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The first time I did this in class, my students looked at me like I was crazy. I wanted to try something new. The traditional rigid “academic dialogue” model was no longer sufficient to inspire courage and honesty about topics that were dividing the world right in front of my eyes. They expected me to throw some discussion questions on the PowerPoint, break up into small groups for discussion, and then have them report out into a larger class discussion. I use this method of discussion often. Today, I invited them into an embodied dialogue. I smile warmly and offer instructions for our dialogue together. “I’m going to say a statement. If you agree with it, stand on the right side of the room. If you disagree with it, stand on the left side of the room. And if you are unsure, don’t know yet, or want to say, ‘It depends,’ you stand in the middle.”   Embodied Dialogue is Generative The vitality in the room changes as students anticipate the first statement. Statement 1: “It is possible for a Christian to be racist.” The energy in the room is palpable as students physically take their stance. The movement creates a sense of generativity as students anticipate where their peers will stand. I wait for the movement to cease, for students to be in place. “Ok, is everybody in place?” I ask. I read their faces. Most students stand eager to engage. Others look about pensively, still trying to figure out if they want to move from one side to the other or to the middle. The statements fluctuate between levels of intensity. We move from less intense statements like “Education is the key to success in life,” to more intense statements like “Metal detectors keep schools safe,” and “Students should be suspended from school and arrested for violent behavior.” Then we move to even more intense statements like “God is at work in the government,” and “Protest is essential in America in order for justice to take place.”   Embodied Dialogue Prompts New Awareness The “take a stance” activity invites students to exercise agency during the entire process of dialogue. Each participant actually gets to choose where he or she stands, even if that stance is “I don’t know.” Perhaps the recognition that everyone is invited into a certain level of risk helps level the dialogical playing field. Choosing our stance is nothing new. We are always choosing where to stand. This activity makes student aware of that. When they are standing in place students suddenly become aware of their body. Not just their body, but the bodies of others. Many are surprised to see which side of the room their peers decide to stand. “Why are you taking this stance?” I ask students. “Please tell us why you are standing where you are.” The invitation to respond to the “why” question is one of the most effective ways to invoke critical thinking. Students hear from those who stand with them, discovering that even those who say “I agree” may choose this stance for reasons different than their own. Many even surprise themselves with their own inability to say why they have taken their particular stance. The embodied awareness of their stance invites them into further exploration, into further participation. In a developmental stage where undergraduate students are still making sense of who they are, what they believe, and why they believe what they believe, it seems unfair to force them to choose one position or the other. And yet, this pressure to choose one way dominates Western understandings of adulting. To be a mature adult, we must know the “why.” We must know the right answer. The either/or dichotomy sometimes traps students. Captive to the desire to please those they admire, or to feign intellectualism, students rush to an answer. When students rush to an answer, they rush past another’s perspective in a hurry to arrive at their own. Our dialogue is no longer participatory. Mutuality is exchanged for “right” or “wrong.” We don’t internalize what others say in order to examine our own thinking; rather, our way of understanding becomes the rubric by which we judge all else. We judge, assess, and evaluate what others say against what we already think.   Embodied Dialogue Illuminates the In-Between What I have found essential for this assignment is the in-between space. I tell students that at any point during this activity they can move from “I agree” to “I disagree” or from “I disagree” to “I don’t know.” It never ceases to amaze me how often students move in between these spaces. They exercise the muscle that enables critical thinking in real time. They demonstrate with their bodies that our opinions and perspectives can change and can also be changed in dialogue with others. How many times do we only provide two options for students? Yes or no! Democratic or Republican. Liberal or Conservative. Providing the either/or inadvertently communicates that there is only one right answer, and we are required to know it. We must choose a side, the right side. Our thoughts have to be settled. The incessant need to box people’s thoughts into categories does not leave room for everything else that comes between right and wrong, yes and no. It leaves no room for the nuances that exist in the liminal space of not yet, not sure, uncertain. It hides the continuum that always exists when it comes to peoples’ thought lives and rationales. What has fascinated me the most in this activity is how students create their own continuum. The three clear positions I offer somehow get stretched out during the game. Students who are not quite in the “I agree” category may lean there but may stand in the middle between “I agree” and “I don’t know.” They make the invisible visible through their bodies, helping us to see that even three clear positions cannot capture the complexity of some topics. The invitation to the in-between space is an invitation to sit in the “I don’t know.” To acknowledge that we exist in a world of unknowns and uncertainties more often than not. Yet in our rush toward certitude, we sometimes miss the process that gets us from “I dont know” to “I know,” “I feel certain,” and to “I agree” or “I disagree.” What if our desire for questions and answers was really an attempt to simplify hard, unanswerable questions? What if a more faithful way to seek understanding is through “questioning and wrestling?” [1] What if we refused to settle into the comfort and assurance of our “I knows”? What if we were required to embrace our “I thinks” and allow ourselves to be formed in and through our wrestling with God? These are the questions that emerge for me as an educator when I facilitate this activity.   Embodied Dialogue is Participatory Participation is inherent in the word “dialogue;” thus, participatory dialogue should be a given. But it’s not. Not all dialogue is participatory. Too many students get lost in large group classroom discussion, are never really challenged to reflect critically. The one or two students who have something to say speak. Those who are more reserved remain silent, keeping their thoughts to themselves. It is possible to be invisible even in dialogue. Embodied dialogue makes it difficult for students to hide. This activity invites even the quietest students to be actively engaged in the dialogue. Academic dialogue may also be one-sided, where students tend to talk at, about, and over other students. Embodied dialogue is about talking with others. It invites not just participation but mutuality. To invite others to engage with our thought life even as we engage with theirs. Additionally, it models visually that our deepest beliefs often put us in proximity or out of proximity to certain people, especially when the conversation centers around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hot-button topics remain easy to avoid in the classroom. This activity has become a regular part of my pedagogical toolbox, especially when engaging topics that are intense. After saying a statement, I hear students respond, “Woah, that’s tough.” In other words, the “hot” doesn’t disappear from the topic when using this approach. Students still exhibit passion and conviction. At the same time, students are less cautious with sharing. Something about the approach itself is disarming. This approach to dialogue offers the learning community space to reflect on controversial topics in a generative way.  Dialogue was never intended to be passive. Rather, dialogue is an active, dynamic process where students are invited to explore, discover, and come to know themselves, others, and the world differently.      [1] Carol Lakey Hess, “Echo’s Lament: Teaching, Mentoring and the Danger of Narcissistic Pedagogy,” Teaching Theology and Religion 6, no. 3 (2003): 135.

