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I was on educational leave in the fall and working, primarily, on a religion and disability textbook. Of the many things I learned (one of which was how very little it turns out I know about religion, the subject for which I have my doctorate; this was humbling!), the fact that there is relatively little treatment of disability in religious studies became quite clear to me. Disability goes unmentioned in canonical texts in the field and introductory textbooks, including the one from which I assign chapters. Unless I was reading specific volumes devoted to the topic--or poking around our disciplinary journal, which we’re lucky to have--it rarely came up. As a person who attends to disability regularly in lots of parts of my personal and professional life (e.g., this recent presentation on inclusive pedagogy for AAR), I also have to admit that I haven’t really integrated disability into my courses, besides the specific one I teach on Religion and Disability. In the past, I’ve made no mention of disability in my lower-level, introductory Religions of the World classes or my upper-level electives, such as Religion and Film or Race and Religion. This is not the case with other markers of identity—gender, class, race—which I routinely note, represent, and try to get students to reflect on. A quick search of our Wabash blog posts shows that disability is not a popular topic. And, in general, “higher ed has been slow to recognize disability as an identity group or include it in programming around diversity and inclusion.” Some scholars, like Jay Domage in Academic Ableism, have even argued that higher education in the U.S. has been specifically designed to exclude people with disabilities. Disabled people account for the largest minority group in the world. On college campuses, we really don’t know just how many students and colleagues have a disability because there is so much underreporting, likely due to all the barriers to disclosure. It’s a lot, though. And, as with any demographic, including the religious, there is immense diversity within the disability community. Disabilities can range from hearing to learning, from movement to mental health. They can be lifelong, from birth, or shorter term. Some folks are proud of their disability and wouldn’t change it for the world, believing it gives them gifts and connections they wouldn’t have otherwise. Other folks with disabilities experience impairment and suffering and wish their lives had turned out differently. Some can pass, although it’s not always beneficial to them. Others have disabilities that are always or immediately apparent to others. Some people prefer “person-first” language (e.g., “a person with ADHD”); others prefer “identity-first” language (“a deaf person”), which allows them to claim, unapologetically, disability as a central and important part of who they are. People with the same disability can experience it very differently. What binds people together in this group is the way society is still not designed for them and the barriers they experience (environmental, social, legal) that result. Awareness and understanding about disability remains woefully lacking on college campuses. COVID has not helped. College students with disabilities experience discouragement, debasement, insecurity, isolation, and cycles of disempowerment. Accommodations are resisted, disabilities are disbelieved. And, when we talk about disability, we tend to think only of students. However, of course, our colleagues may have disabilities too. In our religion classrooms, we can assume there will be students with disabilities enrolled. We don’t need to wait for disclosure, some “accommodation” letter about a single person, to begin considering how to make our courses accessible and welcoming. Let’s be proactive, rather than reactive. This is the entire point of Universal Design for Learning, which I encourage everyone to spend time learning more about. (UDL benefits everyone, not just specific individuals with specific disabilities.) The gist is to preemptively assume variability and then to design for it, proliferating options and providing multiple entry points to the learning experience. (And yes, it’s also basic stuff like turning on closed captions whenever you show a video in class or making sure podcasts you assign have transcripts.) It’s about moving away from conceiving disability as deficit, to embracing the opportunities and assets of having a diverse student population in our classrooms.

A common aspect of websites is “Frequently Asked Questions.” This is a handy feature. It is meant to assist the inquiring person with succinct information. It is meant to answer questions searchers did not know they have or provide answers to questions for which they have specific interest. It is also a way for the business to be able to articulate, in a concise way, their benefits, capacities, and capabilities. The key to FAQ is that they are not the questions of the business, but they are the questions of the client to the business. The value is that the business has answers to these distinct and important questions. I do not want to push this metaphor too far. I do not think our students are our clients, customers, nor benefactors. At the same time, I do think that it is important for us, in introductory course preparation, to take-on an empathic perspective for our students. We must consider, from their perspective, that they are learning new language, new concepts – never before exposed to - ideas. We must anticipate a version of their FAQ. Teachers must take time to think-through, reflect upon, and design succinct articulation of the benefits, functions, and qualities so that introductory courses are not perfunctory, stale, or unintelligible. Learners should not have to wait until the completion of the degree before they are able to understand and meaningfully interpret the introductory syllabus. Below, is a list of reflection questions with learner’s FAQ in mind. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of their questions. This list is meant to spark conversation so colleagues, in context, can discuss, compare-and-contrast, and consider what is better/best for their own introductory courses and the students who trust us with their learning.   