Resources

A 1997 course by Katie Cannon at Temple University examines "the Black Women's Literary tradition to understand how it functions as a continuing symbolic expression and transformer of value patterns fashioned by the female members of the African American community" with a focus on ethical perspectives.

Training students to identify and traverse the identity politics in the United States begins on the first day of my courses. On day one, I introduce myself, then launch into the syllabus review. In describing the required readings, I hold the book or article in my hand, tell students the kind of text it is (fiction, non-fiction, etc.), then I discuss the author. I identify the race and gender of the author, and give a description of the author’s work in and beyond scholarship. And then I tell the students my rationale for selecting this author and particular text for our conservation. Last year, during this part of the syllabus rehearsal, a white woman student, who I will call Sara, raised her hand while I was waxing on about the authors. Sara (age 50ish, married, middle to upper class, suburban mom of three teen-aged children, devoted church member and avid Jets fan, self-identified as politically liberal) asked that I stop identifying the race of the authors. I have paraphrased this interaction in the following vignette:   Sara said, in a chastising tone, “The race of the authors does not matter. We should read the books regardless of the person’s race.”  I responded, “In our classroom conversation, my race matters, your race matters, and the races of the authors matter. Our voices and our perspectives, our values, our behaviors, and our beliefs are directly connected to our racial identity. No author writes for all people or from a universal perspective. We have to be aware of their perspective to better understand their work.” Sara looked puzzled. I continued, “Sara, when you look at my face do you see the face of an African American woman?” Immediately, Sara looked suspicious.  She strained for what to say. She did not know if she should say she saw my race or if she should say she did not see my race.  Sara said, “I don’t think of you as a black person. I think we should just be people.” Sara gestured as if she had said something obvious. In my mind, I heard her say, “I think we all should just be white people…. normal people . . .  just plain people.” I said, “My race informs me and to ignore my race is to ignore my voice, as well as the voices of my people. Please know that I like being an African American woman. I embrace our ways, wit, and wisdom.”  Sara’s face became quizzical, like she was considering something new and for the first time. I continued, “I think of you as a white woman.” This soft statement hit her with a jolt. Sara’s shock gave way to dismay – she frowned. Seeing her alarm, I suggested that she hold her concern for later in the semester. I went back to my syllabus rehearsal.  When I entered the classroom for the second session, Sara was seated. As I unpacked my briefcase she came up to talk with me. She reported that while she enjoyed reading the African American woman author, bell hooks (our first assigned reading), she did not think hooks was talking to her. Sara said, “I just think bell hooks has such a different perspective . . . I am not sure why this book is assigned for this class.” I told Sara to “hang-in” with the conversation – it was just the beginning.  On the last day of class, as Sara walked out of the door she thanked me for the “nice” course. Her hollow pleasantry reminded me of the way a tourist, while leaving the tram-ride, thanks the guide at the end of the amusement park safari.  I thought of James Baldwin. James Baldwin, acclaimed novelist, legendary essayist, and important human rights champion said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I made a mental note to include writings by Baldwin the next time I taught this course. I love Baldwin’s use of the word face(d). It means to confront, challenge, provoke, even threaten or defy. He is also not so subtly suggesting that people need, if societal change is to be given a chance, to turn and face one another. Baldwin suggests that relationships of respect, decency, decorum, and dignity will change the world for the better, if we have the fortitude, tenacity, and care to make the attempt.The politics of the face is serious territory. The police do not take a mug shot of your feet or elbows. We are known by our faces. We face the world with our faces. Most racial profiling happens in the nanosecond it takes to gaze upon the face. The Sweat on their Face: Portraying American Workers, an exhibit of the Nation Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, says, “the face is the primary canvas of the story of our lives.” I agree. Once Sara signaled on the first day that conversations on social hatred were new to her and that she lacked the experience of challenging the social lies she had internalized, I watched for moments of particular distress and discomfort through the arch of our semester-long conversation. From my recollection, here are the three teachings that also shook Sara: #1) Just as victims of rape are not experts in the crime of rape or experts on rapists, so African American people, with our experience of violation, dehumanization, and oppression are not experts in the sin of racism or the contributing systems of oppression. We are typically, and rightfully so, reactionary. Reactionary is not the same as critically reflective. Please do not expect African American people to inform you about the intricacies of racism. Surviving racism does not equip one to teach about racism. Consult well-informed and mindful white persons who are aware, repentant, and doing the work of equity. There are many people. #2) Even with the sophistication and technological advancements of the 21st century, many white people still do not think they have a race. They still think race is for “other-ed” people – people of brown-hued skin or simply black people. Even so, white people typically do not hesitate, on a census form, to tick the box for Caucasian or white. Given the choices of Asian, Hispanic, African American or mixed they can declare they are white. Other than selecting that box, the everyday behavior is usually one of tension, anxiety, nervousness or just plain confusion about issues of race and racial identity.  