In my last blog on this site (the first of three parts) I reflected on what difference it could make if theological education institutions focused on formation of students rather than imparting information to them. That blog generated some interesting comments, questions, and feedback, so I thought I might dig a little further here. In my seasoning as a scholar and a teacher it has become clear that my focus is not on the students in my institution per se. It is not even on the material I want them to learn. As a pastoral theologian, I focus on the suffering in the world, and God’s longing for the wholeness and the flourishing of all that can only happen through justice, reconciliation, and the labor of peace. I think about my students concluding their time with us at Brite Divinity School and facing anew the world and all the impediments to the flourishing of God’s world. I want to empower them to see what those impediments are, to name them and call them out. I want them to leave Brite with the capacities to envision new possibilities, excite others about those possibilities, and get others involved. I want them to move forward with the knowledge and the tools to offer healing care, to lament and attend to suffering, both personal and systemic, to create genuine community. I want them to have grown and changed personally and to have become better integrated during their time with us. I want each of our students to have the chance to become more whole themselves as they prepare to contribute to the healing and wholeness of others and of communities, no matter where their lives take them. It became clear to me many years ago that no amount of reading Sigmund Freud (or his daughter Anna), no amount of systems theory, or object relations theory, or even narrative theory could accomplish these goals for them. Saying this does not negate the importance of those theories (and my syllabi continue to show my firm commitment to the idea of reading as fundamental to learning). But it does shift how I understand my work. I now ask myself how any course I teach will help students understand what wholeness can look like, what flourishing might taste like. I hope each course will help them understand better how to affect that, both for themselves and for others. Perry Shaw argues in Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning that good teaching invites students into deep learning (Carlisle: Langham, 2014). Deep learning, as Shaw defines it, is the learning that continues to affect people 5, 10, or more years beyond the classroom. Deep learning creates space for students to wrestle with the implications of Freud or Heinz Kohut for the world they are facing themselves and the world others are facing. Deep learning teaches students how to connect ideas with lives, practices with change, and gives direction to hope. Deep learning shapes the way students think, how they feel, act, reflect, and engage, more than it relates to what they know. Deep learning changes the way people live and move in the world. It dares to help people figure out what it means to participate in the life of God in the world, to discern what God-as-life-force is doing already, and to magnify that. This is a shift, Shaw asserts, from education-as-teaching to education-as-learning, -changing, and -growing. This kind of education asks less what we are teaching and more what students are taking with them. It teaches them how to assess what is valuable and what is “fake news” in a world inundated by “information.” It helps them sift through the noise to what is most important and meaningful, especially from a theological perspective. This kind of education-as-formation will still require some foundational knowledge, but less of that and more of the work of applying that knowledge to the challenges people and communities are facing. Formation focused education invites much more wrestling, struggling, and deepening than education-as-teaching might. Education-as-formation helps students understand how content relates to and can perhaps be used to change the worlds that they are in. It is funded by the conviction that the God of Life longs for the flourishing of all that is, and that our calling as theological educators is to figure out how to respond to that longing and to do the hard work of living into flourishing; understanding its impediments in ourselves, in others, and in our world; and developing practices (including teaching practices) that nurture flourishing. Deep learning, then, requires that we educators join students where they are and encourage them forward a step or two and much deeper than learning for information does. It invites us to listen to them and the challenges they and their communities are facing. It requires that we faculty get out of our heads on occasion and into our own hearts and souls. It means that we ourselves must be willing to enter ongoing processes of growth and formation, too, as we seek to live more fully into our own wholeness and lean harder into our own flourishing. Deep learning happens best in the context of institutions that understand their role in teaching the formation of effective community, where staff and faculty model growth and integration, and where students can experience a taste of what each of us ultimately seeks.

