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During my teaching experience in Zambia, music became an important part of the day-to-day life of my students’ coursework. When I first asked the students to share about things they valued from their own culture, one of the elements they mentioned was their love for music. As I was to later find out, this love of music did not refer to music theory or a song being played. Rather, it is a way of living out their culture and experiencing life through music. Music was everywhere in Zambia: in my students’ homes, in their schools, in their churches, and in their houses of worship, for example. Music was to be experienced and led to a form of embodiment, or at the very least recognizing that as human beings we are embodied in our everyday visceral reality. I also found myself making connections to my own Latinx ethnicity. For example, many individuals of Latinx heritage also share an African heritage. Several countries in Latin America have been marked by racial intermixing between Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans. There is even a growing field of study of the Afro-Latino experience. I recently did a DNA test and discovered that at least 10 percent of my DNA is African. It was surprising, but in my Latinx experience it was a heritage that was suppressed and ignored, although the cultural influence was undoubtedly there. I thought that perhaps engaging music would be a way to connect my own heritage to the experiences of these students in Zambia. And concomitantly, perhaps the use of music could lead to an embodied experience in the classroom where we could build bridges between our cultures, ethnicities, and races. I knew that I had to improvise in my lesson plans to accommodate this important cultural element in the classroom. I asked each student to prepare a song for one of our teaching sessions during our time together. Because I had 12 students, I asked some of them to pair up. I was specific and asked for songs that they sing for worship in their own country and that were relevant to the course content, but they had the freedom to choose the song. I encouraged them not to use digital sources, but to sing or play the songs in their own way. When the first student presented her song, her voice carried over the class. It was an old hymn that the students immediately recognized (I did not). The students all joined together in their singing. Their bodies swayed and some raised their hands. In this expression, their bodies were present, involved, and recognized. It brought to memory the book by Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire, where she traces the importance of African spirituality in Pentecostalism and describes the body-mind-spirit correspondence of their worship.[1] For my students, music was a corporeal and corporate experience. As an instructor who was present in this environment, I was stating by my mere presence, “Yes, you and I are different; but we can enjoy these musical arrangements together. We can share in this special moment. We are together in this class. We are on equal footing.” Music gave them a legitimacy to express themselves. In listening, I demonstrated that they were valued. Their contributions as authentic as they were to their context were not dismissed or looked down upon, or even looked over. Their voices mattered. Their culture mattered. Their skin tone mattered. I was deeply appreciative of the resourcefulness of my students despite having little or no resources. Music was one way that this resourcefulness played out. For example, the students sang together. Sometimes, it seemed they were singing two different melodies, yet their differences complemented each other. They would also use their hands to clap or use sticks to keep the beat and rhythm. I was amazed at how they all wanted to participate in this experience. If they didn’t know the lyrics, they hummed along. After the singing, the class seemed to come together. Not only were student’s minds engaged in the course content, but their bodies, attitudes, and culture were involved also. I concluded that music is a wonderful resource. It is able to change a person’s mood. It is able to create a certain ambiance or environment. It is also something that is shared if everyone is listening to the same thing. All the participants move to the music together. The classroom was not just a foreign Honduran-American telling students how to think or what to think. Rather, it created space for meaningful engagement. As I return to the US, I want to make music a part of my courses. Whether we sing old hymns or modern music, it is important to honor the cultures, ethnicities, and races of my students. This is one way to engage them. I know students may have reservations about singing, but at the very least they can bring a video clip to play in class through web services like YouTube. Whether it is online or in person, sharing in music is an activity that all can participate in   [1] Estrelda Y. Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African-American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011).

