues about how we accomplish these in the classroom and in the lives of our students (and in our own lives, for that matter). I want to hear more about how they model careful listening, how they dignify diversity as a desirable norm, ways in which they manage to draw underrepresented voices out, and how they model effective conflict management in classrooms and hallways. How do they they help students learn to identify the implications of what they learned for engaging the suffering world? What skills and tools, what ways of being do they try to model? How do they enact justice and engage their work toward wholeness in the classroom and beyond? How do they enliven personal, spiritual, and professional growth? How do they teach toward cultivating a more flourishing world? These questions would likely sound ridiculous to many of my colleagues. “It is my job to teach them a discipline,” they might rejoin, “not teach them who or how to be.” Fair enough, I suppose. This is, after all, how most of us were trained. We learned to read, to dissect an argument, to analyze, and maybe to construct. Many of us never had a course in pedagogy, studying neither its purpose(s) nor effective practices. Our doctoral programs had us focused on content rather than process. We have gotten comfortable there and have had to continue the habits we learned as graduate students to have any chance of succeeding in the academy. I get it. I have done it, too. But I want to suggest that what we imagine our role as theological educators to be exposes how we think of our students and our responsibilities to them. Do we see them as students needing to learn biblical exegesis or history or psychoanalytic theory? To what end do we teach these? Would it change how we teach if we understood that our students are the future, the potential embodiment of God’s work in the world, a potential source of resistance, hope, and healing? Surely even those of us who have not studied pedagogy have heard of explicit curricula (what we claim to be teaching, what we focus on) and implicit curricula (what we teach by being ourselves, by the choices we make in the classroom; what we include and do not include on a syllabus; how we engage students and the teaching and learning community, etc.). Perry Shaw asserts that students learn more through the ways schools function—and in the way they experience the classroom—than they do from any verbal or written content they receive. Shaw quotes pedagogical theorist Robert Ferris as saying, “the faculty are the curriculum” (Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning [Langham, 2014] 10, emphasis added). If Ferris is correct, then many of us have some serious unlearning to do. Most of us are not training future academics; rather, we are teaching students who will soon be parish ministers and other religious leaders, leaders of not-for-profit organizations, community organizers, and activists. They are or may be parents, partners, neighbors, and leaders. And yet many of us (myself included) teach the way we were taught. We teach the way(s) we are familiar with. We teach as professional scholars. But our students need something different. They need something more. They deserve something more. So does the world we all share. If the faculty are the curriculum, then our students are watching. They are absorbing our ways, our values, and our commitments. They are being shaped by the outlines of our own lives. I won’t speak for you, but my life as an academic is often pretty narrow, focused, and insular. As noted above, it has had to be, in order to gain and keep any status in the academy that I have “earned.” I am comfortable in my habits, the rhythms of my days, and in my heady work. But if Ferris is correct, I should be alarmed by what I am modeling. The academy can be a competitive, self-absorbed, and zero-sum place. The coin of the realm is critique and challenge and jostling for distinction. Is this what we want our students to take from their time with us? If we played out Kant’s categorical imperative, what kind of world would we be helping to create? Such a question invites us teacher/scholars to ask ourselves why we do what we do and to what we want to contribute. It calls us further than that, though. It invites us to ask what kind of being human we are modeling for our students, what we want to be modeling, and what hard and intentional work it will take to close the gap. I am a trained psychotherapeutic clinician, so the idea of sitting with someone to explore the stuck places in myself, to engage my potential areas of growth and change, and to face the wounds I carry does not hold stigma for me. Others will find their own way, and I support that—as long as we can all arrive at the same place: understanding theological education as a formative endeavor, whether we are clear and intentional about the ways we are forming ourselves, our communities, and our students or not. Deep learning is usually referred to in positive ways, but I worry about the kinds of deep lessons our students are taking with them without our intention, our consent, or even without our awareness.

