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I was flailing. I was trying to show my students the different features of the videoconferencing tool Zoom that we’d be using synchronously for the rest of the semester, but I didn’t know how to share my computer screen in such a way that would show Zoom itself. Zoom kept hiding. It was our first day back, and I was feeling frustrated and flummoxed. It was not my best moment as a teacher. Or was it? Many of you may be familiar with the work of Carol Dweck. In her book and professional talks posted online (like this one or this one), she describes two types of mindsets: fixed and growth. A fixed mindset means that students believe their qualities, like intelligence, are innate, unmalleable, carved in stone. I get this from students a lot: “I’m just not a good writer,” as if writers come out of the womb good. (Anne Lamott has something to say about this in her brilliant essay, “Shitty First Drafts,” which I’ve assigned in every course I’ve ever taught.) I get the impression that many of my colleagues think the same about teaching: You’re either a good teacher or you aren’t. But those with a growth mindset believe that abilities can be developed over time, through practice and effort; they don’t shy away from challenges and failures because those are opportunities to grow, rather than revelations of unchangeable imperfections best left hidden. Covid-19, and all the uncertainty and upheaval resulting from its spread, is giving us an opportunity to embrace a growth mindset as educators. How can we do so? One of my approaches has been to demonstrate a spirit of curiosity and openness with my students. I had never used Zoom breakout rooms before three weeks ago, but I wanted to try them out with my newly online class. I thought these rooms could help students do the partner and group work they were used to doing face to face. So, I said, “Hey, I’m going to try something out here; let’s see what happens.” I didn’t know what would happen. We were going to find out, together, as co-learners. I remember, a couple summers ago, I was reading so many books from a certain section of the bookstore that my buddy asked me, “Are you just sitting around reading quasi-philosophical self-help books and should I be concerned?” “Yes and unclear” was my reply. One author I was fortunate to come across during this time was Brené Brown. In The Gifts of Imperfection, she introduced me to a phrase I love: “an aspiring good-enoughist.” Many of my friends are drowning right now in self-imposed perfectionism. One spent hours editing a short recorded lecture before posting it on our LMS. If perfection is our aim, however, we may shy away from the very opportunities that would stretch us and challenge us, forcing us to grow—instead opting only into narrow situations that showcase the talents, skills, and knowledge we already possess. We don’t have to be perfect to be good teachers. We don’t have the time, energy, or bandwidth anyhow. Let us all, instead, be good-enoughists. And, while we’re at it, let’s allow our students to see that’s what we’re doing; after all, they look to us as role models. When my daughter was just a baby and she would hear a loud sound—a motorcycle, a lawn mower, a fire alarm—she would look, not toward the noise itself, but up at me. She gauged how she should respond to the world by how I was responding; if I remained calm, she did too. I think it’s the same with students. If we respond to our inevitable (and they are inevitable) mistakes with histrionics or apologies, students will think something bad has happened and react accordingly. If we take our mistakes and failures in stride, and laugh them off, students just might too; they are generally pretty good sports. Failure, of this kind and on this scale, doesn’t have to be a big deal. (If nothing else, the global pandemic has given us all a sense of perspective.) Now is the time for us to model, good-naturedly, what life-long learning looks like. A final key, for me, in embracing a growth mindset, has been to show what learning after a mistake looks like. The next class session, after the Zoom debacle, I came back and shared with my students what I had discovered. After doing some quick Google searches and consulting Zoom’s very helpful tutorials, I could share my screen in such a way that Zoom itself would show. “Look!” I excitedly said. “Look! I’m doing it!” I’m not sure they were as excited as I was, but they had gotten to see my failure . . . and then they got to see the growth that resulted from it. They saw me, their professor, gain a new skill, just as I was asking them to do over the course of our time together. Humility is hard, and may seem altogether too rare, in the academy. Now is the time to embrace it. We’re all learning, we’re all growing. This pandemic is just making it more obvious.