As we finish this semester, it might be a good exercise to look back and see what worked, what didn’t quite work, and what will never work. Student evaluations often convey needs or anger or unfocused frustrations; very little that can actually teach us, so we must ponder our own little achievements and many frustrations. At each semester’s end, it would do us good to ponder what a classroom might be and what we can do in that environment in relation to the larger social-political arena we live in now. In a short excerpt from an interview,[1] Gilles Deleuze speaks about the classroom less in terms of mediating processes of apprehension and comprehension, and more in terms of movements and processes of becoming. He contends: “A class does not have as its sole objective total comprehension [of a subject matter] . . .  A class is an emotion . . .  It is not a matter of understanding and absorbing everything. It is a matter of awakening in time to capture that which is meaningful [to our own realities].” In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze speaks of experiences that force us to awaken, to feel, not merely to comprehend something novel: “this something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental encounter,” he writes.[2] The arts are capable of generating such encounters—they undo the seams of our limitations, habitual circumstances, belief systems, values, and knowledge to weave the invisible back into the perceptible. Beyond a representation of subjects, facts, history, data, encountering art affectively allows us to sense and not cling to the world as it is but to imagine it more expansively, with further potential becomings. As such, the arts require the totality of our beings-in-bodies to be present and to co-create our realities anew—whether in classrooms, art galleries, the streets, or in the intimacy of our closest communities. Artistic manifestations often allow us to access and connect, individually and collectively, with what is meaningful, potentially generative, and ultimately transformative. It is less about fully understanding the world as such and more about being alert to discover the opportunities that this world offers us. For that to unfold, we must rise, we must awaken! We must be willing to co-participate in this unfolding. There is no room for passive observation here. We must be willing to move from dormant complacency into the position of co-creators, conjuring up new possibilities of being. Julia Kristeva describes this aesthetic awakening with a reminder that our bodies must take part in the experience with art not only to contemplate the art object but also to sense it. She writes: “The ultimate aim of art is perhaps what was formerly celebrated under the term of incarnation. I mean by that a wish to make us feel a real experience [in the body]” through lines, colors, sensations, abstraction, volume, textures, and participation.[3] The arts are poised with the power to remind us to celebrate our body-realities. As Mayra Rivera puts it, works of the imagination allow us to move beyond the limits of our earthly flesh and encounter God as we strive to transform this world. Seeing and touching and moving and speaking and feeling is participation in theopoetics—an articulation of the character of God understood through our embodied, affective experiences.[4] Brazilian visual artist Lygia Pape’s performance piece entitled Divisor (1968) does just that: it probes the limits of our sensorial and psychological conditions, relying heavily on the physical, embodied, affective, and—most importantly—collective participation of viewers. Divisor is at once performance and sculpture, interweaving bodies of spectators/participators, physical space, mobility, and artwork in a literally moving piece.[5] Originally performed in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1968, this performance was re-enacted in the streets of New York on March 26th, 2017, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[6] Comprised of a 30-meter, white cotton fabric in the shape of a square, the piece has two hundred holes symmetrically perforated in the fabric through which viewers are invited to “wear” the sculpture, so to speak. Once 200 co-participators and co-creators are properly positioned, they are invited to enact a procession while wearing the artwork. Pape’s white fabric reposed over the shoulders of the participants, isolating the rest of the body, allows a commanding procession to take place. The effect is both poignant and powerful: a multitude of differently “bodied” people, unified by what takes on the shape of undulating waves, moves through the public arena in a procession. Their movement transmutes precariousness into potency. The work of art highlights the simultaneity of the shared life of those present: their bodies both tied to one another and acting upon one another, are transformed by one another. Such “imbrication of bodies in the fabric of the world,” as Rivera puts it, facilitates a union of sorts. What works of art such as this require of us is an awakened presence that is able to move forward in solidarity, entanglement, capacious resistance, and, most importantly, with response-ability, to borrow Catherine Keller’s language. How can we teachers conjure up opportunities in our classrooms that resemble the communal potency of Divisor? As the semester draws to a close and we reflect on strategies for learning and teaching and living, we ask ourselves: how can we wake that which is dormant inside of us? If another reality is possible, how can we work towards its actualization? How can we even keep the love of teaching when