Resources

Recently, I was sharing with my children that one of the first purchases I made when moving to a new city or state was a map. In the not-so-distant past (circa 1995), obtaining a map was of utmost importance for daily travel to visit restaurants, stores, and especially the homes of new friends and colleagues. This need for a map diminished when directions became accessible online, but I still relied upon step-by-step printouts from MapQuest in the days before smartphones. For the entire duration of my children’s lifetimes, which is roughly a decade, the notion of traveling with maps or printouts has been obsolete. Directions to and from anywhere are available at our fingertips. When we are driving to an unfamiliar location, my children are accustomed to instructions emanating from an automated voice on a mobile phone, not the crinkling sounds of a human peering at a paper map. When my children begin driving in a few years, I do not anticipate teaching them to read maps in the same way my parents taught me a generation ago. Rather, I will likely provide reminders about devices being sufficiently charged and issue warnings about the perils of multitasking on the road. Technological developments over the past twenty years have transformed our access to information in a myriad of areas, ranging from shopping for household items to researching academic subjects. This information explosion has altered nearly every facet of our lives, but I wonder if theological education is one arena, at least in some classrooms, where the teaching and learning operates as if we were still in the twentieth century. Although much of my journey as a masters-level seminary student coincided with the advent of the information explosion, my experience entailed a lot of rote memorization with a heavy emphasis on comprehension of content, such as the ability to regurgitate information, often in dreaded blue books, about significant persons, dates, ideas, and movements, without notes. I was also required to analyze this content, but only after I demonstrated an adequate grasp of the foundational data. For example, it was important that I knew from memory the chronological order and specific dates of Martin Luther’s theological writings before I offered commentary on the import, impact, and differences between Luther’s three treatises in 1520. My teaching as an historian of Christianity in the United States has eschewed any requirement of rote memorization. I believe it remains valuable to possess a clear trajectory of religious developments and some historical facts from memory, but I also recognize how the information explosion has made it possible to shift my pedagogical priorities toward method, praxis, and application. Access to historical facts is no longer confined to visiting physical libraries or purchasing books because this information is readily available online. But because history is a contested endeavor pursued from multiple perspectives and sometimes with malicious agendas, my aims are to meticulously cover historiography and trace with my students how history gets made. This includes comparisons of written histories utilizing different sources, such as the different presentations of world missions from the viewpoints of white missionaries from the United States and local Christian leaders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I don’t want my teaching to be “two-thousand and late,” which is a colloquialism derived from a song by the Black Eyes Peas criticizing modes of thinking or doing that are hopelessly outdated. I cannot teach with some of the same approaches as my predecessors and former professors. I am grateful for the ways they sparked my curiosity and stirred my mind, but my students and I are learning today amid an explosion of information, misinformation, and disinformation. A pedagogy centered on lecturing about historical content for three hours every week and then mandating that my students reproduce this content from memory feels as archaic as printing out directions from MapQuest. It is more exciting and effective to interpret, analyze, and apply the historical content together with my students. In studying the history and legacy of U.S. participation in world missions, we are grappling with the pernicious results of colonization and evangelization alongside the courageous and anti-imperial witness of some individual missionaries. After my students graduate, they may not remember when or where exactly these missionaries served overseas, but they can immediately recall this information on their phones and computers. What I want them to remember, as they plan short-term mission trips in their congregations, is our deep engagement with the moral questions and immoral failings of world missions, including Jomo Kenyatta’s observation: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.” Because I don’t want my students to repeat the mistakes of the past in their ministries, I must continuously adapt and revise my teaching to create more opportunities to connect historical content with contextual praxis.

I’m teaching about race more and more these days. That wasn’t my plan. My training is in ancient Greek philosophy and I used to love teaching Aristotle and Plato. But things changed. Ten years ago, the ancient thinkers were great at helping the first-year students at my small Catholic college in the Northeast reflect on the world, society, and themselves. I can’t get it to work anymore. Because my first-years don’t read very well, the ancient writers are increasingly inaccessible to them. And they keep requesting more readings by people of color, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ. This befuddled me for years. I wasn’t assigned a single reading by a person of color in my philosophy grad school program, the only women we read were commentators, and all LGBTQ writers we studied were closeted, at least in their writings. None of this bothered me. I was interested in ideas, not people! Three things changed. First, I realized that marginalized people added different ideas to the conversation. They stressed different issues, and they challenged shared assumptions. Second, my students did better work when I assigned a more diverse set of readings. Third, our students of color began asking us to teach students more about race. They politely didn’t add that white faculty members like me should learn some stuff about race too, but it was implied. All this took on new urgency with the rise and power of the Black Lives Matter movement. I realized that to make sense of the world and their own role in it, our students need to understand race better, and they need to get better at talking about it without getting defensive or shutting down. And of course, I need to get better at it too. But how do I teach anything connected to race in a responsible manner when I know so little myself? This stumped me for a long time. I had trouble finding readings that felt right to me. And when I came up with something, I remembered that including only one thing by an author of color is tokenism, a sin possibly worse than an all-white syllabus. And then I was paralyzed again. I eventually decided to live with tokenism and to start small and simple: I just added Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to my first-year gen ed class, combining it with Plato’s Crito to create a unit on civil disobedience and nonviolence. Once I felt comfortable teaching King, I gradually added other materials: Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet.” Selections from his Autobiography. Veena Cabreros-Sud’s “Kicking ass.” This semester, I added King’s arguments for nonviolence. Next semester, I might add a discussion on anger or a chapter by James Cone on nonviolence and Christianity. And I’m hunting around for a good video on the civil rights movement. I still feel like an imposter teaching this unit, especially when pedagogy requires me to speak as Malcolm X (I sometimes worry that there are secret videos). But I also know that it’s usually one of the most effective units in the class. Students who have seemed bored are suddenly interested. My (very few) black students get a chance to show off because unlike most of my white students, they usually know something about Malcolm X. Students bring up connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, and we try to think through what has changed and what remains the same. I still don’t know enough. My course could be diverse in a better way. Right now, all the black authors are talking about race, they are in a single unit, and they are almost all men. It’s a work in progress. But most of my white students have never heard of Malcolm X or a sit-in. What I do is much better than nothing and I learn a bit more each time I teach it. Perfectionism is the enemy here. It usually is. It’s OK to start small. Add a single piece. Don’t worry about how it fits into the course as a whole – students usually don’t see the overall structure anyway. Try and see how it goes. Next time, do a little more, do it a little better, or try something different. Learn. Grow. *Watch for two additional blogs in this series in December and January.   Resources Cabreros-Sud, Veena. “Kicking ass.” In To be real, edited by Rebecca Walker. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Cone, James. Martin and Malcolm in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992. Cone, James. God of the oppressed. New York, Seabury Press, 1975. (See especially Chapter 9: Liberation and the Christian Ethic.”) hooks, bell. “Killing rage: Militant resistance.” In Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. New York, HarperCollins, 1986. (In addition to “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” see also chapter 15: “Nonviolence,” and 18: “Where Do We Go from Here?”) Mantena, Karuna. “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Politics.” In To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Srinivasan, Amia. “In Defence of Anger.” Four Thought, BBC Radio 4, 2014. X, Malcolm. “Ballot or the Bullet.”1964. (Transcript here and audio here.)