One:     What is the intention of this introductory course? This might be the most difficult of all their questions. If you cannot say the thesis of the course WITHOUT jargony words or technical language or theoretical phrases for which the students have yet to be exposed or taught, then the course is not yet ready to be taught. For your introductory course, what is the punch line, thesis statement, refrain, big idea? Please write in language that can be understood before the study of the course material. From the student’s perspective, what am I about to be graded about?   Two:     What is the approach of the course? The information age is eroding the notion of one supremist perspective for teaching the big questions of life and scholarship. Unmistakably, there are major shifts in the academy for including multiple voices and many worldviews, even starting with introductory courses. Ideas in introductory courses are no longer “obvious” or “natural” or “to be expected under the circumstances” – a kind of “of course” attitude or “everyone knows” posture as if there is no need for deliberation or new planning or thinking anew. The question of scholarly approach is in story. In the course, whose story are the learners being asked to enter into? And if not their own story – then why not? What cultural assumptions and presuppositions are operative in the framing of the introductory course? To what are you asking me (the learner) to open my mind and how will this benefit the people who have sacrificed for me to be a student? What student skills, practices and habits will I need to be successful? What new skills will you expose me to for my learning? The more racial, cultural, ethnic, and age diversity of your learners, the more complex the response must become. Remember that complexity does not have to lead to convolution.   Three:  Why does this course matter? The question of relevance is a critical question to learners. The question is sometimes pragmatic and sometimes political – always on their minds. What do you expect students to become or do as a result of the course? How much time will it likely take before students learn, change, grow in this material – weeks, months, years? The question of relevance will shift with the demographics of your students. The more divers your students, the more complex the response to this question must become. There can be, if we grapple well, elegance in complexity. The question of relevance is directly related to teaching anecdotes to mis-education. This will be particularly vital for majority culture students.   Four:    What is the vocabulary of the course? In the first session of my introductory courses, I got in the habit of initiating a conversation about vocabulary. As part of rehearsing the syllabus, I would tell my students that during the semester I would teach them words that, at first, would feel awkward in their mouths. I told them we would be using a language and jargon that would not work at church potlucks or cocktail parties. But I told them, as learned people, we have a vocabulary for which they must become proficient, even fluent. The presence of students who speak many languages learning along-side students who speak only one language makes this question more complex.   Five:     How? How will students learn? How will students pass this course? What will I be asked to do to learn? What will be the task of my body while learning? Am I just to sit and listen as you talk? What student skills, practices and habits will I need to be successful? What new skills, practices and habits will you teach me to engage my learning in this course? What will there be to: see, smell, taste, hear, feel – to intuit? Will there be field trips, excursions, people to meet, new places and encounters where I welcome the stranger and make them my friend? Will I have opportunity to be as a stranger in hopes of being welcomed? The educational formation which brought students to college, graduate school and seminary will have shaped, formed or deformed learners. Awareness and attention to student’s previous experiences of coursework is critical to answering this question. If there are a diversity of students, e.g. international students and minoritized students, this question becomes much more complex.   Six:       Teacher – who are you? We know that many minoritized students learn better when they relate well to the teacher. For them/us, learning is communal and relational. For many majority culture students, the attitude, opinions, and affirmations of teachers is less important and plays a lesser role in their achievement. For BIPOC faculty, all students will likely wonder or question the credentials, institutional value, and authority of those instructors. The identity politics in classrooms is often dangerous for BIPOC faculty, so knowing what and what not to disclose is complicated. We know from Parker Palmer, noted teacher and author, that we teach who we are.   Seven:  Who is the learner? What does it take to design an introductory course before meeting the students on the first day of class? What can be known about the enrolled students for better course planning? What are the fears of the learners? By what course design and strategy will you quiet their fears early on course? The more diverse the student body, the more difficult and complicated an answer to this question will be. Who in your institution is tasked with providing a profile of each incoming class and a summary report of each enrolled student’s previous experiences and exposures to learning?   Eight:   How is the teacher’s passion taught in the introduction course? If not – why not? I have heard senior scholars say that they do NOT teach what interests them until they teach upper-level seminars because they believe introductory courses are not meant to reflect one’s own research interests, passions, or professional curiosities. From my perspective, this is wrong-headed and explains, a bit, why some introductory courses are so dull and insipid.  How will your passions, unique knowledges, and scholarly knowhow be the cornerstone of your introductory course? Answering these questions does not create a syllabus. And I am not suggesting you add a section to your syllabus for “frequently asked questions.” These questions, as a combination, assortment, and hodgepodge, are meant to encourage your planning, preparation, and thoughtfulness to create empathy with and compassion for adult learners who dare to enter into classrooms of religion and theology. Our students, from the very beginning, deserve teachers who are ready and know how to invite them to learn. Learners want courses that are shared endeavors and not just the presence of a subject expert who has not considered the broader experience of their learning.