Like many parents of small children, I responded to the COVID-19 crisis by subscribing to Disney+. One of my first dives into animated nostalgia was with the Pixar short Presto, which initially preceded showings of the 2008 masterpiece WALL-E. I watched with bemused horror as the magician, resolute on performing for the packed house, ignores the obvious pleas of his rabbit for a simple carrot and experiences greater and greater injury as he tries to coerce the rabbit to do his bidding. I was glad my children were already asleep. Before long, I was thinking about how some of my own attempts at improving my instruction over the years might sadly resemble the flailing and desperation of the magician Presto.  Our students are hungry, and we risk failing them–and getting hurt in the process–if we lose sight of this. They are hungry for connection, for community, for security, and yes, for learning. I want to feed their hunger, to give them the carrot that will hold them over until something more substantial is available again. But now that all our interactions have been digitized, I have found myself a bit adrift, realizing that much of my impact in the classroom depends on a persona that I perform. The shift to remote teaching and learning has forced me to reckon with my lingering assumptions about students as an audience. I have always seen myself as a lifelong learner, and a fellow-learner with my students. But now, more than ever, I have become aware that I still often treat students like an audience who has paid good money for a seat and impatiently await my magic making. But, like the animated magician who pulls off his trick only when he finally listens to his rabbit, I am realizing that in this crisis teaching and learning works best when students are full partners in the enterprise. My Presto moment might just be responsible for a lasting shift in my pedagogy toward students as collaborators, even co-conspirators. My religious studies courses serve exclusively general education students, so I cannot depend on students’ background knowledge or preexisting curiosity to energize the classroom. For students without personal connections to any religious practice or traditions, finding religious cultures interesting often depends on finding me interesting. I found in my early years as a full-time instructor that sharing my inner “history nerd” captured the imaginations of only some students. Watching a video tape of myself teaching was a formative moment in my professional development during my first semester on the job. My best attempts at good, provocative, open-ended questions fell flat, and I could see on tape how the intellectual energy I felt did not come through for the students. So I worked on conveying more excitement through energetic physicality, modeling inquiry not merely through thoughtful questions, but also through emphatic gestures and wide variations in the volume and tone of my voice. I stopped being afraid to say–loudly–“What?!” to my own attempts at interpretation. Students responded. Visits to my office hours increased. Course evaluations slowly improved. A persona that initially struck me as a farcical performance became less forced, more authentic. I am sure that I improved other skills as an instructor, but the energy I put into the performance seems to have opened up my creativity as well as my sensitivity to students. To perform in this way forced me to imagine the intellectual and emotional position of my students. It made me seem more vulnerable. It helped me make stronger connections to students. Demonstrating how willing I was to challenge myself opened up new possibilities for students to challenge me, too, and to ask potent questions about religious texts. My new instructor’s persona did not suit all pedagogical circumstances, but it became an important tool in my belt. Just as important, this new professorial habitus made me feel differently about teaching, in ways that improved my instruction in other ways, some measurable and tangible, others not. Overnight, Covid-19 took away my stage, my audience. Initial feedback suggested that nearly 1/3 of my students new quarantined lives would not accommodate a steady schedule of video conference discussions, so I opted for asynchronous approaches. Optional video office hours gave me some opportunities to speak with students face to face, but not every student would “attend” or watch the recordings. I found I could not fit all my expressiveness into a small box on a tablet screen. Discussion forums facilitate authentic discussions of our shared texts, but it becomes impossible to gauge quickly the reactions and comprehension of thirty students to a 100-word follow-up post on one thread among dozens in a forum. But I cannot, like the magician Presto, continue to perform and prestidigitate for an audience because that audience has more important things to worry about under the present circumstances. If learning is to happen now, we must be even more attentive than ever to what students need. On the one hand, this has meant above all simplifying, paring away inessential elements in order to get to the core of my objectives. I have cut down the length of reading assignments; no longer convinced that there is virtue inherent in testing students’ ability to find the important passages in a challenging text, only then to discern meaning in them. I have cut down discussion questions from four of five to one or two as students are discussing asynchronously need a focused conversation so they aren’t talking past one another. But it has also meant jettisoning performance in favor of collaboration, in and through the humble discussion forum. In other words, I have been challenged to accommodate and facilitate students’ intellectual agendas rather than skillfully molding them to my