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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.

When was the last time you had a student visibly start paying more attention because of something you said? What were you saying? What were you doing with your body? One of the things I do that most consistently causes certain students to perk up is reference other languages. When trying to define theology I compare it to the Spanish Dios, which is a lot closer to the Greek theos than the English “God.” Similarly, the Spanish iglesia sounds a lot like the Greek ekklesia (it derives from it via Latin), which is useful for helping students remember what ecclesiology is, even if the spellings are different. My students are used to teachers and professors introducing new vocabulary by referencing the roots of the words, and similar words, in English. Their bodies, the surprise on their faces, tell me they find it shocking to hear Spanish and other non-English languages used in the classroom. However, the bodies that make up my students reflect a need for a multilingual focus. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, sixty-six million Americans (21.5%) live in households where a language other than English is spoken. Most, of course, also speak English. This reality is reflected in our classrooms. In a recent term, my 130 students collectively spoke Arabic, Dutch, French, Gaelic, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. At one school where I taught, 26% of my students were multilingual to some degree. In a larger city, at another institution where I served, 49% of my learners claimed two or more languages. I don’t know how these numbers reflect the broader campus communities of the universities where I teach, or the percentages in higher education as a whole. However, language is central to learning. How can we teach well if we don’t consider what languages our students speak? How can we design curriculum if we don’t consider their cultural and linguistic backgrounds? How can we help them develop their proficiencies in their other languages if we are not open to incorporating other languages in our teaching? This is not just an issue of pedagogy. It’s an issue of justice. We invest a lot in helping white students learn a second language in school, but typically devote minimal resources to helping native speakers learn to read and write in their non-English languages. At worst, we bar them from using their native language(s) out of the utterly mistaken (so says the research) conviction that doing so helps them learn English faster. Believing that students who grew up speaking Spanish or Polish or Arabic should be able to read and write in those languages by the end of college should not be a radical or rare position. I imagine some of the surprise of my using Spanish and other languages in class is that, as a white person, I don’t look like I should speak them. They’re not wrong. I’m a product of the U.S. education system. A native English speaker, I am functionally monolingual despite having studied Spanish, German, and biblical Greek. That doesn’t mean I can’t find ways to signal that I know my classrooms are populated by multilingual students. This might mean making comparisons to words I know in other languages. Or, providing students non-English editions of required readings. Or, encouraging students to use their other languages when conducting research. The tongue is part of the body. Language is part of embodied teaching. If I want to embrace my students’ identities, using their languages is a good place to start. It is a counter-imperial gesture, one that challenges the hierarchy of languages that equates English with power.

English is not my first language. The first time I went to an English-speaking school was in Baguio City, Philippines, in 2003. I was nervous about learning in a language that is not my own. Would I manage? And what if I failed? These questions haunted me as I boarded the airplane from Jakarta to Manila. It’s the first semester, and so I take a systematic theology class. As the professor is teaching, a question burns in my mind, something I really want to ask him about. I gather my courage and raise my hand. The professor sees me. He turns to me and says, “Eka, do you have a  question?” But as he turns his—and everyone’s—attention to me, I feel as if the world is spinning beneath me. The words I’d planned vanish from my brain. My feet shake. My whole body explodes with heat. I’m nervous and embarrassed because everyone’s looking at me, waiting to hear my question. I try to open my mouth but no longer know how to express my question in English. Seeing me struggle, the professor patiently says: “It’s okay. You can do it!” Knowing that he understands my linguistic limitation helps, but it nevertheless takes me a few minutes to articulate my question. The memory of this experience still vividly reminds me that learning in another language is not at all easy. It takes a lot of bravery to do it. Fast forward to 2017. I am still pursuing my doctoral degree at Vanderbilt University. But on this day I’m teaching a Sunday school class at a local church. A guest (a white man) is in the class, wanting to learn from me. While I’m talking, I notice his discomfort. Finally, he speaks up: “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Your accent is too strong.” I’m totally embarrassed. I pause and collect myself, then smile and continue. I never saw him again. Not long after this