Resources

This resource sets forth the cultural imperatives of ministry and the contextual nature of a public theology of religious education that connects faith formation and action in addressing profoundly difficult, unjust, and wounding experiences of Black people in society. The book begins with the, often neglected, practice of lament as a necessary first step in vital public theological reflection and action. The book proceeds with meanings and ways of equipping persons within and beyond church settings to critically reflect on life and leadership in the throes of present-day social and political realities. It further provides practices for forming skills and shows how to partner with the spiritual guides needed to shape a just public arena and fruitful individual lives. (From the Publisher)

After a lecture in my introductory European course about a year ago, a student who had fallen asleep in the back row remained behind. I had come to notice him: a young man who came to class early, always sat in the back row, was always prepared with the reading, and almost always fell asleep. I asked him about his torpor, which seemed incongruous with the rest of his habits as a learner. He apologized, explaining that before class he worked a night shift at his full-time job as an aide in an elder care facility.   As an educator, my hope and expectation had been for students to view my class as a top priority, imagining that my passion for history should be universal. When they don’t, I often feel offended and humbled. Exposure to the lived experience of this student, and many of his peers, has cultivated an empathy towards those students with schedules and attentions divided between their curricular duties and other aspects of their lives. The ongoing public health crisis, and the shift to online learning, has pushed me even further on this. It leads me to think differently about how we can accomodate in the classroom not only around skill level, but also around the room a student has for school in their lives. My partner and I teach in very different institutions. Lately we’ve tried to identify commonalities and differences in what we’ve learned about how best to serve our respective students. Sarah’s focus has been on providing an emotionally responsive environment and one that embraces neurodiversity. I continue to examine how to make classrooms that enable part-time students to grow in their skills and knowledge, while minimizing the conflict between their academics and their priorities as wage earners and caretakers. We agree that these different areas of focus are a product of the very different populations that we teach. Of the fourteen-thousand undergraduates at Lehman College, 48% are part-time students. Many part-time students have scheduling and attentional conflicts that include full-time work, childcare, and running a household. Covid-19 has increased these demands and forced educators to reimagine their classrooms so they can better meet students where they are. This challenge presents an opportunity to improve our abilities to differentiate by career stage. Asynchronous learning allows our less traditional students to complete assignments and access material around their own schedule. Imagine modular history curricula in which student-led activities, done with teacher facilitation, bring students into contact with content that would otherwise be communicated via lecture, build skills necessary to be a strong undergraduate history student, and interact with her teacher and her peers around the major tensions and themes of the period. Take, for example, a module on 19th-century German society. I imagine our student, sitting at home, accessing a short lecture designed to orient her and then directing her to short textbook readings to glean basic information about the period. Following this, our student accesses four or five important chapters or articles on the period, curated—and if necessary scaffolded—by the professor to ensure she is exposed to multiple arguments about the period. To end the module, students prepare a short formative assessment that they bring to a single class meeting where the instructor leads a conversation about the nature of the 19th-century German middle class. Such a blended synchronous/asynchronous module would accomplish the same learning goals as a series of lectures in an introductory class and allow our student to learn on her own schedule.   In this model, the professor serves as a facilitator of learning as opposed to the source of information. But, the more independence students have, the more responsibility educators have to build skills that allow them to work independently. Schedule setting, advance preparation, and attentiveness to one’s own work habits can be taught, and they translate beyond the history classroom. Right now, circumstance forces us to consign ourselves to distance learning and asynchronicity. But asynchronous and blended models are well suited for a community of part-time learners. I hope that we can take lessons learned during this crisis to help all of our students, no matter their status.