Part One: Ritual Is Communal Learning. We might agree that “community” is a dynamic, divine dance among individuals who, at any given moment, can structure and normalize what might have begun as a spontaneous, enlivening interaction. Community, in the context of our classrooms, can either be a routinized structure of interactions, focused on a set of pragmatics (time allotted, prescribed lessons/topics, inherited answers to repeated questions), or a generative experience, full of imagery and ideas that are liberative to the spirit. In other words, we can create community to fulfill a set of accepted structures about learning, or we can create a space that courageously “touches the spirit.” This is the point of ritual, to touch the spirit, and it involves everyone in the space together experiencing the divine dance. Rituals, when seeking to connect meaningfully to the essence of our being, becomes a point of teaching and learning within the moment. I believe that there are such experiences of ritual in every culture because even as we are human, we are divine. Both aspects of our being desire existence. For those of us in theological education, we have the privilege to focus on both the human and the divine as a responsibility of teaching those called to do spirit work. Ritual invites the community of bearers and seekers to experience this transcendent work together and receive the benefits of communal learning to touch the divine within us together. Part of our challenge is operating in an ecosystem that pays more attention to rules and structures than the divine dance, trusting in our own aptitude and the genius of the spirit to decentralize oppressive rules and structures. My communities called me forth to be a keeper of the ritual. It was not until they gave voice to my “medicine” that I accepted it and began to develop it. Rituals became the first task when I settled myself into class preparation. I would find spaces to just listen. The listening would take even longer when I saw names of learners that I had in a previous class. It was much later that I realized that this listening was paying attention to ancestral voices whose “sight became my vanguard voice.” Ritual not only enlivened the purpose of the course beyond the accumulation of information, but it also afforded each one of us to sit with our individual social location in ritual as an opportunity for personal value in the communal space. With the ritual, we were measuring our worth based upon course content in relation to our lived experiences. We were adding value to the community by our existence and the value of being connected to one another. As I think about the adults who entered those classroom spaces and the complexity of their lives, the ritual space also became a moment of releasing and accepting without having to speak to the specifics of what was/would be going on. This is the healing aspect of ritual. Rituals create space for communal recovery and discovery. Rituals create space for rest. Do I require everyone in attendance to engage the ritual? I do not. Even for those who, in their own way, do not participate in the class rituals, they bear witness to it. And what we do know, is that you cannot unsee what you see, and you cannot unhear what you have heard. This is also the reason why ritual work is a deeply intentional and serious work. It is not an icebreaker or a gesture of novelty. This is an assurance: the presence of a person at the ritual affords them a chance to speak to the spirit.

One of my courses is a first-year tutorial designed to fit in with the college-wide objectives to develop new students’ basic academic skills, including writing, critical reading, and oral communication. It also involves individually advising new students to navigate their learning journey until they declare their major field of study. Because the course has multiple goals, it took me a long time to think about an appropriate topic to connect college students’ academic success with their personal lives. I also facilitate students’ embodied learning in their first year. What strategies can I teach them that will enhance their learning progress while adjusting to a new school environment.When designing my course, I found Tammy J. Freiler’s view of being attentive to the entire body as a way of whole-person learning to be helpful. She argues that embodiment is an approach “to construct knowledge through direct engagement in bodily experiences and inhabiting one’s body through a felt sense of being-in-the-world…. It also involves a sense of connectedness and interdependence through the essence of lived experiencing within one’s complete humanness, both body and mind, in perceiving, interacting, and engaging with the surrounding world.”[1] The statement of “complete humanness” inspired my tutorial course topic, “Mindfulness: The Art of Living,” in which I guide students to develop a sense of physical and mental awareness.This is not a meditation course. Instead, the class uses mindfulness as a subject of study. Students study Jeff Wilson’s Mindful America (Oxford, 2014) to build reading, writing, and presentation skills. They also learn how to evaluate the credibility of online resources. While I guide students to take an active role in learning and exploring their academic interests, I encourage them to incorporate mindful practices into their professional performance and everyday life. Teaching the tutorial not only helps me critically reflect upon how to develop a more holistic view of education, but also makes it clear that the traditional approach to teaching mindfulness focuses primarily on the mental aspect, which creates some pitfalls. Although establishing mind-body interaction is the goal, it is easy to neglect the living body as a medium for knowing and connecting with the surrounding world. Several questions and challenges arise, and I have learned at least two noteworthy points about embodied learning.  Providing practice-based learning opportunities is not enough. Active engagement is the key to triggering embodied experiences. This notion is too obvious to be overlooked. My first day teaching this class was a bit challenging, in part because it was ironic to guide a discussion about “mindfulness” when students were sleepy. The class started at 8:00 am, a time when young learners felt a lack of energy. Attempting to address this, I added two-minutes of mindful listening (to the natural sounds of birds singing or forest stream), combined with three minutes of relaxing body movement. In theory, this should have been beneficial and meaningful. Some students, however, did not find it useful. Why? The critical element is engaging with the doing and being immersed in the activity. It takes practice to hone one’s mindfulness and cognition. Students cannot gain any constructive effects unless they develop exactly their own whole-body practice, bringing sensory organs and the mind together.Learning space matters, but students may not be mindful of their interactions with the external world. Being at a residential college, all full-time students are required to live on campus, thus there are very few clear boundaries between living and studying spaces.  How can I help students develop their bodily awareness in academic environments and beyond? I ask students to write a journal to observe their study habits and in what ways they learn the best. The main concern is whether their bodily activities are related to a learning task in a meaningful way, or not. In addition, I have them pay attention to where the most effective locations that enhance their productivity are, to help students think about how environments affect their cognitive process. Some students report locations where they feel less anxious while doing homework, including the Spencer Grill (a café), the atrium at the Human and Social Studies Center, and outdoors. None of them mention their dorm rooms. Students’ reflections are meaningful, as they develop their bodily awareness on campus, acknowledge the body as a basis for their being in the world, and create a personal connection with their surroundings. Teaching first-year students about mindfulness allows me to reflect that learning involves embodied cognition. Although most agree that mindfulness is a practical approach to dealing with day-to-day issues, not everyone values the importance of being attentive to the body. They tend to take their physical presence for granted, and aren’t aware of body experiences as a way of knowing. Thus, it is my responsibility to guide students to develop cognitive awareness, which can subsequently help them appreciate mind-body integration as a powerful tool to enhance productive learning. [1] Tammy J. Freiler, “Learning Through the Body.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 119, (2008): 40, DOI: 10.1002/ace.304.

