Resources

The online discussion board has long been ubiquitous in synchronous and asynchronous education, so much so that it is notoriously dull. It can be all too easy for discussion board posts to become a regurgitative learning task. When learners find themselves summarizing reading assignments, they often consign the discussion board to mere “busy work” designed to micromanage their progress. Yet through a “crowdsourcing” model, the medium offers an opportunity for learners to become content creators, adding to the knowledge base for the course out of their experience, expertise, and exposure to a variety of content sources. The discussion board has great potential for creativity, playfulness, and student-centered learning. Once we break free from the temptation to check up on whether the assigned reading has been accomplished, a discussion board can be a location for practicing key curricular goals such as critical thinking or theological reflection on the material or topic at hand. Freed from enforcing compliance, it can be easier to break open the multimedia capacity present in a good Learning Management System. I encourage students to engage the subject matter by curating a weekly journal of images, music, or video that reflect their thoughts on the topic at hand. While some still prefer to write their thoughts for a post, the ability to record a video, post artwork, or share music and poetry appeals to a broader range of students. The variety of ways of engaging makes for a lively discussion as students respond to one another’s offerings. To encourage this, I avoid requiring a certain quantity of replies to co-learners’ posts but instead include an “asynchronous participation grade” in my syllabus that specifies how much time per week each learner should spend reading and interacting with discussion board(s). Crowdsourcing learners’ experiences and media exposure for cultural analysis can further encourage learners to act as experts in their own cultural contexts. When I teach my Biblical Families elective, I use this method to contrast ancient and modern ideas around family and related topics. I provide content on ancient context through reading assignments while learners post and respond to case studies on the same topic either from the media or their ministry contexts (I ask for their posts to be equally distributed between the two over the course of the semester) in which they name the cultural constructions implicitly communicated in the conversation or media item. Some hilarity inevitably ensues as we comment together on commercials and experiences alike. It leads to a broader variety of contexts than I alone would be able to provide and increases learner investment in the project of cultural analysis. The increased prevalence of asynchronous courses and virtual presence can make community building a challenge as casual hallway conversations become less frequent if not impossible. One key element of learner formation is the mutually supportive community they can be to one another. A discussion board can be a helpful place to model this by making the steps toward a long-term project both public and collaborative. For this model, I create a “topic” within the forum under each student’s name. They can then crowdsource questions and ideas about their projects, not just with me but with their co-learners, receiving more responses and resources and having the opportunity to exhibit their expertise as adult learners. In my introductory Educational Ministry course I also have students post a weekly quote from the assigned reading that speaks to their educational philosophy, creating a running vision board that they can use when they write their theology of teaching and learning at the end of the semester. When teaching about the religiously unaffiliated, learners took on a “spiritual-but-not-religious discipline” and journaled the experience on the discussion board so that they could respond to and encourage one another throughout the semester. Crowdsourcing the discussion board requires a degree of trust that learners have prepared for their asynchronous participation well enough to critically engage and add to rather than prove that they have received content. This model opens up the possibility for participants to bring creativity and imagination to their posts and communicates that each learner’s cultural context is essential to the course, not a distraction from it. Learners become co-creators of multimedia course content, bringing their experience, expertise, and exposure into the virtual classroom. As such, they practice collaborative learning and experience how they can become a resource to one another in and outside of class.

One of my favorite genres of fantasy fiction is the “magical door” story – tales where a person finds a mystical, strange doorway into another world. Alice in Wonderland is probably the best-known example, but I’m more fond of the contemporary takes, especially Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway (2016) and the Wayward Children series that follows it. In McGuire’s books, children disappear into doorways that lead them to worlds where they feel profoundly at home – sometimes pretty ones, like a world where everything is made of candy, but just as often menacing worlds where lightning can raise people from the dead or where they fight alongside merpeople against the Eldritch horrors of the deep. Besides being the ultimate escapist fantasy for anybody who felt wildly ill-at-ease and out of place in their adolescent years (everybody, perhaps?), these stories also convey that we aren’t really looking for a docile, perfect place to be – we just want to be where we know we fit. This magical door framework recently snuck up on me during an exercise on teaching – we were asked to artistically represent our teaching selves, or the “bother” that spurs us on as professors. Without realizing the connection to some of my favorite books, I quickly crocheted some drab ribbons into a doorway – and on the other side of that doorway, I painted wild and colorful movement, represented in glitter and pom poms and sticky foam. This is how I see my teaching in theology – trying to coax students through a doorway into a world that is bright and overwhelming, chaotic but lovely. Looking at my hasty picture afterwards, I found myself realizing again why students can be so hesitant to jump into this wild world. The doorposts are pretty, in their own way, and they certainly are familiar. We all cling to groundedness when we’re uncertain, and higher education is constantly uncertain, with students suddenly struggling with topics they once found simple, oscillating between the career plans they expected and the ones that better fit their skills, fretting at each new professor’s style of teaching and grading. While my students as a group aren’t particularly religious, for some, their fundamental beliefs about God or the universe or that everything happens