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There’s a case to be made for rigor in teaching, which is a practice grounded in both art and science. Rigor in instructional design is particularly necessary for online instruction. The more we learn about the cognition of learning, most notably from the neurosciences, the more we appreciate that our ways of teaching must align with the ways of learning. While we may like to believe that learning is natural and intuitive (and it is to a certain extent) two insights from the neurosciences are that (1) learning is not easy (it takes a lot of energy and attention), and (2) learning follows certain pathways—from the cellular level to metacognition, or from organic brain processes to the awareness of mind. Rigor in instruction calls for following specific schemas to aid the learning process. Educational psychologist Robert Gagné pioneered the science of instruction. His schema for the “conditions of learning” demonstrates that different instructional methods should be used according to the demands of varied learning challenges (“A blinding flash of the obvious,” you say. Maybe, but he said it first!). He categorized distinct “varieties of learned capabilities” or categories of learning. These represent the purposes for which teachers provide instruction: To impart basic intellectual skills (“procedural knowledge”) To extend verbal information (“declarative knowledge”) To facilitate development of cognitive strategies (metacognition) To develop attitudes (values, affections, attitudes) To enhance physical motor skills (competencies) Different internal and external conditions apply for each type of learning. For example, with cognitive strategies students must have a chance to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments. Therefore, it is necessary to know what kind of learning we are seeking to bring about. In addition, Gagné’s theory outlines a schema of nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes in the teaching-learning process: Gaining attention (focus and reception) Informing learners of the objective (expectancy and motivation) Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval and connections) Presenting the content (“stimulus”) (selective perception) Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding) Eliciting performance (responding and acting on the new knowledge) Providing feedback (reinforcement) Assessing performance (retrieval) Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization and application) These steps provide the necessary conditions for learning and serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media, methods, and learning and assessment activities. Gagné suggests that learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a hierarchy according to complexity: stimulus recognition, response generation, procedure following, use of terminology, discriminations, concept formation, rule application, and problem solving. The primary significance of the hierarchy is to identify prerequisites that should be completed to facilitate learning at each level. This learning hierarchies provide a way to organize the learning experience in online course design. Example The following example illustrates a teaching sequence corresponding to the nine instructional events for the objective. In this example students are guided in a sequence to learn the concept of triangulation in relationships. Gain attention: show a variety of examples of triangulation (case study, cartoon, film, dialogue script). Identify objective. pose questions: “What function does triangulation serve?” “What are the causes of triangulation?” “How may triangulation hinder a leader’s effectiveness?” Recall prior learning: review definitions of triangles. Ask students to share examples of triangulation from personal experience. Present stimulus: present refined definition of triangulation. Guide learning: present examples of how triangulation is caused and motivated; how to identify it; its effect on functioning in relationships and situations. Elicit performance: direct students to create different examples of triangulation in work, ministry, or family situations. Or direct students to find and share triangulated scenarios in films, stories, news features, etc. Provide feedback: review student examples as correct or incorrect (or to what extent they are correct or not). Assess performance: provide feedback in the form of scores/grades and remediation. Enhance retention/transfer: review examples and non-examples of triangulation and ask students to identify qualities for identifying whether or not the example fits criteria for triangulation. Summary Effective online instruction requires rigorous application of pedagogical principles in course design. Gagné’s schema of “instructional events” is an effective model for organizing online course design. Different instruction is required for different learning domains and their outcomes (intellectual concepts; attitudes, values, and affections; skills and competencies). Experiences of learning operate on the learner in ways that constitute the conditions of learning. The specific operations that constitute instructional events are different for each different type of learning outcome. Learning hierarchies define what domains are to be learned and the sequence of instruction necessary to bring about their outcomes.