My family spent a lot of time this summer traveling in our car. As we drove up and down several eastern and southern states, with stops in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the thing we dreaded most was traffic. We groaned and sighed when coming to a sudden stop as the smartphone displayed a bright red line along our route. Even when Siri tried to comfort us, indicating that we were still on the fastest route, we exchanged looks of disgust and exasperation with one another. But traffic did not deter us from travel, and we were always relieved when we made it to the next destination in our journey. Ultimately, we accepted that the traffic we encountered was inevitable and paled in comparison to the joyous experiences we shared together. Reflecting on traffic evokes the faculty meeting at my seminary and probably other seminaries as well. Here is an obvious and perhaps irrefutable thesis statement: Theological educators do not like faculty meetings. In fact, many of us despise them. We think faculty meetings are ineffective misuses of time (cue the “This could have been an email” meme) and sometimes dangerous spaces abounding in microaggressions that stem from intercultural missteps and interpersonal conflicts. But we accept that the faculty meeting is part of the job. When I talk with colleagues from other institutions, we commiserate about the faculty meetings at our respective seminaries and observe how they lack the collaborative spirit and invigorating dialogue we have experienced during the Wabash Center’s workshops and gatherings. At my seminary, I have offered an expression that is part smile, part frown, and all dread with colleagues when bumping into them on the way to a faculty meeting. The expression is hard to describe in words, but I will venture to suggest that many theological educators can empathetically visualize my look with ease. Over the past two academic years, I have taught an interdisciplinary course with one of my colleagues that serves as a concluding capstone for Master of Divinity students in their final semester of study with us. Because the learning aims include synthesizing lessons from other courses and preparing students for vocations in pastoral leadership after they graduate, my co-instructor and I ask the class at the onset what topics they would like to engage together and what kinds of guest lecturers they would like to hear from in the final weeks of the course. One of the topics that arose was church administration, with a question about how to facilitate meetings with laypersons, such as deacons and elders. In the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one of the responsibilities of a pastor is to be the moderator of the session. The denomination’s Book of Order explains that the session is “composed of those persons elected by the congregation to active service as ruling elders, together with all installed pastors and associate pastors.” It is therefore not surprising that some of our graduating students have session meetings in mind and desire to learn more about exercising leadership in meetings. What is surprising to some of my students is the reality that our seminary does not provide an exemplary model for meetings. One student divulged how it confounded them that the faculty at our seminary, with many professors they admired so deeply, struggled to conduct creative and productive meetings that were different from the corporate world and other secular professional contexts. It seemed to them that their professors were not practicing what they were teaching. Another alumnus, a few years after graduation, told me that they had outgrown some of their naivety about the seminary as an idealized church-related institution. When this alumnus was a student, they would have given anything to be a “fly on the wall” at a faculty meeting. Now they would never want to attend one because they believed that there was no joy in witnessing their former professors at our collective worst. Can the seminary faculty meeting be saved? I do not know (probably). But here are two recommendations that I have learned from my experiences with the Wabash Center. The first is the importance of clear objectives. Because the Wabash Center convenes faculty and administrators from a wide array of colleges, universities, divinity schools, and seminaries, the leaders at every workshop I have participated in have communicated their goals, hopes, and expectations with precision, care, and consistency. If one goal of a seminary faculty meeting is to ensure that all voices are heard and included, then two expectations are that the participants receive the preparatory materials with sufficient lead time and the meeting itself is moderated in ways that foster mutuality, equity, and reciprocity. Seminaries also need to be honest about their adoption of hierarchical systems from the academy. If the culture of a seminary is such that untenured faculty members listen and do not speak, then it is unreasonable to hope that faculty meetings embody the principles of inclusion and cooperation. If the purpose of a meeting is to simply vote on quotidian matters that require faculty approval, then the expectation ought to be modest and sights should be set on no more than a perfunctory meeting that moves forward the ordinary business of the seminary. The second lesson I gleaned from my experiences with the Wabash Center is the generative energy that results from collaborative leadership practices. I observed a leadership team with several persons sharing authority with one another and inviting every participant to enact their distinctive gifts. Each of us were given opportunities, with ample advance notice, to provide leadership that displayed our experiential insight, intercultural intelligence, and distinguishing pedagogy. The spotlight was rarely on one leader for a prolonged amount of time and the leaders wore their authority lightly. When a participant talked too much, or was the first to speak on several occasions, they were encouraged to take a step back and make room for others who may not process as quickly and needed a few moments of silence before fully engaging the discussion at hand. We met in various spaces and with diverse formats that fit the stated objectives of the sessions and cultivated a spirit of imagining and envisioning together. Of course, our seminaries are not the same as the Wabash Center. The context of a seminary faculty meeting differs from a Wabash Center workshop, but perhaps there are principles from the latter that we can apply to the former. However, I am unsure whether seminaries like mine want to change. At some of our theological institutions, the faculty meeting is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

“When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.” This quote from environmentalist David Orr expresses the importance of our interconnection with our earth. For my undergraduate students, especially in the midst of the COVID pandemic, an immersion into nature contributes to both physical and mental wellness. The idea of inclusive care—for self, for others, and for the environment—extends human rights and highlights the political and spiritual dimensions of ecojustice. In my teaching experience, these connections are best made with community partners. Students in my Religion and Ecology class work in practicum teams as a key component of the theory and praxis focus of the course. One partnership is with the Agnes Scott Center of Sustainability. Student teams work with the staff on a practicum project in several areas: horticulture (organic garden), seed library (with the college library), trees, Audubon sanctuary area, green buildings, alternative energy, waste diversion, and sustainability education in dorms. Some of the projects are research and development for the future, such as for the renovation of the college greenhouse. Depending on the semester and the needs of the Center, students have done invasive species removal, built birdhouses, created a campus bird guide, designed an organic landscape for a grassy area over a large geothermal unit, written a proposal for natural landscaping (a “green” campus lawn), built fairy houses, designed an aromatherapy garden, written a proposal for connections of the dining hall with local organic gardens, among other things. Connecting the course material with a hands-on project is a way for students to explore concrete ways of being part of sustainability work on our campus. Trellis Horticultural Therapy Alliance, a local Atlanta nonprofit organization, also provides practicum opportunities for community partnership. Trellis’s mission is “using the power of gardening and nature to improve the