for a reason are one of the few stable parts of their identity. My theology class threatens to shake up even that. So, at least on the tough days, they cling to the doorposts and lintels like a toddler avoiding a bath, grasping onto anything rooted until the danger has passed. Or, maybe just as often, they go quiet and inward, not wanting to step through the portal into a conversation they feel unprepared for. Questions and options seem to help – “Do you want to get into groups now, or should we do a poll first?” “I know we might not know much about vows of silence, but who in here needs complete quiet to do homework?” I get them talking about themselves first, and our content second. That way, they can peek through the windows before deciding whether to come outside, and that first tiny step might be enough to build momentum. It’s a helpful reminder that my students are always doing hard work to engage with me and the readings I assign – almost any class day brings up questions. “Do I believe this?” “Could I live that way?” “What commitments would I die for?” “What commitments will I live for?” Even for the non-religious, theology class always holds the potential for deep introspection alongside factual learning, and introspection is hard. With my doorway image in mind, I can recall the importance of gentleness and compassion in my role – not easy-ness, but a gentleness that reminds me to notice the uncertainty, even fear behind the disengagement, and to be ready to try again and again to connect with each individual. I can see more clearly how chaotic and overwhelming the field seems, especially to those who have never crossed the threshold, and look for ways to reassure them that there is something familiar and good on the other side, and that I’ll accompany them until they find it. I remember well a young Latina student pulling me aside after the last day of class and whispering to me, almost like a secret, “Until this class, I didn’t realize I could be both Catholic and a feminist!” She had found her place to belong in the mess of it all. It helps me remember how badly we all want to find a place where we feel welcome, and to create that with both my affect and my syllabus. Every day is a doorway in theology class, and my role is to stand behind it, beckoning, and reassuring, “It’s wonderful here. All you have to do is take another step.”

I remember the first time I felt a sense of awe and wonder about theology. It was in my required Problem of God class at Georgetown University, where I received my undergraduate degree. I had picked a section of the course based on my interest in a list of readings provided with the registration materials the school sent me before I started my freshman year. The professor of that course turned out to be Fr. Thomas King, SJ, who had a reputation as an excellent teacher—something I had no idea about at the time I signed up for the course. I do know I was very fortunate to have done so as my friends who wanted to take his class in the following semester often had trouble finding a spot in his classes. At this point—over twenty years later—I remember little of the specific content of that class, but in terms of overall structure, Fr. King had basically divided everything into groups of three. We examined a variety of readings—from Augustine to Sartre—and Fr. King’s lectures helped us to understand the way each reading explained the nature of God. In the final class of the semester, Fr. King reviewed all the previous content, illustrating how each author’s approach to God (even Sartre!) could fall into one of three categories of ways of talking about God—ways that ultimately could be thought of as an understanding of God as the Father, an understanding of God as the Son, and an understanding of God as the Spirit. As everyone packed up on that final note, my friend Mike and I sat in our seats, completely dumbfounded. Mike turned to me and said, “He just solved the problem of God.” In that moment, for me, a spark had been lit. I had a sense of awe and wonder about the concepts we had examined, and I wanted more of that sense.  In this piece, I aimed to get at a representation of this spark of awe and wonder. The triangle represents the mystery of the divine—a triangle to represent the Trinitarian God of my tradition of Christianity, with a question mark to show how humans, in this life, can never fully know or understand the divine. The heart is meant to represent the sense of awe and wonder that I feel. I would describe it as a sense of joy burning in my heart—similar to the language Blaise Pascal used in his “memorial,” a description of a mystical experience he had that is often published as part of his Pensées, and echoing, of course, Augustine’s idea of the restless heart. The hands are meant to represent my continued seeking of that awe and wonder in my study and research. After creating this, I realized that my imagery had unintentionally mirrored a drawing that one of my other undergraduate professors, Fr. Otto Hentz, SJ, used to draw on the board. In my senior year, I happened to meet an alum who told me this image was all I needed to know in Fr. Hentz’s class—that the triangle represented the mystery of God and the two lines represented the human response to the mystery of God. I recall a bit more discussion in Fr. Hentz’s class about our reading assignments, but his lectures almost always included a reference to this image. When I first considered graduate studies in theology, these Jesuits were the model of the teacher that I wanted to be—one who narrates the content through lecture to try to amaze my students and thus produce the same spark of awe and wonder in my students that had struck me so many years previously. However, I eventually drew on a different undergraduate experience of awe and wonder as a model for my teaching—the experience of reading Pascal’s Pensées in French while studying abroad in Strasbourg, France. This was in the context of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature course, not a theology course, but as I read and interpreted the text for myself in that context, I found a sense of profoundness and truth in what Pascal wrote. For example, one of my favorite fragments states, “Why do you kill me? What! do you not live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just” (fr. 293). This fragment really illustrates the absurdity of the ways we divide and separate our human family. I found through this experience while studying abroad that I could find the sense of awe and wonder for myself, that I didn’t need a professor to tell it to me. Rather, reading, interpreting, and making meaning for myself through these texts could produce that same sense of awe and wonder. Thus, when I teach today, I aim to help my students learn to read, interpret, and discuss texts for themselves. I know that not everyone will find that spark of awe and wonder, but I still aim to provide them with an opportunity for it.

