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My daughter looks forward to her trip to Disneyland, which is scheduled for her twelfth birthday. She listens to the stories about the park from her friends, reads the descriptions on the website and magazines, and watches numerous ads on YouTube. One day I asked her (trying to save some money), “Honey, since you already know so much about Disneyland, do you really think we should go?” You can easily imagine her screaming reply: “No way! I should definitely go! It is totally different!”  Teaching world religions for several years, one question that I try to better answer each time is: “How can I make each religion real and alive, so that students don’t see it as a concept to be memorized or something that exists in textbooks or histories, but as something that they can feel, touch, apply, and appreciate, in other words, something that they can ‘embody’?” I find this question especially important since many students have been trained to see religion as a series of beliefs and doctrines, rather than daily practices, bodily movements, and practical ways of dealing with specific challenges in life. There are several pedagogical methods I have been developing to enhance the embodied understanding of religions. There is much room for further refinement. One is providing opportunities for having sensory experiences of a religion. For example, during our sessions on Hinduism, as students come into the classroom, they will hear ancient Vedic hymns recited by Hindu priests. In another session, they would smell the fragrance from burning herbs and ghee commonly used in daily Hindu rituals. Yet in another session, they listen to George Harrison singing “My Sweet Lord,” which embodies Hindu piety and religious inclusivity with a beautiful melody and guitar sound. It is okay if students keep chatting with their friends, browse the internet, or review previous materials experiencing these things. The casual setting is intentional because I think there’s a significant value in building up familiarity with an unfamiliar religion in a relaxed setting without the pressure to comprehend or memorize information. I find these small exposures make it easier for students to open their minds and engage more intently in class discussions and lectures.  During the class hour, I utilize multiple videos to help students observe the religious practices. In particular, I ask them to focus on the sounds, movements, facial expressions, and variegated bodies of practitioners whose voices are often muted in scriptures. For example, before discussing the concepts of the Hindu sacrificial ritual, I ask students to describe whatever they see in the video of an ordinary sacrifice, paying attention to every detail they’ve noticed. Students are often surprised to learn that their simple remarks are tied to important concepts such as puja, darshan(a), symbols and characteristics of gods, murti, and rituals.  Another method that helps students experience a religion more intimately comes from hearing the voices and watching the movements of practitioners in person. For each religion, I reach out to students and colleagues who practice that religion or are coming from that background to talk about their religion. They share their personal stories, show us photos and objects, and tell us what they value most about their religion. These demonstrations add a visceral component for the students that deepens their understanding beyond the stock images we find in textbooks and the internet. Sometimes the guests also share thoughtful questions and criticisms, which adds nuance to our understanding of a religion and intensity to the class discussion. External observation of sensate practices, however, is not enough. If embodied empathy is the goal, beliefs should be experienced, too, so students can tap into the value that practitioners find in a particular religion. At the beginning of the course, I introduce the concept called “Religious Scholar’s Magic Hat.” It is a rather light form of practicing epochē and getting snippets of insiders’ appreciation of the religion. I ask students to wear this imaginary hat while we practice applying a religion’s core ideas to our daily lives. For example, after presenting an array of Buddhist teachings on suffering and freedom from it, I leave some time for a reflective task. First, students think about the things that create stress in their lives, including some of their most painful experiences. Then after writing down their answers, I ask them to think carefully about the potential causes of those sufferings, looking carefully into the deep desires that they have. After this, with the help of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s short guided meditation, we practice focusing on a single desire or emotion that rises in our minds, aiming to see its illusiveness. Throughout this mock Buddhist meditation, students can try embodying central Buddhist teachings, seeing the potential applicability of Buddhism to some of their problems.  I believe that the conscious practice of embodying religion in class, despite its incompleteness and sometimes awkwardness, helps students extend their understanding of religions. Hopefully this training enables students, when they encounter a religion of others, can practice trained empathy rather than immediately distancing themselves based on doctrinal differences. 