I was asked for pictures of me while teaching in the classroom. An organization I’m part of wanted them for one of their platforms and I obliged. I asked a student to use their phone to take pictures of me during one of our class sessions. I asked them to do it discreetly so the pictures could be as candid as possible. And boy were they candid—and revealing! I was rolling laughing as I saw myself in all kinds of animated postures: down on one knee, face looking upward, arms outstretched toward the sky; all manner of facial expressions and creative hand gestures; nutty drawings of giant circles and spirals on the chalkboard as I tried to explain who-knows-what concept. It was a surprise to me that my teaching style was so animated and a bit dramatic. And while it amused me to see this about myself, it did not make me self-conscious, for even though I had not realized this about myself, my students surely had known me this way the whole time. I got to see what my teaching looked like a little better and know that while there is no single way to teach, I surely had mine. The larger point, of course, is that there is no blueprint to how we embody our teaching, and the more we understand this and understand ourselves, the better we can move into our own. I had received an earlier lesson on embodiment the very first time I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). I hated every minute of my first paper presentation: I hated the podium—how much it blocked my sense of connection with the listeners and made me feel like I could not see everyone clearly. I hated the microphone because it meant I couldn’t move about and I had to stand on my tiptoes to try and keep it at the right level. I hated reading the paper because it meant I was the only one speaking that whole time. It was a stressful and miserable experience. The following year, then, when I was to take part in a commemorative panel scheduled in one of the very large presentation rooms at AAR, I knew I had to find a way to change my experience of presenting. Through a friend, I received acting coach tips to help me feel more comfortable and confident about presenting. The advice in a nutshell was to experiment and play with the embodiment of the activity: practice being at the podium, around it, in front of it; explore ways to change my spatial relationship with the listeners, the paper, the microphone. Play with time, pauses, moments of possible interactions with the listeners, even if not explicitly verbal. She told me to listen to what my body was telling me through its discomfort—what exactly was not working? —and to explore ways to address and attend to the cause of the experience. I should accept that presenting in the traditional way did not work for me and explore and play with various adjustments and shifts to discover the approach that did work for me. Effectively, she released me from the idea that there was a single blueprint for conference paper presentations and encouraged me to bring myself, mind and body, to discover my own. In my last post I wrote that “we teach humans, not subjects,” and argued that in our teaching it is important to attend to the humans before us first and foremost. It is likewise important to attend to ourselves, to who we are in the wholeness of our mind and body, and to allow ourselves to feel and sink into the embodiment of the teaching relationship. Teaching is relational as much as it is embodied. And it takes some experimenting to find one’s grounding within them both. But before receiving the tips from the acting coach, I received an invaluable tip from a student that has remained with me since my first week as a professor. The Faculty Development team at my university invited students to join the new faculty for lunch and an informal Q & A during the new faculty orientation event. I asked the student sitting at my table, “If you could give one piece of advice to new faculty, what would that be?” He said, “Let us see you as human, sometimes. Be ok showing us your ‘non-professor human side’; it helps us relate to you better.” I always remember that tip—it reminds me that it is okay to bring my peculiar, embodied self to the relational activity of teaching and to give myself permission to sink into it, even with its flair and dramatic gestures. What’s yours?  