own. This means asking authentic questions, but it also means responding authentically. Without my in-person performance of classroom leadership and inquiry to subtly redirect, I have had to be more honest about when an answer is off topic and needs clarification,. Students’ links to videos or blog posts on a topic, drawn from corners of the Internet I never visit, have forced clearer and more effective conversations about evaluating sources (and about the differences between scholarly and other sorts of discourse). I have embraced the leveling effect of having my replies treated the same way as my students’ by a democratizing Moodle interface. And I have shared my genuine surprise, sadness, laughter, and joy at the insights and compassion students have expressed in plain-text prose of 100 to 250 words. In response to the crisis, I have stopped performing and started dialoging more thoroughly than before. It is an experience that I hope I will be able to translate back into face-to-face instruction, whenever that should return.

During a crisis, we need trustworthy practices. In challenging circumstances, when our bodies are anxious and tense, learners and teachers need a sturdy undergirding to navigate life as thoughts race and emotions fluctuate. At least, that is my view as a pastoral theologian. Ten years ago, Denise Dombkowski Hopkins and I published a book entitled, Grounded in the Living World: The Old Testament and Pastoral Care Practices (Eerdmans, 2010). We briefly explored the unfortunate use of platitudes in ministry; phrases such as ‘it could be worse,’ ‘she is in a better place,’ ‘look on the bright side.’ Clichés and platitudes are superficial thoughts and comments that stifle further exploration as they reduce complexity to simplicity. Proof-texting with the Bible also functions as a platitude. People are not comforted and much harm can occur through the use of these seemingly innocuous remarks. In a time of crisis, we realize how unsatisfying a platitude can be. A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for a podcast on the topic of care during a pandemic. I responded to a question about “rethinking” leadership practices by suggesting we need not “over think.” A former student and current pastor wrote saying how much he appreciated the passing reference. We need practices that can hold us together since many people are, in his words, “operating in a type of panic mode that is causing an overload to our systems.” Platitudes such as ‘this, too, shall pass,’ and ‘God is bigger than this virus’ serve as knee jerk thought responses that prematurely call the question rather than open the conversation. Recently, I was listening to recording of Joko Beck, founder and teacher at the Zen Center of San Diego. Joko died in 2011, but her teaching lives on. She had a no-nonsense, platitude-free style. I became familiar with her teaching while a Ph.D. student in Claremont, California. I relearned what I had heard many times before and seek to communicate in my pastoral care classes: meditation practice helps to release the thoughts that loop in the mind. Meditation is a kind of unloading of the system. Contemplative prayer and other spiritual practices serve a similar purpose: to let go of the thoughts and tap into God’s presence. Psalm 46 calls for calm amidst a creation in chaos and a world in turmoil. “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (v 10). “Be still” means “to stop, desist, don’t do anything.” That’s the heart of spiritual practice: to be still in a world turned upside-down. Even if you cannot be calm, I tell students, at least practice being less anxious than the people in your care. The world teaches us to keep pushing the “thinking” panic button, but pastoral leaders need to model a healing alternative for showing up in the world. That alternative allows for the embrace of our whole experience regardless of whether we are seething in anger at injustice, fearing for others’ and our own lives, grieving losses, or reeling with anxiety. Embodied spiritual practice makes space for it all. I have discovered it easier to foster such practices in the online class. I find myself teaching more boldly. Students can engage freely without being self-conscious. They get credit whether or not they engage the practices, as long as they write a brief reflection. Most students do all of them; a few opt out on occasion. The evaluation method signals their inner authority is what matters. Some probably still write to please me. Overall, though, I trust students to learn through their own meaningful activity. The abrupt shift to online teaching is simply a mirror of a new unknown reality into which we have all been catapulted. I know myself as a co-learner with class participants. I engage the practices, too. I know that being with fear and anxiety is immensely difficult as agitation stirs in my body. I know being present in and to experience takes effort. Yet, I also know from years of practice, that being still puts us in touch with the energy forces at work within and around us. All is quiet in the eye of the hurricane, but getting there/being here is a challenge. Platitudes run roughshod over experience. They put a superficial happy face on matters. Yet another possibility exists. The poet Rumi muses: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Spiritual practice allows for holding the both/and together instead of denying the negative or forcing the positive. It is the field of being and heart of pastoral caring. Suggested spiritual practice drawn from various traditions: • Sit in a comfortable position • Notice and let go of all platitudes/thoughts/feelings • Focus on your breath and/or sense your heartbeat • Acknowledge what’s happening in your body • Be still for a while I’ll meet you there in the stillness.