lives of people living with disabilities and chronic illness by providing purpose, fostering independence, and creating community.” The partnership began with an invitation to the organization’s founder, environmental scientist Rachel Cochran, to be a guest speaker in class. The purpose was to raise awareness on the practice of therapeutic horticulture and the benefits of gardening and immersion in nature. Trellis (Trellis Horticultural Therapy – Planting Seeds of Possibility) is a member of the American Horticultural Therapy Association (American Horticultural Therapy Association). This partnership provides students with opportunities to engage a variety of wellness and social justice issues, including: food insecurity, nonprofit organizing, climate change, sustainable living, resilience and mental health, as well as experience working in non-profit organizations (including grant writing, leadership, and career exploration). Students work in various locations: the Ability Garden at a local arts center that services seniors, veterans, disabled adults, and children with autism; a local community garden plot with men in a drug and alcohol recovery program, and the Dignity Garden behind a day center for seniors with dementia at a strip mall (and a student project of a fundraising video for Georgia Gives Day that raised $9000 for the organization). Several students continue to volunteer with Trellis or do internships after the semester ends, including one summer internship with their program at an organic farm at a transitional correctional institution for women felons. A basic pedagogical concept is that students become agents of knowledge about the local issues around ecojustice and climate change. They also become visionaries of the possibilities for change. Students often encounter institutional blocks: around certain traditional aesthetics of campus lawns, around the demands of the local movie industry that frequently uses our campus for filming, around issues of funding (a renovated greenhouse would also require rejuvenating the faculty position in Botany), around issues of acceptable community partnerships, and around the general limits of how far an institution will invest in environmental justice. Amidst the general apocalyptic mood of global warming and dangerous (albeit EPA approved) pesticides in our campus grass, sprayed by poverty-wage outsourced staff, the course framework of environmental racism in the US South and the moral failure of a capitalist system, there is also the wake-up call and solutions of Project Drawdown, and course readings from Braiding Sweetgrass to Georgia Interfaith Power and Light to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The issues around ecological justice can be overwhelming. Clearing paths for wheelchair accessibility in a garden, planting and harvesting kale, preparing an organic dinner with men in a recovery program, or crafting with middle schoolers and seniors can provide new vision and energy, and shared community and wellness.

In late May 2021, a shocking revelation made the news. The T’Kemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that evidence was found using ground-penetrating radar of 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of a former church-run residential school to which Indigenous children were sent as mandated by the Canadian government. Since then, hundreds of other unmarked graves of children and youth at other residential school sites have been found. These were educational institutions from which students emerged as “survivors” rather than “graduates.” They were institutions characterized as perpetuating “cultural genocide” aimed at wiping out Indigenous cultures, beliefs, and languages. The first opened its doors in 1828 and the last closed in 1996. The horrific findings at T’Kemlúps and other sites of former residential schools provided further evidence of the abuse suffered by generations of Indigenous children as documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools which ran from 2008 to 2015 in Canada. To lose one’s life as a student at an educational institution staffed by adults entrusted with care, many of whom were priests and nuns, is the ultimate in betrayal of trust. The revelation of these deaths of Indigenous children and youth prompted me, as a religious studies professor, a woman of Caribbean heritage and descendant of enslaved Africans living and working in Turtle Island/North America, to reflect on the broader history of what “education” in the twenty-first century means and my role as an educator. Given the legacy of church-based institutions in the education of enslaved, indentured, and colonized peoples during the colonial era, emerging untouched as a disembodied learner is impossible. What challenges have we inherited as students and educators and what pedagogies can we bring to classrooms as correctives and alternatives, including systems of Indigenous knowledge outlawed during the colonial era? This is an enormous question a thorough answer to which is beyond the scope of this short reflection; however, daring to ask this question is necessary if as educators we are to confront with honesty and integrity the myriad ways in which educational institutions and processes, even those which are well-meaning and couched in terms signifying a commitment to equitable principles, have been complicit in colonial rule. Throughout the British Empire, children and youth were subjected to disciplinary action under colonial rule. Canada’s colonial history as a settler colony in the British Empire and Caribbean nations as a former monocrop economy dependent on the production and sale of sugar and its byproducts are linked. Some children, at various times, were deemed by law and/or custom unmanageable, “truant,” “incorrigible,” “delinquent,” and were subsequently criminalized and in need of “reform,” “training,” or correction by some combination of discipline, punishment, and education. Training schools were instituted in the Caribbean beginning in the post-slavery era, primarily, though not exclusively, for male children and youth. In a Canadian context, as discussed in the documentary Born Bad (CBC, 2021), training schools were instituted in the early 1930s with the final one closing in 1984. These training schools, which predominantly affected white, working-class youth, were total institutions which were supposed to look after the educational and cultural needs of children and youth in a residential setting. The training schools were often located in small towns where children were removed from their families and home communities. In recent years, alleged abuses at former Canadian training schools have come to light with a class action lawsuit pending. In a Caribbean context there is evidence of a shift towards awareness and addressing of factors such as childhood trauma in the lives of children and youth in training schools. What has become increasingly apparent over the last year is that even though unmarked, the burial places of the deceased Indigenous children and youth remained a part of the topography of the physical land and cultural landscape. Secrets of small towns and rural communities in which residential schools and training schools were located are now being revealed to a broader public. In effect, these sites are simultaneously unmarked and marked by their tangible links to individual families and communities. The challenge for religious studies education is to come to terms, honestly, with the legacy of churches (in Canada, the United Church, Roman Catholic and Anglican), mandated by the federal government for over a century to carry out residential school education. The ways in which religious studies is taught could benefit from exploration of these colonial linkages between the Caribbean, Canada, the US, and other former British settler colonies such as New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Studying the impact of religious institutions in these geographically distant yet historically-linked areas would require a comparative approach anchored in the experiences of survivors and witnesses revealed through combined methods of historical and archival research and shared oral histories. This endeavour will require collaboration and fortitude but it is a necessary process and one that begins with individual reflections and actions of engaged educators. For information about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action please see: calls_to_action_english2.pdf (gov.bc.ca). For information on contemporary status of incarcerated youth in some English-speaking Caribbean countries see “The Status of Youth in Incarceration in the Caribbean” (2020): FreemonNunoKatz2020.pdf.