experience, I have a conversation with an established scholar who teaches at a major seminary in the US. He is from an Asian country, and he too speaks English with an accent. He tells me that in his first years of teaching, some students did not want to take his class because they didn’t like his accent. Time to flip the script! When I was in the Philippines, I met a man from Alabama who spoke with a pronounced Southern accent. Sometimes that accent, plus the speed at which he spoke, meant that I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Accent can indeed be a barrier to communication. Recognizing this taught me to respect this Alabamian and his linguistic background. Instead of expecting or even forcing him to speak with an Indonesian, Filipino, or Korean accent (which I readily understand), I pushed myself to accept his otherness and his difference, and over time I learned to understand his speech better. Rosina Lippi, a novelist and linguist, once told the Mercury News, “[A]ccent is often overrated as a source of communication problems… Often, what people perceive to be an accent problem is really due to other biases.”[1] Indeed. Linguistic prejudice is real. People who study language know that everyone has an accent. English accents take all kind of forms, even among native English speakers. An Australian accent is different from a Singaporean accent or an American accent. However, some accents are considered acceptable, and others are not. Who determines the acceptability of an accent? The issue is not whether one has an accent or not, but whether one’s accent is perceived as desired, or is frowned upon as “less than,” “foreign,” “uneducated,” or “uncivilized.” It is merely the hearer’s unfamiliarity with it, their discomfort, their sense of superiority, that deems an accent to be “foreign.” Now of course teaching requires oral linguistic performance. A teacher has to stand in front of the class and speak. In this context, accent in teaching is inevitable. It is an embodied performance because it involves the movement of one’s tongue, the intonation of one’s voice, and one’s breathing. Since our body is habituated in a certain linguistic environment, speaking with an accent is entirely inevitable. All speech is accented, always. Embodied teaching means teaching with an accent. In this sense, a teacher comes with their own unique accent. The question is: What accent is acceptable in a classroom?  I teach at a seminary whose students come from many different places. We have a few international students as well. Whose accent should I use as a teacher? A Nigerian student from South Africa has a very different accent than a student from New York or a student from Tennessee. Should I use a Nigerian accent or a New York accent or a Southern accent? I decided to stay with my own accent, one that is shaped by Bahasa Indonesia underneath my English performance. Like Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian who admitted that he had a hard time attaining precision with the Greek accent because of the habit of his mother tongue (Jewish Antiquities XX.263–4), I too feel such a distance with English, and the habit of my mother tongue affects my English pronunciation. I have learned to embrace and refuse to be embarrassed by it. My accent is who I am. My accent tells a story of migration from Indonesia to the United States. It signifies the presence of otherness in my classrooms. I suggest that instead of seeing accent as a barrier to communication—for example, when students refuse to embrace the otherness of their teacher’s accent—teaching with an accent can also enrich our classrooms. Teaching with an accent clearly embodies otherness in the classroom. Such otherness challenges students to examine their linguistic prejudices or biases. It is not only the face of the other, but also the sound of the other that comes to them. It transgresses their familiarity, their bubble. It prompts them to ask themselves: Do I need to embrace it or reject it altogether? And in asking that, perhaps that difference will also prompt them to recognize that in rejecting or embracing an other accent, they are also rejecting or embracing an other self, an other’s story. For accent represents one’s story. As a legal scholar, Mari J. Matsuda, puts it: Your accent carries the story of who you are—who first held you and talked to you when you were a child, where you have lived, your age, the schools you attended, the languages you know, your ethnicity, whom you admire, your loyalties, your profession, your class position: traces of your life and identity are woven into your pronunciation, your phrasing, your choice of words. Your self is inseparable from your accent. Someone who tells you they don’t like the way you speak is quite likely telling you that they don’t like you.[2] To put it differently, the act of shutting down an accent is a violent erasure of one’s story, one’s identity, one’s self. Students’ reaction to a teacher’s accent will tell whether or not they are willing to welcome diverse stories, backgrounds, and knowledge productions. A teacher’s accent can function as a catalyst for the classroom’s open engagement with difference.   [1] Mike Swift, “How Accents Define Us,” The Mercury News (blog), April 15, 2007, https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/04/15/how-accents-define-us/. [2] Mari J. Matsuda, “Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction,” The Yale Law Journal 100, no. 5 (1991): 1329.