This volume combines insights from secular sexuality education, trauma studies, and embodiment to explore effective strategies for teaching sexuality and religion in colleges, universities, and seminaries. Contributors to this volume address a variety of sexuality-related issues including reproductive rights, military prostitution, gender, fidelity, queerness, sexual trauma, and veiling from the perspective of multiple religious faiths. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars present pedagogy and classroom strategies appropriate for secular and religious institutional contexts. By foregrounding a combination of "perspective transformation" and "embodied learning" as a means of increasing students’ appreciation for the varied social, psychological, theological and cultural contexts in which attitudes to sexuality develop, the volume posits sexuality as a critical element of teaching about religion in higher education. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and libraries in the fields of Religious Studies, Religious Education, Gender & Sexuality, Religion & Education, and Sociology of Religion. (From the Publisher)

The term “pedagogies of cruelty” was created by the Argentine-Brazilian, feminist, anthropologist Rita Laura Segato.[1] Her development of the term has to do with the ways we must learn nowadays to get used to the cruelty of our times. This can be clearly seen in the ways governments are dealing with the SARS-Covid-19. As we have seen, politicians are telling us that this virus, whose first name is always absent, SARS- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is just a flu and some necessary death will happen in order for the economy to go back to normal if we all want to survive.[2] The perversity of capitalism demands an education based on violence, terror, and cruelty. One that destroys any form of solidarity or empathy. We have to learn to see suffering, cruelty, and death as normal, and even inevitable presences in our times.  Since the liturgies of the state must be liturgies of cruelty, control, and death if it wants to survive, the pedagogies of this capitalistic economic system train us that we must accept any liturgical form of cruelty necessary. In other words, necropolitics needs necropedagogies. Thus, we must get used to the prison system because this is necessary for our safety. We must get used to debt because there is no way to live without debt. We must get used to climate collapse otherwise we can’t get all we want. We must get used to health care offered to some people and not all because the costs are too high to provide for all. We must get used to poor people dying because they have no reason to exist. We must get used to walls against foreigners because we can’t accept all immigrants. We must get used to mental illness because this is a crazy world. These “new” pedagogies of cruelty appear as a continuation of previous pedagogies of cruelty already normalized in our social living: we have already gotten used to the notion of private property, staggering salary differences, lack of rights for workers, use and abuse of women, the need to be constantly at war, and so on. The co-opting of the commons by private sectors have financialized health, education, and the earth, turning what is common into “resources” owned by a few proprietors. Due to that, Segato says we cannot understand the capitalism of our time without thinking about the owners of the world’s richness. The speed of the concentration of wealth is alarming, eroding the world’s entire networks of systems and balances. The case for education is the same. Turned into profit, we must now get used to education being for the few and accept its systems of cruelty. Thus, we must get used to student loans and large amounts of debt because higher education is necessarily costly. We must get used to the gap between schools’ administrators and teachers because, you know, it’s a matter of responsibility. We must get used to working for big endowments that grow off the exploitation of the earth and people because we need to offer a high-quality education. We must get used to paying adjunct teachers less and no benefits so we can compete in the market. The same argument surfaces in Brown University’s president Christina Paxson recent article where she calls for returning to campus this Fall. She says: “The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple—tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.”