Recently a colleague shared with me the concept of “ungrading,” written about eloquently in a couple of blog posts by writing instructor Jesse Strommel. You can find Strommel’s posts here and here. (I highly recommend his blog, in general, as well as his @jessifer twitter account.) Strommel asks us to consider why we grade, what we want grading to do, what letter grades really mean, how grades and feedback relate (if they do), and what would happen if we didn’t grade. As the name “ungrading” suggests, this approach can encourage or empower instructors to grade less or even not at all. Here are some complaints about grading that I’ve heard (from colleagues, students, and the literature) and shared over the years, which make the idea of ungrading appealing to me: We get so easily behind on grading We don’t grade fast enough for students’ taste Grading takes up so much of our time Grading feels like a joyless, soul-sucking burden Grading has nothing to do with why we became teachers The burdens of grading limit us in the kinds of assignments we think we can give, especially in large classes (and especially without TAs) Grading often pits students against each other (e.g., when they are graded on a curve) Grading is used to gatekeep Grading is a measurement, which is subject to error, and can have a huge impact on students Grading does not always measure what we intend (e.g., we intend to measure learning, but we instead measure test-taking skills, which students may or may not have acquired from our course) Students disagree with and complain about our grades Grade grubbing The standards or criteria are not always clear, which then makes it difficult to know what grade to assign Students don’t know how to understand or interpret our grades Some students don’t seem to care when they get a low grade; others care too much about a slightly-less-than-perfect grade The grades, and any accompanying feedback, aren’t always reviewed by students Grading doesn’t necessarily yield improvement from one assignment to the next Grades can be arbitrary, discriminatory, and unfair Grades become an extrinsic motivation that detracts from the real focus of the course experience—learning So, Strommel says, “If you’re a teacher and you hate grading, stop doing it.” What a freeing idea! Strommel has stopped grading entirely in his classes (though obviously he still has to submit a final grade for each student at the end of the semester, as he, and I bet most of us, are required to do by our institutions). It took him many years to arrive at this point, a journey he describes in his blog, and it’s a change I wouldn’t recommend anyone making all at once. There are ways, however, that we can dip our toes into the ungrading waters and find out how it goes, both for us and our students. Strommel offers several suggestions in his blog, including self-assessment, portfolios, authentic assessment, and peer assessment. I am trying the self-assessment route this semester in my Religion and Pop Culture class, with students’ attendance and engagement grade. This is a small, upper-level course (enrolling majors and nonmajors) and I always lead it like a seminar, expecting students to learn just as much from each other as they may from me. If they’re not there, prepared, and ready to engage, a heck of a lot of learning is just not going to happen. This is why it’s always felt important to me to attach some kind of percentage to this part of the course. Yet grading attendance and engagement has also always felt problematic to me, given its reliance on attendance, which, especially during the pandemic, has seemed inflexible and even inhumane. I also hate getting into the business of having to decide what an excused vs. unexcused absence is (e.g., I don’t want to be looking at doctor’s notes or deciding whether going to your brother’s wedding is excusable). Ungrading has the potential to accomplish my goals while alleviating my problems with this part of the course. Here is how I am describing, excerpted, the expectations for “Attendance and Engagement” this semester on my syllabus (which will be worth 10% of their grade): Reliable attendance and active engagement will be crucial to our learning community. Students can learn just as much from each other as they can from any professor, in a well-designed class. We will decide together what we expect from one another in terms of attendance and engagement by co-creating a set of “community norms” that will guide our time together; it won’t just mean talking a lot! You will then use these community-created expectations to give yourself an attendance and engagement grade at the end of the semester, justified by a reflection letter you will write to me. This is an experiment for me. I think it’s really important to question, experiment, reflect, and iterate as teachers (this is the heart of the scholarship of teaching and learning or “SoTL”). So I do have some questions that I will be looking to answer at the end of the semester: Will there be any patterned differences in the grades among the students (e.g., will the male students grade themselves higher)? If so, what am I going to do about that, for this class and in the future, if I continue to ungrade? Will I need to change any grades, up or down? If so, how many? If so, will this defeat the purpose of ungrading? Will attendance be different (worse, I’m assuming) in this class than my others? This may be difficult to tell, because we’re still in the pandemic and a lot of students are out right now for health reasons. I also typically experience absences throughout the semester anyway. Will the reflections that students write be any good? (What do I mean by “good” anyway?) Will I need to have taught them how to write good reflections? I’m not planning on devoting class time to doing so—and also not intending to grade (!) the reflections—but this is how they are going to justify their grade, so this may matter to me. Instead of alleviating anxiety for students, will ungrading provoke or exacerbate it? (Students often don’t handle such open-ended assignments or responsibilities well.) This is certainly not what they need right now! What did I and my students think about this approach? Were there other unintended benefits or drawbacks, for them or for me? How will I decide whether to continue this kind of assessment? I’m looking forward to finding out how this experiment in ungrading unfolds.

