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Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion over them. Presumably, he had Genesis 1.26 in mind, but none of the course readings mentioned Genesis—or God.People in the social media group had lots of suggestions on how to respond:Tell him that religion has no place in the classroom.Tell him that there should be no theist or atheist premises in academic writing.Just write “Irrelevant” in the margin!That last comment got a lot of likes, hopefully because people found it funny and not because they considered it good advice.The consensus was clear: Tell the student that appeals to scripture are inappropriate in college papers.I don’t think that’s good advice.My colleagues were ignoring something crucial. In this sort of situation, we can do deep damage to our relationship with our student and to the student’s relationship with higher education if we don’t tread carefully. Presumably the student who wrote this paper believes in God and the Bible. His religion will be part of his ethical decision-making going forward, and the Bible will influence his thinking and his actions.Bearing this in mind, let’s not tell this student that his thinking about right and wrong in class must be utterly divorced from his thinking about it outside the classroom.My advice would be: Before writing any comments, identify your larger goals. Here are mine:I want our class discussions to help inform my students’ thinking and actions about ethical issues, and in particular about whether it’s OK to do “whatever you want” with animals.I want students to listen when I try to teach them more things after this and I want other professors to be able to teach them even more things. If I reinforce a student’s likely skepticism about professors and religion, I make that harder.I don’t want my actions to increase the chances that my students go out in the world thinking of higher education as an enemy to religion and God.These goals suggest a different approach. Start by taking the paper seriously:Do you think that’s what the Bible means by ‘dominion’? Some people think so, but I've always thought it meant something more like ‘stewardship.’ I mean, God is the Father, right? So, I think of it like if your parents go out and put you in charge of the family dogs. If they come home and discover that you haven’t fed them or given them water, they’ll be mad at you.What do you think someone who doesn’t believe in God and the Bible would make of your argument? How would you persuade them? For instance, imagine that you’re talking to the author of our second reading or to the other kids in the class.I would count this encounter as a success if the student feels like I’m treating him and his religion with respect and if he realizes two things:“Dominion” could mean “stewardship” instead of “freedom to treat them any way I want,” and I need to think more about which one the Bible meant.I need to talk about this differently or I won’t be able to persuade people who don’t believe in the Bible.That’s a start. Much more has to happen before this student writes at college level. Later, I and his other professors will teach him more.It’s a very small step. Growth and intellectual development takes time. I probably won’t see the result of the learning process that I was part of. But occasionally I do.My greatest success story in this context is a student who came into my Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman, determined to prove that Christ rose from the dead. It was rough going, but by the end of the semester, his sources weren’t cringeworthy anymore, and he was presenting an actual argument. And he still trusted me. He majored in math but took Philosophy of Religion with me as a senior, and he explained that he wanted to continue developing his proof.I braced myself. But during the semester, the class discussed faith and reason extensively, and I was able to ask him (privately): Given that you think about faith as being the important thing, what makes it so important to you to prove that Christ rose? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided that he didn’t need to prove that Christ rose. Instead, he wrote a strong final paper in which he reflected on the meaning of faith, discussing his own experience and the course readings.I rarely get wins that size. But taking my students’ religious views seriously makes them possible.