They still believe that their racelessness is just being “normal.” The politics of this identity-delusion is debilitating to non-white people. #3) The USA has exported its systemic prejudices and social hatreds around the world.  As an American traveling overseas, being African American has mattered sometimes in dangerous and unpleasant ways. Being an African American has made me a novelty in Japan, an oddity in Korea, a target in Jamaica, an object of suspicion in Ireland and Israel, beloved in Ghana and ogled-at in France. The emotional outpouring, from rage to reverence, was at times overwhelming. The world is quite aware of the racist and stereotypical narratives of blackness in the USA and, for the sake of power and prestige, has chosen to embrace them. As an African American traveling abroad, I was a spectacle, an embodiment of the racist narrative. I was a spectacle as in celebrity or spectacle as in despised – all expressions of objectification, commodification, and all quite scary. Racism in the USA makes it difficult for African Americans to travel the world. It was challenging for Sara to understand that our goal is never to overcome all differences (being post-Obama is not the same as being post-racial), since God clearly created our spectrum of differences. God loves our faces in all their many colors, textures, shapes and sizes. It is when differences are deemed to be deficiencies that the problem of other-ing occurs. When whiteness and maleness are considered “normal” then any person not white and not male are, by base logic, abnormal and inferior. This white supremacist mentality undergirds and maintains social systems which control, sort, are suspicious of, exploit, criminalize or eradicate (quickly or slowly) those who are deemed as other. Facing this reality is our liberation – mine as well as Sara’s.  The Saras of our time are uncomfortable when the lies of the melting pot and assimilation are exposed, countered and rejected.  There is great resistance in allowing the voice of someone who has been othered (bell hooks and me) to speak our perspective. There is surprise, dismay and disorientation to learn that those who have been othered have a perspective of merit, even a perspective that is potentially revelatory. Allowing an Other’s perspective to decentralize previously un-contested norms, values and beliefs takes time, prayer, and patience. As we wait, we must acknowledge that until it is faced we will not be able to find our way forward.  I have an urgency about this. 

Theological education centers on attention. Attending to another person’s thoughts, their arguments, their conceptions – studying, parsing, comparing, etc. This is not a novel claim. The Jewish philosopher Simone Weil, however, claims that there is more going on as we work out a geometry problem, tussle over a difficult argument, or wade through a difficult theological text. Attention in academic studies, she argues, trains us for prayer and for loving our neighbors (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God, 57-66). Weil implies that attention is like a muscle. Giving attention to academic studies trains that muscle so it can be flexed by attending to God in prayer and attending to our others in love. Prayer first. Contemplation consists of attention: “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” Studies train that muscle. More is therefore happening when we carefully attend to the thoughts of others in the theological classroom. Even a geometry problem can accomplish this. If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary, it is almost an advantage. … Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention is wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind. If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer. What is Weil doing? She is shifting the telos of study according to her religious imagination. “Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes.” Rather, “applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer . . . To make this the sole and exclusive purpose of our studies is the first condition to be observed if we are to put them to the right use.” The telos of study—good marks or the aptitude for prayer—orients the student’s motivation and intention. Now love for others. Love for our neighbors is also served through academic studies. Weil’s argument tracks along the same lines as before. Love requires attention. Thus, by training our attention-muscles through academic studies, we are better able to flex those muscles toward our neighbors. She explains:  Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. . . . Only he who is capable of attention can do this. So it comes about that paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need. If Weil is right (I believe she is) then we could say something bold like this: careful, patient, and deliberate attention to the thoughts, arguments, and conceptions of others can serve not only the cultivation of one’s abilities as a theologian, but also one’s capacity for loving attention to God and others. We are bombarded today with distraction and constantly lured with promises of entertainment, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if theological education were forming persons fit for contemplation? Today, partisanship and fear so quickly divides us, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if theological education were forming citizens capable of compassion? What if – dare we dream – that through attention, theological education could train us for love?