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh heavily on the students’ hearts. I sensed that this communal crisis would be an undercurrent in whatever we were going to discuss, and that students needed a space to process their thoughts and feelings. It turned out that several students lived close to one of the spas. One student passed by it almost every day. These students were particularly hard hit by the murders. [caption id="attachment_250943" align="alignright" width="476"] Students at Candler School of Theology held signs outside Gold Spa[/caption] The next day, two Asian and Asian American students in the class went to one of the spas to protest the shootings. One of them held a sign saying, “Stand with the Asian Community.” A New York Times journalist took a photo of them and wrote about their protest in the newspaper. Later that weekend, other students also visited the site to remember the victims and speak out against anti-Asian violence. Prompted by the students’ activism, I gathered the Asian and Asian American faculty of my school to find ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hatred in the country. We decided to organize a webinar and invited scholars and a local activist to address “Anti-Asian Racism and Christian Responses.” The response was beyond our expectations. More than 600 people of different racial backgrounds from across the US registered for the webinar and more than 430 people attended! During the webinar, some clergy and leaders of white churches asked for resources on the Asian American community and churches. I felt the need to educate the public about the long history of discrimination against the Asian American community and the people’s resilience. Living in the South, the discussion of racism usually follows a black and white binary, such that the oppression of Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans becomes invisible. Orientalized stereotypes portray Asian women as obedient, compliant, and hypersexualized. Popular media casts them as the long-suffering Madame Butterfly or the seductive Suzie Wong. During the Vietnam War, sex tourism flourished around American military bases in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Asian women’s bodies were exploited by American GIs for their “rest and recreation” during the brutal Vietnam war. Sex tourism created the myth that Asian women’s flesh is available and there for the taking. Robert Aaron Long, the white killer of the spa shootings, said that he has a “sex addiction” and that he thought the spas owned by Asians were “safer” than paying for sex elsewhere. A member of a Christian church, he has struggled with his addiction and lashed out at the spa businesses, which he viewed as sexual temptation. To provide opportunities to learn about Asian and Asian American women, I facilitated an online course on Asian and Asian American Feminist Theologies in the summer of 2021. I invited guest speakers from both Asia and the US to speak about feminist theology, interpretation of the Bible, Christian ethics and sexuality, interreligious learning, and leadership and ministry. The online short course attracted hundreds of participants from Asia and North America. It provided a forum for dialogue across geographical, racial, cultural, and religious differences. The pandemic forced us to shift our teaching online in the past years. While we lament the disruption and long for in-person contact, online teaching enables us to reach a wider audience. Millions are accustomed to using Zoom as a learning platform. My short course was truly transnational and the discussion was rich and riveting. The recordings of the course were uploaded to YouTube so that people can use them as resources. As scholars we have to begin thinking about the “community” we teach in a much broader sense. It is important to remember that Asian feminist theology emerged during the height of the Vietnam war. Some of the pioneering theologians, such as Mary John Mananzan from the Philippines, addressed the sexual exploitation of women, sex tourism, and militarism. Today, Asian and Asian American female scholars and activists continue to protest sexual abuses and harassment of Asian women by militarism, the police, and other powerful men. [caption id="attachment_250944" align="alignleft" width="425"] The altar created at the vigil service in the Cannon Chapel at Candler School of Theology[/caption] Close to the anniversary of the March spa shootings, I organized a vigil for the victims at my school’s chapel. During the vigil, we prayed for other victims of war and violence, especially those who died in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their families. When the Korean hymn “O-So-So” was sung by a student, I invited the community gathered to place Japanese peace cranes on the altar to symbolize their prayers and solidarity. On the altar were two paintings by a local Korean American artist, Connie LaGoy, who painted them in response to the shootings. She has sold prints of the paintings to generate funds to donate to the victims’ families. When a community tragedy disrupts our classes and teaching agenda, it opens a window for rethinking our teaching and vocation as a scholar.

