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In a previous blog, I surmised that the diversity of students within theological education is one of its greatest strengths and one of its deepest challenges. One reason that theological institutions comprise among the most diverse student populations in higher education is access. Comparatively speaking, theological schools have fewer barriers to enrollment versus other graduate schools in terms of acceptance rates and tuition costs.In 2023, the average acceptance rates for Master of Divinity and Master of Arts admissions across all member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools was 68 percent and 72 percent respectively. In the same year, the average acceptance rate for law school admissions in the United States was roughly 42 percent. Some law schools, such as Yale and Harvard, had acceptance rates under 10 percent. The cost of theological education is also significantly lower than many other graduate programs. For example, the annual tuition of Harvard Law School ($77,000) is more than double the annual tuition of Harvard Divinity School ($31,000) and more than triple the annual tuition of Columbia Theological Seminary ($22,000), the school where I teach.Theological schools therefore enroll students of all ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, genders, and nationalities. Over the past twenty years or so, many theological institutions have also taken further steps to include a wider range of students through the implementation of additional learning modalities, such as fully online degree programs, alongside in-person education.I have witnessed several evolutions in my seminary classroom over the last dozen years. The first change largely consisted of more diversity across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and denomination. Straight cisgender white Presbyterian students comprised the majority, but I was teaching more students of color, more LGBTQ+ students, and more students from various Christian traditions.The second change entailed increasing generational and vocational diversity alongside the ongoing demographic shifts due to the first change. There is now no one clear and discernable identity marker that represents the majority student population in my classroom. In terms of age, some students are in their twenties and thirties and others are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. Some will preach their first sermon at my seminary whereas others have been preaching for years. Some are working full-time in congregational ministries and other professions as they study at my seminary. Some are from the United States and others are from Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and other nations. Some belong to theologically liberal and progressive denominations whereas others worship in conservative and fundamentalist churches.These differences present rich opportunities for mutuality and reciprocity as well as potential pitfalls of misunderstanding and conflict in theological education. I plan to further engage these matters in future blogs, but I want to conclude this reflection with one aspect of diversity that I find simultaneously inspiring and perplexing: The rise of multivocational students who are pursuing their seminary education while also working full-time as well as caring for their families and fulfilling other important obligations.I am grateful that these students are in my classroom, and many have joyfully shared with me that my seminary’s commitment to greater access has made it possible for them to enroll. Because these students carry multiple responsibilities, some understandably struggle to complete assignments on time and adequately prepare for class sessions. Nearly all my students take three or more courses in our fall and spring terms because my seminary’s most generous scholarships covering the entire cost of tuition (and the entire cost of tuition and fees for African American students) are not available with part-time enrollment.When encountering unsteady student performance, it would be immature and harmful for theological educators like me to respond with petty expressions of anger and annoyance. Yet I also feel that it is my pedagogical imperative to effectively manage class participation and course engagement. I am keenly aware that a good number of my students, including some with the busiest schedules, are faithfully doing their work, and they are rightly discouraged when some of their peers are ill-equipped for face-to-face discussions and absent or perpetually tardy in online forums. Small group activities are probably the most dismaying and frustrating when there are varying levels of student preparation. I continue to grapple with how to lean into access and compassion without compromising my standards of academic integrity and excellence.