Last semester I spent two weeks in Zambia teaching a Doctor of Ministry course to students from eight different African countries. This was an important experience for me because it magnified many of the similar cross or intercultural exchanges that I have experienced in the classroom here in the US. Of concern to me was the notion of cultural competency in order to have a creative classroom experience that enhanced students’ learning. Cultural competency may be defined simply as “the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than our own.” It has also been defined as “the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.” The first definition is a bit too utilitarian for me. It is measured simply by teaching students, and students learn all kinds of things from us—including sometimes what they do not want to be like. The second is a better definition, since the focus is on the interaction between the teacher and students. I think it is important to study our students and learn as much as possible about them, in order to build rapport with them and creatively relate our course content to their lives and contexts. As I prepared for this experience in Zambia, there were many contextual aspects to consider. First, I was clearly an outsider. Even upon arrival at the international airport, individuals looked at me and could tell I was not only different, but also an outsider. Many of the students came from countries that suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and much of my training in the Academy has sensitized me to its effects and the necessary work of conscientization among the oppressed.  Secondly, I had to consider how distance would affect us. In African countries, students are generally used to getting to know the instructor and spending time with them. I had met the students virtually via online discussion boards, but their cultures require a person-to-person engagement. Several students had limited internet services and/or sporadic cellular services. Sometimes their cities experienced brownouts or blackouts that limited their online engagement and even their submission of assignments in a timely manner. Being present with the students made a difference and they made it known to me how much they appreciated me being there in person.  This type of situation can be frustrating. Conflict may arise unnecessarily. My ethnic background is that I am Latinx and specifically of Honduran heritage. I have also been immersed in North American education culture for most of my adult life. The Academy has its own culture and expectations. I constantly asked myself how I was to navigate these cultural differences and build bridges to students with completely different experiences and expectations in the classroom. The heart of the matter was that I first had to get over myself. I am Latinx, but even among my community I have always heard things like “hay que mejorar la raza” (“we must improve the race,” meaning we must act European and live among “whiter” races); or “trabajar como negro para vivir como blanco” (“working like a black person in order to live like a white person,” implying that white people always live better than black people). Work among people from different ethnic identities and cultures requires humility. We must have a posture of asking questions and learning from the other—not passing judgment. We must become students of our students. I went into the Academy to be ever inquisitive, to seek out new experiences, to have new ideas, and to somehow make this a better world. This meant that I also had to move beyond my own stereotypes of Africa. Colonizers referred to it as “the dark continent.” One of the first references I had to Africa was seeing hunger portrayed on television through human disasters in Ethiopia and Somalia. More recently, a president referred to countries outside the US as “s—hole countries.” Our mental sketches and mental images need deconstruction. But deconstruction is the easiest part of the process. Anyone can tear down, criticize, or point out flaws and errors. The hard part is to reconstruct a new just and fair structure or mental scheme once the previous ones have been torn down. As for creativity, on the first day of class I asked my students to create a list of positive African values and ideals that they strove to live for. Among the many things they shared were Ubuntu and music. Ubuntu is a South African term that means “I am because you are,” or “humanity towards others.” It is a philosophy adopted by many people of Africa that emphasizes relationships, listening, and being heard. Ubuntu gives them a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in their relationships with others. Music stood out to me because music is everywhere in Africa. Through drums, in their ministries, and in their homes, my students in Zambia love music. I asked myself how I could use these values to create a classroom environment that would appeal to my students. Our classrooms in North America tend to be cold, dry, and stale. We tend to see education as disseminating the right information so the students can think the right way and act the right way in this world. It is a manner of doing education that prioritizes intellectual ability to the detriment of students from different cultures. The students in Zambia appeared to be pointing me in a direction through Ubuntu that was warm, relational, and alive. The concern was not only in receiving the right information or learning the right way of doing things, but in being in the world and being in right relationship with one another. Music accentuated the quality of pathos, in the sense of evoking emotions or affections that seemed to satisfy a desire to be in right relationship with one another. After finding out what the students valued, I decided to tweak my lesson plans and include activities that were more dialogical and that included music. In my following blogs, I will continue discussing specific ways in which Ubuntu and music helped establish a positive rapport with my students from African countries.