our very schools are crumbling down? How can our very understanding of education continue to produce a teaching-wonder and teaching-resistance that is so fundamental to the fullness of our lives and our communities? Knowing the dazzling possibilities of education and the dangers entailed in it, we are required to place the practice and the thinking of education in relation to the structures of our time. And we don’t live in the easiest times. Educators are rapidly becoming dispensable people who are supposed to teach whatever it is that has no critical engagement. In Brazil, for instance, a growing number of people are calling Paulo Freire to disappear from curricula. He is accused of being an ideologue, a communist whose education project aims only to destroy the values of family and country. Just recently, Judith Butler was almost physically attacked at the Sāo Paulo airport by a Brazilian woman who saw in Butler’s feminist and queer theories a threat to what she understood as the “traditional” Brazilian family. In the US, education, like health insurance, religion, among a great number of other things, has come to be understood as a private value dependent on individual efforts. Having been taken hostage by neoliberal systems, education must “produce” something, preferably at a profit. In this model, students must be treated like customers—education is less about formation than production, like an assembly line. The assaults by the Department of Education, the constant push to make education a matter of corporate profit and endless student debt, the targeting of colleges as a bad thing for the life of the country, the cutting of educational budgets for the sake of “austerity plans,” the creation of prison systems, the loads of money the Koch Brothers injected into higher education, the Senate Tax Bill that was passed recently, all form a narrative worthy of Dante’s Inferno. If education should only serve to produce people to fulfill the lines of jobs, the endless testing and precise measurements of syllabi begins to make sense. No wonder many of us in the classrooms have become apathetic and anesthetized. If one was able to go to AAR this last November and paid attention to the conversations that happened in between the academic sessions, you would know that the plight of so many educators is dire. I heard a professor saying to a friend at the exhibition hall: “I have been battling for 3 years now and I can’t continue doing adjunct jobs. This is my last year trying to find a job, or I will have to find something else to do. I can’t keep living this way, I have a family.” If the classroom and school bring daily struggles, embarrassment, precariousness, and even humiliation to our colleagues, how are we to keep our love of teaching? It is easy for me Cláudio to say, let us keep on loving our teaching and do it the best way we can. But I have a good job with great colleagues. Yohana who co-writes this blog post is a Ph.D. candidate. Will she ever find a good job? We need to engage our profession with a more critical sense of what it means to us, and how it can be made more expansive and sustaining. How can we support and accompany our colleagues who contest the violence of a plutocratic state, the erosion of our communities, the criminalization of protest, rising poverty, constant blaming of the poor, debt, emotional and physical exhaustion of those who are poor? There are no easy answers. There were never any easy answers. Perhaps we can start by thinking that our classrooms are places where we can still be awakened, that every time we meet we can raise up what was dormant in us. Perhaps we can discover that we need to pay attention to our emotions, our bodies, the communities that are formed in each classroom. Perhaps we ought to find better and more sustainable technologies of self and communal awareness, or spiritual practices that can become resources for our constant battle against the empire and its neoliberal systems. Perhaps we can also see our gift to teach as a way of positioning ourselves: first within ourselves, and then as a way of positioning ourselves in the world. Perhaps . . . . [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ln2A0fkA78 [2] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139. [3] As quoted in Stephen Bann, “Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust,” in Parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 64–65. [4] You can see more of this articulation in Rubem Alve’s work. [5] Fernanda Pequeno, Lygia Pape e Helio Oiticica: Conversações e Fricções Poéticas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Apicuri, 2013). [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art *Blog Originally Published on December 14, 2017

Brazilian writer Eliane Brum tells this story: Vanderley was a man who used to go to an agriculture fair in the south of Brazil with a broomstick saying that this broomstick was a pure breed horse. He was known around as the “little cuckoo guy.” One day I asked him, "Are you really Cuckoo Vanderley?" And he said, "Don’t you think I know this isn’t a pureblood horse? That this is just a stick? But this is my way of thinking about that which I will never have.” Perhaps we teachers could be more like Vanderley, a little cuckoo, imagining that which we cannot think, have, or teach, and make it our own. Perhaps we can engage a double pedagogical movement: to listen to those students who actually have a broomstick and see what meanings they give to it, and help those students who don’t have one to invent a broomstick as a pure breed horse, or whatever else, and make it their own. Our classrooms need an