Take a deep breath in … and exhale. This has been a recurring practice in my classrooms lately. Taking a moment to breathe – both physically and pedagogically. What started as an interesting idea to shape my classes in a rhythm of breath, has proven to be a welcomed experience for students throughout the landscape of a semester of communal learning – breathing together. Both the actual practice of slowing down at the start of class, centering, and taking a moment to breathe before or after diving into class content; as well as the movement through learning as a breath – an inhale of information, and an exhale of reflection – cultivate a unique rhythm of engagement, communal connection, and sustained learning. This idea of intentionally infusing breath into the classroom has fascinated me for some time with its creative possibilities. In its development, I have found that this breath-centered pedagogy creates space for one’s humanity and lived-experiences to be present and valued in the learning process. For example, in my most recent class, students expressed feelings of freedom in learning, being seen and heard, and recognizing a community that held space for their theological processing. The classroom became a place of embodied learning that welcomed vulnerability, risk-taking, and difference. At the same time, it also required a willingness to be fully present in the process. Breathing was a primary part of ensuring this presence, with moments to breathe together at the start of class, after working with difficult content, and sometimes at the close of a class session. The breath-centered pedagogy I have developed is informed by time spent in actual breathwork practice led by a certified coach. From the lessons learned working with this coach, my approach to teaching holds three priorities: (1) model the practice of breath in the classroom, (2) make room to breathe, and (3) be open to what breath can create. In modeling the practice of breath and making room to breathe, my classes are shaped in a circular rhythm that includes information intake, processing, and reflection through creative modes of learning. There are breath weeks introduced at weeks five and ten of the semester, which provide a chance to slow down and think deeply in community. These weeks make room for us to breathe in learning and in life. They are points along the way to assess the progress of the class as a collective, while also making room to allow life to show up in the room, which provides insight to the wellness of the students beyond the classroom persona they put on to navigate institutional expectations. Breathing allowed them to let down guards and be freely themselves – even if only for a few hours of the day. The final priority is where I have witnessed the magic – being open to what breath can create. This past semester in my Womanist/Feminist Spirituality and Worship course, breath created community and connection, it empowered creativity and vulnerability, and it cultivated joy. Bodies in space learning together, who were allowed to breath, became a community that developed a connection across dialogue around ritual, sacramental theology, and women’s ways of worship. This community affirmed and celebrated one another, they laughed and cried together, and they developed constructive theologies around liturgical practice born from theological creativity and freedom that many of them were afraid to embrace. This was the power of breath for this community. So, what am I learning from this breath-centered pedagogy? While there is still room for fine-tuning the practice, there is so much potential in breathing together. I am learning that this practice of breathing must be mutual. I must breathe with the class, and not just facilitate the breath process. In breathing together, in shaping a class in a rhythm of breath, there must be room for flexibility because just like our natural rhythms of breath, depending on the activity or location, our rhythms of breathing change, and we must adjust in the moments to catch our breath, to find our breath, to pace our breath. So was the case in our learning. Finally, while not so much of a lesson but rather an observation, breath led to laughter, laughter led to joy, joy led to transformation (even in the smallest ways), and shared transformation led to deep learning. This is the impact of breath in the classroom. May we all be so inclined to breathe together. So again, take a deep breath in … and exhale.