During our close reading of The Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defiantly asked in front of the whole class, “If you can force people into complacency, then segregation works, right? Society still functions.” I froze for a second, absorbing the gravity of the moment. My mind immediately calculated the multiple layers of that remark made within the complicated sociopolitical climate of the 2016 election season. This young white man was not just challenging Martin Luther King Jr.; his tone was intentionally challenging me as an Indian-American woman. Why? What was informing his challenge? The tension in the room was palpable, particularly as the students of color waited with bated breath for their professor’s response. This spontaneous internal calculation produced an answer that still feels like a moment of grace. After an initial pause, I responded, It’s not a question of whether society can still function, but the principles by which it functions. King is arguing that the only way a society can subjugate an entire population into complacency is by stripping them of their sense of worth; transforming them from a somebody into a nobody. This subjugation cannot be the basis of a just society. How might his claims relate to our earlier discussions of imago dei? What makes this letter prophetic in a manner similar to what we said about Moses? I could sense a collective sigh of relief in the room as the student’s initial defiance melted into greater openness. Another student immediately jumped in to offer her perspective. The discussion continued. Occurring within the first three weeks of my first year of teaching, this moment taught me to recognize that how I handle such tension either builds or destroys my credibility for the rest of the semester. While I intuitively prevented an escalation of violence by avoiding any kind of us versus them binary on the basis of race and turning all the students back to the text and shared content of the course, I sought resources that could aid me in understanding the role of embodiment and visceral responses in the classroom. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies,[1] Resmaa Menakem argues that racism and white supremacy cannot simply be addressed through intellectual conversation. Rather, the discomfort we feel about these themes reveals how they live and breathe in our bodies. If we are born in the US, our bodies reflect trauma responses surrounding the myth of race. In the classroom in particular, racialized trauma can show up in heightened hypervigilance connected to a fight, flight, or freeze response that interrupts normal cognitive pathways. For example, the students of color in the classroom example above expressed this alarm when they waited with bated breath for my response. They were only able to relax once the questions were answered honestly without further harm being committed either against them or their peer. Menakem also proposes the idea of metabolizing trauma, which is especially helpful in preparing for these visceral moments when they occur in the classroom. First, as educators, we must recognize the intersection of our own social locations with those of the various students who make up our classes. Not only will each student relate to the content of the course from different social locations, but such social locations will involve different visceral entry points when the topic of racism is involved. Second, we must discern if our pedagogy is engaging in dirty pain or clean pain. Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. The classic example of dirty pain, Menakem argues, is “white fragility.” When talking about racism and white supremacy, white fragility is often viscerally expressed as a reflexive, protective response by which a white body avoids the pain or experience of racial trauma. Clean pain, on the other hand, is pain that can build a capacity for growth. Such pain helps us to engage our body’s integrity and tap into our embodied resilience by moving through painful realities with honesty, step by step. Accepting clean pain has two different effects. For white bodies, it allows them to confront their collective dissociation and silence. For bodies of color caught between white supremacy and anti-blackness in this country, clean pain allows for honesty regarding how these ideologies shape identities and forms of belonging in false ways. The wisdom of this approach, however, is that while all pain hurts, clean pain promises to heal generations so that we do not pass this visceral trauma on to our students. After being exposed to these fundamental concepts of racial trauma theory, I no longer fear these tense moments or see them as aberrations that distract from the lesson plan of the day. Rather, by skillfully attending to them with an awareness that the classroom asks us to be engaged in mind, body, and spirit, such moments have the capacity to heal by showing how we may better engage the hard conversations.   [1] Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Reclined on my large, red, comfy, couch, I was reading, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. I was enjoying the read, and then I got to #14, entitled “Joy Is Such a Human Madness.” In this section, Ross wrote about a student in his class, Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be a teacher, and what she wanted her classroom to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join… And what if the wilderness – perhaps the densest wild in there – thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers … is our sorrow?... What if we joined our sorrows … What if that is joy? I was so taken with this idea of teaching, as espoused by Gay’s student, that I sat up, closed the book, tossed it on my coffee table and said out loud, in vernacular speak, “Ross! What you done done?” His poetic prose crystallized for me the plight of teaching as recently described by distressed colleagues. In the last several months, colleagues have reported a kind of lingering malaise among students and colleagues. The reports say that teachers and students are making efforts to continue in the routine while at the same time there is a palpable sense of forlornness, sadness, even, dread. Most of this, they say, is unspoken and oftentimes unacknowledged. One colleague said, “Students are just acting weird.” Another colleague said, “I feel like no one is able to hear anyone else.” Still another said, “I suspect this is a kind of depression, but none like I have seen before.” The conversations also told of an exacerbation. There is, colleagues have said, no singular trouble, no discrete problem, no focused event that can be blamed, fixed, nor done away with, to adjust or that would return us to “normal.” We have intuitive knowledge that “things don’t feel right,” and a confusion, reticence, unclarity about what to do and how to do. The intangible which we cannot identify, and for which our semester is so heavily ladened, is – if Ross Gay and his student are accurate - sorrow. We are burdened by collective sorrow, and we possess few institutional coping skills for this corporate onus. Our classrooms are situated in brittle times. We do not know how to navigate the depth of sorrow which enters our classrooms – either brought by our students or by ourselves. I suspect we have underestimated the collective consequences of having lived as a society on lockdown for more than a year. Having lived in mandatory isolation, and now emerging from that strange lifestyle, we are coming to know that our collective minds, bodies, and spirits are irrevocably changed – for better or for worse. We enter our classrooms as changed people tasked with discovering those changes by trial and error, by first-hand experience, or by pretending they are not there. We are ill-prepared to navigate these changes. In addition to the effects of the quarantine, like so many others, I have been staggered by the myriad of events which are contributing to our individual and collective sorrow, our inner terrains of wilderness. We know the list of recent events that have us on edge, that are strangling us: grief for the millions worldwide who have died from Covid, the violent attack on the U.S. Capital to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the ongoing triple-threat health crisis of Covid/RSV/the flu, new outbreaks of polio, the uptick of police violence caught on camera, recent hurricanes, wild fires, war in Europe, the annihilation of Haiti, the British Prime Minister debacle, mass shootings across the country, rises in domestic violence, swells of suicide in all age groups, and on… and on… We wonder if we are living through a foreclosure of democracy, and if we are, upon what can we depend for survival? Our sorrow is deep. Our inner bogs, swamps, and uncrossable ravines are expanding. We bring our expanding wildernesses into our classrooms. Ross Gay asks, “What if we joined our sorrows… What if that is joy?” Ross Gay is pointing us toward delight and joy, even amid profound sorrow. The crux is that our sorrow, our wilderness, might be better handled, survived, coped with, if classrooms, rather than ignore or pretend our sorrows away, are joined together – allow us to come together and acknowledge one another’s humanity. It is then through community that we will grapple through these new troubles – come what may. I know that for some teachers the call for classrooms to become places of community is as arresting as the current plight of our sorrow. We must redesign, rethink, recommit or continue to falter and come up short. Classrooms that allow our wilderness to meet and join might be thought to be invitations to a shared onslaught of tears, gnashing of teeth, ringing of hands, heightening distress for already anxious people; a kind of therapeutic approach to teaching for which few of us are prepared, and even fewer are interested. That is not how I hear this profound vision of teaching toward communities of care. Joy is not the antidote for sorrow.  Joy emerges when a community of persons are present one to another in times of distress, grief, uncertainty, and doubt. Classroom spaces which encourage that our wildernesses meet, and possibly join are spaces for which the communal values of listening, compassion, tenderness, and accountability are a shared priority. Ross Gay is suggesting that our classrooms, if they are going to be balm for this strange moment, are best when they are spaces of caring community. In this peculiar moment, when we do not recognize ourselves, our teaching task is to pivot away from climates of isolation, individualism, and those assignments that insist upon gratuitous stress or hollow competitions. This is a moment to call one another together in care and compassion. The joy will be in the discovery that none of us are alone as we navigate these unfamiliar, uncertain, and death dealing times.