Yesterday I was doing my walk and I found this little newborn bird on a sidewalk. She was alive and gasping for food. Her eyes were still closed and there were only few very thin feathers on her back. I was so lost I didn’t know what to do. I looked around to see if there was a nest nearby, but there were no trees or signs of any other birds around. Flies were already buzzing around his tiny body, so I took my shirt off, wrapped it around him, and brought him home. On my walk back I started searching Google to know what to do. I couldn't find any rehabilitation place to take him. I learned that wet dog food and a boiled hard egg could serve as food. I placed her in a cardboard box, got a thick winter pair of socks, and covered her body to keep her warm. I finished preparing her food and when I got it to him, he was eager (opening her mouth widely) for food. I was so happy he was eating. From six p.m. to midnight I fed him every fifteen to twenty minutes. But just before going to bed she stopped eating. This morning she wasn’t moving much or gaping for food anymore. I sang to her, I whistled to her, I tried to move her so she knew food was there for her. But to no avail. I went to check on her again and she wasn’t breathing anymore. He died. As I did her funeral, I realized how my spirituality has changed. These recent connections with the living and the dead, the human and more than human, are throwing me into loops that have taken me into so much that is unknown and confusing. The amazing part is that the more confused I become by the presence of other beings, the more I unlearn and the more I open myself up to other forms of spirituality. The more I lose my forms of knowing, my bearings, the more strangely free I become. I start most of my classes by opening the windows and asking my students to listen to the birds. If we can’t listen to the birds, we simply can’t listen to what we often call “ourselves,” that is, a discrete form of an individual being. The need to listen to the birds is to listen to our own songs. For we are never autonomous individuals but inter-relational ones, living in what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. Listening to the birds is a form of spirituality that blurs what might be inside and the outside.  I am searching for spiritualities where all of my senses engage other forms of life, affected by ways of paying attention to other living beings around the landscape I am a part of. I am having more trouble with forms of spiritualities that are primarily ingrained in the mind without much attention to the body, or are even the mind with the body but removed from the surroundings and relations with broader ecosystems. I am having problems with spiritualities that are more attached to buildings and things than to the fullness of life outside and the vastness of the natural worlds with its patterns, relations, connections, and complexities. Spiritualities that are attentive to a set of beliefs and practices that are disconnected from the land are becoming more difficult for me. Spiritualities that are way too human, with a God who mainly relates to humans, that is also becoming difficult to relate. I am learning to deny these forms of spiritualities while also recognizing other forms of life of the Spirit through the patch of land where I live. In other words, a spirituality where the land orients the ways of believing and being. What one might call a more enchanted form of (local) living.  The spirituality I was taught never helped me to pay attention to my landscape, to other forms of life around me, to what was underneath my feet. That spirituality made me look to the sky to search for heaven but never paid attention to birds, to the top of trees, to clouds, to rain, to stars and planets. Moreover, the theology of my spirituality taught me about class struggle but had nothing to do with nonhuman forms of life or with other species. I know how to talk about agri-business and the power of capital. I know how to set up a critique of a higher colonial class destroying the worlds of poor people. But I never learned to talk about the ways in which the poison of agribusiness fills the soil, runs to the rivers, and spreads in the fields, killing communities of people but also communities of plants, vegetation, fish, bees, and so many other living species. I never realized that the monoculture proposed by the agribusiness is the same erasure of diversity within cities, that the destruction of biodiversity is the same program that operates in jail systems.  Bees, fish, soil, plants, and animals are deeply correlated with indigenous, black, brown, and poor people and women. They must all be part of my class struggle analysis. As I said, when I saw this newborn bird, I was lost. I grew up in São Paulo and learned to walk around beggars and animals. Stopping for a newborn bird was immensely surprising to me. In my lostness, my spirituality was challenged to relate more deeply with the breath of this little precious creature. To help this little bird is to help that living being to survive. But also, to help his bird is also to sustain the environment, the whole mutuality within the systems where s/he belonged. But most fundamental perhaps, it is to learn to see myself as part of this system, imbricated in this system, responsible for this system. I was wondering about the natural gaping movement of that little bird, her own ancestral knowing searching for food, and the forms and movements of knowing in our classrooms. How do we search for that which keeps us alive? What is it in us that is still related to the movements of the earth that orients our gaping, our longings, and processes of mutual formation? In classrooms, perhaps teachers gape for respect and positive responses, for a place where they are seen as the ones with power holding some sort of knowledge. Perhaps students also gape for respect and positive responses but know they are there to receive knowledge. A friend pictured the classroom as a nest. I was wondering about that too. How so? Who brings the food and who gapes? Is this a one-way movement from teacher to students? Aren’t we also gaping? We are all gaping for something. Our desires are shaped by the world we live in. Our education system is a Cartesian system becoming a neoliberal product where we are taught to gape for efficiency, for objectivity, for calculation of measures and results, for precise syllabi, for clear learning outcomes, for the ability to say that this class will fulfill items 2.1, 3.7, 4. 3, and 7.5 of the educational mission of the school and give the results (profit) promised. There is very little life in this nest. Or perhaps there is only gaping for a certain food, just like the bird needs a very specific food to survive.  I always return to Rubem Alves who said that teaching is the production of espantos: wonders and awe! I wonder about a pedagogy of affections, a pedagogy of the heart. This bird provoked a thousand espantos in me. And so much sadness. That connection affected me and changed me. Perhaps this is what I hope to do in the nests of my classrooms: find connections, be affected, and create affections; change my way, my heart, and perhaps even change the class assignments, readings, final work, and so on. I am slowly learning that classrooms are not this calculated event where students show their acquired knowledge to the teacher. It is more about the heart, and the knowledge they need to gain for themselves.  In this pedagogy of affections, I might need to continue to keep listening to the birds. Can we hear them? What are they saying, singing, uttering? So much I need to learn. But one thing I know: they are singing our songs, they are ourselves “out” there.