[3] In other words, school is based on profit and we, the people, not the state, not the government, must pay the price for its existence. It’s simple! We must pay the salaries of high ranking business educators too. Pedagogies of cruelty aim at depleting any source of solidarity and any form of vincularidad, of connection between people, people with animals, and the earth. We must learn to cope with the pain of the other and make sure to pay attention to ourselves since this is a vicious world and we must survive at any cost. Using military strategies of deflating the power of pain of the other, pedagogies of cruelty teach us to look at the death of other and say: such is life, or what can we do, or I am sorry and move on.  Who cares if the largest number of deaths due to SARS-Covid-19 are in poor areas and among minority people? Who cares if black people are dying in greater numbers? Who cares if poor white people are dying? Who cares if migrants are dying in private prisons or if black people are dying in prisons? They are all already expelled from society. What can we do? This is the crux of the pedagogies of cruelty: to take away any sense of agency and political action from us. We are lost. Both main political parties are suffused with these pedagogies even if in different modules and intensities. We feel we have no way to go. When we teachers go to the classroom, we come already indoctrinated by these pedagogies. To care for the students is getting more and more difficult. Both because they are not our business and because we must protect our schools so we can keep our standing. If we can fulfill the “learning outcomes” we are doing our job. The subjectivities of our students paired with their objective lives must be placed in a second plane of awareness. At the end, they are on their own as we are on our own too. We can lose our jobs at any time. Unknowingly, we reflect in some way or another, these pedagogies of cruelty in our classrooms. Our task then is to constantly raise a sign and scream: NO! we must continue to be in solidarity! We must continue to create bonds of affection and care! We must keep the threads of vincularidad, of connection, of mutual belonging. We must join other groups and expand the public spaces that have been encroached on by capitalism. We must foster communities of alterity, of other forms of living, thinking and relating to life. In Latin America, there are many communities who live on the exteriors of our systems: indigenous, quilombolas, raizales, palenqueras, communities led by women in the Amazon and the Zapatistas.[4] They are the deepest target of pedagogies of cruelty, for they still hold a counter narrative to the system. However, they are the ones who can teach us how to resist, how to create pedagogies of affection, of relationality, of vincularidad, of production of collective means of care and a common life with other people, species, and the earth. The task at hand is immense or even impossible. But as somebody said: Who said the impossible wouldn’t be difficult? [1] Pedagogies of Cruelty is a development of Hannah Arendt’s political education in Hanna Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. Segato understands the current form of ‘capitalism of cruelty’ as one that creates forms of education to keep the edifice of the system protected and moving. In her words, “the pedagogy of cruelty is the system's reproduction strategy… which is “absolutely essential to the market and capital in this already apocalyptic phase of its historical project.” in Rita Laura Segato, Las Nuevas Formas De La Guerra Y El Cuerpo De Las Mujeres (Argentina: Tinta Limón, 2013), 23, 80 [2] Trump’s Deadly Mistake In Comparing Coronavirus To Flu, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-flu-comparison-trump/?comments=1; Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living,' https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493879-texas-lt-governor-on-reopening-state-there-are-more-important-things; Chris Christie argues for reopening economy because "there are going to be deaths no matter what," https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-christie-reopening-economy-deaths-no-matter-what/ [3] Christina Paxson, College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-colleges-universities.html [4] Eliane Brum, The Amazon Is A Woman, https://atmos.earth/amazon-rainforest-indigenous-activism-history/