“You are a creature in the midst of creation.” Those words, which I have heard or recited in versions of the Ignatian Examen countless times in the past decade, kept returning to my mind as we gathered in our outdoor classroom. That space and time made it possible to better notice and appreciate our communities of fellow creatures, human and nonhuman. As I noted in my first blog in this series, my students in “Contemporary Theology” and I found it almost impossible to sustain discussion indoors while masked and socially distanced. Outside, though, our conversations often flowed freely. Experienced educators work hard to cultivate a sense of belonging, and each class develops its own collective personality. I have noticed that the classroom communities that I have had since beginning to teach outside have often been markedly stronger—students are more resilient, more engaged, and more willing to be challenged constructively—than those I was able to foster indoors. I took primary responsibility for setting up and tearing down the classroom—including moving our portable whiteboard, stored chairs, and a table for my laptop for Zooming students. But I invited students to share in such responsibilities and many commented that doing so enhanced their learning and sense of belonging. By meeting outside, despite the challenges, students noted that they knew they were doing their part to keep our community safe. The distinctive contingencies and flexibility required to be outside enhanced our sense of togetherness. The specialness of the opportunity to be outside seems to have primed us to attend well to one another and to the unique tasks of the moment, working to ensure that we could safely and fruitfully continue meeting. Neighbors and members of our uncommon community often passed by and through our classroom. Students, faculty, staff, administrators, prospective students, and other visitors passed by, reminding us of the institutional context of our shared work and of our accountability to one another. We were reminded of our relationships with and impacts on the nonhuman neighbors in our community constantly. I was not the only one to root around in the mulch—one day when I reached into the soil to show my students the mycelium, I discovered instead a beautiful millipede going about their own work of decomposition. We were joined by towhees, robins, and countless other birds who made a ruckus in the leaves and mulch of the flower beds as they searched for food. Sometimes five-lined-skinks, catching the sun with electric blue tails, skittered by or paused to soak up the heat from the bricks. Bald eagles, ospreys, red-tailed hawks, black vultures, and turkey vultures soared above us majestically. The bird song sometimes overwhelmed us in its constancy and diversity. In late summer and early fall cicadas serenaded us with the birds, and in the spring upland chorus frogs and spring peepers made their contributions to the soundscape. On a warm early spring day in March one class asked if we could meet for class on the bank of the French Broad River down the steps from our normal classroom. An otter, a great blue heron, and countless bluebirds joined us that day—or rather, we joined them. Sometimes harmless but intimidating carpenter bees insisted on participating in our discussion, buzzing and bumping along the picnic tables. On multiple occasions I had to rescue wasps and spiders from terrified students, gently scooping them up and relocating them away from danger. God had created them and declared them good after all (Genesis 1.21, 24, 25), our ignorance and incredulity notwithstanding. Just as God does not need us (Acts 17.25), I reminded everyone (including myself) that God does not need them; but God nevertheless calls us and them into being out of love. One September day immediately following class a student shouted my name from just up the stairs: “Dr. Gordon, there’s a snake!” A midland rat snake was crossing the road towards our classroom. The distressed serpent had crawled through erosion control mesh that was cutting and constricting its body. It was a poignant reminder of how human decisions and assumptions cause suffering for our nonhuman neighbors. I borrowed a pocketknife from a student, freed the snake, and released it down the hill. Once, a flock of thousands upon thousands of starlings brought class to a complete standstill. The deafening cacophony of their calls left us no choice but to watch as they moved from tree to tree over an area where the undergrowth consisted solely of English ivy. Both groups of organisms were clearly thriving, but they do so at the expense of our native nonhuman neighbors. They are both here in east Tennessee, I reminded us all, because of human choices. In my classroom without walls, we often talked about God’s transcendence and otherness, but we learned also of God’s nearness, God’s care for our particularity, and that our particularity is bound up in countless relationships with other persons, and with our nonhuman neighbors—both animate and stationary. Such lessons came to us outside without much effort on my part. Resting in the cool of autumn and the early warmth of spring, listening to the birds and cicadas and frogs and lawnmowers and children, smelling the damp mold and blooming roses, setting up and putting away chairs or shade canopies, we could sense and know well our connections to one another, to the place itself, and to God, as “creatures in the midst of creation.”