Cathy N. Davidson’s The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux is an engaging, enlightening, and empowering call to action. Though its focus is on why and how to transform higher education to meet the needs of today’s students and society, it offers commentary on innovative and effective pedagogy that will be of special interest to Wabash Center readers. If you only have time for a condensed version of Davidson’s recommendations for improving college teaching, read the “Ten Tips for Transforming Any Classroom for Active Student-Centered Learning” (263-67). Davidson lauds 10 techniques: Think-Pair-Share, Question Stacking, Everybody Raise Your Hand, Interview, Class Constitution, Collective Syllabus Design, Collaborative Note Taking, Collaborative Projects with Peer Assessment, Exit Tickets, and Public Contribution to Knowledge. In keeping with Davidson’s central thesis, these techniques serve to invigorate learning in college courses, but their ultimate value is that they best prepare students for life beyond the college gates. Indeed, it is the demands of modern life that prompts Davidson to argue for radically revising the university. America’s system of higher education has reified, she argues, the vision of Charles Eliot, president of Harvard in the late 1800s. Eliot sought (most notably in his essay entitled “The New Education” from which Davidson takes her title) to transform America’s colleges from seminary systems to institutions designed “to train farmers and shopkeepers to be factory workers and office managers” (3). In pursuit of this goal, Eliot, and fellow educational reformers, established the university as we know it: majors, minors, divisions (humanities, social sciences, natural and biological sciences), credit hours, degree requirements, grades, the bell curve . . . class rankings, certification, general education, upper-division electives, . . . professionalization (credentials, accreditation), graduate schools . . . financial aid, college entrance exams . . . tenure . . . school rankings . . . (35-36) and more. By 1925, Eliot’s vision (shaped by his study of German and French models) dominated the landscape of American higher education. Not much has changed, Davidson laments. These features continue to define the college experience for most Americans. But now, they come with anemic “teaching to the test” at all levels of education, crushing student debt, and graduates narrowly trained for specialties that are fast disappearing in the technology-laden world in which we live. Against the current state of affairs, Davidson argues for pedagogy and universities to center on students and aim at preparation for life, not just careers. Davidson documents how the shift from the Industrial Age to our current age (which she dates at 1993 with the dawn of the Internet) has yet to be taken seriously by academics. Doing so, she insists, demands radical rethinking of the college experience. To illustrate the types of changes she advocates as proper responses to the technological age, Davidson points to community colleges and initiatives at universities. LaGuardia Community College in NYC, Arizona State University, and The Red House at Georgetown University receive the lion’s share of her attention. And for good reason. Education at these schools is being rethought and retooled to serve the student and his/her future needs. Actually, as Davidson notes, community colleges have been doing this all along. Founded to serve non-elite students, community colleges succeed by proceeding “from a pedagogy of acceptance. Any growth constitutes success. The student is at the center” (57). Although active learning and student-centered pedagogy benefit students, it is not risk-free. Fear of “losing status” causes many professors and institutions to shy away from adopting the mindset and support systems community colleges embrace. To illustrate the risks, Davidson recounts the story of Alexander Coward, formerly of Berkeley . . . formerly because allegedly his student-centered pedagogy did not sit well with his colleagues (208-210). In addition to the aforementioned “Ten Tips,” those primarily interested in pedagogical issues should read Chapter 3, “Against Technophobia,” and Chapter 4, “Against Technophilia.” Within these two chapters, Davidson offers many, many helpful hints for how to use technology imaginatively and effectively in the classroom.

The Latinx/a/o population is the largest and fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, yet higher education attainment for this community is among the lowest. Latinx/a/os in Higher Education: Exploring Identity, Pathways, and Success addresses topics relevant to the experience of Latinx/a/o students and professionals and illustrates key elements that should be considered in the development of varied pathways to their success.