In teaching undergraduates about social justice, I have found that the concept of the common good is both the most foundational and difficult one for students to learn. According to Catholic social teaching, the perspective from which I teach my theology and justice courses, the concept is defined as such: every individual person should have sufficient access to the resources of the society that they need to completely and easily live fulfilling lives; therefore, the rights of the individual to personal possessions and community resources must be balanced with the needs of the disadvantaged and dispossessed. My students are able to memorize this definition for exams, but when asked to apply this principle to everyday life and current events, they struggle. I recently discovered, however, that tethering the abstract concept to the concrete circumstances of their lives, as with most things, is the key to their learning. I made this discovery in mid-March during the abrupt transition of my classes from face-to-face to online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With only a few panic-filled days to reformat my classes, I sought help from my “squad”—i.e., my group of justice-seeking colleagues and friends that I trust for advice on how to care for students. Over phone-calls and group social media chat, we shared ideas about how we could ascertain and meet our students’ needs during this unprecedented time. I decided to send out a survey worth enough points to insure that every student would fill it out, quickly. This enabled me to assess whether every student had sufficient access to the resources they needed to live their lives and continue their education. I was worried about the safety and health of my students—particularly those in possible situations of intimate partner-violence, LGBTQ+ identified students who were returning to live with unsupportive families, international students who could not return home, students who lost their jobs or were now working more now than ever in healthcare, grocery stores, or family businesses, and students who had contracted or been exposed to the coronavirus. Of course, I also needed to know about Wi-Fi and computer access, since without these necessities any online learning would be impossible. I was sure there were also student issues that I had not thought of yet. So, I created and distributed a simple survey. I asked students about: Their concerns about safety, health, Covid-19, and current living conditions Wi-Fi availability Access to a computer Access to course textbooks (since some had not been able to return to campus after Spring Break, before moving home) Preferences for online class sessions and office hours to supplement asynchronous lectures and discussion boards--e.g., optional groups hangouts; open office hours? (Accounting for abrupt schedule changes and heeding advice from my “squad,” I made all of my classes asynchronous) Concerns they had about online learning and completing coursework What support they needed from me Other concerns I told the students that the questions I asked them on the survey were “no-brainers.” I needed this information, first, to connect them to resources for their safety and health, if necessary, and then to re-construct course syllabi that were fair and manageable during this time of upheaval and crisis. I told them that these are the questions that the principle of the common good asks and that the responses the questions generate often demands a restructuring of the community. They got it, because it related to their lives directly. I also discovered two things: I should be explicitly asking every semester, even outsides of crisis, about student needs and access to resources. Responsible pedagogy demands upholding the common good principle. And effective teaching about this foundational social justice principle requires the instructor to model it by applying it to students’ immediate situations and experiences. This application, in my experience, proved to be the bridge necessary for students to transverse the gap between memorizing a definition to rooting it in their lives with meaning. As I write this blog, the recent murders of African Americans Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and the ensuing outrage and protests over their murders, demand me again to consider the common good outside and inside of the classroom. The fact that black lives do not yet matter in our country and world is a clear illustration of the common good failing to be met in our nation. I should be teaching content like this in my classes, while at the same time being cognizant in my pedagogical practice of the heightened needs of my students, particularly those of color. If you are teaching this summer, how have you restructured your content and pedagogy to account for how the basic needs of your students have changed, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic and the continued outright disregard for black and brown lives?