I’ve been doing some nonfiction creative writing recently (you can see my latest piece here, if you’d like). And it’s been an interesting exercise in curation, a term most closely associated with the world of art history, but now used all over the place. When writing about a real life, you have so many precious details, nuances, characters, memories—and you have to carefully select, and then organize, which of those are most important, which will then be preserved in the (perhaps someday published) story you aim to tell. Of course, we curate all the time, not just in art galleries or storytelling. What do we take care of? What do we retain or prioritize or foreground? What do we exclude? What are we missing? When someone asks us how we are doing, so often we simply default to saying, “Great, and you?” regardless of whether this is actually how we feel. We curate what news we consume, what friends we spend time with, what food we put in our bodies. We curate in partnerships and parenting. We curate at work. And we curate in our teaching. Think about which parts of yourself you disclose to your students. Think about what activities and assignments you make space for on the schedule and which you don’t. Think about what concepts or skills you think the students can handle, or need, to learn at any given moment in a course, and which will have to be saved for another time. This is all a form of curation, I would argue. I often say that a syllabus is more about what doesn’t make it in than what does. Especially in introductory religion courses—we have to leave out so much! (And, of course, with the material that does make the cut, like a curator at a museum, we have to think how to structure that material into the “narrative arc” of a course—a concept I, as a writer, love.) We only have so much time and energy. We can’t do it all, folks. There are all sorts of criteria for curation in the classroom—our areas of expertise, our personal interests, the course’s learning objectives, the level of the students, the institutional mission—but those aren’t my focus here. What I want to muse on is the dark side of curation, which I think social media aptly represents. (This is one of the main reasons I stopped using social media over a decade ago.) Curated content can give a false, and unattainable, impression of perfection. (How often do we feel badly about our own lives when we see the seemingly flawless lives depicted on others’ Facebook or Instagram accounts?) Curation can elide or obscure process. (How many photos did it actually take to capture that one where the whole family was smiling?) Curation can seem to emphasize singularity or definitiveness, over nuance, messiness, options, multiplicity. Curation can make matters appear finished or settled or completed. Curation can feel closed. I imagine these impressions can have some negative effects on students. Perhaps, when we cut out debate or history or context—that is, the messiness, the details—students are left with problematic notions about the study of religion (e.g., that there is a singular definition of the term) or specific religions (e.g., that Hinduism is all about karma and dharma). Perhaps students wind up not understanding the extensive, nonlinear, trial-and-error process that’s required to acquire important knowledge or skills in our field. Perhaps they feel ashamed if they don’t understand the reading for the week or if they bomb the only test. Perhaps they look at the example essay and think, “Maybe this whole college thing isn’t for me.” Curation is necessary, common, and often beautiful—but it can carry some risks. How might we dodge these downsides in our teaching? Here are some strategies I’ve tried, to pull back the curtain a bit for students, while accepting that I must inevitably curate the learning environment and experience to some extent. For starters, I sometimes talk about how I went about creating the syllabus and how (and why) I decided what to include and what to leave off. Or I mention what I’ve done in past courses and why I’ve changed my approach. I point out mistakes or typos in the printed works we read. I show students drafts of my own articles and (often quite critical) peer-review comments, as I’ve mentioned in this blog before. When I want to provide a model for a particular assignment, I try to give multiple examples (rather than one, which they may then feel pressured to simply emulate) and/or annotate the example(s) with both strengths as well as areas of improvement. I assign authors or speakers with different, sometimes totally oppositional, viewpoints, so students understand that there isn’t a single correct view to hold on any given topic. I provide examples of the differences between the aspirational, ideal, “authoritative,” or textbook version of a religion and the various ways that real people are going about, living their lives, around the globe and at different times. If we don’t have time to get into the depth or nuance of a particular topic, I still make a point to underscore, repeatedly, the complexity. I admit to some of my own struggles with the readings or tough topics. I tell them about my own undergrad experiences. I say when I don’t know. We talk about what’s happening around campus, in town, or around the world, and how appearances can differ from reality. How do you experience the concept of curation in your own teaching? And what are some ways you can retain the benefits and beauty of curation, while also avoiding its pitfalls?