This semester I taught the Gospel of Luke for the first time. My class was a seminar style class with seven students who worked diligently through the Lucan text while also engaging various scholars and they ways that these scholars used a variety of methods for interpretation. Since most of my published works are in the Gospels of Mark and John, teaching the Gospel of Luke was a new experience for me. During the course of this class, my students dubbed me as their most “confessional” professor. At first, I disliked the term because, in my mind, I was still seeking to embody the detached state in my teaching approach which would have been very similar to many of the professors with whom I studied New Testament texts. However, I had to ask myself why I was seeking to be detached within this particular pedagogical space. Upon reflection, I realized that the makeup of the class was one reason I wanted to appear detached. In my Gospel of Luke class, I had a variety of students ranging from budding womanist and feminist students to strictly complementarian male church leaders. As an African American woman professor, I have found in my years of teaching that strictly complementarian male church leaders often avoid my classes just because of my embodied presence. Because I knew that some of our conversations could become tense, I wanted to remain a detached presence even though my embodied presence oftentimes cannot afford to be detached. My particular embodied presence makes a difference in the ways that students receive information. Realizing this, I embraced the idea of being confessional—with some caveats. Most scholars understand confessional approaches to religious education as not valuing differing interpretations of understandings of scripture and theological concepts.[1] Confessional scholars often believe that different opinions cannot be valued and accommodated within confessional spaces. I would offer something slightly difference and nuanced. Turning to the work of Patricia Hill Collins, I argue that even though I am an ordained minister and seminary professor, my “confessions” are not rooted in the above-referenced (and outdated) understandings of confession but are confessional with a hint of testimonial authority. Collins argues that academia is influenced by various forms of critical analysis. Citing critical race theory, Collins discusses that said theory was advanced by legal scholars, practitioners, and activists while drawing upon dual theoretical traditions: specifically, structural analysis within the social sciences as well as narrative traditions within the humanities.[2] Collins further explains that the narrative traditions stem from the testimonial authority of storytelling. The recipients of the worst practices within the legal system told their stories as a way to bring about change to the system. As I reflect on what I am calling “Womanist Confession as a Form of Embodied Teaching,” I realize that even as I explain the various theories and methods of biblical interpretation, most of my examples and discussion prompts stem from my own life and being as a Womanist New Testament scholar. Similar to Collins’ understanding of the testimonial authority of storytelling, I often reiterate stories of the worst practices of biblical interpretation that continue to gaslight within traditional confessional spaces. By doing this, Scholars can bring about change in the academic study of the Bible. For example, when studying Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 2, I prompted the class to think about questions of consent, knowing that my own experiences of sexual assault lie in the background of my questions. While I may not explicitly tell stories about such experiences, I do allude to and testify about different experiences in my life and how male pastors have gaslit me into believing that the sexual assault was not as bad as it was.[3] Statistics also help in explaining the importance of asking these questions. According to the CDC, one in four women experience a rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.[4] There were five women in my class so that means that two of us has had such an experience. How does the conversation of Mary’s “consent” play out when we ask these questions while reading the biblical text? Oftentimes, male students do not think that such questions belong in the conversation but, as I argue to them, preachers may miss more than half of their congregation if they ignore such questions. As pedagogues, we are not objective, dispassionate, and detached presences in our classrooms. I hope that each and every one of us continues to interrogate our own identities and our own stories as we enter the classroom space. [1] L. Philip Barnes, Education, Religion and Diversity: Developing a New Model of Religious Education (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014). [2] Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press) 90.   [3] See https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/june/sbc-caring-well-abuse-advisory-group-report.html. [4] See https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfact.html.