A tense moment in my classroom captured some of the changing dynamics at my seminary. We were learning about the rise of higher criticism within the history of biblical interpretation in the United States. As we were analyzing a lecture that Charles Augustus Briggs delivered at Union Theological Seminary in 1891, some students found Briggs’s honest grappling with factual errors in the Scriptures invigorating and resonated with his push for new interpretive methods distinct from the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. They were surprised and encouraged to encounter a scholar who declared that the “theory of inerrancy” was neither located in the Scriptures nor sanctioned in the ancient Christian creeds. Over one hundred years ago, Briggs excoriated the doctrine of inerrancy as “a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” As I moved our discussion from this primary source to the ecclesial divisions that transpired in Briggs’s denomination (the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) due in no small part to his scholarship, we reflected on how and where we see these ruptures today. In 1909, one presbytery in New York ordained a handful of ministerial candidates who did not affirm a belief in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. In the following years, Presbyterians vigorously debated whether it was possible to be a Christian without attesting to the virgin birth, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the actuality of Christ’s miracles as recorded in the Gospels. Some students shared that these divisions persist in their congregations and denominations today. One student wondered aloud if their presbytery would allow a candidate to express a nuanced and complex position on the virgin birth today. But my classroom was not only buzzing with excitement and collaborative energy; it was also buzzing with trepidation and anger. Some students remained quiet and a few hardly looked away from their notebook computer screens. Finally, one student shared that this was not what they expected to learn at our seminary and that they thought any notion of Christianity without the doctrines of inerrancy and the virgin birth was heretical and dangerous. Another student expressed frustration with the trajectory of our discussion. They thought it was appropriate to learn this history, but how their peers were talking about the Bible deeply troubled them. The student added that conversations like this one were precisely why mainline Protestant congregations were in decline and losing members. Student populations at my seminary and other PC(USA) schools have shifted in the twenty-first century. In 2000, most of the students at my seminary were white, domestic, and Presbyterian. Since then, there have been large increases in the enrollment of international students and students of color. Black students comprised approximately 4/5 of the incoming class in 2021. There are now fewer Presbyterian students than students from other Christian traditions. In addition to educating students across wider diversities of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, culture, and national origin, students have a broader range of theological viewpoints. When my classroom was predominantly Presbyterian, there were certainly differences on matters of biblical interpretation and belief. As the PC(USA) wrestled over the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons, so too did the students in my classroom. But after the denomination made changes in its polity to permit the ordination of LGBTQIA+ pastors and allow ministers and sessions “to use their own discernment to conduct same-gender marriage ceremonies,” the enrollment of PC(USA) students opposed to these changes declined and the number of LGBTQIA+ students grew. These students, along with others seeking creative ways to enact intersectional justice in familiar and new ministries, are enlivening my classroom as they prompt and provoke us to fresh analyses and more expansive understandings of humanity and the divine throughout creation. The anxieties around this discussion of the virgin birth illustrate another shift. There are more students from theologically conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist traditions at my seminary today than there were twenty years ago. Some have deliberately chosen to enroll here because they too are yearning to expand their knowledge of God in an open and inclusive learning environment. They relish opportunities to excavate the depths of many theologies and ask the probing questions that they were discouraged from expressing in their churches. Others remain firmly rooted in their traditions and perpetually frustrated. They question why a seminary that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion ignores their religious interpretations and cultural perspectives. As an Asian American with firsthand experience in conservative, evangelical, mainline, and progressive Protestant contexts, I am acutely aware of both the promise and peril of my changing classroom. The increasing diversity presents new possibilities for learning with a student population that more closely represents the breadth of Christianity locally and globally. Both the church and the world are bigger than the denomination to which my seminary belongs. Yet, there are chasms of difference between progressive and conservative Protestants on foundational issues of doctrine and human dignity. It can be difficult to find common ground when some of us stand so far apart from one another. However, the instruction in classrooms like mine must meet the demands of more complexity with more clarity about learning covenants and pedagogical commitments. My cultivation of a hospitable learning environment distinguishes between welcoming all students and facilitating the public expressions of their private beliefs to uphold my seminary’s intersectional commitment to the flourishing of women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons in the classroom. It also requires a differentiation between conversion and education. I must continually discern how my students are learning and acknowledge that, for a few, the gaps between their learning expectations and my teaching philosophy will remain significant.

Teaching through pandemic brought home two basic lessons to me: What happens in our students’ lives affects their performance in the classroom. Professors are mere human beings who can only do so much before our health suffers. Both seem obvious. Surely, I knew all that even before the pandemic? Perhaps. But I hadn’t internalized it, and I certainly hadn’t acted as though it was true. I see many of my colleagues do the same. The pandemic was the first time I taught in a situation where my students and I were all doing poorly at the same time. We were jittery and frightened. We were trying to carry on as usual, but nothing was normal. It quickly became obvious that the pandemic would affect our students’ ability to work. In March 2020, kids in my class who had been great students the previous week suddenly become incapable of following basic instructions. They kept emailing me with oddly clueless questions. Expectations had to change, and I began settling for my students at least learning something. I assigned easier and shorter readings, more videos, and shorter papers. I gave more extensions, excused more absences, and talked to many more students about their mental health struggles. But my own workload didn’t lighten. I worked much harder than normal. And my life was in upheaval too (along with everybody else’s!). I would have benefited from the same sort of break and support that I was giving the students. My doctor considers me high risk for pandemic-related burnout because I’m a female professor at a small college. She sees me as a member of the helping professions. I initially downplayed her concerns, pointing out that healthcare workers have it much worse. They do of course. But she is right. I see signs of impending burnout in myself and in many of my colleagues—especially younger women and especially those with children. This isn’t sustainable. We’re just like our students. We can only do so much before our performance and our health suffers. Our limitations need more attention and more action than we have been giving them so far. We are, I hope, coming out of the pandemic, but in higher education we’re emerging into an uncertain future. Many of our institutions are deep into discussions of budget cuts; the crisis of the humanities continues, and programs are being eliminated. And mental health issues among our students are at an all-time high. It won’t stop being hard. Going forward, how can we respect our own limitations and set clearer boundaries with our institutions, our students, and our colleagues? How can those of us who are tenured and more experienced help our junior colleagues do this more effectively? And how do we do all this while continuing to be there for our students? Those are big questions, and figuring out how to go forward will take collective action. Institutions need to change, junior faculty need to be protected, and we need to get better at allowing people real time off. I have no idea how to make all that happen. So, I start small. My individual actions, for now: I will do for myself what I did for my students—I will recognize that my expectations of myself have to change. I can’t continue to work at my regular pace. I’m too tired. I and the people around me will have to settle for me doing less. And I will tell them that. Over the summer, I’m going to rest. I won’t try to catch up on my research (neglected for the past two years). I won’t revise my fall courses. They are good enough. I’ll read, following my curiosity and meandering from book to book. And I’ll write if I have something to say. I’ll take a few weeks off, and I’ll stay off email when I do, away message in place. I’ll rest. In the fall, I’ll work with an eye to my limits. If I’m still drained, I’ll accept that and I’ll say “no.” A lot. I’ll think about how to shift the cultures around me in a more sustainable direction so that rest isn’t just a privilege for faculty with tenure. I’ll think about how to help junior colleagues and students to set and maintain boundaries. I’ll remember that my students won’t be back to normal in the fall either and I’ll continue to treat them with compassion and understanding. It’s been a long two years—for all of us.   References and resources: “Burnout and How to Avoid It” from one of my favorite authorities on happiness, Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale. It’s part of her podcast The Happiness Lab. Santos is going on a leave of absence. She’s noticing that she is heading for burnout and thus wisely changing course. Newspaper article about that here. For more on showing compassion to ourselves as well as to our students, see Kristin Neff and Dr. Chris Germer’s work on self-compassion. A massive number of articles in the Chronicle, including the report Burned Out and Overburdened (which I haven’t read it yet).