As I said in my earlier blog in this series, it can be a relief for teachers to know that making a course more antiracist isn’t only about introducing fraught topics and crossing one’s fingers that students have the self-awareness to handle them; antiracism can be present structurally, in much the same way that racism can be present structurally. In this blog, I will explore two practices I use in my own teaching to help promote a more antiracist learning environment, neither of which involve staging contentious debates or calling out individuals to speak on their experiences. While neither practice can suddenly create a perfectly antiracist classroom, they can help move one’s overall teaching farther along that spectrum.The first place to start is examining imagery usage in one’s class. I personally came late to PowerPoints in my teaching (only really becoming proficient in slides during remote-synchronous learning in the pandemic when writing things on the board was no longer an option), so imagery for me was initially confined to my online course structure in my LMS. I dislike “plain” pages with nothing but text, so I was habitually using stock images on assignments and pages to offer some visual breaks – close-ups of water, forest photos, and so on. This continued until I was slotted to teach Women in the Bible and started exploring imagery for the Biblical figures I planned to focus on. Initial Google Image searching yielded everything from cartoons to Renaissance oil paintings and everything in between – but the enduring theme was that most representations depicted Bible characters as white, white, white!This was irritating on multiple levels. Historical accuracy was certainly a factor, but even if we could all agree that nobody really knows what Ruth and Naomi looked like, why do so many artists seem to assume they were pale-skinned and fair-haired? (The answer, in short, is white supremacy and Eurocentric Christian bias, but if you’re reading a blog like this one, you probably already knew that). I was saved in that course by discovering James C. Lewis’s Icons of the Bible artistic photography series, a project that depicts Bible figures more accurately with models who are exclusively people of color. Sweet relief!Once slide decks became a more typical staple of my teaching techniques, then, I already had some experience realizing that the way I depicted people and communities on these slides would affect my students’ imagination. I teach at a women’s college, so I started by ensuring that my stock images included far fewer men than women, and then aimed to depict a wide range of racial diversity in each slide series. In teaching my class on Bodies in Christian Theology, I also learned to emphasize size diversity, visible disability, and visible queerness to continually enforce the implicit curriculum that Theology is for everyone and is done by everyone. For those who mostly use slides for text, I encourage you to experiment with the color and liveliness that comes with human images – and to use two or three stock photos rather than just one at a time. PowerPoint’s Design function can help you work them in tidily, and you have another subtle antiracist practice in your toolkit.

I was the only Hispanic student in my elementary school. In high school I was always in some kind of conflict because I was still the only Hispanic. My whole life I have had to learn to navigate a culture in which I stood out for various reasons. This in-betweenness has characterized my life since then. It is like living in the hyphen between Hispanic-American.[i] I have studied and gained my education where I was a minority. I have dealt with microaggressions and full-out aggressions of various sorts since I was a child. So now that I have a PhD and am a Director at the institution where I am employed, have things changed?No. I am now the “Hispanic Professor.” Some students come to my class guarded and assume that I am “liberal” just because I am Hispanic. Some people have the audacity to think that I am a “token” professor and am here although I really did not earn my place. As Hispanic/Latin@ my point of view is not the same as theirs and naturally, since Hispanics do not have education and are not educated, my viewpoint carries less weight than that of other professors. As a corollary, my judgment as a program director is faulty since Hispanics don’t think. People come to my office and are surprised that I am “tall for a Latino.” I have been asked “Are you really Hispanic?” simply because I speak English relatively well. However, the question I am most often asked is, “Where are you from?” Like, “Where are you ‘really’ from?” It is as if people just want to pigeonhole me, label me, and keep me in their neat little place in their social constructs, especially that social construct that sees Hispanics as wetbacks, illegals, foreigners, and not truly American.I read The Merchant of Venice in High School. The lines I remember most in this play are when Shylock the Jew states,Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?[ii]Shylock was making an important self-discovery. Was he a villain just because of his Jewish heritage? Did he not also have feelings, passions, and senses and live like everyone else? These lines help us understand Shylock’s posture throughout the play. But for me, they point to something that I have longed for since childhood. At some point, I want to be known by everyone as a fellow human being. I do not wish to be limited by my bronze skin, ethnicity, or the nationality of my parents and grandparents.I am always mindful of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “I Have a Dream.”[iii] Please do not misread me, I have not faced any of the cruelties that he or those in the Civil Rights struggle did. Nevertheless, his speech is a constant reminder that our mental schemes need transformation. What hits home with me are these lines: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”This is the cruelty of our own society. We assume all kinds of mental and social constructs based upon the mere outward appearance of a person. The outward appearance is but one of the many dimensions of a human being. It does not account for the mind, the psyche, the spirit, or the soul of a person. It does not take into account the personal story of that individual and the experiences that have shaped him or her. It does not take into account the spirituality and faith of these people and the beauty and creativity of the Black Church, or the Latina Church.[iv] While a person’s phenotype may reveal some things, a common history, a common ancestry, it does not in and of itself define the totality of that human being. And as those who study humans know, humanity has a powerful soul that dares to dream, that challenges the status quo, that questions the way things are, that invites the divine to enter their lives to rearrange our brokenness into the image, likeness, and goodness of God.So, I am one of the most educated Hispanics/Latinos in my community. I still am reminded on a daily basis of the need for humility and patience with my fellow human beings, who, having much less formal education than me, have pigeon-holed me into the mold of “the Hispanic professor.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Sarah Menkedick, “Living on the Hyphen,” October 14, 2014,https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-86-fall-2014/living-on-the-hyphen. See also Justo González, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 79.[ii] William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” 3.1.57-66. References are to act, scene, and line. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/read/3/1/#line-3.1.57.[iii] National Public Radio, “Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech in its Entirety,” https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.[iv] Church in Spanish is iglesia, a female term, hence “Latina.”