Trauma. Is there any more apt word for the past few years? COVID-19, social distancing, racialized violence, political insurrection—these are just a few of the collective traumas affecting our lives. I’m sure each of us can name additional layers from a personal standpoint, from broken relationships to untimely deaths. So, the need for trauma-informed pedagogical interventions in the classroom seemed uncontestable and urgent when I wrote a small project grant proposal to the Wabash Center in spring 2021. We knew our students were hurting. We were aware of individual trauma histories before social distancing shut down our in-person classrooms. Then COVID hit. Since mid-March 2020, significant portions of our online instruction were dedicated simply to checking in with students, connecting with them emotionally and spiritually, before engaging with them intellectually. Then, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in May 2020. Racialized violence hit our students and their communities hard; 35 percent of our student body is African American. We sought trauma-informed pedagogical strategies to help us. The project, “Trauma-Informed Classroom Teaching at Lancaster Theological Seminary,” was intended to equip our faculty with skills, tools, and strategies to optimize the classroom learning experience of students with existing and ongoing trauma histories. I learned that this is no small project. And neither is trauma-informed care reducible to tools and strategies—it involves our whole, embodied selves and the entire community. We began by engaging a Trauma Informed Specialist to provide our faculty a conceptual introduction to trauma and trauma-informed care. This was an easy ask since Lancaster County is committed to becoming a trauma-informed community. In preparation for the workshop, the specialist, Melanie Snyder, invited the seminary to commit to becoming a trauma-informed organization through a program sponsored by her employer, Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health. It was not a good time for Lancaster Seminary to commit to this larger goal. Too much was in flux institutionally, including a combination with Moravian University, for us to look beyond our immediate classroom needs. Snyder’s workshop, “Understanding Trauma, Resilience, and Trauma-Informed Care,” provided a robust introduction for our full-time faculty, some adjuncts, and a select few staff persons. The three hours flew by, equipping us with the basic vocabulary and concepts necessary to talk about trauma. My first inkling that this initiative would not remain confined to the classroom was when someone remarked how valuable the presentation was and asked why the entire staff had not been invited to participate. She was right. Trauma-informed care is a community-wide effort. Our work on classroom pedagogy began in earnest with a workshop by Oluwatomisin (Tomi) Oredein of Brite Divinity School in October 2021. She taught a liberative approach to our individual preparations to create and implement one trauma-informed pedagogical strategy in our classroom during the academic year. We discussed how diverse experiences of race shape the trauma and resilience of individuals. We also examined how we bring our entire, embodied selves to the classroom as instructors, including our racial biases, experiences, and personal trauma histories. As one participant noted, “Trauma-informed pedagogy requires building relationships of trust with students, and to do this, I must be appropriately vulnerable.” Acknowledging our own difficulties over the past two years was essential to this effort. Many faculty, as has been well-document, were suffering their own traumas. As instructors, we had to grapple with “The Truth of These Matters . . . .”: we were worn down, some of us barely hanging on, and we had little bandwidth for innovating, improvising, and implementing new pedagogical strategies. A mid-year listening session with students informed the faculty of some of the struggles students were having and reminded us that we were all in it together. Again we learned that trauma impacts, and trauma-informed care requires, the work of the entire seminary community. During the final workshop of our 18-month initiative, Stephanie Crumpton of McCormick Theological Seminary led us in a discussion of what we had accomplished, areas of growth, and next steps. Individual faculty members had succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, in testing new trauma-informed pedagogical interventions in the classroom (informed by the resources below). We understood we had a long way to go. Crumpton observed that our faculty had succeeded in become trauma-aware, the first step in becoming trauma-informed, and perhaps even becoming a place of healing centered engagement. The next steps would involve students, staff, and all members of our seminary. We are on a journey from classroom to community.   Select Resources on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Crumpton, Stephanie M. “Trigger Warnings, Covenants of Presence, and More: Cultivating Safe Space for Theological Discussions About Sexual Trauma.” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (2017): 137–47. Tinklenberg, Jessica L., ed. “Trauma-Informed Pedagogies in the Religious Studies Classroom.” Special Issue, AAR Religious Studies News, Spotlight on Teaching (March 2021). https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/trauma-informed-pedagogies/editors-introduction. Wabash Center Blogs. “Teaching and Traumatic Events” series. (2018). https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/category/teaching-and-traumatic-events/. (See especially posts by Lewis and McGarrah Sharp) Wabash Center Blogs. “Teaching and Learning During Crisis” series. (2020). https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/category/teaching-and-learning-during-crisis/. (See especially posts by Lee, Oredein, Rideau, and Silva-McCormick)  Wabash Center’s Podcast Series: Dialogue on Teaching. “When Trauma Touches the Teaching Experience with Dr. Lisa Cataldo.” (2021). https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/trauma-informedteaching/