Serving as both a campus pastor and an adjunct instructor, I know that web-based teaching can feel disconnected for the students I'm called to serve. I'm also not satisfied with this reality. Thankfully, neither are my colleagues. Together, we're learning how to better design our web-based content to move from online teaching to digital formation. Formation is teaching that is received and incorporated into the development of a student’s knowledge, skill, vocation, or identity; all formation includes teaching, but not all teaching results in formation.  My desire to teach at the college level came from a yearning, even a calling, to connect with students in their critical years of identity development and vocational exploration. I want to empower them with reason, wisdom, and knowledge that they might find not just lucrative careers, but rewarding lives. In other words, I desire to teach in a way that promotes formation. Online education doesn't change that intent, but it surely changes the methods.  • Relate your pedagogy to student's priorities. Many of my students now have entirely different schedules than when we were all on campus. Some are out of work entirely, while others are working twice as many hours in shipping centers and grocery stores to make up for job loss experienced by other family members. Expecting everyone to be available at the time we agreed upon when the world wasn’t in the midst of a pandemic doesn’t work with the entirely different set of priorities that have emerged for them—and for us. Adjusting some class times and providing asynchronous modules has been essential in retaining student engagement. • Reformat your office (on campus or at home) to enhance engagement. There are many content creators who have helped us think through simple logistics to make recorded and live interactions more engaging to your audience. This short and particularly helpful clip from the VlogBrothers offers some insight into space, lighting, and equipment. Helping your students see your face, hear your voice, and appreciate your context provides multiple points of connection for those on the other side of the screen. • Augment--or avoid--information dumps. Information dumps are a mixed bag. For many of our courses, a certain amount of information is essential. Many of us are used to giving that information via lectures, while others utilize activities in class that require creativity. While it’s relatively easy to record a lecture for students to watch, that doesn’t necessarily promote content retention. Youki Terada provides a helpful literature review and provides five strategies to promote increased cognitive recall. I’ve found success with two of those suggestions in particular. ◦  Peer-to-Peer engagement, a common tool in physical teaching, can still be accomplished in online learning. If meeting in a synchronous class, technology like Zoom allows educators to separate the class into smaller groups to promote discussion among peers and then return to the larger group for a report back on their discussion. In asynchronous models, additional assignments to meet outside of the lecture and reading provide students a similar opportunity. Students can record brief summaries of the conversation and send them to the instructor. This increases their repetition of the information as well as provides accountability for participation.  ◦  ​​Incorporating images with teaching helps many types of learners access an additional reference point for the essential information. I’ve had particular success utilizing a core image to guide a theme, sometimes for one class, a section, or even an entire semester. This provides a sort of touchstone, to which other selected images then relate. One hint here: too many images can become distracting and reduce student interest. I only utilize images--and, at times, videos--for major themes in any given class (usually about 3-5 per class).  • Gamifying still increases engagement. My mother-in-law, Kim Conti, is a math whiz and Senior Lecturer with SUNY-Fredonia. She taught me the wonders of Kahoot, a learning platform she’s used to rave reviews in her classroom for courses like Math for School Teachers. Quizlet, another resource she commonly uses, reports that 90% of students who use it earn higher grades. These tools allow users to utilize content created by other professionals or create their own games. Initially designed for use in a physical classroom, they’re introducing new features for web-based interactions.  In all of this, it’s important to remember that alternative delivery methods aren’t lesser delivery methods. We may, however, have less skill at these methods, which requires more of us to learn and employ new ways of forming our students. That, then, is the key to doing this all well. Simply taking all of our in-person content and deploying it in the easiest fashion (for us) on the web can be called online teaching, but it doesn’t necessarily promote digital formation. In periods of crisis--and indeed, in all eras of education--we ought to design courses in ways that promote true formation. The best online teaching utilizes web-based tools to create points of contact that foster digital formation. The above suggestions can enhance our practices in ways that promote digital formation through our delivery of online teaching.