[caption id="attachment_251233" align="alignright" width="424"] A “glacial erratic” on Skidegate, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada (photo by author)[/caption] “Could God create a stone too heavy for God to lift?” This question may be familiar to those of us who teach about the traditional qualities of God in the philosophy of religion classroom. The so-called “paradox of the stone” is a pithy yet fascinating riddle that helps unpack the inconsistencies and logical incongruities at the heart of the notion of omnipotence as a divine attribute. And yet, over the years I have found that even with questions as crisp and deceptively simple as this one can be, students find it hard to relate to ideas like these as anything more than abstract intellectual exercises. If students don’t know or don’t care about the Christian God, or even much about Christianity, why would they care to explore the labyrinthine twists and turns this question implies? I have found that one of my key challenges as an instructor is to create fruitful connections and open easily traversed pathways that bridge gaps between what can seem like archaic or overly abstract ideas on the one hand and familiar, even urgent, issues from our contemporary cultural discourses on the other. These, it seems, may not only be the problems of a philosophy of religion class in 2022, but are reflective of the deeper challenges that the study of religion faces in the secular liberal arts context. I teach a second level introduction to Western religious thought to undergraduates, most of whom have little if any substantive knowledge of Christianity—let alone the questions posed by religious studies. In this class, I engage with issues of faith and skepticism and the complex relationship between the two with undergraduate students from across the university. It is common to have, say, biology majors alongside fine arts students interacting with English majors who are in turn working on minors in international relations. The context is interdisciplinary and diverse. Few of these students are familiar with the broad intellectual and spiritual traditions of Christianity and yet all come to this class with their own set of questions. My role, in a class that can tend towards the abstract, is to provide points of connection where the tradition meets their contemporary experience and to guide a conversation where this encounter can be unpacked and more clearly understood—even if rarely resolved. For example, arguments for the existence of God are a staple part of any introduction to philosophy of religion. Not surprisingly, I cover the basics with Anselm and Aquinas, but I also bring in an ancient Sumerian beer recipe, a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke about the nine billion names of God, and a poem by Emily Dickinson comparing train tickets to knowledge of heaven. Later in the course, we deal with another topic involving the significant challenges of the classic Problem of Evil. In addition to the traditional formulations, and various logical and evidential approaches, we look at William Nicholson’s play, Shadowlands, exploring the experience of writer C. S. Lewis and the untimely death of his wife Joy Gresham—rendered so poignantly in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film of the same name. Interestingly, the challenge here is not necessarily to defend the existence of God in the face of clear evidence of evil. It can sometimes seem more of a challenge to convince students that it is worth arguing the case in the first place. By the time we get to this topic, it is important to have a sense of value for what religion can be and do, culturally and practically speaking, before wrestling with the tricky paradoxical puzzles that the problem of evil brings into stark relief. By the end of the course, as one topic builds on another, my hope is that students will appreciate such things as the difference between probability and possibility and the relationship between the sacred and the secular. I want them to understand that religious thought exists entwined and enmeshed in our cultural experience in ways that thwart our neat secular/sacred division. But most of all, I want them to appreciate, with as much vividness as I can manage, how religion continues to “speak” to the perennial challenges of human experience and interaction. In the most recent iteration of this course, as we approached the final weeks of semester, my students requested a topic of their own. As we passed the second-year milestone of the pandemic, they wanted to discuss the pervasiveness and power of conspiracy theories that seemed to have proliferated in the face of the ongoing global disruption that had so impacted their lives. For the students, the character of conspiracy theories appeared to parallel some of the major issues we had been developing through the course. I was certainly open to the suggestion. Typically, I would end the course with something topical, a current issue that served to draw together the various strands we had explored though the semester in practical and easily identifiable ways. But this time, I was fascinated to consider this alternative: a contemporary riddle that seemed for them so urgent and at the same time so challenging to account for. In our final discussions, I asked students to describe what was happening in those of-the-moment conspiratorial conversations. I asked them to consider scholarship on “conspirituality” and associated key examples that traced their way back to elements evocative of the New Age movement and the tragedy of 9/11. There they discovered issues of community and identity, of disenchantment and re-enchantment, and of faith and apocalyptic hope. Regardless of our conclusions in these final classes, it was apparent to me that they had located their own “paradox of the stone.” In these culminating conversations I found myself amongst the most engaged cohort of students I had ever encountered, dealing with the issues from the course in complex and applied ways in collaborative, lively discussions that really mattered to them. Indeed, inspired by my students, I went on to teach a full course on the topic of “conspirituality.” In some ways, this culminating moment around the phenomenon of “conspirituality” exemplified the challenge of teaching in the secular liberal arts context, the increasing difficulty of “translating” religious tradition for a contemporary learner, and it also offered a moment to celebrate. For me it was solid affirmation of my pedagogical efforts to bring the traditional and the contemporary together as a way of creating a flashpoint of engagement. But it was also a reminder that the classroom is a community of learners of which I am a part. Little did I anticipate that it would be the students, the focus of my teaching strategies, who would be the bridge builders, providing me with this most effective and evocative example.