If you teach long enough, you will teach a course that feels flat, has low morale, or even fails.  While a totally ruined course is rare, there are moments when the sinking, the malaise—yours and that of the students, happens.  We all know this experience.If you have never taught a course that has tanked, then you have likely been a student in a course that has. No real need to recount or describe all the ways a course can fail—the ways a course can “go south” are legion. The more important emphasis is to know that when a course is collapsing it can be rescued. When you feel the course sinking …...do not blame yourself.do not blame the students.do not blame the administration.do not blame your family.do not blame your pets.do not blame the moon phase.do not blame the state of the nation.do not blame the national economy.do not blame climate change.Blaming is ineffective. Finding fault, placing fault, shaming, guilting or scapegoating rarely corrects the problem. Sinking courses are not saved through blame.Do not ignore the situation or pretend that, without adjustment, it will mend. If you sense that there is trouble with the course, the students know there is trouble with the course. When you find yourself watching the clock during your own class session – this is a clue that something needs to be adjusted, altered, changed.Resist the impulse to knuckle down, grin and bear it.Resist the impulse to stay-the-course, stick to your guns!Resist the impulse to “right-fight” and believe whatever you planned, how you planned, is best and “be damned!” anyone who will not comply with your plans.Consider that rescuing a course might take a multi-pronged approach. The recovery of the course might need support from others. Don’t be a hero - please ask for help. If you feel as if the course is weak, ask for help. If you feel lost or disoriented, ask for help. If you do not know how you feel or what to do, ask for help.What help?Get a new perspective, fresh eyes, a more seasoned approach, an empathetic listener. Talk to colleagues. Talk with a trusted colleague at your school, or a trusted colleague beyond your school. You might talk just once, or you might talk several times. Describe the incident or incidents and ask them to listen to what might be changed to strengthen the course.Consider asking a trusted colleague to observe your teaching and then assist you with reflection. These talks are not for confessing to being an imposter. Resist reducing these conversations to disclosing your deep-seated anxieties about public performance (save that for your therapist). Use these conversations to troubleshoot, problem solve and strategize for better teaching and strengthening of your course design.Consider, at the beginning of the semester, creating a small reflection group of colleagues (3 or 4 people) for a semester long conversation so when the course feels like it is not going well you have established conversation partners. The group might be organized around studying teaching resources, together.Talk with a trusted student to get feedback. Talk with a small group of students and ask their opinion. Perhaps, take class time to ask the entire class for feedback and suggestions.Talk to human resource personnel, consult the faculty handbook, know your Title IX procedures. Sometimes bullying behaviors are the culprit in troubled classroom environments.What might be needed?Consider that you might need to recast elements of the syllabus. Consider creating different assignments, adjusting timelines, subtracting some readings or adding new kinds of readings. Add a field trip. Invite a guest speaker.Ask yourself about yourself. Are you too tired to teach well? Are you bored in your own course? Are you anxious? Are you distracted? Are you disappointed, grieving or just sad? Do you have an experience of belonging in your institution and in your own classroom? Your vibe radiates to the students and permeates all aspects of the course.Are the materials in the course too advanced for the students or too inconsequential? Are the materials culturally aligned and relevant to the students’ experiences and expectations? What story are you inviting the students into—is it a story of their imaginations and aspirations?What are the larger happenings of the school, community, region and country that are affecting your classroom? What would it mean to weave these happenings into the conversation?Perhaps it is the students - by which I mean – perhaps you do not know the students and their lives well enough. In what ways can you get better acquainted with your students. Do your students come to class tired after a long day of work? Are your morning students tired after having worked all night? Are they taking too many courses? If they are rested, are they hungry while in your class? Awareness of the conditions of your students might help with addressing some of the malaise.Do not be surprised when a course tanks. It happens to the best of teachers. When a course is “not going well,” do not abandon it or your students. Learn, by experience, how to adjust and adapt to create a meaningful experience for your learners and for yourself.