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I recently read Valarie Kaur’s remarkable book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. At one point in her story, she describes her struggle to find herself “inside the law” at Yale Law School as a Sikh woman with communal commitments to justice developed in a post-9/11 world where racist and religious violence had impacted her own community profoundly. She feels so alien to the hallowed halls of an institution created to be impenetrable for women of color that she begins to imagine it as Hogwarts, a strange place where it is her job to learn the law as if it were a set of “magic spells, incantations that when spoken in the correct order had the power to compel individuals and institutions to do things in the world” (172-173). One day, Kaur and a classmate “found the basement” they previously had not known existed: It was a different world, frenetic and urgent, coffee cups strewn on tables, students strategizing behind closed doors about their clients—inmates on death row, immigrants in deportation proceedings, detainees at Guatánamo… Here students represent real clients in real cases under the supervision of professors. It was as if two schools existed in one—one removed from the world, one enmeshed in the world; one for learning the spells, one for using them. The minute we walked in, we knew that we had found our home. Lauren joined a human rights clinic and I joined an immigration clinic. We had found our Justice School. (Kaur 2020, 178) She goes on to detail the work of Yale’s “Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic” and her own formation through working with the East Haven community to reduce civil rights violation by the local police force. She later notes that this work with her student partner Tafari and her faculty mentors “defined her legal education.” The basement was her educational home, full stop. Since I read this passage, I have been wondering where the unknown basement might exist in my own graduate theological school. Where do students and professors work together in strategic, on-the-ground work for justice? How might we bring about the kind of partnered learning about prophetic leadership that calls both student and professor together to enact visionary work in partnership with local communities? Is there such a space where the most essential formation of capacity for on-the-ground praxis related to justice occurs? How did the faculty who established these clinics come to create such a conducive climate for the formation of their justice-seeking students? Could I be a part of the same in my own school? And I admit that my imagination falters a bit. I teach primarily middle-aged adult students who are squeezing their academic work into the corners of fully deployed lives. They are parents, employees, already serving churches and working jobs in nonprofit organizations that involve full-time work for part-time pay. They live scattered across forty-four states. We rarely gather in brick-and-mortar classrooms, much less the exciting clinic and community spaces after hours and outside of credit-structures that Kaur describes. To be honest, in a small, freestanding theological school related to a denomination that is in crisis due to its own justice-related fights about sexuality, most of my time and that of my faculty colleagues is being recruited to innovate to attract new learners who will help provide revenue to support the expensive graduate degree programs that we hope to sustain into the future (without an endowment like Yale University’s). While I know that the real story of how that clinic came to be and the work that kept it going is probably full of struggle, scrappiness, and determination on the part of the mentoring faculty, it also feels very far from my Canvas classroom. The dream of that vibrant basement space, where the real education occurs, feels about as magical and distant as the enchanted castle of Harry Potter’s learning that inspired Kaur’s quest. Then I, too, have to shift my imagination again, and stop longing for the resources and available time that undergird the situation described by Kaur that are not a part of my own context. I begin to notice that my students are often already in positions with influence and power in their own communities. The very realities that make it harder for them to carve out time for the traditional academic work in a classroom keep them deeply connected to the contexts of their home settings. They have not left to immerse themselves in some constructed community away from their homeplaces. They have continued to invest in work and home spaces where their influence is established, and they maintain relational connections even while they are giving their all to take on the challenges of graduate theological work. What they, and I, need is permission and vision to work for justice within what Dr. Gregory C. Ellison, II, calls the “three feet” that surround them. When I make this shift in my own imagination, I see much more possibility for how to support their justice-seeking vocations in context. I can imagine how they can draw upon the resources in their communities to do the work that is there, just as I make the connections and attempt the work I am called to do in my own three foot radius. And that work matters. While I might long for the collaboration and shared struggle of the magical basement clinic, and yearn for the kind of influence and resources that would allow us to be together to engage in world-changing work, I am reminded that important justice work can happen in each of the institutions and relationships and churches that my students are involved with. Learning to shape my imagination for this reality, a learning community of overburdened adults dispersed across a wide geography, helps me to show up to that challenge and continue to support their vocational development in justice-seeking rather than grieve the lack of the gathered clinic in my own setting.

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

I have been a consultant for the Wabash Center for more than a decade now, and I still often wonder what I am supposed to be doing when I consult, and how I should be doing it. Supporting colleagues in the intimate and courageous act of opening up their teaching to other colleagues’ input is often an uncharted journey. I think it’s even more challenging in an era where the primary pandemic I worry about is the one having to do with discerning what is true and real, and what is not. I think you can talk about this in any number of ways—COVID-19, racial injustice, climate catastrophe—but at heart the question is how we navigate the complex and multiple realities we and our students are inhabiting. I have had the enormous privilege of walking alongside two gifted colleagues these past few months—Dr. Mitzi Smith and Dr. Dan Ulrich—as they took on the challenges of designing and leading a course together, where one of them was the expert and the other was the learner, all the while walking alongside their student learners. Drs. Smith and Ulrich are Second/New Testament scholars, teaching in two very different seminary contexts. Dr. Smith is an African American woman, and Dr. Ulrich is a white man. This last sentence is at the heart of the project they took on, within the Wabash Center’s grant program, to imagine and embody what it can mean to develop a pedagogically effective and ethically responsible trans‐contextual online intensive course. They set out to bring into focus African American and womanist approaches to sacred texts—both those of the Bible, and those of the lives of women and men whose struggles are part and parcel of having no permanent shelter. Dr. Smith was the formal teacher, Dr. Ulrich the formal learner. And I was a listener, a learner, and perhaps a cheerleader as they tried to walk this walk. I think I know a lot when it comes to designing learning in digital spaces—but much of what I know is not relevant when trauma is the essential ecology in which we are living. Here are things I learned: Teaching and learning are thoroughly relational, and this moment in time requires us to face that reality directly and intentionally—it is no longer possible to pretend that what we do is purely cognitive. It’s really difficult to be trained as an expert in your discipline, and from that training demonstrate being an active learner. Humility and openness are key to navigating this terrain, but they are rarely the skills or capacities we are rewarded for in our scholarship. Empathy, not sympathy, is essential in this work but the difference between these two abilities is not generally taught in higher education. Certainly our students find the distinctions very difficult to parse. Structural and systemic racism are so much a part of higher education that it takes a lot of effort simply to discern the “next right step” in resisting them. Teaching together needs to begin in relationship-building long before a syllabus is written, let alone implemented. There is a necessary balance to be found between the improvisational nature of teaching when you are doing it alone, and the shared work of collaborative pedagogical design. Institutional constraints will force certain problematic compromises to be made no matter how committed you are to justice. Here are questions I still have: What kind of authority is it necessary to have in a class? With a colleague? As a consultant? How do you say “I’m sorry” in a way that matters? What does it mean to be an “expert” in an academy so riddled with injustice that the very performance of “expertise” may be re-inscribing that injustice? What degree of transparency is important for students gaining a sense of the power dynamics embedded in specific academic disciplines, and when might it be better to obscure them? I am left with a profound gratitude that there are scholars in this world who are seeking to break down some of the power dynamics of the academy. I remain thoroughly committed to the search for a “pedagogically effective and ethically responsible trans‐contextual” way of teaching even if I’m still not sure what that looks like—at least this project has offered me a hopeful glimpse!