It was a spectacular morning on Emory’s verdant quad. The early October air was just offering the hint of crispness that announced the imminent arrival of fall. The grass, roped off for re-seeding (a detail some students thought revealed loving care for the soil and others thought revealed a desire to control a manicured landscape), shimmered a dewy electric green. The oak trees’ leaves were beginning to flaunt their autumn gold, offset by an expanse of sky the color of a robin’s egg. But then, I noticed two students were standing off to the side of the rest of the class, whispering to each other, smiling, and almost giggling. All my self-preservation alarm bells hard-earned in junior high started going off. What are they laughing at? Is it me? Am I doing or saying something stupid? It was the “Religious Education and Our Ecological Context” class, and we’d come out to the quad on an October morning to discuss and try to practice Sallie McFague’s use (which she borrows from Marilyn Frye) of the concepts of the “loving eye” and the “arrogant eye” when encountering nature.[1] When beholding nature with an arrogant eye, we look upon it as an object, something separate from ourselves for our use and convenience. When beholding nature with a loving eye, we acknowledge its mystery and relationship to us, appreciating it on its own terms. The students were divided into two groups, each of which assumed the point of view of the arrogant eye or the loving eye and asked to make notes of what they saw or encountered in the quad from that point of view. Some students bounded off in pairs or trios, chatting and pointing out what they saw to their classmates, while others slowly wandered off quietly by themselves, pens and notebooks in hand. A couple of students lingered near me, asking a question about an upcoming assignment, perhaps not entirely comfortable with this task of just being in their bodies outdoors. I often incorporate such embodied and contemplative learning experiences, particularly in this class. In fact, the students also were asked to choose a location, near where they live, to observe for five minutes daily. They were invited to marshal all their senses to make note of all the changes in that place as the semester slid from late summer into fall, and then winter. A few weeks earlier, we visited an art installation by Charmaine Minniefield at Emory’s Carlos Museum, Indigo Prayers: A Creation Story. In that work, Minniefield powerfully uses pigments indigenous to Gambia, where her ancestral roots are found, to visually represent the “ring shout,” a dance of prayer and resistance. In these seven very large paintings, installed in such a way that they move slightly as one walks past, the artist’s own body is represented. The paintings tell an embodied story of the relationship between the self and place (and displacement), mirroring a theme for our class. All of this is to say that in this class, which considers the spiritual and moral relationship of the self (and the community) to particular places and to the “more-than-human world,”[2] I have intentionally built in embodied pedagogies to open up paths of knowing perhaps not available in more didactic or even discursive classroom activities. I made this decision on sure theoretical and pedagogical footing: Donna Haraway and Lorraine Code both argue for a more expanded epistemological framework, appreciating the role that embodied and emotional experience play in the production of knowledge.[3] And yet, as we were gathering back to talk about the experience, I was distracted by the two students standing very near me who seemed to be having a laugh at my expense. I immediately began to second guess my choice to bring the class outdoors. My inner voice began shouting at me: “This is graduate school for God’s sake! Get serious!” (I suspect that my inner voice comes from the same place as Stephanie Crumpton’s, also featured in this blog series: “Even worse, I hear my own voice telling me, ‘You’re dumbing it and yourself down. Folks [including yourself] need to step it up.’”) I didn’t want to put the students on the spot, but they made eye contact with me as I opened up the discussion. I paused, and one of them said, “We were just saying how much we like it that you take us on ‘field trips.’” They were happy. Now, I can’t say that knowing this fact erased my self-doubt. Indeed, there’s some small part of me that still believes seriousness and joy are somehow in tension with each other, and learning should be serious. As the conversation unfolded, however, a tapestry was woven that incorporated all the students had beheld on the quad, and the ways in which McFague’s categories accounted for (or didn’t) the ways in which we were relating to the more-than-human world in this moment. I revealed more of my pedagogical rationale for being out there, the principle of embodied learning as a pathway to ecological knowing, though we’d discussed that principle before in the ordinary classroom. As we walked back to the building, the students were animated, talking about the ways in which they might incorporate similar practices in their field sites or other settings. And we were happy.   [1] Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997). [2] Abram uses this phrase to appreciate the animacy of the natural world, and to avoid objectifying dualism. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1996). [3] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599; Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Your PowerPoint slides are not projecting on the screen as students trickle into the classroom. Normally you like to have everything prepared before their arrival, but ITS is not responding to your calls. Running on coffee and a few hours of sleep you begin the lecture only to be interrupted by late students. Pushing your hospitalized parent out of your mind, you continue with the lecture thinking that you never would have disrespected your professors this way. A student in the front row is nodding off to sleep. You made it to class early after dropping kids who were screaming for your attention, with runny noses, off at daycare. An “A” student catches your eye. They are diligently taking notes despite having pulled an all-nighter. It is a scene all too familiar to educators. We check our bodies and emotions at the door and wonder why students don’t also. Our advisors and mentors taught us to be disciplined. Prioritize your research and writing in order to succeed. The life of the mind is built upon outsourcing the mundane things like cooking and cleaning to someone else.  Students who prioritize learning information to the neglect of their health are rewarded within the status quo. When they compartmentalize their learning from the messiness of life, it is a relief to the educator. They focus on ideas rather than responsibilities to community. Conversely, students overcome by malnutrition, lack of resources, and abuse are punished. They face negative consequences for prioritizing caregiving over self-care. The message is clear: students who are overcome by contexts beyond their control or extenuating conditions are left to “figure it out” as an acceptable pedagogical tool of disciplined thinking. We as educators often assume that the process of learning is for the students, and our job is to deliver content. We use words like “rigor” and “grit” to put the onus on students to persevere through the stresses of learning. Those who don’t succeed presumably were not worthy.  