Staying at Trippet Hall on the Wabash College campus always feels like a treat. It was my privilege to go back and stay there for a week earlier this summer as a participant of the early career workshop for theological school faculty. We were the first group that Trippet hosted in three years, yet every corner of the building looked ready to welcome guests again. Amenities in guest suites, white table linens in the dining hall, and snacks and beverages in Clifford Lounge. Everything was in place. It was Thursday morning. At the very moment when I had just started shampooing my hair, a fire alarm went off. I hoped it would stop after a few beeps, but no, it kept going. “Oh dear, I can’t go out like this,” I thought. I decided to finish the shower as quickly as possible. With the shower faucet turned off, it became clear that all the fire alarms on the entire third floor of Trippet Hall, including my room, were going. My heart was beating fast. I hastily reached my hand to the towel hanging on the bathroom door, thinking, “Is this from the kitchen? What if this is something serious?” Right then, someone banged on my door, “Fire department! Open the door!” My heart was now pounding. “Give me a second!” I shouted. No time to take real, presentable clothes out of the closet. I picked up my pajamas lying on the bed, barely put them on, and snatched my phone and wallet. Ready to evacuate, I finally opened the door, and there was a burly firefighter standing in front of my room. “Just wanted to make sure nothing’s on fire in your room,” he said, with a big smile on his face, even. It was simply an alarm malfunction. The following day at around the same time, I was shampooing my hair again, and all the fire alarms on my floor went off, again. As soon as I got out of the shower, I rushed myself, recalling what had happened yesterday. Putting on clothes, I thought, “A firefighter will be here soon. I’ll be so ready this time. Lesson learned!” I even felt a bit proud of myself. Ten minutes passed; nobody came. It turned out that they were testing the alarms to fix them. What does it mean to be “ready” in theological education? Our disciplines have trained us to understand readiness as being about control. To be ready to teach is to be in control—of the material, of the classroom dynamics, of what’s going on in our field. Our readiness in the academy is enfleshed in the authority we build and exhibit through degrees, publications, rank, and service. It is often assessed by the number of checkboxes we check: How many degree programs are you able to teach? How many languages or subjects? How many committees are you willing to join or lead? How many students will you advise? Often, we let this “control” mode dictate our pedagogy as well. One certain page number on my lecture notes, although I know I will never get to that page in class, seems to prove that I have prepared enough. More details in my syllabus and rubrics, although I know they cannot wholly assess students’ learning and engagement, seem to ensure my grading is fair and informed. We often come to teaching with the assumption that more control means more expertise. In Trippet 301, I had to pivot to a different kind of readiness to open the room door and let the firefighter know at the right time, there’s no burning object in my room and everything is fine. What does it mean to be “ready”? At one time, I thought having my framed PhD diploma on the wall would indicate I was ready to teach. Though it conveys that we have completed onerous work, that does not equate readiness. Over time, I have learned that we become more ready as we open ourselves to unlearning what we know and how we were trained. We become more ready as we open ourselves to surprises and challenges and let them form us. We become more ready as we center students’ processes and learning, rather than necessarily their outcomes and proficiency. In the end, our readiness is built upon our intentional and habituated openness. Because the line between teaching and learning is always porous.