In remote teaching we all wrestle with how to effectively translate our typical assessments of student learning, and possibly, how to create new assessments.  This requires (re)determining what we most want our students to achieve and thinking creatively about how they can best demonstrate their learning in an online environment.  While there are tips to discourage cheating online, many instructors are concerned about academic integrity in online high-stakes, closed-book exams. Because students are more likely to learn from (and less likely to cheat on) assessments that provide authentic experiences or reflection on learning, it is valuable to think broadly about how best to assess our students learning in creative ways online. The principles of inclusivity and sustainability can guide our development of online assessments from the beginning to the end of the course. Sustainable assessments are those that help students develop skills necessary to direct and monitor their future learning.  Shifting students’ expectations from all feedback originating from the instructor to using self and peer assessment will help them reflect on their learning processes, and identify gaps in their skills and understanding. Making this shift will allow students to begin to assess and monitor their own learning, making it sustainable a skill that students can use after leaving your course. Inclusive assessments are those designed to measure students equitably, and in ways that are sensitive to cultural, economic and social differences. Transparency and clear communication regarding expectations for successful completion of work is key so that students understand its purpose, the necessary tasks to successfully complete the work, and upon what specific criteria they will be evaluated. This approach levels the playing field for diverse students while facilitating learning for all students. To apply these principles in your online course: Begin by seeking input from your students At the beginning of a course, surveys can be used to discover students’ incoming knowledge and skills as well as something about them as a person.  Rather than focusing on knowledge ‘deficits’ that the curriculum must fill, this kind of preassessment will allow you to discover students’ interests, lived experiences and motivations.  Equitable assessments should be accessible and responsive to students whose abilities, access to computational tools and reliable high-speed internet, access to quiet work spaces, and extent of flexibility in setting their study schedules may vary. Therefore, it will be important for you to know about your students for your course planning. Ask students to share what they are most excited about in the class, unique skills they are proud of, past educational experiences, and their own perceptions of their current knowledge and skills.  Use students’ input to help them build connections between the course content and their interests. To help them take ownership in creating spaces that welcome all members of the class, invite students to contribute to ground rules for class interactions. Where possible, provide opportunities for students to make choices about an assessment topic or format that leverages their skills and interests to help them feel more empowered and engaged in the course.  Use frequent low-stakes assessment to guide students’ learning throughout the course As your course progresses, assessments are a learning tool that can develop the students’ sense of belonging in the course community, as well as a shared responsibility for and awareness of their learning. There are many ways to accomplish this. Here are a few: Include a variety of low-stakes activities and assignments early and frequently such as short quizzes, reflective writing prompts, group projects, and synchronous or asynchronous discussions. This allows students to calibrate your expectations, get feedback they can incorporate, and understand their individual progress. Use online discussions to build opportunities for interaction that develop students’ sense of belonging, and motivate them to learn from each other in their responses and question of each other.  In both asynchronous discussions and synchronous sessions, guide opportunities for effective peer feedback by modeling it yourself, highlighting examples of productive exchanges, prompting them to ask each other guiding questions and asking them to use rubrics / clear criteria to guide and assess their responses. Before students hand in work, ask them to self-evaluate according to the grading criteria and to identify areas where they would most benefit from your feedback. Culminate the course with authentic applications of course knowledge and skills with integrative assessments Students can demonstrate their achievement of the course goals by applying disciplinary tools to real-world situations, analyzing authentic data or exploring solutions to so called “wicked problems.”  These are problems that have changing parameters, are resistant to solutions, involve incomplete data, or are difficult to recognize (Hanstedt 2018).   Creative projects with formative feedback will support students in developing the sustainable assessment skills necessary for lifelong learning. Consider To synthesize key ideas or reflect on what they’ve taken away, have students write research reports or papers. These can provide opportunities to practice disciplinary language and styles of communication.   To creatively demonstrate learning, have students create artifacts such as maps, figures, photo essays, journals, videos, blogs, podcasts, or portfolios. Structure checkpoints and opportunities for formative feedback to support students in successfully completing these projects.  To learn to self-assess the quality of their work, have students use use rubrics, peer-feedback, and/or compare it to exemplary examples.  Whatever forms of assessment you choose, clear communication is critical to their success.  Consider starting each unit with a brief overview of how all the course components fit together and alerting them to upcoming deadlines.  Make sure to inform students how each assessment will be useful for their learning, make expectations as transparent as possible, and be clear about where students can find answers to questions as they arise.  Learn More The Art & Science of Successful Online Discussions (Faculty Focus) Five Discussion Ground Rules for the Online Classroom (Colorado State University Online Blog) Professors Share Ideas for Building Online Community (Inside Higher Ed) Alternative to Exams for Remote Teaching (Teaching@Tufts) Creating Epic Finales or Limping Across the Finish Line (Teaching@Tufts) Curricula for Wicked Problems (Wicked Problems Project) Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT Higher Ed) Inclusive Assessment: Equal or Equitable? (Teaching@Tufts) Selected References Dewsbury, Bryan, and Cynthia J. Brame. “Inclusive Teaching.” CBE—Life Sciences Education 18, no. 2 (April 26, 2019): fe2. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-01-0021. Gikandi, J. W., D. Morrow, and N. E. Davis. “Online Formative Assessment in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature.” Computers & Education 57, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 2333–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004. Hanstedt, P. (2018). Creating wicked students: Designing courses for a complex world. Stylus Publishing, LLC.   Kelly, D., J. S. Baxter, and A. Anderson. “Engaging First-Year Students through Online Collaborative Assessments.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 26, no. 6 (2010): 535–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00361.x.

Is the study of theology worth it? That’s a question you and I might pose to our students at the beginning of every semester. At times, we may have to answer this query for ourselves. At the beginning of each semester, I presume this is a question that students have, particularly because at my university students are required to take three theology courses. The first day of theology classes, then, I offer a value proposition. (Now, mind you, I generally teach moral theology classes primarily to business and pharmacy students.) I tell my students that this course may not position them for their ideal job in a corporation or biomedicine, but that a theology course can help students think, write, and speak with a depth and breadth they before had not known. The subsequent question every term is, “but how will that help me advance in my career?” These developed skills, I tell them, will aid them in living out the challenging and, perhaps, painful realities of life. That has never been truer than in these days of Covid-19. One of the first topics I teach is “narrative.” I invite my students to consider what the foundational stories for different religions are. Conversations extend from the metanarratives that undergird traditional monotheistic religions to Rastafarianism, Wicca, and Mormonism. These class days tend to be lively ones as we move into discussions of the Branch Davidians and the Westboro Baptist Church. Good narratives mature over time as profound experiences impact and challenge them. My parents’ generation had Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Second Vatican Council, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the rise of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Honestly, it made me jealous. I wanted stories to add to my collection, but could not imagine having any of such historical impact as they had. How young and naïve I was! GenXers and I have experienced stories that have forced us too to reevaluate the foundational narratives in which we were grounded. The students in front of me, now on my computer screen, were curious about my generation’s stories. Mind you, when I first started teaching, as I suspect all of us are/were, we are/were our students’ older sibling. Now, I could be their parents and for that reason, they are curious. When asked, I speak of how marginalized groups and their allies consistently have fought for equality, particularly LGBTQIA+ citizens, communities of color, and immigrants; seemingly endless wars in Viet Nam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq; governments, including the United States, having a wide range political scandals; 9/11; and, of course, the information technology revolution. For some reason or another, they are fascinated, and I suspect hungry like I was when I was younger to have their own stories. While some have alluded to the global digital transformation in their lives, there has never been a clear consensus as to what might unite GenZers in a common narrative. Now, there is. They get it. Students recognize that they must understand the profound effect this global health crisis has had on them, and on their narrative. For those who have been grounded in an understanding of who and what God is for them, they will have additional work that may take them places about they least expected to go. What will be required is what the study of theology provides:  some deep thinking, critical writing, and clarity in speaking.