“This class goes soooo fast!” “Wait, we just started! … It’s over?” “Doc, time in this class flies by.” Recognizing when students are learning and when they are not can be a challenge. The above student comments are the kinds of feedback I yearned to hear. I would listen for how my students were engaging the materials and how the materials were engaging them. And, equally as important, I was listening for feedback concerning their experience of the course. Student feedback, even in the immediacy of a comment, can convey as much about student learning as reading their essays or grading their tests. When student comments were like those above, I knew I was achieving what I had planned. I knew I had suspended time in my classroom. Suspending time in the classroom has less to do with planning the content of a course and more to do with sculpting/choreographing/composing the learner’s experience in the course. We know that form and function are important to any kind of design. In using our artist’s eye, we know that form and function are operative dynamics in all teaching sessions. Function, clearly and normally in our wheelhouse, is attended to through learning outcomes, prescribed disciplinary literature and overall school curriculum. Form, attended to only sparingly and only by a few, needs our awareness and much work. Better learning happens when teachers intentionally plan the forms of learning activities rather than relying upon the stale and traditional. Better forms of teaching invite learners into experiences of being engrossed, immersed, or swept up – into new ideas, provocative assertions, or deep examinations of relevant problems, aspirations, and new knowledge. An indication that we have selected the better form for teaching is when students report an experience of time being suspended. We plan to suspend time in our classrooms so that students might become, for a little while, completely unself-conscious.  Orchestrating and choreographing learning activities to assist students with being less incumbered, less distracted, and less fearful during class requires teachers who are aware of and who revel in the flow. Entering into the flow is a common part of the creative process – a common part of daily living. Playing games like bid whist, backgammon, or video games where, at the end of the time together, it feels like time slowed as we enjoyed play, is a typical experience of the flow.  People report that while engrossed in common tasks like gardening, writing, reading, or spirited dialogue, they felt swept up or transported to a place of relief and joy. People watching sporting events, or those who participate as athletes report that during play worries melt, concerns are no longer burdensome, and they experience a sense of realness or even euphoria. The flow are moments of intensity that seem to defy time. Flow happens in classrooms when you and we love what we are working on and care about the students we are inviting into the mutual work of learning. An intensity is created. When we struggle to fall in love with our teaching work – when we can let go and work on what we are longing for, then classrooms have the possibility of giving way to flow, wading into flow, rocketing up to flow. Like the runner’s high or losing one’s self into the story while watching a movie, professors can create for students the feeling of being drawn up, swept up, in the best way. While there are many aims of teaching, few are as important as assisting students with being present, riveted, captivated while together in learning – experiencing the flow while learning in classrooms. A central goal of teachers is to learn to guide students into the ability to focus upon the task at-hand, the now, the here, the being with one another. The paradox is that we are trying, in the moments of being most present, to forget ourselves and our petty problems, and for that duration of a class session, work collaboratively on saving the world and our own lives. We are teaching so we and they can learn to let go. My suggestion for how to suspend time in classrooms might feel counter-intellectual. And, it might go against your pedagogical presumptions. My hope is that it will give you permission to tap more earnestly into your artistic self and creative processes. A key to assisting students in the classroom with the aim of better focus, resisting distractions, and being fully present, is, rather than demanding they think, invite students into activities of imagination, storytelling, and collaboration. Rather than reducing thinking to compliance with ideas and opinions, invite learners to work out complex ideas of injustice and formulate the activism, practices, strategies, and implications to do something about the injustices. There is no one way to suspend time for your students. And, the way one teacher achieves this magic will not be how another teacher achieves it. Each teacher will have their own way. Some colleagues make use of complicated student projects and learning activities. Other colleagues craft and hone their facilitation skills. I have vivid memories of being swept up simply by discussing taboo ideas, ideas for which I had not had previous opportunity to explore or consider. Complexity, provocativity, or any number of other techniques allow time to be suspended. “Professor! Where did the time go?”