It’s a heavy time at our university. The pandemic is still with us (a funny/not-funny tweet I read recently said, “i didn’t realize 2020 was gonna be a trilogy”). Within the first few weeks of class, I had six students from my Religion and Pop Culture class out with COVID symptoms or positive diagnoses; there are only 17 of them enrolled. Throughout the semester, they have emailed me with health updates, how they’re feeling, when they’re getting tested, what the test results were. I myself got sick at the start of the semester and had to cancel the first day of class and hold the next two online. Worse, if possible, there was a shooting on a college campus just a few miles from us, at the beginning of February, resulting in the deaths of two beloved campus safety officers; this is a college always considered one of the safest places to attend, in a town always considered one of the safest places to live. Many of our students, as well as faculty, hail from the surrounding areas, so this event affected our community deeply. And then, just a few weeks later, there were two suicides on our campus. Information was scarce, privacy protected. The administration sent out emails of support, with urls and phone numbers for crisis hotlines, but nothing seemed like enough. Faculty and students were struggling, are struggling still. Mental health issues are on the rise. We are not all trained counselors. Nobody is equipped. Life isn’t stopping. But there is something we can do. We can acknowledge the difficulties, the events, the overwhelm. We can give them a name. We can convey our shared humanity. We can create space for processing. We can say something. This seems so basic, but it is crucial. After the Bridgewater College shootings, I came to class and told my students I was really sad about what had happened. I said it felt utterly stupid to me to be trying to talk about the definitions of pop culture (our topic for the day), in light of the tragedy. I opened up space for them to share any feelings or reactions. Many students chose to talk. They said they felt scared. They said the event brought up memories and connections to other shootings, other trauma in their young lives. They said they were left with a “it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, to us, to me” sense. I then led them through a gratitude exercise. (Gratitude, as a practice, has been shown to increase happiness.) I asked them to write down what they were grateful for having in their lives. I told them about a quotation that struck me many years ago: What if you woke up tomorrow with only what you were grateful for today? I encouraged them, if any people appeared on their list, to let those people know. As the shootings show, you never know what can happen. Later, a student told me I was the only one of her six professors who had said anything about the incident. The only one. I imagine, of course, there could be many reasons for such silence. It could be that folks didn’t know what to say or how to say it. It could be that they felt awkward. It could be that they didn’t want to make things worse or cause harm. It could be that they didn’t know, or want to presume, what students needed in that moment. It could be that they didn’t want to get too personal, especially if this was out of character for them or the learning environment. It could be that the lesson plan for the day didn’t seem to allow time to detour. It could also be that they themselves were feeling traumatized. It could be that this event was indistinguishable from other shootings on or around campuses (like what happened near Virginia Tech just recently), or the other acts of violence in other spaces, that continue to happen on a regular basis. It could be that they have reached a point of compassion fatigue, a numbness that has been settling over us all because of the terrible things that keep happening and our inability to cope with it all. I understand all of these hesitations. It’s hard to know what to do and difficult. But I still think we have to say something. Even if it is imperfect, halting, awkward, uncomfortable, uncertain. It’s similar to the way social justice educators recommend we handle microaggressions in class (e.g., here and here). Don’t let the incident pass in silence, in avoidance, in complicity. Silence is damaging. It itself communicates something and that something, I worry, is: nothing of note happened; I don’t care about you all as whole humans, only the topic or lesson at hand; people died and it didn’t matter. There are a lot of moments in class where we can acknowledge and honor our students’ humanity, and our own. When terrible events, like shootings or suicides happen, these are moments to stop, to slow down, and to say something.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…   Romans 12:2a (NRSV) Students are stressed today, and Omicron is not the only culprit. Twenty-four-hour access to social media and our preoccupation with it has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With every posting that stirs divisive issues like Critical Race Theory, attacks on voting rights, or the “anti-vax” movement, what may have begun for students as an average day can quickly lapse into chaos. “This is really nothing new,” faculty might whisper to themselves. Educators have always been challenged by the effects of life’s storms that impact adult learners. What is concerning now is that tempests seem to be rising at an alarming pace. During the past two years we have witnessed: (1) The COVID-19 pandemic taking the lives of almost one million Americans; (2) The cruel public murder of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer; (3) The violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and (4) The brazen slaughter of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and subsequent criminal conviction of his unrepentant assailants. You undoubtedly have your own list that may include one or more of these tumultuous events. Consider George Floyd’s death. Students throughout the world were outraged by the inhumane treatment inflicted upon Floyd. Organic protests spread from Berkeley to Budapest. On the other hand, a vocal segment of Americans believed that Floyd caused his own demise because he unlawfully purchased cigarettes with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. In a June 8, 2020, article in Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay McKenzie noted that many university presidents called for social change following Floyd’s killing but very few offered concrete ideas for implementation. That fact was not lost on discerning college students. So, what did you share with students and what did they share with you in the wake of these critical events? Perhaps the prospect of discussing the “COVID/Floyd/Insurrection/Arbery” incidents with students raised problematic classroom management issues for you. Did any of these events create anxiety for you personally? Were you transparent with students? Was it your first impulse to offer solutions or solace? Did you