Listen to Dr. Westfield read this blog post in her "I'm Just Saying" audio blog series “Will somebody please Hold My Mule,” might sound like an urgent plea for animal restraint. Spoken in the African American vernacular tradition, it is a warning of a pending ecstatic release. But, here, context matters.  Today rustic moments that involve a sun whipped sharecropper harnessed to a mule are only to be found in murals of Charles Wilbert White – and even those are rare. It is in the deep Black folk wisdom not, yet, hushed by the street flow of our urban youth, that “hold my mule” signifies a breakthrough – joyous, adoratious, shoutlicious and affirmatious Truth revealed. In the face of such sanctified Truth, every atom must come to rest, yet, without being stilled.  A moment of creative insight, clarity of purpose, any critical happening – “Hold my mule” is a peroration to pause for deep prayer, praise, worship, cry and give thanks. Let me reiterate, “Context matters.” “Please somebody hold my mule” can signal a moment of urgent trouble. It can, also, be a call to gather for defense, diplomacy or a piece of curative business. In either case, to say Hold My Mule signals a leave-taken, a break from or with whatever occupies you. It presages a moment of intensity, sometimes transcendence, and always urgency. My most recent Hold My Mule moment happened in the Wabash symposium with Victor Wooten. We were discussing improvisation – something I thought I understood. As a group exercise, each participant defined and/or described improvisation, then said the feeling(s) associated with it. By the end of the report-ins our group had verbally constructed a tapestry of understandings and feelings about improvisation; very beautiful and informative. Victor, adding to our tapestry, offered this wisdom (I am paraphrasing): Improvisation is in our DNA…. for example, those of us who grew up in poor households learned from our parents to improvise…Our parents were models for improvisation and how to create something new. As human beings we are all really good at improvising. It is who we are.  To be alive, you have to improvise… We can improve upon improvisation but there is no need to learn to improvise because it is what we already do all the time. Babies do not have to be taught to laugh, walk, cry – they improvise based upon how they feel. Your body does not have to ask what or how to feel; it just does… Then based upon those feelings we decide how to create, improve, and change. Improvisation is about taking what we know and using what we know to produce the unknown. (Victor Wooten, December 2, 2020) “Hold My Mule!”  It was all that I could do not to get up from my chair in front of the Zoom screen and I run around my house praising and thanking God for this wisdom, this insight, this moment of exuberant joy (audio and video on). This was a moment of ah-hah! When the lightbulb goes on. The thick white clouds part.  The Red Sea splits. Eureka! Before Victor’s teaching, I had reduced improvisation to a technique that was separate or apart from daily life activities or a tool occasionally deployed when needed in music or in teaching. (My Lord!) I had thought improvisation was what the “greats” of music are able to achieve after years of study and performance. (I once was lost!!) I had been operating as if improvisation was something that was utilitarian and reserved for those who worked tirelessly to develop this specialty. (But now I am found!!!) Victor opened my eyes to see that improvisation is intrinsic. All of life’s decisions are acts of improvisation. (I was blind!!!!) When we have the where-with-all to take what we know and put it in service to discovering, exploring, and coming to know what is unknown – it is then that we are living into the fullness of our humanity.  (But now I SEEEE!!!!!) Allowing what we know to pull us into and guide us to the unknown is a risky proposition. Teaching to produce the unknown will not be satisfied with regurgitating the known – by learner or by teacher. It requires teachers who are capable of being aware of, and able to be flexible, limber, and open to seeing the miracles, not when they come, but as they come. Teachers who understand their improvisational nature and the improvisational nature of their learners, create through discovery. They understand that in a sense, it is discovery that teaches. In teaching with this knowledge at the forefront, we are not following a way of teaching or of learning, but creating a way of being that revels in the joy of the unknown and the newly created. (Through many dangers Toil and snares We have already come Twas grace hath brought Us safe thus far And grace will lead us home)