We all craft a syllabus for each class, but honestly what is a syllabus and for whom is it written? I hope to expand our vision. The quick and typical answer is: A syllabus is a plan for how we hope to engage students with content and practices of our field of study. Of course, a syllabus is a covenant of learning between teacher and student about the outcomes students might expect from the class. Yet syllabi have many other audiences, and their construction is a daunting task. Over the last two years, I have reviewed nearly a hundred introductory syllabi in my field (Christian religious education). By completing a content analysis of them, I hoped to discover what is at the heart of our shared discipline. I learned that two emphases usually guide classes in my field: attention to the art of teaching and to the congregation as a context for learning. I thank the colleagues who entrusted me with their commitments. As I read them, I was in awe of the quality of teaching. I honor their integrity. Despite this, many of these colleagues expressed anxiety with the way we often think of syllabi. They offered a challenge: We need to make a difference! That means, they said, we need to significantly change the way we construct classes. Above all else, they argued, syllabi are a plan for a journey that impacts lives and the wider world. That is not an overstatement. Person after person told me that “business as usual” could no longer be the case. Classes had to change! The COVID pandemic, the rush of classes online, the inequities revealed, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the continuing violence in the public square against people of color revealed challenges that have redirected the whole class-planning process. We write syllabi for students. We make our expectations and our commitments clear. We write syllabi for our colleagues, often following a prescribed form, to demonstrate how a class fits into a school’s curriculum. Moreover, we write our syllabi for colleagues in our guilds to show how each of us stands within the traditions of a field of study. But my colleagues told me that syllabi need to be more – much more. They have a wider audience and impact. Syllabi are a concrete and sacred expression of our vocation of teaching. They embody hopes for the future. Syllabi are our efforts to connect students, fields of study, a curriculum, and outcomes that make a difference in the world. Through our teaching, we want to influence the ways students live their vocations and interact with the wider worlds of church, faith, ministry, and public service they touch. We each make choices. We include some foci and ignore others. We emphasize some practices of learning – reading, study, analysis, creative projects, oral presentations, or written papers, to name a few. We seek to embody the wisdom and practices of a field of study. But more! From wherever we are located, from the wisdom of academic traditions in which we are embedded, and from faithful efforts to live a vocation, we join with our students on a journey. We choose what we will emphasize. We choose who we will serve. We choose what difference we will make. It is obvious, isn’t it? A syllabus is a concrete reflection of our hope to make a difference. Syllabi are filled with our passion for our field, with the liveliness of the worlds our students inhabit, and with our best efforts of teaching. Teaching is not the replication of what we did before, nor honestly what the authorities in our fields say it is. Teaching is our calling, and the syllabi, our promises.  By reviewing over a hundred syllabi, I saw similarities that define a discipline, I saw practices of good teaching, I saw colleagues struggling, but I also saw a passion to make a difference in a world that needs teachers and great traditions of hope and wisdom. Just as books and articles shape dialogue and influence policy, even more so do syllabi. Teaching cannot be “business as usual.” What difference do you hope to make?

When I got my PhD in 1997 and began my teaching career we were just being introduced to PowerPoint. I like many others remember those days which have long since gone. Over my career we have moved from the use of PowerPoint to teaching in classrooms where students have laptops, tablets and phones. Students are engaging life through the screen. What does it mean to teach in an age where our students are being shaped by what they have in their hands? How do we focus our teaching in light of our student’s reality of living in an age where they are learning via moving and still images? How does our teaching align with how they see the world via Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook? We live in a world where, “…three hundred hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute. Six billion hours of video are watched every month on the site, one hour for every person on earth. The 18–34 age group watches more YouTube than cable television. (And remember that YouTube was only created in 2005.)[1]  “Every two minutes, Americans alone take more photographs than were made in the entire nineteenth century.”[2] We  have become a world of image makers and these images have become our primary way to engage the world, learn about the world and our students are visual learners and much of our teaching is literate and oral. I propose that we embrace the visual world and learn as our students learn so that we can become more effective pedagogues. In his book How to See the World, Nicholas Mirzoeff articulates aspects of the contemporary visual age and provides insights about the history of visual media since 1930: As early as 1930, an estimated 1 billion photographs were being taken every year worldwide. Fifty years later, it was about 25 billion a year, still taken on film. By 2012, we were taking 380 billion photographs a year, nearly all digital. One trillion photographs were taken in 2014. There were some 3.5 trillion photographs in existence in 2011, so the global photography archive increased by some 25 percent or so in 2014. In that same year, 2011, there were 1 trillion visits to YouTube. Like it or not, the emerging global society is visual. All these photographs and videos are our way of trying to see the world. We feel compelled to make images of it and share them with others as a key part of our effort to understand the changing world around us and our place within it.[3] So, what does this mean for me and what does it mean for us? For me it has meant a complete shift in how I teach. I have moved from thinking first about lecture, words, reading and content to thinking visually. How will I engage the eyes of my students so that I can touch the mind of my students? How can I help them see what we are thinking about in this course as it lives in the world as an image that expands their imagination? Imagining the image expands the imagination of students who live in a world of images. The image becomes the lens by which my students enter this world on a daily basis therefore I start with them in my viewfinder. I see them as they see the world and because this is their starting point it is my starting point. I am teaching with them in sight, I see them looking at their phones, I see what they see and as they see so that I can teach in the visual language that they understand. My students sleep with their phones beside their beds and before they brush their teeth in the morning, they pick up their phones and start their day looking at images. I want my courses and my content to be on their home-screens. This is the world in which we live, this is the age in which we are called to teach. I had to change how I see my teaching so that my students could see what I am trying to get them to engage.  This has been a major shift for me. It called me to go back go to school to learn how to see so that I could become an effective teacher in the visual age. I talk about my shift and embrace of the world in which we live in the short video that accompanies this Blog. In this video we are celebrating my installation in an endowed chair. The video speaks to the shift I have made, and I invite you to consider. What does it look like to teach in the visual age (pun intended)? Teaching in the Visual Age: Dr. Ralph Basui Watkins from Ralph Watkins on Vimeo. [1] Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World (4). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. [2] Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World (4). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. [3] Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World (4-5). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. *Original Blog published on December 11, 2019