When asked, “What was Muhammad’s moral character like?” Aisha replied: “His moral character was the Quran.” Students encounter this hadith at two moments in the introductory course to the study of Islam. The first is when students meet the Prophet Muhammad through hadith literature, the written record of sayings and actions of the Prophet. We return to the hadith the following week when students begin to explore the Quran. In our second pass of this famous narration, we begin to contemplate what it means to say that the Prophet’s character was the Quran. The idea that the Prophet was a walking Quran is at once simple and simultaneously beyond the immediate reach of the class. Students explain that to say the Prophet’s character was the Quran means he exhibited ideal virtues. This exegesis grasps at an accessible meaning of the hadith, but does not yet appreciate the concept of embodied knowledge that is so important in classical Islamic education, especially Quran education. In some respects, the notion of embodied knowledge runs counter to the kind of education students embark upon in their college years (and the whole of their education leading up to college). Most students describe the purpose of their liberal arts education as a training in a particular way of thinking—honing the skills of critical reading and analysis. But perhaps the idea of embodied knowledge is not so foreign to them. The university where I teach emphasizes “hands-on” and “experiential” learning, the power of doing to facilitate learning. Students are encouraged to study abroad, take on internships, and generally roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves—physically—in their education. So, there are some comparisons to make with students as we discuss the idea of what it might mean to embody the Quran. In this way, the institution’s learning philosophy translates to our classroom in my effort to create for students an embodied experience of the Quran. One of my goals when I teach the Quran is to develop in students an appreciation for the Quran beyond its written text (the Quran as mushaf). I emphasize the significance of the recited Quran and the place of recitation in Muslim life. As I introduce them to the art of Quran recitation, I try to create an auditory experience for the class. In doing this, I aim to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation of the recited Quran. This is an ambitious goal, one that deserves some probing. What kinds of possibilities and limitations might there be in cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for the recited Quran in the (secular) liberal arts classroom? To introduce the Quran to the uninitiated through its recitation is, first, to invite the audience to listen. Listening is itself an act to be honed. To prepare students for the auditory experience, they learn about the significant place of memorization (ḥifẓ) and the art of enunciation and elocution (tajwīd) with patterns of melody (maqāmat). Even with this preparation, the listening we try to practice in our class is complex. Just as much as opening the Quran and reading a page of text cannot convey its meanings, neither can listening to the most beautiful of recitations. In my effort to cultivate for the uninitiated an appreciation of the aural experience of the Quran, I try to create an opportunity for them to recognize its beauty. But this beauty may not be accessible to everyone. My hearing-impaired students have urged me to consider more deeply what an aural attunement to the Quran means for the deaf. For hearing students, the question of what it means to listen to the Quran can be overwhelming. In their preparation to listen, I share various sources with them (readings by Michael Sells and Kristina Nelson, as well as videos of Quran recitations where audiences physically and vocally respond to the performance). So, when students are not moved by a Quran recitation, they describe a sense of feeling left out. For them it is like standing in front of the Mona Lisa and grasping to understand its power. The Quran itself situates ways of listening in relation to the recognition of its truth. While the Quran describes hearing as a physical perception of sound, hearing is typically associated with spiritual understanding. Indeed, the Quran insists that listening requires the heart. Hearing is sutured to learning and understanding, whereas those who reject its message are described as those who “do not hear,” and those who are “deaf,” among other sensory descriptions. In one passage, those who reject God’s message are described as putting their “fingers in their ears” (2:19). At other moments, God interferes with hearing, such as when God placed “heaviness in their ears” (18:57), and “a seal upon their hearts so that they do not hear” (7:100). To listen, then, is not limited to creating an auditory experience for hearing students, but one that involves the heart. Or to put it in less anatomical terms, hearing in the Quran requires a recognition of it as revelation. In this way, the goal of cultivating in students an aesthetic appreciation of the Quran may be at best naïve and at worst problematic. Listening to the Quran for delight, pleasure, or entertainment may be an invitation to over-aestheticize the Quran—to dissolve its message into mere beauty. Listening to the Quran does not allow for a distanced observation. It immerses the listener, all listeners, in an embodied experience. While Quran recitation offers an opening into the Quran in ways that might awaken students’ interest (since it offers a break from the written word and involves their senses that are so often neglected in liberal arts classes), it is through recitation that those who hear and those who do not are distinguished by their bodies and beliefs. To expose students to the significance of the embodied Quran may be to invite them to the edge of its beauty.