As the fall semester draws to a close, I reflect on how our classrooms continue to absorb the dense impact of exhaustion, grief, and so many unknowns. The isolation and physical distancing brought by COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 have remained a reality for much longer than any of us could have anticipated. We have hardly been able to metabolize our grief, frustration, fatigue, and the toll the lack of contact and sensation has had on our bodies. Along with COVID-19, we have continued to somatize the woundedness of profound inequalities in our communities, as I have written elsewhere. From election cycles in the Américas, to ongoing anti-Black racism and violence, white supremacy, settler/extractive colonialism, racial capitalism, and cishet patriarchy, we continue to survive systems of exploitation, dominance, and oppressions of all tenors. In light of this historical moment, my colleague at the Pacific School of Religion, Dr. Aizaiah Yong, and I chose to codesign a syllabus that engaged formation through the lens of spirituality and leadership, in an attempt to deepen our lives individually and collectively. It intentionally centered the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color. We created a compendium aimed at sustaining our vitality, rootedness, and creativity during this period of remote learning where we surveyed practices and scholarship from varied religious traditions, geopolitical contexts, and artistic modalities. Throughout the last four months, our virtual classroom became a collaborative learning environment where coconspirators “identif[ied] and valorize[d] that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies,” as de Sousa Santos puts it.[1] By privileging experiential epistemologies, we attempted to interrupt the dominant politics of knowledge and made every effort to enflesh sensorial experiences, understanding that they are fundamental in the shaping of knowledge and students’ formation. Corporeal ways of knowing presuppose contact, sensation, concrete, emergent, and living bodies, in all their capacity for suffering and healing, copresence and distance, for knowing-with rather than knowing-about. The semester’s various activities ranged widely: we created centering and closing moments where we could collectively breathe, built sacred spaces, performed an archeology of our joys, recollected our ancestral connections, our ecostories, ecomemories, understood land as formation, as pedagogy, thought about emergent strategies for transformation, engaged with how we metabolize anger, and how to develop a keener experience of tenderness.[2] Students were invited to imaginatively cocreate workshops, artworks, reflections, engage one another via a “spiritual formation virtual café” suggested by one student, raise difficult questions via online forums, and come up with field guides for spiritual formation with spiritual practices, reflections, centering moments, devotionals, rituals, meditations, art-making, embodied work, and much more. And yet all of these strategies seemed somewhat insufficient in our attempt to foster bonds of copresence, sensation, and contact that body-with-body classrooms offer. How could we respond to the urgencies, the sense of isolation, fragmentation, and the intensities of the present moment through remote learning? How could we open up the nexus of space-place-time to embodiment? How could we be responsive to Lama Rod Owens’ call to embodiment as a returning home to our bodies, in this moment and context, opening up some kind of spaciousness that could allow us to respond to both the woundedness and the joys of the now?[3] How could we cultivate embodiment in a virtual setting with a deep understanding “that disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained,” because we become desensitized to the conditions around us, to our emotions, to our sense of vitality, to that which deeply moves us and puts us back in touch with ourselves, our joys, pleasures, hopes, and dreams?[4] How would we subvert the logic of isolation and “presentify” zoom rooms so that a confluence of encounters, contact, and embodied sensation could transpire? How could we create a classroom experience based on a poetics of presence and intimacy as the artist Elisa Arruda invites us to create? By turning to creative practices and the arts, we were able to weave, potentialize, and ignite a process of contact and sensation. Each week, students received what we called Spiritual Formation Care Packages (SFCP), which were designed based on the readings for that week. They became a series of centering and creative exercises that invited us to meditate, embody, and create for about one full hour per week. The intention of these exercises was to provide support and an opportunity for creative embodiment, integrating what students learned in class with their own lived experiences, creative processes, spiritual traditions, and research. The SFCP ritualized and generated containers allowing students to tap into the power of their spiritualities and creative vigor. Inspired by my own art practices and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the packages afforded us an opportunity to sense how our skin, viscera, and psychosomatic bodies carry knowledge that—in moments of pain, dis-ease, conflict, and unknowingness—yield us the capacity to see, touch, and create in expansive and incendiary ways. Art, as Anzaldúa puts it, is the “locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments.”