More important than any topic I teach is teaching my students how to learn. Facts can change. The percentage of Christians in the United States that I teach first-year students today may be different by the time they graduate. The anti-racism landscape in this particular moment is different from the one laid out the 2014 Religion and Popular Culture textbook I use. What will the situation in Myanmar be like in a few years? Such facts, on their own, aren’t worth much beyond the grade they might get a student if she successfully memorizes and regurgitates them on a test. But skills—in question asking, in studying, in note taking, in writing, in critiquing, in empathy, in appreciating differences, in recognizing our own limitations, in knowing what motivates us and why we (do or should) care—are what will stay with students, long after they leave my class and go out into the world. Many faculty grumble these days about lowering admissions standards and how students are so much less prepared now than they were back in the “good old days.” Part of it, of course, is a pandemic. Sophomores at my university missed the end of their senior year of high school (with its important rites of passage, like prom and graduation) and they had a totally online first year in college, with its isolation, Zoom fatigue, and poor pedagogy (not exactly ideal). None of us are at our best. Part of it, too, is shifts in K-12 education, the pressures of standardized testing, the diversification and democratization of higher education, and the rise of a new generation, with all of its own quirks. But, like many other educators before me, I’m persuaded that we need to meet students where they are. We need to teach the students we have. If a skill is necessary for success in my class, then it is something I teach. If I want students to write essays, for example, I can’t assume they will even know what I’m asking for (since professors in other disciplines, even in my own department, may not mean the same thing by that word—one of Dan Melzer’s very interesting findings from Assignments Across the Curriculum), let alone how to write an “essay” well. Without such explicit instruction, I’m simply rewarding the students who came into my class already knowing how to do the thing, which basically just rewards students of certain demographics who are already advantaged anyway. Not good. Usually college campuses have a lot of great resources to support students “learning how to learn” (sometimes used interchangeably with the concept of “meta-cognition,” which simply means thinking about how you think). We have a Learning Center here, with support for writing, presentations, and more, as well as a Learning Strategies Center that I always recommend to students for just these purposes. And there are a few books I regularly turn to for inspiration, including Saundra Yancy McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn (and its companion, Teach Yourself How to Learn, for students). But I include various opportunities in my classes too, since research into how we learn demonstrates how effective it is to teach with meta-cognition in mind. Here is a sampling of what I’ve tried: I ask students what the purpose of studying religion even is, assign them the task of looking around online for justifications, and then have them write what the point of studying one of their other subjects is. Why bother? Who cares? Let’s figure out why this is worth our time. We talk about the origins of the study of religion, as well as concerns/critiques of the term and its associated field, and I encourage them to investigate the history of their other disciplines. I assign Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” (from her book Bird by Bird) and I ask students what they learned about the writing process from the piece, as well as which strategies they’d like to try. I show them some peer-review comments on an article of my own (and point out how much meaner scholars are to one another than I am to them!), but only after I show them the fancy-looking published piece. They need to understand that what’s final and polished is only a very small part of a long, arduous, and usually invisible process, which even experts undergo. I ask students how they might be able to use persuasive writing in other contexts. When you apply for a job, what are you doing in your cover letter? You are trying to make a persuasive argument (hire me!) and support it with reasoning and evidence (here’s my past work experience, here are my relevant skills). Practice this skill in my class; apply it for the rest of your lives. I convey that something like writing (or math, as Carol Dweck originally studied) is a skill and can be learned with practice, over time, vs. something fixed and static. I share examples from my own life (along with embarrassments and failures) of learning, such as my bike-riding journey. I ask students to share their annotation strategies after doing a reading and show a projection of some of the notes I’ve taken on the same piece (highlighting what I made notes on, as well as how and why); I ask them to write down new note-taking strategies they’d like to try. I put students in groups or assign reading responses and ask them to figure out what the main argument in a scholarly article is, how that author supports the argument (i.e., with reasoning and evidence), and what their confusions and critiques are. I explain this is the same process I use, as laid out on the rubric, for reading and evaluating their own papers. I ask students to put the scholars’ ideas or claims into their own words, in class and on exams. I try to make exams, which are online and not timed, uncheatable (inspired by the work of James Lang), by asking students to apply what they’ve learned to novel and often current contexts (e.g., which definition of “pop culture” does this tweet from the Dalai Lama exemplify and why?) I have students fill out “exam wrappers,” in which after a test they reflect on their preparation and study strategies, what seemed to work well and what didn’t, what kinds of questions they missed (and what happened), and how they will adjust their approach for future tests. We generate a list of self-care strategies that can help students de-stress, especially around midterms. We do breathing exercises and body scans in class to help relax them for the day. I tell them about relevant research into how students (really, all people) learn: for instance, if they don’t take notes in class, and review those same notes, they basically won’t remember anything later on; if they cram right before a test, they might do okay, grade-wise, but they won’t retain anything for the next (cumulative) one. I tell students that we all learn better when we care about something, when we can discover the relevance to our own lives. I have them write weekly reflections that ask for a connection between what they learned in class and their lives outside of the classroom. I ask them, in small groups in class, to generate real examples of what we’re discussing that day (e.g., how have you noticed religion creating community in the world around you?) I tell them about various phenomena, like the Dunning-Kruger effect or confirmation bias, so they can be more aware of their own tendencies and correct for them. I ask them to share examples. In class, I read the children’s book They All Saw a Cat, which emphasizes differences in perceptions and how even our own views of ourselves are inevitably only partial, limited. I am experimenting with “ungrading” to put more of the responsibility and reflection into their own hands. On the final exam, I ask students what the most important thing they learned in the class was. (They rarely list some fact; instead, many of them write: “I learned how to think. Thank you.”)