squarely address the tough questions raised or did you conspicuously sidestep the deeper issues? I regret that I was not actively teaching courses during this period. However, I personally experienced moments of reckoning in the classroom following the murder of Trayvon Martin and the mass shooting deaths of 20 precious children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I also witnessed the rise of disparaging racist speech leveled against Barack Obama and his wife Michelle following Mr. Obama’s first election as US President; I recall adult students arriving in class expressing despair or anger while others sat in relative silence. Those incidents led me to reexamine my responsibility as an educator in the aftermath of a social crisis. A number of my colleagues found themselves distressed by the feverish hostility expressed by competing political factions. Some faculty were reluctant to share with students because the subjects of controversy were outside the scope of their field of scholarship. Others found it safer to tread lightly on the periphery and not address contentious student concerns. But this message is not intended as a critique; now is a time for grace. In an era when student feelings of isolation often predominate, adult learners need a sense of community with their peers and with educators. We are listening to students, but do we hear them? If we can encourage students to boldly go into the world and speak truth to power, then we must also be willing to bear witness to each student’s truth—even when it is raw or unscripted. Effective teaching is essential, but it is not without limitations. When instructors teach, we facilitate student acquisition of information and the development of discrete skills. But when we endeavor to educate, we answer a higher calling; a calling rooted in a belief that each learner has the potential to experience growth and gain insight in ways that can ultimately transform the whole person. When we educate, we are not tentative—we are intentional. During times of crisis, we cannot permit ourselves to be constrained by the four corners of cherished syllabi. It is imperative that I operate “in the moment” and not become a hostage to the moment. We must seek first to educate; we can always teach tomorrow.

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my first-year students’ reluctance to argue with each other. Several years ago, I started asking my classes where these sentences change from being OK to not OK: I agree with Peter. I want to add to what Peter said. I disagree with Peter about this. Peter’s view has some serious problems. Peter is wrong about this. Peter’s view is silly and naïve. Peter is an idiot. Years ago, first-year students here at my small Catholic college in the Northeast usually said it was around 4 or 5. But these days, they generally draw a line between 2 and 3. Expressing disagreement is no longer okay. It’s a significant loss. As an academic, I know that defending our position from challenges helps us hone our own position. It sharpens our wits, and it makes us revise and improve our arguments. My students are no longer getting this practice, and it shows in their papers. They don’t anticipate basic objections and their arguments are weaker. For years, I tried to reverse the trend. I explained the value of academic arguments, and I pushed my students to express disagreement with each other. They resisted. I pushed harder. One day, a student looked at me and said, “We know you want us to fight but we don’t want to!” Of course I didn’t want them to fight. Did I? The comment shook me, and I started thinking. Why did they think that I wanted them to fight? Were there downsides to classroom arguments that I wasn’t seeing? Could I reach my pedagogical goals without having students argue with each other? What might that look like? I kept thinking. I studied Buddhism and thought about the downsides of an adversarial approach: It makes us focus on winning, so we listen for flaws and weaknesses, ignoring the strengths of positions. We risk becoming less open to alternative views and less able to see the flaws in our own thinking. I studied feminism and considered reasons why some won’t enter a combative discussion. Not everybody has the confidence and inclination to speak up if they believe that they’ll be attacked—and they might see what I consider rather mild disagreements as attacks. I wondered how many had not dared enter those lively discussions that I so fondly remembered from my past classes, and I squirmed. I have increasingly come to see my students’ distaste for disagreement and argument as healthy reactions to an overly angry and combative culture. My students years ago could playfight in class and trust that things would be fine. My students today have seen too many discussions turn nasty. Too much is at stake for them socially. They don’t have that luxury. I rethought my approach. I want them to “fight” because I want them to get better at building and examining arguments. Could I treat “fighting” as the means, not the goal, and then reach that goal in a different way? I started shifting the focus away from students arguing with each other towards us together examining and arguing with the text and its author. I let them work together to identify flaws and to devise ways to improve arguments, and we discuss better and worse ways to communicate what we discover to an author. It’s not as effective as arguments with each other for teaching students how to improve their arguments and respond to objections. But they like having a class in which they talk and figure things out together. And I like the care and sensitivity with which they investigate the views of others, finding things to appreciate and ideas to consider—even in arguments that I thought were rather bad. I worry that by letting them avoid “fighting,” I am ignoring something crucial. Students need to learn how to disagree civilly—heck, most of us could use some work in this area! I worry that they only have two modes: polite avoidance of conflicts in person, and then fights, name-calling, and cancel culture online. I’m still figuring out how to get students out of those two modes. I’ve had some success with role-playing, assigning them a position to argue for and sometimes even assigning them a confrontational personality. That makes it safe. If disagreeing and being disagreeable is their assigned job, it’s my fault, not theirs, so their performance in the role won’t harm their relationships. They tend to go at it with some enthusiasm. It still doesn’t have the energy and fire of real arguments where students defend their own position to people who disagree. I worry that I’m babying them, but it seems that they need that safe space. And sometimes, the dissonance between what they are saying in their assigned role and what they believe becomes too much for them. They fess up, stating out loud that they disagree with the position I’m making them argue for and explaining why. It’s a roundabout approach, but it may get the job started.