[5] It allows us to become anchored in our bodies, to “shock ourselves into new ways of perceiving the world,” to “feel our way without blinders,” to “touch more people,” to evoke the personal and social realities through blood, pus, and sweat. Our creative practices afford us the opportunity to access, re-member, and revive “what most links us with life.”[6] Art practices, as shown in the work of Elisa Arruda, embolden us to reclaim our processes of formation, fully embodying our shadows and desires for presence, joy, pleasure, restoration, expansion, contraction, proximity, sensation, and connection. [su_image_carousel source="media: 244745,244746,244747,244748,244749,244750,244751,244752,244753" limit="100" slides_style="photo" crop="none" align="left" max_width="2000" captions="yes"] About the Artist: Elisa Arruda is a visual artist who was born and raised in Belem do Pará, in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Currently living in São Paulo, Arruda investigates the poetics of intimacy, moving quite freely through several mediums. She pays particular attention to the realms of the domestic and the public as well as the tensions sheltered in dynamics of strength + fragility, endings + beginnings, intimacy + alienation, loss + growth, proximity + confinement. Notes [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. [2] For more on this, please refer to Eros and Ideologies by Laura E. Pérez, Voices from the Ancestors edited by Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ecowomanism by Melanie L. Harris, The Way of Tenderness by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owen. [3] Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020), 119-120. [4] Rod Owens, Love and Rage, 121. [5] Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 177. [6] Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Writer to Third World Women Writers,” 34.

Rubem Alves was a Brazilian theologian who became a psychoanalyst, educator, and writer of children’s stories. In one of his short stories called Happy Oysters Don’t Create Pearls, he tells the story of an oyster that was different from all the others. This oyster could not be happy like the others and was always very sad. The cause of his sadness was a grain of sand that had entered his body. He felt that excruciating pain day and night. As a way to survive the pain he sang sad songs. His songs were so sad that they tormented the oysters that sang happily. “Why is he so sad?” they asked. But the truth was that he had to live with the pain caused by the arrival of that unexpected grain of sand that was plaguing his life. One day, a fisherman threw his nets and took all the oysters, the happy ones and the sad one too. At dinner, the fisherman was eating oyster soup with his family when he felt something hard inside his mouth. When he took that stone out of his mouth, he realized it was a pearl! And he gave it to his wife. Rubem Alves then says that happy oysters do not produce pearls, only those that suffer a piercing pain in the flesh. In the Bantu and Yorubá traditions, it is said that the Orixá Obaluaê, also called Omulu, is the Lord of the Pearls. There is a story where Iemanjá, the Orixá of the seas, adopts Omulu when he is sick. She washes his body and heals his body with the water of the sea. But Omulu, who goes around the world offering healing and producing plagues, is poor and sad. Iemanjá takes compassion on him for she doesn’t want to see her son poor and his body covered with wounds. Iemanjá gets all her riches, her pearls, and makes beautiful necklaces to cover Omulu’s body so he could go around shining. These two stories can help us figure out a certain pedagogy of astonishment. Four ways to think about it: First, education as an oyster space that listens to human suffering The stories of Alves and Iemanjá and Omulu, in such different and diverse ways, tell us that pain and suffering are central issues of our existence. We must be attuned to the ways of suffering in our time. We are seeing so much suffering everywhere and COVID-19 has not only eroded so much of what we knew but also expanded poverty, stretching the already frail social threads of our communities. Our political and economic organizing systems are creating forms that deny the ways we recognize pain. We live at a furious pace of life, giving more to get much less. We are so alienated from nature. Our illnesses shift and expand in uncontrollable proportions. We live in a world of depressions, refluxes, panic attacks, heart attacks, barbiturates, anti-depressants, antihistamines, and painkillers. We medicate every form of feeling and morbidity, we lose the capacity for wonder. More