inventory of broomsticks! Broomsticks that can give us a sense of our reality. In order to do that we need more art! Art helps us access the madness of our realities. Art helps us think and feel differently. Art gives us access to different forms of reasoning of our bodies and our relations in our world. Art wires our brain differently. Art gives us a space beyond objectivity so we can venture into the unknown in order to reshape our realities. Unfortunately, our pedagogies are often centered in objective knowledge, positivistic thinking based on progress, and detached forms of thinking that celebrate a necessary distance between the seeing and the thing seen. Sadly enough, this form of knowledge can’t catch our realities from the point of view of Vanderley. We need something else. We need other venues and forms of thinking that can help us invent and imagine something that can actually affect our reality. We feel that our objective words can grasp our reality in some forms and yet, it feels also that what we say is like unopened letters that end up returning to us.[1] We can’t be transformed only by precise objective readings of our reality. We need the enchantment of the unknown, gray areas of thoughts and beliefs, the uncontrolled parts of our lives, the broomsticks of Vanderley. The Brazilian theologian, poet, philosopher, and sociologist Rubem Alves lived in the academy for many years and produced many books. One day he realized that his kind of work wouldn’t change people. He then started to write short essays and children stories. With the theoretical knowledge he gained, he delved into the abyss of the quotidian life of people by way of children stories. He would mix Escher, Camus, Bachelard, Bach, Celan and many others with daily events in life. I was introduced to art by his theo-poetics writings. In my classrooms, I am growing more skeptical of only objective readings of realities. We are lost trying to grasp the ever-expansive disasters of our lives. We need rituals! We need art to tap into that aspect where objective knowledge can’t go. Words alone can’t do it. We need other mediums to express the absurd of our present, to retell stories of pain and trauma of our past and imagine our future. Without addressing the present, reshaping the past, and gaining a good sense of future we will be lead to a future that will continue not to be ours. However, life will be given to those who can invent life in its multiple, timely possibilities. And for that, we need new partners! When we bring Doris Salcedo to our classrooms we have a much-expanded way of addressing violence, trauma, and loss. When we invite Tania Bruguera and Weiwei to present their works to us, we can have a better sense of repressive governments and societal systems. It is when we wrestle with Favianna Rodriguez, Justin Favela, Guillermo Gómez-Pena, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, and Alvin Ailey Dance that we can wrestle with a flow of white supremacy, race and identity politics. When we deal with the artist Banksy, we can learn about social contestation. When we engage Giuseppe Campuzano and Miguel A. López, we see new figurings of sexualities and gender nuances and immensities. When we open up to know Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, we can see the complex collective interdisciplinary environmental colonial/postcolonial gaze of native people. It is when we listen and watch Mona Haydar, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar, we can deal with the cultural racial pop culture. We indeed need more art in our classroom! But we have many challenges to do that. First, we don’t feel we have enough expertise to do it. We would need to learn how to teach it. Second, we don’t know what to do to assess it. Once in a faculty meeting, I heard from friends that they wish they could use more art but they don’t have criteria to evaluate any work of art. Third, art doesn’t seem to have the same academic weight. We all know the fight Cornel West had to undergo at Harvard when he was accused by the president Lawrence Summers for not doing proper scholarship when he ventured into recording a rap CD. Yes, to use art we need to cross these boundaries. We have to venture into that weary space in order to know a little more. But we can start by looking and imagining. And helping our students to look and invent as well. The best “final projects” in my classes are the ones students can imagine and invent. Perhaps we can give up a little of our sense that we have to control every corner of what is to be taught, both for proper reasoning and meaning, but also for coherence. Not to dismiss intellectualism and proper theoretical work, but to actually expand it for better ways to grasp life. Perhaps we can start by trying some new things out. GO visit a museum, a street artist, a mural. Perhaps we can start by listening to a song, watching a performance in a video, looking at a picture. And let the artists help us expand ourselves and our imagery/imagining. They might help us dream, invent, figure out something else! They might help us see that Vanderley’s broomstick is indeed a pure breed horse! And that we desperately need one too! [1]Eliane Brum, O Brasil desassombrado pelas palavras-fantasmas. Como o sonho e a arte podem nos ajudar a acessar a realidade e a romper a paralisia, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/07/10/opinion/1499694080_981744.html Resources:  http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/transvestite-museum-of-peru/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idMJIEFH_ns http://postcommodity.com/About.html http://favianna.tumblr.com