As faculty become more adept at the online learning experience (of necessity for many; reluctantly for some) many lament the loss of the classroom experience. There is a real sense of loss in not being together with students in the classroom, seeing faces, engaging in discussion, flipping through that awesome Powerpoint presentation one spent hours refining, enjoying the energy when the classroom environment is charged with learning. While we teachers may miss the experience of lecturing, presenting, and explaining, it remains true that students learn what THEY do, not what WE do (lecture, explain, expound, wax eloquent, et cetera). Research demonstrated that 70 to 80 percent of classroom teaching experience is “teacher talk” (Hattie 2020). But as previously noted, and as paradoxical as it may seem, learning is not an outcome of teaching. There is a challenge in shifting one’s stance from teaching-focused to learning-focused, especially for teachers whose only or primary experience of teaching is the classroom. The shift requires a deep understanding of the cognitive and affective processes of learning that happen within the student. The good news is that the online environment leans toward student-focused learning rather than teaching. To oversimplify, this forces teachers to become designers of a student learning experience rather than instructional performers. Fortunately, the online learning environment offers almost unlimited opportunities for students to do something in order to achieve learning. It can be helpful to focus on domains of learning and align the student learning experience with the desired learning outcome. Here are things students can do to both achieve learning and demonstrate learning. Cognitive Learning Domain Explain Examine Evaluate Critique Defend a position Posit a theory or proposition Affective Learning Domain Give an opinion Share an experience Reflect on a feeling response Express an attitude Share a perspective Demonstrate empathy Skills or Competencies Domain Demonstrate Present a tutorial Write an essay or paper Compose an argument Complete a project Instructors should strive for higher-order demonstration of learning or activities, and avoid rudimentary activities (“list,” “identify”). For more ways to get students to DO, see Student Engagement Methods: A Checklist. For more: Billings, L., and T. Roberts, “From Mindless to Meaningful,” (2014). Hattie, J., “Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning,” (2012). Ripp, P., “Cultivating Passionate Learners in Common Core Classrooms,” (2014). Soranno, P., “Improving Student Discussions in Graduate and Undergraduate Courses: Transform the Discussion Leader,” (2010).

Im/Possibilities of Learning in Crisis Teaching and learning in times of crisis require ongoing recalibrations. In 2020, both teachers and students have quickly implemented new skills, accessing each other and learning activities in new and different ways, trying to plan one step ahead even as fresh challenges emerge. It is difficult to focus. Griefs, losses, and longings multiply. Intentional listening to students and colleagues about learning in 2020 and reflecting on my own experiences, I keep encountering an impossible seeming calculation of teaching and learning + writing + editing + administrative work + service commitments + helping children with online school + yearning to see relatives across quarantines or in nursing care facilities + daily chores, eating well, and exercise + attending to other aspects of life beyond work. All this is unfolding within unprecedented restrictions and constrictions of time, space, and breathing, alongside the blurring lines of work, school, and home. Students and I need more than a workload calculator to recalibrate course design. As we think ahead to another semester of teaching and learning in conditions of raging pandemic, social-political, climate, and economic crises, what would it look like to account more for courage on the front end of course planning? Course Design with More Than a Workload Calculator Course design involves a careful calibration of learning objectives, readings and other learning resources, assignments, learning activities, rubrics, and more. Workload calculations inform course designs that support collective thriving, individual learning, access to and expectation of good work, advancement in a course of study, vocational development, career preparation, exam or credentialing readiness, and academic topics and tools that translate beyond the course itself. A workload calculator estimates the amount of time it will take students to complete assigned course work and, by extension, reasonable workload for instructors. Workload calculators not only account for the volume of reading, writing, and exams assigned in a course, but also difficulty, density, and complexity of each. Newer versions account for more widespread online and hybrid teaching, including discussion board assignments and variable synchronous course contact hours. Workload calculations help teachers design courses that justify credit hour tuition without surpassing the maximum amount of work that it is reasonable to expect for students to complete the course. Reflecting on student and teacher time and energy this year, what is a responsible amount of work to expect for academic credit during the triple pandemic of COVID-19, the unmasking and reorganizing racialized terror, and climate crisis, all in the context of mounting political tensions? Workload calculators support good course design, yet only calculating for number of pages and hours of writing and meeting can neglect context. Teaching online in a pandemic, even using a workload calculator, I am realizing that something else is missing. No one teaches or learns outside of context(s). In addition to accounting for time for appropriate amounts of reading, writing, testing, discussing, and studying that inform good work, course design must also leave room and account for courage. Four Course Design Recalibrations Emergency pedagogical shifts in response to pandemic contexts have uncovered workload factors unaccounted for even when workload calculations are adjusted for rhythms of online teaching and learning. In addition to reading, writing, and assessments, what would it look like to also account for the extra courage it takes to engage the learning process in times of crisis? #1 Acknowledge Griefs: Making Room for Ambiguous Meaning in Course Design Grief is present in and around learning for all teachers and students. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of deaths from and exacerbated by pandemic conditions, grief work is needed to notice, acknowledge, and learn to live with deaths, losses of connections, rituals, traditions, plans, and severely altered mundane rhythms of life connected to both special events and everyday practices, from eating and laughing to moving about the world. Grief takes multiple, often compounding, forms from mourning deaths to deep disappointments to an uneasy, ambiguous depth of longing. Can we add time to the workload calculator to acknowledge griefs and to celebrate the possibility of learning in the midst of loss? Courses are not and should not be therapeutic spaces. Neither are they made up of unfeeling, unaffected partners in the work of school. While stage-theories of grief are both beloved and disputed, many grief researchers consider meaning-making to be a long-term goal of grief work. We are teaching in a time of loss and longing borne of disillusionment, unrest, uncertainty, disease, and division. Neither teachers nor students know yet what it all means, what meaning we will make as we reflect back to this historic and challenging time. Yet, we yearn for something to make sense, words that fit the moment even when there are often no words that feel adequate in the face of temporary and permanently tangible absences. For every assignment submitted late, I have started first with “wow, look what you created in this midst of so much uncertainty and loss!” before other logistical implications. Where in your course design could you make room to name losses and acknowledge longings? Where can you acknowledge and celebrate the miracle, possibility, and power of learning in a context of compounded griefs? #2 Expect Anxieties: Making Room for Purpose in Course Design A recent news headline reads, “Sleepless Nights, Hair Loss, and Cracked Teeth: Pandemic Stress Takes its Toll.”