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe  impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why,  sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  -- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass   The matter-of-factness of the Queen’s statement about believing impossible things is her formidable strength. My contribution to a society that must take seriously its issues of inclusion, equity, eradication of poverty, economic justice, and ecological ruin is showing my students that belief in impossible things is their prophetic obligation. I want to teach my students to be more like the Queen, and less like Alice. The current hegemonic reality would have us believe that the current state of things is all there is. And, how it is now is as it should be – and anything else is impossible. We are distracted from imagining a world of communal mindedness and cooperation. We are taught that justice is impossible, improbable, and, I dare say, imprudent. For some students, the challenge to believe impossible things is the immediacy of being taught by an African American, female professor who has, by the position she holds in the school, authority over them.  “How is it possible,” I hear them attempting to reconcile their cognitive dissonance, “that a person deemed by society to be inferior can be in this place of higher education? She must be a credit to her race; She must be an Affirmative Action hire; she must have slept with somebody to get this kind of job.”  For other students, the challenge to believe impossible things is when they see someone like themselves–same racial identity, same gender, same hair texture, and possessing the same ability to suck my teeth and roll my eyes like a champ. “How is it possible,” I hear them attempting to reconcile their confusion, “that a person like Her can be in this place of higher education? She must think she’s white. She must have left the church–she ain’t Christian. She must be sleeping with somebody to get this kind of job.”  If I can press past the immediate narrowness of some students when gazing upon my Black, female body in my own classroom, I am eager to get to deeper urgencies of believing impossible things for social change.  The politics of inferiority, the oppressions of white supremacy, white nationalism, and the current state of misogyny would have us believe, require us to believe, that the current reality is all that is possible. The status quo truncates the imagination as a way of maintaining control. Unimaginative students routinely resist learning about social transformation and the creativity necessary to disentangle and revision society without systemic oppressions. Every teacher, if you get to teach long enough, develops a shtick. The word “shtick” comes from the Yiddish language meaning “bit”–as in a “comedy bit” performed on stage. If you are not sure if you have a shtick or if you are not sure what it is–ask your students, they know. Or attend the annual end-of-the-year skits where students gleefully parody the faculty.  Keep in mind that imitation is the greatest flattery and smile during your moments. One of my many classrooms shticks goes like this: With a wry smile on my face and beginning with a dramatic pause I pose this question:  Which came first – race or racism?  Some students recognize my wry smile, become cautious--suspicious that this is a trick question. Some students hesitate to answer for fear of getting the answer wrong. A silence wafts through the classroom. I then answer my own question: Racism birthed race and not the other way ‘round.  Students’ faces signal more suspicion, disbelief, and occasionally . . . curiosity.  The silence moves deeper into disbelief and some low-grade fear (like something dangerous is about to happen). Feeling a teachable moment potentially approaching, I keep going: It took the depravity of racist hearts to construct race and not the other way ‘round. Race was created as a social/political system whose ultimate and exclusive aim is to create a permanent social under- caste of human inferiority.   (Dramatic pause, I breathe deeply so students can breathe also.) I continue: Given the spiritual evil necessary to maintain the system of patriarchy, white supremacy and white nationalism, it would make sense to assume that the victims of this social system (all women and children, people of color, the poor, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, disabled folks–for example) should be, and many are, either annihilated, embittered, or paralyzed with fear . . . . Yet, the African American men and women I know, while they have suffered tremendous hardship, oppression, and loss, exemplify a story other than defeat.  When you are a people who know how to believe impossible things, the reality of a situation does not keep you from freedom. I ask for questions and comments, linger only for a little while, and then continue with discussion questions such as: What would it take for you and your people to be able to imagine a more just society-a world without racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism? What obstacles make imagining this society difficult? What is at stake for your people if you do not imagine this world? What is the role and responsibility of church leadership in the more just society? What skills, capacities, and know-how do you need to assist your people in transitioning into a more just society, church, and world? These are not questions proffering a utopian society, nor are they questions for idle flights of fancy or busy-work. Believing in the impossible as well as teaching belief in impossible things is what it will take in order to save the racists and the victims of racism. If we are to teach our students, in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, to endure hardship without becoming hard and to have heartbreak without being broken, then they have to have an imagination that can conjure that which evil says is impossible.