My daughter looks forward to her trip to Disneyland, which is scheduled for her twelfth birthday. She listens to the stories about the park from her friends, reads the descriptions on the website and magazines, and watches numerous ads on YouTube. One day I asked her (trying to save some money), “Honey, since you already know so much about Disneyland, do you really think we should go?” You can easily imagine her screaming reply: “No way! I should definitely go! It is totally different!”  Teaching world religions for several years, one question that I try to better answer each time is: “How can I make each religion real and alive, so that students don’t see it as a concept to be memorized or something that exists in textbooks or histories, but as something that they can feel, touch, apply, and appreciate, in other words, something that they can ‘embody’?” I find this question especially important since many students have been trained to see religion as a series of beliefs and doctrines, rather than daily practices, bodily movements, and practical ways of dealing with specific challenges in life. There are several pedagogical methods I have been developing to enhance the embodied understanding of religions. There is much room for further refinement. One is providing opportunities for having sensory experiences of a religion. For example, during our sessions on Hinduism, as students come into the classroom, they will hear ancient Vedic hymns recited by Hindu priests. In another session, they would smell the fragrance from burning herbs and ghee commonly used in daily Hindu rituals. Yet in another session, they listen to George Harrison singing “My Sweet Lord,” which embodies Hindu piety and religious inclusivity with a beautiful melody and guitar sound. It is okay if students keep chatting with their friends, browse the internet, or review previous materials experiencing these things. The casual setting is intentional because I think there’s a significant value in building up familiarity with an unfamiliar religion in a relaxed setting without the pressure to comprehend or memorize information. I find these small exposures make it easier for students to open their minds and engage more intently in class discussions and lectures.  During the class hour, I utilize multiple videos to help students observe the religious practices. In particular, I ask them to focus on the sounds, movements, facial expressions, and variegated bodies of practitioners whose voices are often muted in scriptures. For example, before discussing the concepts of the Hindu sacrificial ritual, I ask students to describe whatever they see in the video of an ordinary sacrifice, paying attention to every detail they’ve noticed. Students are often surprised to learn that their simple remarks are tied to important concepts such as puja, darshan(a), symbols and characteristics of gods, murti, and rituals.  Another method that helps students experience a religion more intimately comes from hearing the voices and watching the movements of practitioners in person. For each religion, I reach out to students and colleagues who practice that religion or are coming from that background to talk about their religion. They share their personal stories, show us photos and objects, and tell us what they value most about their religion. These demonstrations add a visceral component for the students that deepens their understanding beyond the stock images we find in textbooks and the internet. Sometimes the guests also share thoughtful questions and criticisms, which adds nuance to our understanding of a religion and intensity to the class discussion. External observation of sensate practices, however, is not enough. If embodied empathy is the goal, beliefs should be experienced, too, so students can tap into the value that practitioners find in a particular religion. At the beginning of the course, I introduce the concept called “Religious Scholar’s Magic Hat.” It is a rather light form of practicing epochē and getting snippets of insiders’ appreciation of the religion. I ask students to wear this imaginary hat while we practice applying a religion’s core ideas to our daily lives. For example, after presenting an array of Buddhist teachings on suffering and freedom from it, I leave some time for a reflective task. First, students think about the things that create stress in their lives, including some of their most painful experiences. Then after writing down their answers, I ask them to think carefully about the potential causes of those sufferings, looking carefully into the deep desires that they have. After this, with the help of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s short guided meditation, we practice focusing on a single desire or emotion that rises in our minds, aiming to see its illusiveness. Throughout this mock Buddhist meditation, students can try embodying central Buddhist teachings, seeing the potential applicability of Buddhism to some of their problems.  I believe that the conscious practice of embodying religion in class, despite its incompleteness and sometimes awkwardness, helps students extend their understanding of religions. Hopefully this training enables students, when they encounter a religion of others, can practice trained empathy rather than immediately distancing themselves based on doctrinal differences. 

We were halfway through the first day of class when a student started viciously criticizing a TED talk I had just shown. It wasn’t hard to determine where the student’s criticism was coming from. He was furious that I would consider a woman worth listening to. He was spewing misogynistic hate in a room that was 70 percent female. On the first day of class. I responded to the student’s misogynistic rant in my usual way. Trying to stay calm, I seized on something he was saying I could spin into a statement I agreed with, interrupted him with a “yes, and,” and proceeded to explain the value of the points made by the woman in her talk, being sure to emphasize how important and insightful they were. I never heard a misogynistic word out of him again. He never mistreated his female peers (I monitored closely) and by the end of the term was thoughtfully engaging with readings by female authors. It probably helped that he was surrounded—in my class alone—by thirty brilliant young women who were living proof of women’s intellectual capacities. It also helped that I was a white male, in a position of authority, who had not let him get away with saying misogynistic things unchallenged, even if I did use a strategy inspired by nonviolent conflict transformation techniques rather than direct confrontation and criticism. This story illustrates the power of embodiment, even in the form of a video. I doubt assigning a book or article by a woman would have elicited the same visceral reaction. Honestly, it usually takes me strategically getting a little angry in class to get students to stop routinely misgendering authors as “he,” despite my best efforts to ward off that habit, including through strategies like making cover pages for PDF readings that include a short biographical statement on the author. We often think of “embodiment” in teaching as referring to the kind of presence the teacher has in the classroom. Perhaps we also need to find ways to apply embodiment strategies to the authors we assign. Do we lose some of the power of a diverse syllabus when the authors remain just names on a page? In my classes, I try to use media to help highlight the diverse array of voices I hold up as worth listening to. Sometimes I assign a video or podcast or invite a guest speaker in person or on Zoom, but since most of the assigned readings are books, individual chapters, and articles, I also find other ways to help my students see our authors as real people. I often weave short videos or clips of lectures by our authors into my lessons. Lacking those, I’ll include a photo of an author alongside a quotation from their work in a slideshow. These aren’t complicated interventions; however, I fear that without them my students miss the diversity in my syllabi. This is perhaps most true of those students who most need to see it, those so steeped in patriarchal culture that even a “Barbara” or “Maria” becomes a “he.” Such interventions might not be the best idea if the message your reading list sends is that your field is dominated by cishet white men or that they are the only ones worth listening to, reading, or studying. Applying embodiment strategies to authors assumes that we’ve already done the work of diversifying our syllabi with the voices of those whose gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, nationality, language background, disability, age, religion, socioeconomic status, etc., both reflect the full diversity of humanity and affect their scholarship. As a white male, I don’t often deal with the kinds of challenges to my authority and expertise other educators experience, at least not from my students (as an adjunct, administrators and my tenure-track colleagues routinely devalue my expertise and experience). This means that my embodiment in the classroom is not particularly fraught. If anything, I have to take care not to be too intimidating lest my presence stifle participation. My identity and positionality also give me a platform and a responsibility to challenge worldviews that dehumanize and devalue those whose backgrounds, identities, and experiences are different from mine. Making the authors in my syllabi a little more real for students is one small way I pursue that goal.