Education prepares learners for a world that educators cannot possibly anticipate. This has been true for longer than most educators would like to admit but it is even more the case today. Learners are viscerally aware that they inhabit a rapidly shifting landscape that calls the relevance of our courses and institutions into question. These shifts have become all the more dramatic and unpredictable in the last few years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The relevance of education in theology and religion is made even more precarious when we present ourselves as a—or even “the”—source of information. To be a source of information is superfluous in the digital information age. Content is googleable. Students have a boundless source of information at their fingertips should they seek it. They are in urgent need of something more important and less accessible: the skill set to critically assess and creatively apply that information while remaining curious for more.  When my children first started school, this was the kind of education I wanted for them: a student-driven, experiential education in 21st Century Skills that would take their voice and agency seriously. I found it in classrooms practicing Problem and Project Based Learning (PBL), an approach to teaching and learning that has long been used in medical and engineering schools and that is increasingly present in elementary and secondary contexts. PBL confronts learners with real life complex problems, asking them to seek out and apply the necessary skills and information to address them. In that way, the course content becomes the means rather than the goal, resulting in increased relevance and retention. The learner is implicitly formed, not by receiving the content but by creatively applying it towards a concrete result. This formation takes the learner’s knowledge and experience seriously and encourages them to utilize it so that they can do the same in whatever landscape they inhabit or enter. What better approach, I thought, for teaching and learning in theological education and religious studies.  I began experimenting with what a PBL classroom would look like in an introductory religious education course in the spring semester of 2020. With trepidation, I began with a sparsely populated syllabus that provided structure and a set of broadly applicable readings, but left time for students to collaborate in small groups around the problems that were most important to them as I circulated, supporting them in seeking out the necessary content to address the problems about which they were most passionate. One group focused on creating Brave Spaces while others wanted to consider how to nurture spirituality in the classroom or apply what they had read about multiple intelligences. Our end goal was not a group presentation of research on the topic; they were to teach the class by doing, not talking about, what they had been working on collaboratively. In the final classes before spring break, they took leadership of the classroom to work toward Brave Space, nurturing spirituality, and engaging multiple intelligences. We planned to return in two weeks to begin a second set of projects focused on formation through experiences outside of classrooms. It was fortunate that we had completed those first projects when we did. When we returned to class, we did so on Zoom. After a lengthy check-in it was apparent that every learner in the virtual space had an urgent real-life complex problem to address in religious education and it was the same problem I had: how could we teach if we couldn’t meet in person? We chucked the entire second half of the syllabus. We spent the next several weeks being and finding resources for one another. Each learner’s problem became not just real-life and complex but took on the specificity of their context so that their ways of addressing them were as varied as the communities they served. They took seriously that they were the content experts in their own contexts. I rewrote the rubric for the final project. At the end of the semester each individual instead of each group took on leadership of our virtual classroom so that we could share in a peer-led online learning activity. My goal had been for them to learn about teaching by doing it; in the process we became a community of learners. In the two years since that first semester when PBL went from theoretical to urgent I have continued to adjust my approach so that I gradually hand over the leadership of the (now multiplatform) classroom. The pernicious prevalence of the PowerPoint presentation motivated me to model experiential teaching and learning in a variety of forms at the beginning of the semester before asking everyone else to do the same. When asked to teach asynchronously, it became clear that I would also need to model experiential asynchronous teaching so that I could ask learners to teach one another asynchronously. Instead of weekly interactive class meetings, I listed a different interactive asynchronous learning activity engaging each unit’s content at the outset then asked all enrolled to do the same for their own passion projects and assess one another’s learning activities in conversation on the discussion board.  It takes courage and humility to move from a content-centered course to a PBL classroom. I love my content. Every reading I am accustomed to assigning feels urgent, as if I cannot send learners out into the world unless they are equipped with it. But the real-world complex problem I am living with is that I am not sending them out at all; they are already living into a world that is shifting under their feet and the ability to creatively shift with it is far more urgent than anything I could ever assign. Interestingly enough, they end up discovering that they need the content along the way and cherish it all the more for having made that discovery themselves. 

Our seminary recently hosted a symposium on beauty. For the occasion, I performed a musical interpretation of a digital art piece entitled “By night and by day,” part of a larger composite of cloud themes depicting God’s presence with his people by artist Sarah Bernhardt. I explored a range of sonorities on the double bass to tell the Exodus story, to depict God’s leading of Israel out of Egypt by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. To guide me in my portrayal of the theme of divine presence, I composed a musical setting based on a melody from a Latin American song entitled El Señor es mi luz (The Lord is My Light) based on Psalm 27. The psalm speaks of Israel’s trust in the Lord’s protection from adversaries who assail her during her earthly pilgrimage. The psalmist also sings of Israel’s eschatological hope to dwell in the house of the Lord forever and behold his beauty in his temple. In my composition I employed word painting, a technique used in sixteenth century music to match a concept in a written text with a corresponding musical effect. The following description of the flow of the piece explains how I used the range of the double bass to communicate various aspects of the biblical story. High pitch harmonics placing fingers over strings      The piece begins with a variation of the psalm melody using high pitch harmonics, which are achieved by touching the strings without pressing them. This technique communicates a sense of God’s presence on high as Israel prepares to cross the sea. It is a calming presence; God is in control. Energetic tremolos with the bow      The harmonics are followed by energetic tremolos made with rapid bow movements to the chorus of the hymn. This technique expresses the tumultuous movement of God’s people away from their enemies, with the pillars of fire and cloud ahead of them as they rapidly (and perhaps a bit anxiously) make their way through the great waters. Hitting strings with the bow’s wood (col legno) to introduce the theme (chorus)      To express Israel’s proximity to the waters of salvation, I play the psalm melody with the back of the wooden bow (col legno technique), evoking images of drops of water falling on or sprinkling faces and bodies as people prepare to cross the sea. Flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow (verse, stanza)      Then I play a flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow, depicting Israel’s safe arrival to the Promised land, which anticipates the final beatific vision of God’s people in his presence. Festive plucking to a Cuban guaracha       Plucking the strings (pizzicato), I play a Cuban guaracha (salsa) rhythm based on the song’s chord progression to express the mood of eschatological fiesta after the people’s safe passage through turbulent waters into the Promised Land. Playing a Panamanian tamborito rhythm percussively on the wood of the bass…      Finally, I sing the hymn’s chorus in Spanish while tapping the top wooden shoulders of the instrument to a tamborito Panamanian rhythmic pattern, using the bass in a percussive way. So, what makes the piece a Latin American interpretation? The most obvious element is the use of a psalm in the Spanish language. But the more interesting ones are the plucking of strings to a Cuban Guaracha (salsa) and the drumming of the wood on the shoulder of the bass to a Panamanian tamborito. But why infuse the text with a Latin American spin? Here the context of the performance matters. I have performed this piece in three settings with similar audiences—predominantly White, monolingual (English), mid-Western church audiences in the United States. By incorporating these elements in the performance, I am inviting the audience to imagine a world in which the biblical story is told, heard, and sung through Latino/a eyes. I am using music as a gentle challenge to see the biblical story in the context of the catholicity or universality of the church, which is a church of people from many ethnicities, languages, and nations. I am also raising awareness about the presence of forgotten Latino/a neighbors whose voices are often not heard, who crave for belonging, justice, and the psalmist’s hope in God’s deliverance. By foregrounding these elements into the piece, my double bass functions as an extension of the Latino teacher-performer’s own identity as a proclaimer of God’s story, a bearer of an inclusive catholicity, and a herald of hospitality, justice, and hope.