than ever, we need to find “oyster spaces,” to transform our sadness into pearls and songs of sadness and joy to sustain our lives. Education thus can be this oyster space, when hearing and exchange provides possibilities for the remaking of ourselves. Education becomes this oyster space when the hearing is also seeing, understanding, going deeper, creating empathy and compassion. When that happens, the classroom becomes this oyster-like environment, conducive to the metabolization of pain in other forms of life, sustenance, imagination, resistance, and forms of living in the world. For the pearl is that amalgam of the body, mind, heart, and soul that learns from itself, and is able to remake itself from the experiences of pain and suffering. If the oyster is that place of astonishment that turns itself into pearl, the attentive classroom can also help us wonder, turning the pain of life into a delicate and strong stone, rare and beautiful. In this way, each teacher who feels and even perhaps can come close to understanding the pains of the world and the pains of the students, is also a therapist who listens and engages in the process of transference; the teacher is also a healer who offers symbolic exchanges; is also a clown who activates other forms of lightness and laughter; and is a magician at reordering worlds so that the life inside the oyster can continue the symbiotic movements of life. In this oyster space, the pearl becomes the capacity for continuous amazement with the potential of life that is continuously remade. Second, education as the oyster place to produce beauty Omulu had his body covered with sores and that is why he lived hidden under his straw clothes. Iemanjá, as an affectionate foster mother, wants to see her precious son shine with his healing gifts. The queen of the sea creates pearl necklaces that cover Omulu’s entire body so he would be honored, and live happily and proudly. His body would continue to be marked by the wounds of his scars, but now he shines the light of pearls, that like white flowers adorn his skin; the shiny stones made from the pain of oysters now caress his skin and adorn his suffering body. From here, we can regard education as the care of Iemanjá for her son Omulu. Education as production of beauty that helps us to move around the world. Educators as oysters, who use their own pearls, gestated by the symbiosis of their bodies in pain, and offer their precious, beautiful, luminous pearls to decorate their student’s lives. The same way in which students offer their own beautiful pearls to decorate their teachers’ lives. Often educators cannot change the situation of their students, but they can pay attention to their wounds, hold their bodies in care, enlarge their thoughts, help their knees to walk and fly, strengthen their hands, illuminate their eyes with the sparkle of astonishment, bewitch them with words of life in resonance with the words of death, and pace their heartbeats in a rhythm other than the destruction and annihilation that often surround their worlds. The educator is not all-knowing of everything. The hope is that the educator has already learned to be in awe with life and has been astonished in many ways. If that has already happened, then the educator becomes a double path, or a bridge, that helps others to be astonished and is wide open to be astonished by others. If the educator is ready to engage this double path, pause and listen, be astonished by the very presence of the student, the educator will see this encounter always as a thrilling surprise, as the production of desire that changes and transforms, creates mutuality, brings spells, charms, and chistes to life, providing tools of defiance and self-sustenance, building paths for new trajectories. In this way, the educator and the classroom as this oyster space will not be voyeurism of one’s suffering, but rather be a mutual singing of songs of sadness, a mutual creation of pearl necklaces for mutual survival. The healer in history is not Iemanjá. Omulu receives healing from the forest and from Olorum. But it is Iemanjá who takes care of the healing symbology, covering Omulu’s wounds in beauty so his joy would be full. In the same way, we educators must strive to be like Iemanjá, looking for beauty, for pearls in the sea to put on the wounded bodies of our students. Pearls that come from inside our own bodies like oysters that learned to make pearls, pearls that come from the history of our people and other people, pearls from ancient wisdom, pearls from below, and pearls produced by the students themselves. The pedagogy of astonishment is thus the crafting of necklaces of thousands of forms of beauty in multiple pearls and of several places for entire bodies, both individual and collective, to shine. Third, education to open ourselves to engage the different, the uninvited grain of sand Fourth, education that helps us hear the suffering of nonhuman forms of life. To be continued…