During my teaching experience in Zambia, music became an important part of the day-to-day life of my students’ coursework. When I first asked the students to share about things they valued from their own culture, one of the elements they mentioned was their love for music. As I was to later find out, this love of music did not refer to music theory or a song being played. Rather, it is a way of living out their culture and experiencing life through music. Music was everywhere in Zambia: in my students’ homes, in their schools, in their churches, and in their houses of worship, for example. Music was to be experienced and led to a form of embodiment, or at the very least recognizing that as human beings we are embodied in our everyday visceral reality. I also found myself making connections to my own Latinx ethnicity. For example, many individuals of Latinx heritage also share an African heritage. Several countries in Latin America have been marked by racial intermixing between Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans. There is even a growing field of study of the Afro-Latino experience. I recently did a DNA test and discovered that at least 10 percent of my DNA is African. It was surprising, but in my Latinx experience it was a heritage that was suppressed and ignored, although the cultural influence was undoubtedly there. I thought that perhaps engaging music would be a way to connect my own heritage to the experiences of these students in Zambia. And concomitantly, perhaps the use of music could lead to an embodied experience in the classroom where we could build bridges between our cultures, ethnicities, and races. I knew that I had to improvise in my lesson plans to accommodate this important cultural element in the classroom. I asked each student to prepare a song for one of our teaching sessions during our time together. Because I had 12 students, I asked some of them to pair up. I was specific and asked for songs that they sing for worship in their own country and that were relevant to the course content, but they had the freedom to choose the song. I encouraged them not to use digital sources, but to sing or play the songs in their own way. When the first student presented her song, her voice carried over the class. It was an old hymn that the students immediately recognized (I did not). The students all joined together in their singing. Their bodies swayed and some raised their hands. In this expression, their bodies were present, involved, and recognized. It brought to memory the book by Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire, where she traces the importance of African spirituality in Pentecostalism and describes the body-mind-spirit correspondence of their worship.[1] For my students, music was a corporeal and corporate experience. As an instructor who was present in this environment, I was stating by my mere presence, “Yes, you and I are different; but we can enjoy these musical arrangements together. We can share in this special moment. We are together in this class. We are on equal footing.” Music gave them a legitimacy to express themselves. In listening, I demonstrated that they were valued. Their contributions as authentic as they were to their context were not dismissed or looked down upon, or even looked over. Their voices mattered. Their culture mattered. Their skin tone mattered. I was deeply appreciative of the resourcefulness of my students despite having little or no resources. Music was one way that this resourcefulness played out. For example, the students sang together. Sometimes, it seemed they were singing two different melodies, yet their differences complemented each other. They would also use their hands to clap or use sticks to keep the beat and rhythm. I was amazed at how they all wanted to participate in this experience. If they didn’t know the lyrics, they hummed along. After the singing, the class seemed to come together. Not only were student’s minds engaged in the course content, but their bodies, attitudes, and culture were involved also. I concluded that music is a wonderful resource. It is able to change a person’s mood. It is able to create a certain ambiance or environment. It is also something that is shared if everyone is listening to the same thing. All the participants move to the music together. The classroom was not just a foreign Honduran-American telling students how to think or what to think. Rather, it created space for meaningful engagement. As I return to the US, I want to make music a part of my courses. Whether we sing old hymns or modern music, it is important to honor the cultures, ethnicities, and races of my students. This is one way to engage them. I know students may have reservations about singing, but at the very least they can bring a video clip to play in class through web services like YouTube. Whether it is online or in person, sharing in music is an activity that all can participate in   [1] Estrelda Y. Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African-American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011).