I, like so many, have been flooded with a mixture of emotions during this pandemic and self-isolation. While feelings of fear and anxiety often overcome me, I also have a profound sense of gratitude. I am privileged to be able to take a step back and ask religious questions those deep questions of meaning and value–with fellow religious educators. It is from phone conversations in isolation that Dr. Kathleen O’Gorman and I came to wonder what is this emergent curriculum, or “curriculum of pandemic,” that has descended upon us all, teaching us? What might we learn and how we are we called to respond in meaningful, educative ways?  The first place Kathleen and I thought to process this emergent curriculum was with our learning community, to learn from this pandemic with our students and alums. We invited a small group of about 10 people, all of whom were enthusiastic about this gathering, into a process of introspection and learning. It was apparent from our initial correspondence leading up to and during our first session that we all want to feel connected in some way right now. This affirmed for me the need not just for community, but to create an intentional learning community. I­ –we– longed for a “community of conversation”–to connect and make meaning together. For me, the calling to teach means both teaching and learning and this pandemic called my colleague and I to be more intentional about our praxis as teachers and learners together. Kathleen coined the titled for our virtual sessions “Pandemic Pandemonium.” There is no script or textbook that tells us what we can learn and how we should respond to this global crisis; therefore, we developed a framework of four sessions from which will flow a process of unpacking this curriculum of pandemic. Drawing inspiration from Kathleen’s gifts of music and aesthetics, we framed each one around a different song to evoke our affective sensibilities. In our first session, we set the context for our process of teaching and learning through the pandemic by listening to Sam Cooke sing “A Change Is Gonna Come” set to a video with still images of people standing up for their human rights across the world throughout different moments in history. In sharing our interpretations and insights from this video and song, we discussed how we might connect these historical movements for change to the change emerging before us right now. What change do we want to see from this experience of sheltering in place, from teaching in learning through new modes and mediums, and from recognition the earth is healing itself while we remain still?  We concluded that first session by observing how each movement for change in society was a movement towards deeper inclusion. How, then, is this curriculum of pandemic guiding us towards greater inclusivity? This set the tone for our next session, “Go to your room” (something Mother Earth seems to be telling us right now), and the introspection on our feelings and emotions as we withdraw from everyday life. Following John Lennon’s song, “Isolation,” we invited our group to start thinking about how this time away has opened new patterns of living. How have our feelings given rise to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world and how might we help others (those we serve, family, friends) discern the meaning and value of isolation as we are experiencing it?  Our third session will reimagine how we “Come Together” (using the Beatles cover song by Gary Clark Jr.), by asking: What now? What is the meaning of all this?  What are we learning from gathering in new ways and how does that inform and transform our praxis as religious educators; how does this change in patterns of living call us to rethink our curriculum and praxis towards greater inclusivity? In our final session, we curated a curriculum of closure to be the start of a new beginning. With help from The Beatles again, “Let it Be,” we reflect the meaning of  Sabbath during this time as we ask what is Mother Earth telling us? How are we called by Mother Earth to Let it Be? We end our session with a pastoral plan informed by what we learned and how we are called to respond. I hope to return to these reflections as our process unfolds in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I am sharing this experience in developing a process curriculum to invite others, if you have not already begun to do so, to engage in a process of introspection and discernment with your learning community to uncover how your teaching and learning can respond to a curriculum of pandemic.

With the peculiar upheaval of COVID-19, and the recent, flagrant events of racist violence, what competencies are needed by institutional leadership? What does it mean to lead change in this moment of volatility? What courage is necessary? What approaches in higher education will bring new stability in a more equitable society? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Rev. Stephen Lewis (FTE - Forum for Theological Exploration) and Rev. Matthew Williams (Interdenominational Theological Center).