When my first-year students write bad papers, I assume they are bad writers. If they don’t revise, I assume they don’t want to do it. If they don’t pay attention, I assume they don’t care about my course. Again and again, I assume that my students’ actions are based on conscious decisions, that they flow from their characters, and that they express their values. I should know better, given what behavioral science has taught us about human decision making. People often don’t act rationally. We’re easily knocked off course. We fail to sign up for retirement plans even though they are great deals; we take the elevator instead of the stairs even when we’re trying to get in shape; and we eat junk food we don’t like that much just because it is there. Talking to my students gives me the distinct impression that they are typical human beings. They don’t decide to underperform in my class. Stuff gets in the way. Those bad papers were written in a rush at 3 a.m. the night before they were due. My students look uninterested not because they dislike my class but because they are freaking out about their financial accounting exam. Many of their actions aren’t based on conscious decisions, they don’t flow from their characters, and they don’t express their values. Things just sort of happen. So, can we make better things happen instead? Like, better papers? Sometimes. Many of the factors that influence our students’ performance are of course outside our control. I can’t stop COVID-19, I can’t fix my students’ mental health issues, and I can’t make all the scary political stuff go away. I can only be aware of how they affect our students (and me) and find ways to work with and around them. And I can tweak the situation in my class, nudging my students towards doing the right thing. Richard Thaler coined the term “nudge,” and he describes it as an intervention that “gently steers the individual towards the desired behavior.” The classical example is saving for retirement. Informed by behavioral science, many retirement plans now automatically sign people up unless they actively opt out. Nudges abound in our society. To encourage people to take the stairs, make them attractive and well-lit and place the elevator off to the side. To encourage us to watch several episodes of Bridgerton back-to-back, autoplay them. An effective nudge makes it easy for people to do what we want them to do. Nudges work. How can we use them in our classes? So far, I’ve used them mostly around writing. In despair over all those 3 a.m. papers, I have started requiring drafts in all my classes. They are due a few days before the actual paper, they count for almost nothing, and I don’t read them. I tell the students that I assign drafts to force them to start the papers earlier and explain why starting early is useful. They can opt out at minimum cost, but very few do. And the papers turn out better. Once I started requiring drafts, I also noticed that I encountered less plagiarism. I suspect it is because my students really aren’t bad people who think cheating is OK. When they plagiarize, it’s usually a last-minute decision, made in despair at 3 a.m. Eliminate that last minute panic, and students are less likely to plagiarize. I’ve also started using nudges to get weaker students to ask for help. Here’s a recent triumph: This spring, I had a student who kept doing poorly on his papers and didn’t seek out help. I sent him a brief email: Your writing needs work. Would you like some help figuring out how to do it? I’m happy to help; just email me back if you’re interested. I heard back within ten minutes, he got help, and his next paper was a C+ instead of a D. There was nothing magical about the words in my email. I had written the same thing on his graded papers, and I had said it to the whole class. The email was more effective nudge because it made it so easy to reach out for help: Just click reply and write “yes please.” I used to think that this type of approach was paternalistic and enabling. Students should choose to ask for help, they should plan their own time, and they should suffer the consequences when they don’t. And if they are the sort of people who cheat, let them—and then punish them harshly. I keep backsliding into that way of thinking, and I have to remind myself that I know better. People aren’t fully rational, and situations affect behavior. As Thaler points out, we and our students are being nudged all the time -- by advertisers, friends, and social forces. Many of these nudges are in directions that are bad for us. Given that, why not be intentional about using nudges in a way that might help students pass their courses? Using devices like nudges seems especially important since there is an equity issue at play here. Some students don’t need nudges and guidance as much because they feel at home in college. They find it easy to ask for help from the professor; they have been taught good study habits; they have had stellar writing instruction. But others don’t and haven’t. If I avoid nudging my students, I make it harder for those who desperately need guidance in order to succeed. I don’t want to do that. It’s hard enough for them already.     Sources: ·      John M. Burdick and Emily Peeler, “The Value of Effective Nudging During COVID,” Inside Higher Ed, February 23, 2021. ·      Dan Harris, interview with Richard H. Thaler, “How to work around your own irrationality,” 10% Happier podcast, episode 402, December 6, 2021.  ·      Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011). ·      Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2021). ·      Shankar Vedantam, “Think fast with Daniel Kahneman,” Hidden Brain podcast.