A while back I read an interesting, if not somewhat problematic, book called Hunt, Gather, Parent. The author, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, went all around the world, along with her young daughter, trying to learn how people parent. She noticed that, in many other places, children seem to be calm, motivated, flexible, responsible, helpful, confident, cooperative contributors, unlike the tantrum-prone toddler she had in tow. These families functioned more like teams, with both parents and kids playing important and integrated roles. Doucleff offers the apt acronym TEAM to convey what these parents do differently: Togetherness, Encouragement, Autonomy, and Minimal Interference. Dishes need to be washed? TEAM effort. Tortillas need to be made? TEAM effort. Other kids need corralling? TEAM effort. I got to thinking, as I do, about teams (and even toddler-like behavior) in another context: the college classroom. There is no shortage of information about group learning, cooperative learning, and team-based learning, such as Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching (2004), available in the teaching literature. Fields like business and engineering have done a particularly good job of helping educators understand how to compose teams, how to create projects that actually require team effort (vs. a divide-and-conquer approach), how to grade group work, and how to teach students the skills needed to collaborate, such as establishing norms or navigating conflict. Journals devoted to the teaching of these disciplines are well worth the read (e.g., Journal of Education for Business and Journal of Engineering Education), even for those of us in the humanities. Such skills are, I believe, important for life, since working successfully as part of a team is something we’ll all have to do at some point, no matter what type of job we end up in. Even religion professors, lone wolves many of us, still have to serve on committees or attend department meetings with… other humans. But this kind of team isn’t what I’m talking about here—and not just because I always did hate group work. When we talk about teams in the classroom, what we usually mean are teams of students. Teach them how to work well together, teach them how to take personal accountability, teach them how to resist “social loafing.” But what about us? Why is there always a distance, a separation, a distinction, between us and them? Could we, instead, think of our classes as opportunities for TEAMwork, similar to what Doucleff found in functional families across the world? Could we, instead, conceive of ourselves as being on the same team as our students? Athletic analogies, like teachers as coaches, abound in educational writings, so this idea isn’t exactly far-fetched, though there are a lot of people who don’t love these metaphors. And, of course, there are some real differences between professors and students, including differences in power (which can go both ways: we can give them bad grades, sure, but students can also give us poor evaluations, for instance), that we must keep in mind when considering a team approach. But let’s give it a try. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how I spend time in class co-creating community norms with my students. I realized, after reading Hunt, Gather, Parent, that part of what I am doing in this activity is positioning all of us on the same team, responsible for one another and working toward common goals. Another example, one focusing on the T-for-togetherness part of Doucleff’s TEAM, is that we might start taking a closer look at our own role when students’ performance goes awry. On a team, everyone is responsible for everyone else as well as the success of the team; nobody is exempt. When mistakes or failures happen, we support one another and we try to do better, next time, together. So students bomb the midterm. Okay, well, maybe they studied poorly or not at all. Maybe they didn’t take proper notes in class. Maybe they stayed up too late, cramming or partying, the night before. This happens. But could it also not be that the test was poorly designed, that it didn’t align with what was taught in class? Could it also not be that we didn’t teach students how to study, so the midterm was actually testing not what they had learned in the course so far, but rather their test-taking skills? So students turn in sub-par final papers. Okay, well, maybe they came to college unprepared. Maybe they procrastinated and started writing too late. Maybe they have an overinflated sense of their own writing skills. Yes, of course. But could it also not be that we didn’t provide them proper instruction about how to write this kind of paper, in this class, in this discipline, in the first place, or didn’t give them a rubric or set of criteria to lay bare our expectations? Could it also not be that we didn’t scaffold the assignment into manageable chunks with ample opportunity for feedback and improvement? So students cheat, lie. Okay, well, maybe they’re just entitled, lazy, looking for any opportunity to cut corners. Sure. But could it also not be that our learning environments and assignments incentivize dishonesty? Could it also not be that there are too few and too high-of-stakes assignments that their entire grade is riding on? Could it also not be that we haven’t conveyed why this subject is important for them to know? Could it also not be that we’ve made ourselves so intimidating and unapproachable that they can’t come to us when they’re struggling and simply tell the truth? I’m not saying that we need to use the idea of a team to start blaming ourselves for every bad behavior on the students’ parts. This would be a mistake. Students are adults and, ultimately, responsible for their own learning. (And this is an important life lesson they need to learn, too.) But thinking of ourselves as on or as part of their team, rather than something separate, opens up new ways of thinking about common and perennially frustrating teaching problems. What are some possibilities that the idea of teaching as teamwork opens up for you?