[1] In addition to griefs over specific losses and longings, anticipatory griefs also abound in every class(zoom)room today. Anticipatory grief is an experience of grief triggered by realizing a potential loss or imagined future that is suddenly unstable, cherished dreams and long-held plans that are not going to happen as expected, if at all.[2] Anticipatory griefs compound already heightened anxieties, fears, and rising mental health challenges related to the unending and shifting nature of current pandemic conditions. I asked a colleague how students were doing in their class and they responded that the good students were doing well. Upon further reflection, it seemed that students who were relatively well were doing better, while many otherwise good students were struggling mightily. Many factors compound the already well-founded anxieties students and teachers carry to and from class every week. We know that it can take much more energy to focus when new and old trauma wells up in the body.[3] In the past few months, I’ve received stories from students anxious about GPA- and credit-enrollment-dependent financial aid and other scholarships, ordination or other credentialing processes that remain unpaused, first generation and international students whose sending communities are proudly counting on student success, graduation requirements, internship trajectories, and other concerns about future employment opportunities. Can we add time to the workload calculator for breathing, time for students to muster up the courage to ask for help, and time to model and respond with non-anxious collegiality along the way? I have started each synchronous zoom with breakout rooms asking students to share how they are doing. I have added moments of silence and asked students to share what practices are keeping them going. I designed a credit/no credit midterm meeting in small groups to assess material, review assignments, and take the temperature of the class. Where in your course design could you make room to reinvest in the purpose of learning? Can you plan flexible-yet-framed learning environments with habits of brief checking in and referrals for more in-depth care needs prominently posted on learning management systems? Where can you acknowledge the harm and fear of harm in mental and public health by connecting to resources of sustaining purpose already present in the course subject matter? #3 Support Ritualized Focus: Making Room for Energy Investment in Course Design Crisis conditions challenge structures of time, space, energy, reflection, attention, and collaboration that affect learning environments. It takes longer to focus. Private and public spaces are shared in ever-shifting ways. It takes extra energy to negotiate daily decisions. Thinking out loud now has the added pressure of being recorded in video or posted text. Going to the class or store or dinner is a risk-benefit analysis. How have work-spaces and rhythms changed for you and your students? What is better and what is missed? For courses meeting on campus or outside, new rituals of attention unfold in shifting configurations of social distancing and communication patterns without familiar patterns of facial expression and tone. For courses meeting online, it is both necessary and can be overwhelming to prepare and process one more zoom meeting after another after another, one more discussion board post or response, one more attempt to get ahead of email. Let us add time for the transition into the workload calculator and support the extra configurations of time and space needed to learn. How do your courses support thinking in a distracting context of divided attention? Might you share some of your own practices that support your focused attention with your class and/or invite students to share with each other what is working to help them stay engaged in learning? #4 Invite Translations: Making Room for Connections in Course Design “If we can’t find ourselves in the readings this semester, we just can’t and won’t do it anymore,” students have shared in recent advising sessions, detailing the extra time and labor it can take to translate learning activities into something that matters for their lives in a time where life is unmasked as more precarious than we sometimes feel. In addition to the extra effort needed in times of uncertainty to make space in one’s home for teaching and learning, it can also take a great deal of effort to learn alongside deeply held dreams and visions. It takes effort to weave someone else’s dream into your dream when there is no opening to shared dreams or the coexistence of multiple dreams. Many graduate students have to research words and phrases as new vocabularies accompany advanced study. Some also translate every assignment into second or fifth languages. Beyond literal linguistic translation, reading also requires careful interpretation accompanied by a felt sense of distance from or relevance to the reader’s experiences. Different students often work a lot more or less to translate the reading on these interacting forms of engagement. Twenty pages of assigned reading could take equally bright and motivated students twenty minutes or five hours. Let us add time for translation to the workload calculator and invite every student into this work rather than foisting it as unaccounted-for extra work shouldered by only some learners. Extra effort is worth it to connect the learning activity to the student’s worth as a learner. However, in times of crisis, there is little room for extra and the alternative is often mimicry, an out of body, out of spirit practice of learning oneself into someone else’s dream. bell hooks indicts course design that renders some traditions not good enough to be included, arguing for expansive course design in educational systems mis-oriented toward selective visibility.[4] It is too much pressure to feel the world is on any one person’s back, therefore let us foster opportunities for connection. It is too much pressure to fight for one’s existence or the existence of a particular people, history, or dream, therefore let us foster opportunities for translation within our course design. Who is helping you check your course for opportunities and burdens of translation? How are you responsive to learning and shifting course design in response? Accounting for Courage in Crisis Teaching and Learning When filling out workload calculators for course design in crisis, instructors can’t presume healthy, whole, living their best life, so-called typical students. Rather we are in a time of needing courage and grace with each other. Students and teachers are rightly on the edge needed to be vigilant regarding public health and safety concerns while also not normalizing crisis conditions. In each three-credit hour class, I typically parcel out twelve total hours a week to course-related activities. In addition to time for reading, drafting, editing, attending synchronous or asynchronous class activities, and completing assignments, I’ve started allocating more time for thinking, more time for celebrating creativity in the midst of loss, reminding students and myself to breathe and be as well as we can be while