Developing a more learner-centered course design does not have to mean pulling everything up by the roots. A good start is to examine the activities already happening in your courses, finding where good learner-centered design principles already exist. Here, I look at two versions of an activity that is common in my own course designs: Peer Review. The first example is simple; the second example is more complex. Both are fully asynchronous, allowing learners to manage their time as their lives require. (Honoring learner time and agency is a learner-centered principle.) Along the way, as in the last sentence, I keep an eye out for learner-centered design principles that I can identify and name. Example One: Peer Review and the Short Writing Prompt: In small groups on an online discussion forum, learners write a short weekly post in response to a writing prompt asking them to integrate course readings with their own contexts and insights. (Constructivism is a learner-centered theory.) During the week following a due date, small-group classmates offer each other 2-3 sentences of substantive informal engagement, followed by a peer review embracing three yes-or-no elements: Balance (every element of the prompt receives attention); Engagement (the whole work is engaged substantively with the course and its materials); Mechanics (spelling, grammar, organization, citation). For the first 1/3 of the term, peer reviews are purely diagnostic: no revisions are needed, but learners MAY reach out to the instructor for guidance in response to feedback. (Learners taking responsibility for learning is a learner-centered principle.) For the middle 1/3 of the term, learners getting two or more "No's" from peers must reach out to the instructor. For the final 1/3 of the term, learners getting any "No's" must reach out to the instructor. In practice, my role as instructor is mostly to provide guidance in the early weeks, rewarding (via recognition) social goods like risk-taking and commitment. (Guide-on-the-side-style facilitation is a learner-centered practice.) Example Two: Peer Review and the Final Paper: Bear with me on this one. There's this final research/thesis paper, see? (My course is "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," and this is the notorious exegesis paper.) But a complete draft is due at the midterm...and by "complete draft" I mean Complete Draft: it's at the full word count and includes all of the expected elements of the final paper. Why? For many reasons, but relevant here: your small-group classmates need something complete to be able to peer-review it! So that's the "bad news" on the draft: it must be complete. What's the "good news"? The draft does not have to be particularly good! Because the Complete Draft does not count toward the student's grade in the class: this peer review is a formative evaluation, not a summative evaluation. (Formative evaluation is a learner-centered practice.) So, learner: in your draft, take risks! Try things! Get out on a limb! Pull out all the stops to try to articulate the things you are trying to say. (Creating conditions for student voice is a learner-centered principle.) In order to promote informed, substantive peer review--something more illuminating than "I liked it; it was good"--students are armed with two (2) rubrics. First, there is the rubric for the final paper itself, made available to learners at the start of the term. (Instructor transparency and accountability in assessment is a learner-centered principle.) If reviewers have so far neglected this document or struggled with it, now they are put in a position to have to get to know it better and work with it constructively and ask for help if needed. The second rubric is the rubric for the peer reviews themselves. (Are the reviews engaged with the draft being reviewed? Are they engaged with the final-paper rubrics? Are they constructive as well as affirming?) Here I include one coercive element: 20% of a student's peer-review grade requires that *their own draft* be complete and on time, and this element is a binary: you get 20 points, or you get zero points. And here's the thing: the evaluation for peer reviews is not formative, but summative. This thing must go smoothly and tightly, or the wheels fall off. (Don't ask of learners more self-motivation than reasonable for their level: scaffolding is a learner-centered principle.) Closing notes: Learner-centered course design principles didn't descend from the sky on stone tablets. Rather, they arose from the reflected-upon experiences of educators like yourself. By joining in this process of reflection and discovery, you join in the construction of applied learner-centered pedagogy. Where can you discover some more of the learner-centered principles that you're ransacking your course designs for? Do a web search for "student centered learning"; "learner centered instruction"; "learner-centered assessment" (or "student-centered assessment"); "learner centered teaching"; and so on. Good luck and have fun.