“...it’s easy if you try.” In fact, it is not easy for me to imagine no grading. But I’m trying, colleagues. I’m trying really hard. I’m not talking about being finished with this spring term’s grading, though that would be nice, too. When I say, “Imagine there’s no grading,” I mean imagine learning without grades. Okay, wait—don’t go anywhere! How about, imagine learning with fewer grades. Or finally: imagine a learning environment that is designed to encourage learners (and instructors) to focus more on learning, and less on grades. When we put this imagination into practice, we are Ungrading. I’m not doing away with grades and grading. I have invested decades into discovering and sharing grading practices that are more equitable, more just, less biased, and more accurate than many of the grading practices I learned from my own instructors. However, these very discoveries have led me into practices that many describe as ungrading: more formative evaluation and less summative evaluation; peer learning via peer review; more narrative and collaborative evaluation processes; and more openness to surprising demonstrations of learning. This unpredictability of learning is one of two experiences that, today, urgently persuade me to consider more committal practices in Ungrading. Put simply: Learners come from everywhere and are going everywhere. Learners come from everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what prior experiences and insights they are pouring into the learning that they mix. (“Constructivism” is a theory of learning holding that learners construct understanding by integrating new information with prior knowledge.) If learners come from everywhere (and bring anything), then how can I be confident in one-size-fits-all grading strategies that presuppose that I already know what “learning” will look like? What is more, learners are going everywhere, and therefore, I have very little idea what an application of learning might look like in their imagined present or future contexts. If learners are going everywhere (and might need anything), then how can I be confident that I already know what a successful application of learning should look like? This is to say: do my evaluation processes have ears? Are they open to challenge? Do they invite surprise? The second experience that today urgently persuades me to evaluate grading more critically is my experience of trustworthiness in learners. This is not a new experience of course, but is fresh on my mind, in part because of a new experience, and in part because of fresh reflection on a frequent experience. This spring, I taught a class that my institution designates as Pass/Fail. Learners responded weekly to a pair of prompts calling on them to engage the readings of the week in particular ways. The rubric for these weekly prompts was unchanging through the semester, and learners got the hang of it all quite early. At that point, I wondered whether student submissions would become minimum-effort, “paint by numbers” exercises in tedium, but things proved otherwise: overwhelmingly, learners engaged the course materials in authentic, often risk-taking ways that showed more than the necessary commitment of time and attention. This was true not only for the habitual overachievers, but also for those learners who had had the most trouble getting the hang of things early in the term. The prior semester, I taught my usual Intro course in my subject matter (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament). This was where I encountered a by-now-familiar phenomenon: the learners became more enthusiastically engaged with the material in the last weeks of the term, once (as an intentional result of course design) most student’s final grades were more or less established. Learners would go on to take low-stakes, short assignments and stretch their creativity, taking provisional ideas out for a spin and testing their own limits freely. Countless times I have reflected, “It’s amazing what’s possible once they feel like their grades are more or less set...” without considering what an indictment that is against the basic presupposition that grading is necessary to coerce performance. Why in the world am I not doing all I can to create those liberating conditions as early in the term as possible? Why am I not doing more to get grades out of the way of learning? This summer, I am once again taking my aspirations as an instructor to the notion of Ungrading. Discover more about Ungrading by reading Susan D. Blum (ed.), Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University (2020). Find active, up-to-date, practice-based discussions about Ungrading by searching Twitter for the hashtag #ungrading.

My fall 2021 “God and the Human Person” students had just read M. Shawn Copeland’s excellent piece “Scripture and Ourselves: Reflections on the Bible and the Body” and were having a rich discussion on the goodness, beauty, opportunities, and limitations of the experience of being “body-persons.”[1] Every time we engage that piece, I am shocked anew when students, especially young women, report that they have never heard that God values bodies and calls us good. Despite what some Christian traditions have held, Copeland reminds us that according to Scripture, according to God, it is good to be body-persons in our particularity. In the second creation account in Genesis, we read that humans are made from, and made to work, the soil. Our embodiment is good and it is also connected to the dirt![2] During a lull in the conversation I spontaneously walked to the edge of the patio, reached over the red brick wall, and plunged my hand into the flower bed. I pulled out bright yellow and white threads binding the soil and woodchips together: “What is this beautiful structure and what is it doing here?” I asked. It was mycelium, root-like fungal threads—hyphae. Unbeknownst to most, the life and thriving of such organisms are integral in subterranean ecologies and are vital ingredients for what happens above the soil, too. Fungi play a vital role in decomposing organic matter. I replayed that object lesson during Lent this past semester. Such organisms return us to dust, too, giving us back to other creatures (Ecclesiastes 3.20). My outside classroom invited such serendipitous teaching moments again and again during the past two years. Without a ceiling sheltering us, away from the artificial light of flickering screens and in the blinding brightness of the sunshine, none of us could forget or ignore our embodiment. With no walls the breeze caressed our skin, sometimes a few raindrops threatened to send us scrambling inside. We dressed in layers or brought blankets on cool but warming days. On early fall semester days and during late spring semester days we wore hats and sunscreen or put up shade canopies. Being outside forced us to heighten our attention to the weather and changing seasons to better know our place and its natural rhythms. Even while standing and sitting on a built environment, the brick patio where my class met, being outside literally grounded us. The openness of the classroom to the sky above also signified our capacity for self-transcendence and growth in knowledge of ourselves, God, and God’s world. Our growth in knowledge of ourselves, God, and God’s world is always embodied, always grounded, of course. But the goodness of that fact, and even the goodness of our limitations, can be communicated outdoors in ways that it cannot be while inside. The week after we talked about embodiment in “God and the Human Person” we discussed interiority, consciousness, and ways of knowing. To exhibit the linkage between inner and outer, consciousness and sensation, most days I played instrumental music at the beginning of classes for prayer time. I invited students to close their eyes, to recall that we are always in God’s presence and that God is for us, and to attune themselves to their breathing, the music, and the sounds of the breeze and birds. The pivot between sensation and inner quiet served the work of attending both to our bodies and our minds.