checking on each other, carving out space and time to devote to learning in the midst of chaos, translating content that connects to dreams, and asking and listening to students and mentors on all of the above. The total time devoted to writing and total pages read will be less, but I have already seen that learning that accounts for courage can far exceed expectations. Workload recalibrations that make room for grief, anxiety, ritualized focus, and translation add rigor and support courageous academic work with added opportunities for meaning, purpose, investment, and translation. Courses that merely check off required boxes may have a place in the ecology of credentialled teaching and learning among limited human beings. Some days this is enough, more than enough. However, it’s not enough to fund a vocation. Some days, coursework serves as an escape from the world. However, a course of study also equips students to be change-makers in the world, even and especially in times of crisis. Will we be able to look back at 2020-2021 syllabi and notice that learning is unfolding in extraordinary times? Teaching and learning in crisis are challenging; both teachers and students need courage and support. I believe that making some room for grief, anxiety, ritualized focus, and translation in course design is one concrete way to recalibrate course design for the courage we will need to keep learning through a chaotic time of stress and possibility. Accounting for Courage →    Practices of Recalibration in Workload Planning   Acknowledge Grief name losses, honor longings →    Make Room for Meaning create into felt absence; supply words where needed; acknowledge miracle and power of learning Expect Anxieties acknowledge harm and fear of harm in mental and public health; refer →     Remind on Purpose fund flexible yet framed learning environment with ready referrals; share practices of sustaining Support Ritualized Focus negotiate space, time, and rhythms of attention →    Design for Investment model in class rhythms; invite conversation/check in about what is working (and not) for you and for students Invite Translation account for representation, language, and relevance →    Multiply Connections audit syllabi and check in with students; ask for help; invite all learners to stretch   [1] Aneri Pattani, NPR, October 14, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/14/923672884/sleepless-nights-hair-loss-and-cracked-teeth-pandemic-stress-takes-its-toll.  [2] Andrew Lester, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 51. [3] Resmaa Menekam, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 13. [4] bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 104. Amy Lonetree talks of it as the work of fighting for survivance in a well-supported myth of extinction (Decolonizing Museums [Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2012]). If we’re accepting tuition, but not teaching meaning-making toward more humane human beings, challenges Toni Morrison, then it’s better to stop this business of education (“Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address,” The Source of Self-Regard (New York, NY: Vintage, 2019), 71). Poet Mary Oliver suggests we’d be better off just copying the old books when there’s no room for new comments (Long Life (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), xiv). These wise teachers continue to help me reflect on the purpose and possibilities of learning.

Growing up in Haïti, the bulk of my knowledge of literature centered on French writers like Descartes, Rousseau, Pascal, Molière, and Voltaire, among others. I did not read Shakespeare until I was in my mid-twenties, and I only recently became aware of George Bernard Shaw’s famous, or rather infamous, statement, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” While I have yet to read the full play, I believe that the statement contains a false dichotomy and misses the point about what teaching is, and what teaching should be. However, I found myself using this phrase when addressing our incoming students this past summer. I was making a case that the Wesley Seminary faculty are actually “doers.” Our faculty are practitioners who are teaching out of the abundance of the ministerial experience they have gathered over the years. As I bragged on the faculty this past summer, I could not help but think about two experiences that shaped me as student. The first occurred when I was an undergraduate student at Caribbean Wesleyan College in Jamaica. One of my professors pastored a church with a ministry in the inner city of Savanna-la-Mar. She invited me to teach outdoor Sunday school to at-risk children whom their parents could not send to church. I fell in love with these children, and we shed many tears when it was time for me to leave upon graduation. My four years doing life with them gave meaning to my time of study far beyond what reading or talking about social justice could do. The second experience took place during my time at Asbury Seminary when I enrolled in the course Wealth and Poverty in the New Testament. The course required us to read Robert Wuthnow’s Poor Richard’s Principle, and to engage in a service-learning opportunity during the semester. The weeks I volunteered at the food pantry in Wilmore, KY were very formative and helped put in context the concepts we discussed during class. Teaching on social justice and civic engagement calls for pedagogy that creates a lasting impression on the heart and mind of students. We need to influence students’ lives by doing what we teach. By this, I mean two things: first, lead by example; second, create experiential learning opportunities so students can be immersed in a context or contexts that allow them to put what they are learning into practice. Engagement implies active interaction. As a New Testament professor, I have the opportunity to lead travel courses to Greece, Turkey, and Israel. I create learning experiences that allow students to not only visit historical sites and admire the beauty of the locations, but also interact with the people in these places. The recent refugee crisis in Europe has provided opportunities for students to worship with and minister to displaced persons and survivors of sex trafficking. In Palestine, students have the opportunity to interact with Palestinian Christians and gain an understanding of the complexity of their situation. Such encounters cause students to reevaluate their theology, eschatology, and overall outlook on life. They experience brokenness and grief firsthand, and this experience moves them to action. For example, several students who travelled with me later returned to Greece for short-term service at a refugee camp, and at least one is serving long term. Meaningful engagement requires sustained interaction. I create a Facebook group for each trip. This allows us to stay connected and to reflect on the experience as the years go by, even beyond graduation. At least once a year, students are able to relive memories of the trip, share the impact it has had on their lives, and talk about where they are now. Teaching is doing. While I disagree with Shaw’s statement, I believe it conveys a warning which all teachers should heed. It is a warning against settling for merely discussing the concepts and ideas surrounding issues of social justice. It is a warning against merely giving assent to the need for engagement without living as one who belongs to the struggle. Teaching for social justice and civic engagement should embody “doing.” As an administrator, I encourage faculty to live out this truth. It is all the more important because we expect our students to be engaged in ministry while pursuing their studies at Wesley Seminary. In the Gospel of Mark, the author uses the verb poie­ō, “to do,” to describe the miracles Jesus performs. When crowd saw the things he did, they expressed in amazement, “What is this? A new teaching, with authority!” (Mark 1:27, NRSV). I do what I teach, I teach because I can! One of the best gifts I have received is a sign on my desk that reads, “I teach. What’s your superpower?”