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.

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.

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

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

It is no secret that the arts are powerful tools that can be used in any classroom to challenge, liberate, expand, complicate, and even heal aspects of our educational practices. The visual arts, in particular, not only allow us to connect in deeper ways with the content and context of our studies but can also function as a portal to what is hidden in our deepest recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. From rage to grief to wonder and joy, the arts help us access emotions and educate our affections while inspiring us to resist, denounce, agitate, connect, conjure, and generate tools for speculative imagination, for integration of embodied and intellectual knowledge for the healing of all our relations. As a site for world-making, art lends itself to dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and acting in the world. Artists and works are poised with the capacity to enhance our understanding of how historical and cultural amalgamations circulate our bodies, shape our culture, and inform our experiences, while also offering opportunities to assess and integrate multimodal processes of learning. What follows is a series of suggestions on how to bring the arts into the classroom to activate and enrich multimodal learning. When I am presenting an artwork within the context of classes in art and religion, I like to begin by providing historical information based on my previous research of the work. I find the work’s curatorial files which, depending on the artist, are broadly available online. Many contemporary artists use their own websites as archives of works, exhibitions, ephemera, press clippings, etc., so be sure to check those as well. Then I consult chapters, articles, catalogues, and reference works which provide context for the creation and reception of that particular artwork.[i] I also provide the artist’s full name, the work’s title and date, the collection to which it now belongs, how it was acquired, and how the museum or gallery’s curatorial practices participate (or don’t) in “unlearning and changing the base of colonialism in the concepts of private property, Manifest Destiny,… Eurocentrism, Cartesian dualism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, positivism, sexism, racism, individualism, extraction, classism, violence, and control,” as Wanda Nanibush, the assistant curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, puts it. The goal is to deepen and expand the experience of engagement with the works—not so much to define, constrain, or limit the contours of interpretation. In other words, the contextual information we offer on any creative work should not limit the personal connections, emotional reverberations, and embodied experiences that teacher-learners may develop with the work. Beyond the artist’s and work’s contexts, I ask teacher-learners to describe in detail what they see and what they understand. For example, if I share a painting, I ask them to describe the color, contours, textures, contrast, movement, proportion, composition, medium, size, dimensions, and how the lines appear in relationship to one another. This step reveals to us how we have been conditioned to take in a lot of images hastily, spending a very short amount of time looking, identifying, and savoring what the works are doing, and how the textures, colors, and rhythms of the composition have been carefully arranged by artists to elicit responses in us. Only after exhausting our capacities for naming what is in front of us, do I ask teacher-learners to progress in the interpretation of “what is” to “what it might mean.” We often claim that artworks mean something without carefully tracing for our class participants where these meanings are visually located or where they originated within the work. The last question I engage with is the “so what?” that Gilda Williams proposes in How to Write About Contemporary Art.[ii] What are the echoes for the context of our class? How does it invite us to look at our subject and discussions differently? How does it open up a space for the poetic to guide and allow us to access our deepest, sometimes hidden, recesses? Works of art are powerful in connecting us to our emotions, in helping us understand what it means to be human, to be whole, to be here. As theological educators who are laying out the blueprints for sacred, embodied, planetary change, we must remember to have the arts in our toolboxes. The arts are never far away from what matters most in life. Artistic productions participate in decolonial efforts—are capable of doing what Macarena Gómez-Barris names as “the erosion of the extractive gaze” while “affirming the diversity that resides within the matrix of coloniality.”[iii] As antidotes to Empire, visual arts are sites of subversion that promote imagining and shaping into being other emergent worlds. They also require from us, as Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak puts it, an acknowledgement that we are co-responsible for maintaining our capacity and responsibility to keep the dreams of our ancestors alive.[iv] As apertures into worlds of the not yet, artworks also welcome wonder, openness, diversity, reciprocity. Allowing a careful looking, engaging, and sensing what the works are activating emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in us is generative way to amplify learning in our classrooms. Part II of this series will provide practical examples of engagement with artworks. Available April 27, 2022.   [i] A helpful resource for helping in the design of the experience with works of art is Teaching at the Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rikak Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2014. [ii] Gilda Williams, How to Write About Contemporary Art (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2014). [iii] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 133. [iv]Ailton Krenak, Ideias pra Adiar o fim do Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019), 47.