It is well substantiated that the retention rate in predominantly white institutions (PWI) for BIPOC faculty is abysmally low. Newly hired BIPOC faculty in PWIs report feeling ignored, unwelcomed, even shunned by colleagues and students. They are treated as if, though hired for the job, that they do not belong. Yes, there are some PWIs for which providing hospitality to BIPOC faculty is done well. However, the majority of BIPOC colleagues who leave employment after less than three years report that their reason for leaving hinges upon experiences of being treated inhospitably. With this assertion, I am not focused on overt acts of racism or discrimination. I am, instead for this blog, focused upon acts of cultural insensitivity, lack of basic social skills, and the inability of an institution to be caring, compassionate, and friendly to newcomers who are BIPOC. What goes wrong? Simply put, the new people are not on-boarded, not offered kindness and warmth. Climates of care, hospitality and belonging do not just happen. An ethos of welcoming new people must be attended to by many, many persons. The habits and practices of care, compassion, and belonging when BIPOC persons enter the PWI must be painstakingly exercised and attended to conscientiously. Regrettably, so many schools do NOT have systems for on-boarding, orienting, and providing for the arrival of new persons in the first six to nine months of employment. People feel unwelcomed because no one, in a robust and institutionalized way, is welcoming them. I would like to offer this list of activities, rituals, and happenings for your context so that, from the very beginning, BICOP colleagues feel a strengthen of ties and a genuine forming of connections. All these possibilities will not be for every context and every hire. Find what works for you and the person who is newly hired. Consider this list, and given your context, create new ideas of care for newly hired BIPOC colleagues: Invite the colleague to meals hosted in their honor. These are not meant as informal committee meetings, but gatherings to get acquainted with one another. Decide if the meals are better in an area restaurant or hosted in a private home. In either case, ask about the person’s dietary preference and restrictions. Who on your faculty gives the best parties? Soon after arrival, ask the best host to throw a party for the new BIPOC faculty and have fun. If you are a well-established member of the community, do not be stand-offish. Do not hold-up waiting for the new faculty to ask you to coffee. Take the initiative – invite the new person to coffee or a meal - with no other agenda than getting acquainted. During the conversation listen more than you talk. Develop a ritual of welcoming professors by having the president, provost, dean, or department head introduce the new colleague to their first class, then applaud wildly in front of students. Send the message to students that this new person is not on probation, not still being interviewed, is not less significant as a faculty colleague due to race. Send the message that there is an expectation that all respect will be given to this colleague. Invite the new person to participate in campus rites, rituals, religious services in a role of their own choosing. Assist the person with finding a religious community for themselves and their family should they desire it. Invite the person to the trustee meeting, alum gathering, student event. Plan to introduce and celebrate the arrival of the colleague at the event. Invite the person to attend the campus sports event and sit in the location of honor. Invite the person to the faculty retreat and make sure they have transportation to the location. If the venue is in a rural location where the BIPOC colleague would be unwelcomed, or in danger, change the venue. Make sure the person has club or institutional memberships that are common and available in that context. For example, membership to the local country club, membership to the local gym, membership to the local library, etc. Connect the person to known childcare networks, if desired. Inform the person of access to certain “insider” goodies, e.g., campus guest housing, coupons for travel, use of vacation properties, meals in the refectory, bookstore discounts, etc. Connect the person with one or two colleagues (one from faculty and one from staff) who will take responsibility for on-boarding. Assign an elder faculty colleague to mentor the person on issues of tenure, promotion, and institutional culture. Make sure the person has necessary keys, identifications, computer accesses. Help the person with office set-up. Make sure all available institutional documents are provided, e.g., Employee Handbook, campus calendar, trustee meeting minutes, faculty meeting minutes, organizational chart, phone and email directory, etc. Connect the person with persons who have a similar family structure (persons caring for children, elderly, pets, etc.). Help the person locate doctors, groceries, barber shops, hair and nail salons which are culturally woke. Consider what is unique about the town, city, or area and invite the new person to participate in that regionally cultural event. Create an “ambassadors” list, i.e. a profile of families who would welcome getting calls from new persons about issues as they arise. Ask the new person what they need, or what their family might need, to secure a good quality of life in the new location, then work to provide for that need. In the most hospitable schools, it is understood that all persons in the community have a role and responsibility in welcoming the new colleague - ALL PEOPLE - EVERYBODY! The key is for the new BIPOC faculty person not to feel alone, isolated, abandoned, unwanted, or suspect. In the words of my mother, Nancy B. Westfield, “You do not have to become friends with all the new people, but you do have to be friendly.”