The first religion course I took in college was an introduction to the Bible, one of two required religion courses in our core curriculum. The students’ reaction to the course follows what, I suspect, is familiar terrain for those who teach similar courses. The application of academic tools to the study of their sacred text was, for many students, unsettling; for some, inappropriate and heretical; and, for others, “meh” --  that is, not even curious as to why this tension might show something about their lives or the world we inhabit. I am reminded of that experience each time I teach our required service-learning course. The use of critical academic tools to examine acts of kindness, charity, and compassion is experienced by students as unsettling, inappropriate, political… despite the fact that, like the introduction to the Bible course, this critical approach to service is not new. With the changing religious landscape shaping the experiences of incoming students as well as the diminished place of religion courses in many university curricula, courses involving service-learning may increasingly become the primary sites for introducing critical theories to deconstruct problematic notions of ethical action in the world. The service-learning course I teach most often involves a short-term study abroad component in South Africa. For our students, everything about that course is new; and, as is so often the case, my passion for the topic and the transformative potential of the experience results in an overstuffed bag of history, social theory, religious studies, contemporary politics, peace and reconciliation studies, global health, music, and, somewhere in there global service learning – or, as freshly minted clergy know it as: trying to preach the whole of the Bible in your first sermon. One of the primary methods of assessment typical in these courses is reflective journaling, both prior to and during the trip. It affords an opportunity to see the students’ integration of course materials and their expectations and experiences. These journals also serve to focus evening debriefs while traveling – a kind of focus neither I nor the students are able to achieve during the fragmented nature of a full course load on campus. What do these reflective, real-time reflections consistently reveal? Many students struggle with their newly acquired critical perspective on service, especially when pressed on the (in)appropriateness of doing short-term service learning with children from other countries. The conceptual frame of white/western savior throws into turmoil service identities that have been formed throughout childhood and reinforced by the accumulation of a kind of social capital that finds purchasing power on college applications. (Is it surprising that students who have spent years curating a college resume to cater to our institutions’ premium on volunteering and quantifiable service hours find critical examination of service disorienting?) I have tried a variety of strategies intended to hold together processes of learning and unlearning,  or at a minimum suspending one’s previous learning long enough to consider a new perspective. The goal in these strategies is to induce experiences constructive cognitive dissonance and creative disruption, without inducing irreparable irruption. Some strategies, like the use of satire, I test out with trepidation, aware that my own appreciation for the poignancy of the satirical critique draws deeply from an academic literature that remains opaque to the students. (In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, videos by the group Radi-Aid have made consistent cameos in my classes, serving as conversation starters. They also remind me of how problematic, yet persistent cultural tropes about Africa and famine from my childhood in the ‘80s that pricked my conscience then can be critically examined now in ways that re-center the agency of persons who were the objects of international displays of pity.) Other strategies include the move from general reflection to more structured, guided journal entries that invites students to engage directly and critically with their assumptions about volunteering and service abroad; required completion of an in-depth, case study based ethical volunteer module prior to the trip; and, a class blog visible to the wider campus and the students’ networks of support. It is this last one that I have found particularly effective. The semi-public blog, though a lot of work on the trip itself to update – especially when wifi accessibility is variable – has been a new venture for me. As an assignment, I have found it especially helpful in foregrounding questions of representation in ways that student journals and papers do not. Its publicity demands additional reflection on the part of the students and, since they are required to work with me in revising the blog before posting, it provides an opening for a focused conversation about how subtle (and not-so-subtle) colonial and racial frames inform our efforts to depict the lives of others. A lot has been written in recent years about the problematic posting of photos and videos from service trips and their role in reinforcing stereotypes and savior complexes or legitimizing selfie culture as some kind of proxy for service – standard fare now for orientations sessions prior to travel. However, the blog format reminds me that we should be encouraging through our assignments a similar degree of self-awareness in our non-visual (or textual) depictions of service learning. To be sure, not every student comes out the other side of the blog conversation “converted” to a more critically aware approach to service. The decisions they make in conversation with me about what to include in the public-facing blog likely mask the degree to which students’ beliefs about service-learning or the appropriateness of selfies with children “served” remain unresolved. As with so much of what we set out to do in our courses, the introduction of new conceptual frameworks and the accumulation of evidence is not a guarantee of scales falling from students’ eyes. I do take some solace in coming across phrases in journals and spoken aloud in debriefs such as “I had never really thought of … but now…” Such acknowledgments serve as a reminder for me of my own personal path towards critical service-learning, a path that started unsurprisingly, perhaps, with what I would now characterize as problematic encounters, that is, with experiences of serving “others,” and only later – much later, often – with theory. Perhaps this is what a learning as praxis extended over time feels like.