But what if we as educators are the problem?  Unhealed trauma certainly inhibits student learning, but, perhaps more to the point, the unhealed trauma of educators perpetuates harm in the classroom. What might trauma-informed pedagogy look like? Stacy Williams explains that trauma is not defined by events, but by the lingering effects on our brains and bodies. People can experience the same event and some seem to emerge unscathed, while others may be left struggling to return to their daily routine. This explains the differing levels of impact upon communities with shared experiences and divergent effects. Rather than adjudicate whether the student’s distress is reasonable (the loss of a pet, end of a romance, hunger, discrimination, etc.), we would do better to model teaching and learning as embodied and contextual. We (the authors) suggest that as educators, one of the best things that we can do to improve pedagogy is to attend to our own bodies and emotions. With this baseline in mind. we can begin to unpack the experience of the professor described above. Perhaps the late student was also visiting a loved one in the hospital, the sleeping student might have also been up most of the night with a sick toddler, and many students have missed breakfast.  Paying attention to our own needs influences how we hold the learning space. Stress and trauma disrupt the students’ ability to learn, but they also disrupt educators’ ability to teach. The lingering effects of stress and trauma show up in the brain and body faster than logic and reason can process and remain in the body systems much longer than people realize. Which professors and mentors reminded you to attend to your wounds? If they didn’t, what are the lingering effects? In order to avoid retraumatizing others, initiate self-awareness and get curious about the behaviors of your students.  Here are a few questions we propose to get you started: When did I last eat a nutritious meal and drink a full glass of water?  Do I need to go outside for some movement?  Who have I deeply connected with this week? In short: what do you need today to be the best version of yourself to show up for others? Attentiveness to your bodily and emotional needs sets the tone for trauma-informed teaching and learning. 

I do not believe teaching, itself, to be miraculous. I can bear witness to miracles which have come with teaching. The wonders come in the learning. Learning is both improbable and extraordinary. Classrooms with adult learners can be places where the splendor of miracles is known. The first kind of miracle depends upon time. On the first day of the course, students racked with hesitation, reticence, nervousness, fear of failure, and fear of success, are the same students, who miraculously, enter the classroom on the final day of class with confidence, sometimes swagger, having metabolized that which they did not know. Time can afford us miracles if we can see the shifts, modifications, accepted considerations, and the full out rethink. Sometimes, over the span of a few semesters, or in-between the first session and the last, through learning activities, discussions, cognitive dissonance, the yearning for wisdom, the torment of grappling with new ideas, and the challenge of grasping new practices, skills, and habits, students learn that the world is more than they previously suspected or feared. The second miracle happens when the illusion of inferiority is successfully shattered. Teaching is an embodied art. I inhabit any classroom as I am. I am, by the pronouncement of my physical body, an African American, woman, age 60 plus. By U.S. societal norms created by white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, and racism, I am perceived as inferior. I am, according to the accepted (albeit contested by some) systemic hatreds which permanent social norms, at the bottom of the societal and academy hierarchy. I am, as an older Black woman, less than those who are men, those who are white, and those who are young. The politics of inferiority is operational in society, and these real and dangerous mindsets enter my classrooms in the imaginations of my students. Inferiority is not scientific, but it is a real part of the moral matrix of U.S. society. Regardless of my credentials or standing in the academic community, my students have been given license by ruling power structures to see me as inferior. The miracle is when I can dissuade students, Black, white and otherwise, that the lie of inferiority must be exorcised, purged, eliminated. Most times I have not been successful in provoking this miracle--it is not an easy miracle to summon. But there have been a few times I can bear witness. There have been a few students who have left my courses no longer deceived or duped by patriarchal mindsets. They discover the ability to refuse to live in, and believe in, a narrow world of sameness and homogeneity. They summon the capacity to see a world that is dripping with Maybe? and Perhaps? This is their miracle - they have had the audacity to accept the keys which unlock their miseducated minds. The third miracle is the most difficult to perform and not easily witnessed or claimed. It is the miracle of possibility. It is akin to the miracle of ridding students of white supremacy, but not exactly the same. Students, especially adult students, insist upon risk-less learning. They want assurances, guarantees--proof. They prefer learning experiences to be like Disney World simulations, no risk and only gleeful reward. A championing of mediocrity. They want learning that is carefully scripted, with an ending that is foolproof and predictable. With experience, I have learned to watch for the glad surprise in my teaching. It is in the surprise, the unplanned for and sometimes unpleasant, that we have a chance of being visited by new possibility, new opportunity, and perhaps grace. Some semesters, everything happens as planned on cue, and with exacted precision. These are the semesters I know the learning is flimsy. Beyond these three kinds of classroom miracles, my hunch is that the best miracles happen when I can-- simply and with a Buddhist’s kind of detachment--invite students to take from my teaching what they can. And so, for our own critical reflection, we ask: By the end of your long and productive teaching career, what miracles will you have performed or witnessed? What miracles, between now and retirement, will you invoke, provoke, evoke in your classrooms or in your teaching life? If one of the tools of teaching is the ability to rely upon, ascertain, identify, or produce miracles, what habits, practices, or strategies will you need to nurture in order to strengthen this capacity? When you were a student, what miracles assisted your learning and sustained your knowledges? Keep in mind that the fulfillment of student learning outcomes, the successful completion of assignments, and the granting of high grades does not necessarily indicate the activity of the miraculous.