[3] Some days playing children, noisy lawnmowers, or gusty winds made the planned intellectual work of my classes difficult or even impossible. Despite my frustrations with such “distractions,” each served as a poignant reminder of the privilege of intellectual work, of its value, of its limitations, and of its relationships to “real life.” The “distractions” pressed in on us, and through them God taught me (and my students tell me they are learning this, too,) how we are not objective points, atoms bouncing around off one another, but are enmeshed in communities with other body-persons, communities including other nonhuman creatures, in worlds of meaning shaped by social and cultural assumptions and infrastructures. We always learn our capacities and limitations as body-persons in such communities, after all. My next and final reflection on learning and teaching without walls will explore how being outside helped us to recognize and attend to such communities.   [1] M. Shawn Copeland, “Scripture and Ourselves: Reflections on the Bible and the Body.” America: The Jesuit Review (September 21, 2015). [2] On how we are “soil-birthed and soil-bound,” see Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 65-67. [3] The first few times that I utilized music for prayer time, though, we dove straight into difficult discussion. I quickly discerned that the transition was too abrupt, akin to emotional or intellectual whiplash! I devised a buffer time of standing and stretching following the music/prayer time and preceding discussion.

The final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission led by Justice Murray Sinclair, on the tragic impacts of Indian Residential Schools, was released in 2015. It included 94 Calls to Action, with several of these Calls relating directly to higher education. For instance, Call to Action number 62 urges postsecondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms. One way to begin addressing integration has to do with unsettling settler colonial worldviews, histories, and perspectives. How might this unsettling be done in a good way? Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall states that Two-Eyed Seeing is “To see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” ( 2012, 335). In using both eyes, my students and I need to locate ourselves in own stories of identification in the classroom. I would like to be aware, and I want my students to be especially aware, of the issues and history of self-identification. According to Anuik, “Self-identification has an impact on teachers’ practices, and understanding how people identify can help teachers to adapt learning environments to meet their needs” (2019, 107). One way to get at this is through stories of identification—my own and my students.’ I ask my students to identify two labels that others at school had used to describe them in the past. I then share my two identifiers and tell my story about teacher judgement and a school system’s misjudgment of an assessment. If one aspect of an indigenous way of knowing is about relationality and building relationships of trust with my students, it requires me to be vulnerable with my story. So, when I was in third grade, I brought home a report card that ranked me “below average” in relation to my peers. A row of failing grades ran down the report card beside each topic. The report card generated a meeting between my parents, the teacher, and the principal and a series of assessments. The meeting with my parents was awkward because my parents didn’t speak or understand English very well, and the principal wanted to meet after school and my parents, who worked at a Chinese restaurant, had to take time off to visit the school. The test results indicated that I was a slow learner (I didn’t understand and speak English very well) and may have a cognitive impairment. I knew this verdict made me different from my peers. I thought that every kid at school knew about my issue, and I felt shame. My parents felt shame as well because they came to Canada to make a better life for their children. I mixed up the assessment results with being stupid—what else was I to think since my report card showed that! I chose to disengage. If I stayed quiet, then no one would suspect I had an intelligence issue; I didn’t participate in class even if I knew the answers better than my peers. My style carried me through to grade 8, when my enthusiastic gym teacher said I was very quiet and needed to speak out more in class. That early assessment and teacher’s judgements failed me. As a child, I feared that if my teachers said I had a cognitive issue, then they would treat me differently than my peers—if only they knew where I am today! I then ask my students to look at their identifiers and ask if they accurately represent who they thought they were? In most cases, they were an inaccurate representation of who they thought they were. I show them this diagram: Discussing this diagram allows my students to begin to understand that indigenous students have identities conditioned by Canadian legislation which was historically rooted. Naming students “Indian” or “Aboriginal” had a negative impact because being labelled one or the other triggered fear that an educator would throw the student into a box that held a collection of negative stereotypes or misinterpretations of a person that needed to be fixed.  How might I move this further with self-identification? Going back to Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s concept of Two-Eyed Seeing has been a helpful way to reflect on my own teaching practices and course design, and the ways that they might impact my students’ own identity and spiritual formation as they move out into the wider world after graduation. For myself, I wonder at times if I simultaneously need a third eye to think and voice more creatively an Asian way of knowing as well?   References Anuik, J. 2019. “If You Say I am Indian, What Will You Do? History and Self-Identification at Humanity’s Intersection.” In Knowing the Past, Facing the Future: Indigenous Education in Canada, edited by S. Carr-Stewart, 106-117. Vancouver, BC: Purich Books. Bartlett, C., Marshall, M., and Marshall, A. 2012. “Two-Eyed Seeing and Other Lessons Learned Within a Co-Learning Journey of Bringing Together Indigenous and Mainstream Knowledges and Ways of Knowing.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 2(4): 331-340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-012-0086-8.