It’s no fun lecturing to blank stares. As a church historian in an undergraduate institution, I teach quite a few general education classes to students who come to me ready to “do their time.” Thankfully, I stumbled upon a unique learning aid that has helped me bring to life some previously disengaged students The Reacting to the Past (RTTP) historical role-playing games have been all the rage these last few years in higher-education and have helped radically increase student engagement in my own courses. There are a variety of games available, many of which are well-suited for religious studies and Christian higher education. While studies show increased overall student engagement, it’s the games’ effect on student leadership that caught my interest this semester.[1] With student permission granted to share this story, I’d like to talk about how playing the RTTP game helped “Sam” transition from passive to active learning through his leadership role in Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791.[2] Leadership Self-Assessment Let me start by saying that I was not expecting Sam to become our RTTP star player. While he made a few insightful comments during the class, he struggled with turning in work and general participation. I had quite a few blank stares from Sam from the back of the class. This semester I had my TA choose who would play what role in our RTTP game. Each student completed an online questionnaire that helped gauge their interest, experience, skills, and limitations. They had the opportunity to state if they would be open to a leadership role or had experience in a range of areas such as student debate, event planning, or gaming. This TA had no knowledge of the students in the class other than what she found on these sheets, which allowed her to make an unbiased choice of who would receive what role. The crowd leader in our game was the historical character “Danton,” a key role that needed a strong leader. Based solely on his self-assessment, my TA assigned Sam this part. It was a risk for me to let it stand—the game really needed this character to shine—but I trusted Sam’s self-assessment and I am so glad that I did!        It turns out that the blank stare from the back of the class was masking a passionate leader. My previous lectures elicited a few comments from him, but nothing substantial. Now, all of a sudden, I had an excited student—when he received his role, he literally bounced out of the classroom. Moving forward, he came to class prepared, rallied his faction, made strategic plans, and worked outside of the classroom to meet his faction goals. His speeches were passionate, logical, and contained the necessary primary source material. He brought his “A-game” and helped lift the rest of the class with him. At the end of the game, his classmates voted for him as the strongest player. Removing Teacher Bias There’s a lot that could be said about how this highlighted Sam’s natural leadership abilities and buoyed his self-esteem, but teacher-to-teacher, I want to share this: Sam was able to lead and shine because my own potential bias was removed. He said he was a leader, my TA believed him, and that was that. There was no checking of attendance or grades, no memory of how often he had engaged in classroom conversation. The whole class benefited when I trusted the student’s self-assessment. The heart of RTTP pedagogy is pulling the professor into the background and letting students take the lead. However, we still steer things from behind the scenes, perhaps most importantly in role selection. Some professors just pull names out of a hat, while others hand pick roles. For myself, it was through the adaptation of another professor’s student pre-game questionnaire that I was able to land somewhere between these two options. Previously, I had used the questionnaire and selected roles based on student responses and my own knowledge of them. This made for some active games; however, with my TA assigning roles based only on student self-assessment, it created our best game yet. Sam’s success has taught me to release my own hand even more from this aspect of the game and is pushing me to reevaluate all of my courses beyond the game. What can I do to offer students an opportunity for self-assessment of their own leadership abilities and then honor it in the classroom? By finding ways to further reduce my own potential bias, I hope to cultivate a greater diversity of student leaders in the classroom. [1] Julie C. Tatlock and Paula Reiter, “Conflict and Engagement in ‘Reacting to the Past’ Pedagogy,” Peace Review 30, no. 1 (2018) and Matthew C. Weidenfeld and Kenneth E. Fernandez, “Does Reacting to the Past Increase Student Engagement? An Empirical Evaluation of the Use of Historical Simulations in Teaching Political Theory,” Journal of Political Science Education 13, no. 1 (2017): 46–61. [2] Mark C. Carnes and Gary Kates, Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2013). “Sam” is an anonymous name given to my student and with his permission.