I was born and grew up in the hills of east Tennessee, in the Appalachian region of the United States. As a child, I didn’t realize that where I lived had a reputation in other parts of the country. I also didn’t know that I had an exceptionally strong Southern accent until I was in college. When I decided to pursue academia, I worried that my accent would lead others to think that I did not belong in graduate school. I began to attempt to erase my accent, especially during classes or when speaking to a professor. Before giving my very first paper at a conference, I practiced over and over again to be sure that I sounded “smart” and “professional.” It was becoming clear that, to many people, “Southern” and “smart” were not synonymous. When I moved to the “north” (New Jersey) for my doctoral studies, these fears increased. I worked to prove that I was smart and capable, which meant that I attempted to hide my accent, even though it wasn’t as strong as when I was younger. Even with all of my work and practice, it occasionally slipped through and inevitably someone would comment on it. Through reading and reflection, I now realize this struggle with my accent was connected to my background and, further, my class. While many of my fellow students seemed to understand academia instinctively, I struggled to grasp it. This imposter syndrome affected me in numerous ways, especially in graduate school. Even when I had a question or a comment, I was nervous to speak. Insecurity infiltrated my body; I would wring my hands under my desk, cross and uncross my legs. When I finally found the courage to speak, my face would redden with every word. While I have worked to overcome these feelings and now can speak in academic settings, I still vividly recall my embodied experiences as a woman from Appalachia navigating academia. A number of scholars have written about class as it relates to the academy and the classroom.[1] For example, Stephanie Moynagh writes about the ways that class affects embodiment. She observes: Embodied experience varies widely, always shaped by the pervasive impacts of power structures that affect different bodies in different ways. Making sense of our somatic experience is also influenced by cultural discourse and by the limitations of cognitive processes of understanding. . . Membership in identity categories such as working-class, working-poor, poverty-class, low-income, or cash-poor is also confusing because class-based experience and identity can shift dramatically over time.[2] These observations resonate with my own experience in academia, a space that I continue to carefully navigate based on my background. My embodied experience also affects my pedagogical approach to the classroom. I remember vividly how it felt to enter a university classroom and feel out of place, confused at some of the language being used, and worried to contribute to a class discussion. I now recognize that my experiences navigating the academy help me to be a better teacher and guide for my students.[3] While my southern accent is now (mostly) hidden, I do not enter the classroom assuming that everyone understands terminology. Instead, I define words and set expectations clearly from the first day of class. As Moynagh argues, “All learning environments, both formal and informal, need to make meaningful space for nondominant ways of knowing and relating to the world.”[4] For this reason, I also offer a variety of ways that students can participate in the class. Instead of only acknowledging vocal contributions or sophisticated vocabulary, I encourage silent reflection and journaling. Similarly, offering creative assignments within the classroom is a strategy that can help to ease the tension for students who are less familiar with academic writing. I use storytelling often as a teaching strategy. Storytelling is popular in Appalachia, where we hear stories from our parents, grandparents, and even our neighbors. When possible, I take the students outside or arrange chairs in a circle as I tell a story, usually a biblical or historical one (because of the courses that I teach). I have found that students remember these stories later into the semester. In these ways, my geographical background becomes a way that I mentor and encourage students. I now acknowledge my Appalachian background when possible and attempt to dismantle harmful assumptions about geography and class.     [1] bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York: Routledge, 2000); Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). [2] Stephanie Moynagh, “Class and Embodment: Making Space for Complex Capacity,” in Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization, ed. Sheila Batacharya and Yuk-Lin Renita Wong (Edmonton: AU Press, 2018), 356. [3] For an example of the ways sharing our own experiences can positively affect student learning, see: Phil Bratta, “Relating Our Experiences: The Practice of Positionality Stories in Student-Centered Pedagogy,” College Composition and Communication, January 1, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/43453027/Relating_Our_Experiences_The_Practice_of_Positionality_Stories_in_Student_Centered_Pedagogy. [4] Moynagh, “Class and Embodment: Making Space for Complex Capacity,” 365.

One exercise that has sustained me throughout these last three years of a global pandemic has been writing letters to my Beloveds. As a child who was always on the move, inhabiting la frontera, physically and intellectually, writing to friends in my home country was a way to remain grounded while sharing glimpses and shifts in my inner landscapes in embodied ways.  