What comes to mind when I say the word “predictable?” The comfort of knowing that you will walk into the same class every day? Or perhaps repeatedly teaching the same (boring) thing? Often the latter negative interpretation wins out. But I’ve never thought of predictability as inherently bad, and the current pandemic and scramble to move into new modalities reinforced the importance of predictability as a stabilizing mechanism in times of crisis. Students crave a sense of normalcy in the classroom, which becomes apparent any time you want to try something new. It was particularly evident last spring when we had to swiftly switch to remote teaching and learning. I was able to make the transition relatively smoothly in large part because my courses were based around a few easily replicable principles: predictability and flexibility. Predictability during Normal Instruction Creating classes from the outset with these ideas in mind can help ease transitions between in-person and online learning. The most salient points are to: Integrate the Learning Management System: Use the LMS as much as possible in order to familiarize students (and yourself) with online course structures. Post all class readings, handouts, and PowerPoints and make students submit quizzes, papers, and tests 100% digitally. Use Diverse Teaching Strategies: Mix activities in every class to engage student learning: shorter lectures, primary text reading and analysis, recall of previous course content, brief videos, and small and large-group discussions. This variety creates students who can navigate quickly among many different activities by drawing on a relatively large repertoire of familiar course activities. Utilize Universal Design for Learning: UDL principles are key to shaping flexible in-person and online course structures. This can be done in part by using Backwards Design which helps eliminate extraneous work and streamlines classes down to the essentials to quickly convert between in-person and online instruction. Predictability in Crisis When we moved online, students adapted quickly, even remarking that they were happy the class could return to “normal” within three days, despite being completely asynchronous for accessibility reasons. To do this: Draw on Your Diverse Teaching Strategies: In Spring 2020, I gave virtual lectures of about 20-35 minutes with enhanced slides, additional outlines, and at-home activities. I also posted videos and readings we would have had in-class with guided questions. Engage Directly with Students: To replace in-class discussions, I created discussion boards on the LMS that I monitored and responded to once a week. I also created daily journals on GoogleDocs that I would respond to 2-3 times a week; this gave students predictable interactive time. Keep to the Schedule: Aside from pushing back a few students’ presentations, I kept all the due dates in the class the same. Students responded well by filling out their journals, turning (most of) their work in on time, taking quizzes, writing papers, etc. Accept Your Imperfections: One of the key things to my success was that I did not try to make anything perfect. Instead, I was predictable; I was the professor I was in class, complete with silly jokes, awkward pauses, and mistakes. By the time we made the switch, we had established a predictable yet flexible routine for learning that students could follow online. In fact, my classes were so predictable that when my videos didn’t appear one day by 8 PM, I got multiple emails from students asking if I was alright. What Predictability is Not I want to be clear, however, that being predictable does not mean avoiding crisis. Addressing crisis can take many forms within a predictable structure: discussion questions linking course content to current events or forums dedicated to student views on what is happening. Predictability means acting like the class we have is the one we want to have. As instructors, it is important to remember that we might be the one solid thing in students’ lives when everything else feels beyond their control. Making this fact central to pedagogical practice means being predictable yet willing to change the class in predictable ways when necessary. Using Predictability Wisely In times of crisis, it is natural for people to seek something steady, and our classes can be this. Still, I’m not going to pretend this was easy because it wasn’t. Predictability was and is in short supply, and the emotional and physical toll of the pandemic and recent campaigns for racial justice are extremely taxing, especially for Black, Latinx, Native American, and other minority groups. But the sense of normalcy in the class was good for both students and myself, giving us a structure to our days when everything seemed so strange. I’ll take this into the coming year which is bound to be (un)predictable.