One of the tools I find essential for teaching is journaling. I recently wrote about how I journal for my own research, and I have incorporated the same practice in my teaching. When I teach introductory religious studies classes, for example, the course objective I focus most on is helping students learn how to read and interpret religious texts. In the end, whether the students retain what they’ve learned about—for example—early church heresies and the Christian understanding of the Trinity, the skill of being able to read a religious text and understand the author’s ideas about God can be more broadly applicable. Journaling assignments are an effective way to get students to actively think about their reading and class content instead of just glossing over it as they prepare for class or trying to passively retain it. As I note in my assignment guidelines, journals are powerful tools of reflection, that is, “the process whereby we reconstruct and make meaning of our experience.”[1] Journaling also helps students become better writers, both by providing the space to think through ideas informally and by helping build writing motivation and fluency. I use journals in undergraduate and graduate classes, but in what follows I will provide practical guidelines based on how I’ve used journals in introductory courses. For more examples and ideas, I highly recommend the book Journal Keeping by Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper that I quoted above. In my introductory religious studies course, “The Christian Tradition,” I have students write reading response journals using the journal feature on Blackboard, a practice I began during the pandemic. The accompanying image is a screenshot of the instructions for the journal that students see on Blackboard. For this, students free write their responses to the reading assignments before class. The class meets twice a week, but I only require the journal entry to be done once a week unless students are absent, in which case they must do their journal entry for the class they missed. I emphasize that I am not looking for students to be “right” or “wrong” about their interpretation, but to engage with and respond to what the text says from their perspective. I ask them to complete this before the class to prepare them for our discussion. One change I implemented this past semester was to delay this at-home journaling until the fourth week. Instead, we did journal entries in class after the discussion, and I provided written feedback to help the students learn this skill. After we did this in class, I could use the Blackboard rubric to give minimal feedback on their online journal entries. Because students in this class only write one entry a week, I read and grade every single entry they complete. In contrast, in an interdisciplinary general education course that I teach titled “Discovering the Self in the Universe,” I ask students to use a physical journal just for that class. They write responses to the reading assignments, but they also use the journal for in-class reflection. This class is writing intensive, so students do much more journaling than I require in “The Christian Tradition.” Because the students are writing more, I do not read every entry in this case. For grading, I collect the journals three times during the semester and check for completeness (50 percent of the grade), then read five entries which I grade for quality (50 percent of the grade), having provided them with a simple rubric at the beginning of the semester. Students generally respond positively to the journal. In last semester’s final course evaluations, in response to the question on what was most effective about the class, several students mentioned journaling. Students noted that this assignment “helped me examined [sic] the text more closely” and “really helped me express my opinion and also remember what we did in earlier sessions.” I was teaching “Discovering the Self in the Universe” for the first time, and in that class one of my students, Sebastian Derflinger (name used with permission), chose to do his final presentation—about what was most beneficial for them in the course—on the practice of journaling. Derflinger is from Austria, so he noted that the ability to write freely in English without worrying about mistakes was a particular benefit for him. He also noted the importance of building the habit of journaling to improve how he expresses his thoughts, record important ideas, and go deeper into the course content. He said that journaling in my class led him to start a private journal about his goals, experiences, and thoughts. These are just a few examples of student responses, but they give a sense of the positive responses I receive about this. I am thus a huge proponent of journaling, both for myself and for my students. [1] Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper, Journal Keeping: How to Use Reflective Writing for Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight, and Positive Change (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2009) 3.