The first time I taught Interfaith Justice and Peacemaking, a class that explores interfaith efforts to create a more just and peaceful world, I began the class by discussing terms. What is justice? What is peace? I gave students quotes to read from various figures in American society and asked them to reflect on these famous persons’ notions of justice. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and Cornell West’s “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public” were some of the quotes that made it onto the strips of paper I passed out to students. The exercise worked fine but it did not invite the kind of openness I was hoping for. It didn’t give students insight into how our various life experiences inform our understanding of what is just and unjust. A year later, I tried a different approach. I printed out results from an image search of the word “justice” on Google. I settled on five interesting, although imperfectly representative, black and white images: a raised fist, a gavel, lady justice with scales, a silhouette of a crowd of people with mouths exclaiming, and an image of children watering a tree. I created five desk stations and placed an image in the center of each one. I invited students to sit together facing one another in groups of three to four at each station and to freewrite about how the images made them feel—their gut reactions, emotions and memories stirred, and further images that came to mind. Then, I invited them to share their feelings and experiences with the other students at their station. Once everyone had a chance to share, they were encouraged to reflect on how, if at all, these images squared with their own senses of the word “justice.” This time, students opened up in ways that surprised me. They shared stories of positive and negative encounters with the police; stories of being treated fairly (and unfairly) by teachers; and discrimination they faced in their hometowns and at Regis. They brought up volunteerism, breaking the law, and efforts to change the law. And upon hearing the stories of their classmates, at least one student responded by saying, “I never thought of justice that way before.” The conversation that emerged framed justice as something more than retribution and in contexts as diverse as students own backgrounds. Genuine listening occurred between a group of students who included first- and second-generation migrants to the US from Mexico and Iran, an international student, an army vet and mother of two, feminists, atheists, Protestants, Catholics, and a Muslim-raised but Buddhist-leaning environmentalist, to name a few. In short, they discussed justice from all the angles I had wanted to teach them about. Students have a lot to teach one another. Though it’s easy to forget, the collective knowledge of the classroom in terms of personal experience and wisdom is often richer, more diverse, and potentially more transformative than my framing of a topic alone. Many of my students know all too well what it feels like to be a victim of an injustice. When given an opportunity to share these insights with one another, they arrive at a broader and more personalized understanding of justice than can be represented by a few famous figures’ quotes. This collective understanding is foundational to their ability to work together across lines of difference to build a more just and peaceful society. But creating an inclusive classroom environment where a diverse group of students can share with and learn from one another is not easy. Last week, in a writing seminar, as part of an assignment geared toward helping students avoid hurtful essentialisms in their writing, I gave students a writing prompt in which they were to reflect on an experience when they felt misunderstood because of their race, gender, faith, sexual orientation, country of origin, or economic status. One student, from Vietnam, wrote about her experience being accosted in a Walmart shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. A middle-aged white man came up from behind her and yelled at her for bringing the virus to the US from China. Shaking, and thus still physically bearing the wounds from this emotional trauma, she described to us the various cultures of Asia, and how it felt to be lumped together with people from forty-eight different countries, and blamed for a virus she did not create. Another student in the class, a white student from Kentucky, shared his experience of being called a racist because of an emoji he shared with a friend. “She thought I was being racist and I wasn’t! My best friends are Mexican and black. I chose the Latinx fist bump emoji because I like it. But I didn’t care. I didn’t let it get to me.” Everything about his body language—his shaking voice and red cheeks—betrayed the fact that it did get to him. These two students’ stories, the juxtaposed narratives of the one—a victim of racism, with the other—a person accused of racism, were pregnant with teachable moments. I listened to both, even tried to pause and slow down. Still, I failed to think of the right questions to ask in the moment. “How did that make you feel?” was all I could muster. In reflecting on what transpired, I’ve come to realize that while I appreciated both students’ willingness to share, something about his story directly following hers felt misplaced to me. While the student from Kentucky’s story mattered, and has much to teach us, it was in no way on par with the Vietnamese student’s story. They were not equal victims. Being blamed for bringing COVID-19 to the US because one appears to be of Asian origin is a far heavier burden to bear than being questioned about one’s use of a Latinx-looking fist bump emoji, especially when considering our country’s history of racism against Asian Americans. Moreover, I had asked students to write about an experience when they felt misunderstood because of their race, gender, faith, sexual orientation, country of origin, or economic status. Did the white student’s story of being accused of racism qualify? In “Pedagogies in the Flesh: Building an Anti-Racist Decolonized Classroom,” Karen Buenavista Hanna proposes a model of classroom dialogue that disrupts the conventional free-market models. In engaging with prompts or readings related to racism or sexism or any other kind of institutionalized oppression or injustice, she recommends that students be permitted to share only stories that happened to them, not stories that happened to a friend or someone they know. What this set of discussion parameters does is upend the normal colonial-based hierarchies of the classroom. It forces those who are used to speaking to listen and gives those who are used to listening a chance to speak, which begs the question, did I fail my students by giving them a prompt for which not every student had a response? Should I have reworded the prompt to say, write about an experience when you were misunderstood because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, or economic status OR if you don’t have such story, save your blank paper for notetaking in the conversation that follows? There are no easy ways to have an interfaith conversation on the topic of justice (and injustice). There’s no exercise or prompt that works all the time, and no set of fail-proof directives for the teacher-facilitator. The beauty of the interfaith classroom is that every person adds uniquely to the dynamic of the classroom. This is also the challenge. What I do know is that facilitating dialogue across lines of difference requires the acknowledgement that we’re not all equals—we can’t all contribute equally to every conversation on racism or other kinds of systemic injustice. Next time I ask students to write about being misunderstood, I might set up the conversation a little differently: “Write about an experience when you were misunderstood because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin and/or write about an experience when you were accused of being racist, sexist, or prejudiced in any kind of way. We’ll hear from everyone, but let’s give those who responded to the former set of questions a chance to speak first. Then, we’ll consider how all of us might be hurt by racist and essentialist thinking even if such thinking hurts some more than others.” I owed it both of my students—the one from Vietnam and the one from Kentucky—to help them unpack their stories. I wish I had asked the student from Kentucky, “How did that make you feel?” followed by “Why do you think your friend felt hurt by the emoji you sent?” I think he is brave enough to receive those questions. Or maybe I could have invited my students to pose compassionate questions to their classmates from Vietnam and Kentucky? Maybe their inquiries might have led us to an epiphany about justice I have yet to even imagine.