In a previous post on this blog, I reflected on a common misperception among students preparing for ordained ministry and other leadership roles in Christian community: that studying theology in a formal sense is not of obvious utility in pursuing and exercising one’s larger vocation. I offered several reasons why that might be the case. And I described an assignment I had developed and used for the first time as a result of participating in the Wabash Center’s Teaching with Digital Media workshop. This project entailed making and sharing memes on theological themes and then reflecting on what was learned through that exercise. The goal was to give them a concrete experience of selecting specific theological concepts to communicate to a specific audience in order to elicit specific formational outcomes. The assignment required students to do small-scale, but active, public theologizing and employ techniques of metacognition to help them perceive more clearly the need for solid theological grounding as part of their formation and, by extension, for the formation they will be responsible for in others. For this semester, I created an assignment that amplified that intention by requiring them to offer a bit of formal theological instruction in a more direct and standard mode, but still in a digital form. The prompt for the assignment was this: Imagine that you are the rector of a program-sized parish. In substantive conversation with at least five readings assigned [in the previous unit], create a 5–7 minute presentation to teach your clergy staff about how one’s eschatological imagination can be a resource when engaging those of other faiths or of no faith. Create a TED-style talk, a narrated PowerPoint, a VoiceThread, or a video of another kind that your staff can view on their own time. It must include video, sound other than just your voice, and still images. Think carefully about what it is you want them to know and tailor the use of the technology to ensure that it is communicated to them clearly. Focus on the theology at the heart of your teaching. Ground your theology in the sources and be sure you let your hearers know when ideas are not your own, especially if you quote anyone’s writing. Students were given a deadline by which these presentations needed to be complete. I then posted them as separate threads in a Moodle forum open to the class. There was then a second deadline by which each student was “required to have watched all of the presentations and to have made substantive comments of a theological and/or pedagogical nature on at least three of them.” Finally, there was a third and final deadline by which students were “required to have replied thoughtfully to all comments made” on their work. I then viewed all the presentations and read through the discussions, and I assessed the projects based on a previously provided rubric of seven criteria, each with four levels: above standards, meets standards, near standards, and below standards. The seven criteria (with the maximum number of points earnable for each indicated in parentheses) were: use of sources (30), original and critical thinking (15), structure of presentation (15), pedagogy, meaning the clarity and achievement of the presenter’s learning outcomes (10), required elements (10), comments on peers’ presentations (10), and responses to peers’ comments (10). Interestingly, students were less intimidated by this assignment than by the meme assignment. Presumably, this has to do with the medium: all students have experienced an instructional presentation online, but not all are familiar with the syntax and culture of meme-making. During the Wabash workshop, we were encouraged to assign multimedia projects of this kind with very short time durations. Nearly universally, however, students bemoaned not having enough time to communicate all they wanted to say, wishing they had been able to provide more nuance in their presentations. I was surprised, but gratified, by this. Next year, I will increase the time limit, but I will also warn them that more time means a greater temptation to wander too far from the central idea the presentation is meant to communicate and that they must diligently maintain that focus throughout. The extent to which most students readily grasped the importance of providing ongoing theological formation for their clergy staff was highly gratifying. They attended to that task with rich creativity, substantive theology, and an inviting personal presence. As teachers-to-be, I think it was useful for them to see themselves and their colleagues in this role. Students were eager to discuss pedagogy in the forum, but a little less forthcoming about their specific theological choices. As the one evaluating and providing feedback on their approaches to the theological formation of others, I would like to know more about that and I will ask for more detail about that in the future. Overall, the use of digital media in connection with this assignment appears to have ignited the imaginations of the students to think about doing theological formation in the milieu they are most likely to do this in their careers: the parish. Education in formal theology in the seminary is meant to equip students for bringing the riches of the theological heritage and discipline to bear in the work of ministry. This assignment seems to have contributed well to that outcome.