Many of us have probably been following the Hamline University controversy. I first came across it in InsideHigherEd and the New York Times, whose links I sent to my colleagues with a “Yikes!” attached. In case you haven’t been following it, it’s good to know about. It concerns all of us. To briefly recap, at Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, an adjunct instructor teaching a global art history class showed a famous painting of the prophet Muhammad in class, after warning students on her syllabus and then reminding them of her intentions that day. A student complained afterward; the complaint was that showing images of the prophet is “forbidden” in “Islam” (I can’t help but add these scare-quotes) and thus sacrilegious. The administration concluded the incident was Islamophobic and declined to rehire the instructor for the next semester. Attempts by experts in art history as well as religion to explain the value of showing such images (and to counter the claim of Islamophobia) had no effect. There are many important layers here, including students’ very real experiences of racism and Islamophobia on the small campus, how instructors contribute to students feeling like they belong (or not) in the classroom and on campus, what counts as “Islamophobia,” academic freedom, the control that faculty should or do have over curriculum, the role of expertise, the invisibility of religion in DEI, the increasingly popular model of a modern American university that seems more like a business or a corporation than an institution of inquiry and higher learning, the reminder that universities are inequitable places of labor, the power that students do hold over us (and not just the other way around), and more. I was bothered by the student(s) ignoring the instructor’s multiple “trigger warnings,” the complaint quickly making its way to administration (vs. being further addressed with the instructor directly), and, of course, the administration reacting in the way that it did. Lots of mishandling, it seems to me, by multiple people at multiple levels. Given that I’m going back into the classroom this week, I was also thinking about my own pedagogy, our disciplinary tenets and values, and the whole point of learning. I’m not a specialist in Islam, but, like many of us, I am responsible for covering Islam when I teach my introductory World Religions course. I am less concerned, even at the intro level, in teaching students about facts, which can and do change over time, and more about concepts, questions, debates, and approaches in the study of religion. I find inspiration in the four principles of religious literacy from Harvard, one of which is that “religions are internally diverse.” This particular point is so important to me that I include it in my classes as a learning objective. In past iterations of this course, I have even addressed the very issue causing all the controversy at Hamline, by assigning pieces like Omid Safi’s brief “Why Islam Does (Not) Ban Images of the Prophet.” (Omid, an instructor of mine in college, was interviewed for the NYT piece, to share his perspective as a Muslim and a specialist in the area.) As the NYT piece notes, “Most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed…. There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.” In a forum after the incident, a professor of religion tried to raise the question with which we are all, in the discipline, familiar: “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue?” The same could be asked of any religion. Students, in a time of their lives where they tend to default to or prefer black-and-white dualistic thinking, often assume religions are monoliths—static entities with clear-cut boundaries and universally shared beliefs and practices. It’s comforting to feel certain about who’s in and who’s out, what’s acceptable and what’s not. We tend to put people into categories. We love to think we know. And it’s not just students. A book I use in one of my classes makes frequent claims about the beliefs and practices of “all Muslims…,” despite there being 1.9 billion worldwide. Of course, assumptions, generalizations, and stereotypes exist for all religions (e.g., Buddhist societies are peaceful, despite evidence otherwise), but Islam has some of the most persistent and pernicious in our country, sometimes with deadly real-world repercussions (like the murder of the Sikh man after 9/11 because he was presumed to be a Muslim). Such assumptions cause me special concern, perhaps, because my daughter is half-Afghan. I take it as my professional, and personal, duty to ensure that students who finish my courses are disabused of notions of reductive homogeneity and dangerous stereotypes. (Even seemingly positive stereotypes, like the “model minority” stereotype, can be harmful, research has shown). In recent years, I have struggled with the Islam unit in my intro course. I like to organize the different units around big questions related to the study of religion, not just the individual religions themselves (eg., the question “is Buddhism a religion?” allows us to get into the definition of religion and the history of the field, as well as gives us a lens to sort through the specifics about Buddhism from the textbook chapter). I wanted an Islam unit that left room for the basics, that confronted and corrected misinformation, that tackled urgent and big-picture questions, that didn’t harm any Muslim students in the class, and that seemed relevant to students’ lives by tapping into, for instance, current events. A tall order. This Hamline controversy has provided the perfect material for me this semester. This spring, my Islam unit will be focused on: What happens when religious people disagree? (I’m sure I’ll finetune this question, and the unit’s assignments, in the future.) In addition to a chapter on Islam from the textbook I use, I am going to ask students to read some of the news articles reporting on Hamline, as well as other relevant material (like Christiane Gruber on images of the prophet), outside of class. I will likely alert them to the fact that these articles depict images of Muhammad, so they can take proper precautions and prepare for self-care. (I admit here to having an ambivalent stance toward “trigger warnings,” as I believe, fundamentally, that learning is an often-uncomfortable enterprise; that higher education’s purpose is to expose students to content that they may disagree with; and that it is necessary, in order to be a citizen of a democracy, to be able to engage with people, perspectives, and material that you find objectionable, unsettling, or even “offensive.” Moreover, there is evidence that trigger warnings don’t really work.) Framing the unit in this way will also help to connect back to earlier conversations we’ll have in class about insider vs. outsider approaches to religion, another important aspect of religious literacy. Some instructors may now choose simply not to touch the topic with a 10-foot pole. Why bother courting controversy with a discussion about or an analysis of images of the prophet? I get it. I’m not tenured, so I have to think carefully about the kinds of risks I take in the classroom. But allowing the perspectives of a few or even a majority to dictate the terms under which we view or can talk about an entire group is a bad idea—and I believe we have a disciplinary responsibility to confront these instances when they occur. Religions, like any groups (racial, political, national, you name it), are quite diverse things. Catholics for Choice! Jews for Jesus! This diversity is not only something to clarify in our courses, but something to center and celebrate.