Epistolary practices have connected peoples across space, time, and geographic divides for millennia. So ancient and so distant, this tradition remains so close, so potent, and so alive. Several religious traditions are quite familiar with this form of expression. Think of the Apostle Paul, who wrote to many communities in response to specific urgencies. I believe such a poetic-prophetic exercise has helped generations of our kin to be reassured, connect to their roots, and move through many dangerous crossroads. As I write these words, I am reminded that it is election day in my home country of Brazil. I don’t take the right to vote for granted as it was an impossibility some six decades ago. Paulo Freire, from whom we have all learned a lot about education, shared reflections in his A Pedagogy of Hope (1992) on what it was like to be forced into sixteen years of painful exile following the 1964 coup d’état. Letter writing was essential to him during those treacherous years. A lot of what later became known as the core of his teaching philosophy and praxis was developed in dialogue with distant friends, communities, and home country, many of whom he communicated with via letters. In his Profesora Sim, Tia Nao: Cartas a Quem Ousa Ensinar (1993), Freire indicates in the very title of the book that he would be communicating with his audience through letters to those who dare to teach. I suspect that Freire chose such a mode of communication precisely because of the impact phrases such as “Dear Comrades, Dear Co-conspirators” may have on readers. These words have the power of disarming us, conjuring a type of openness to our sensorial and embodied experiences. More than academic, abstract, and conceptual knowledge, those who dare to teach know that accessible, clear, and heartfelt content is not necessarily simplistic or superficial. On the contrary, it is drenched with histories, as Freire put it. He often wrote about how one never arrives alone in any context, whether to exile, a classroom, or the reading of a letter. Our bodies are, indeed, drenched in history, carrying an overlay of feelings, desires, memories, cumulative knowings, worldviews, longings, saudades, frustrations, trauma, and tensions that live at the threshold of our texts and contexts. For Freire, writing letters while in exile was a way to preserve his identity while inventing new ways of living and being and loving in unknown, and often strange, countries. Letter writing became a way to educate his affections, as he put it, and of coping with the insurmountable challenges of his geopolitical condition while resisting the urge to succumb to naive optimism.  This fall semester, I have the immense pleasure of co-teaching an online class on spiritual formation with Dr. Aizaiah Yong at the Claremont School of Theology. As we began thinking of how to “Bless the Space Between Us,” between the weekly assignments, among the diverse time zones and geographic locations, an idea emerged of incorporating epistolary practices in what we named SpiritLetters. At the end of each week, we take turns writing a reflection on how our weeks have been, what kinds of spiritual practices have sustained us, and what types of literature, art forms, prayers, and blessings have given us nourishment as our lives unfold. These experiments with letter writing in the context of our teaching-learning community are intended to share a kind of presence that enacts, embodies, and evokes a sense of deep regard and warmth that only this medium can radiate. The Irish teacher and poet John O’Donohue is responsible for inspiring and inspiriting both our SpiritLetters and this blog post’s title. His book To Bless the Space Between Us (2008) offers readers insights, comfort, and company in our spiritual journeys. He reflects: The commercial edge of so-called “progress” has cut away a large region of human tissue and webbing that held us in communion with one another. We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown. For such crossings, we need to find new words. And these new words that slide from our minds to our hearts, spilling into the pages as SpiritLetters, are offered as blessings and invocations that hopefully can accompany teacher-learners in their academic journeys.  In what follows, Aizaiah Yong shares a bit of the impact SpiritLetters have had on him. As a teacher and scholar who is deeply influenced by the Christian contemplative tradition as understood by Raimon Panikkar and Julian of Norwich, it is important for me that the practice of intellectual learning be deeply tethered to the practice of embodied living. The practice of writing a weekly SpiritLetter to our learning community has supported the intention of harmonizing intellectual learning with embodied living in two important ways: (1) providing an opportunity to slow down and be more fully present to the insights and ruminations offered from within the class and (2) inviting a deeper and more profound integration of them in our global social witnessing, which is an important element necessary when tending to collective trauma. Through the practice of SpiritLetters, I have found that slowing down is less about the speed by which I perform a task, but rather the level of intensity in which I engage. In this sense, to slow down allows one (for me as the teacher-learner and co-facilitator) to be more fully aware of the precious and invaluable insights offered by each person in the class through a stance of curiosity and compassion. Here, I am disciplining myself to avoid prematurely entering into critical analysis but instead choosing to contemplate first, allowing for their words, assignments, and questions to unfold within me. A process of slowing down invites a more embodied awareness of how the class is flowing and also informs a more holistic response, which in turn becomes the words written through the SpiritLetter. SpiritLetters ultimately then become a moment of mirroring back to the whole learning community what I am hearing and then asks those wisdoms to be more deeply integrated in the class journey’s forward. SpiritLetters offer a space to reflect back what is arising and to allow for a finer-tuned calibration that guides our collective responses as persons and communities. I consider this a contemplative and trauma-informed approach to teaching which Thomas Huebl describes as “resilience building as collective coherence.” Huebl writes, “Resilience building means that I am not just a cognitive participant of the communities I am part of, it is that I feel it. When we are aware of each other we create collective coherence. That is especially important when we go through disturbing times.”[*] As we continue to invite more diverse and geographically-distributed learning communities into our classrooms of higher education, I hope that we continue to practice emergent pedagogical approaches that allow us to slow down, be more fully aware of the relations that support us, and invite a deeper collective integration of the wisdom revealed. It is our hope that these reflections will invite you to inhabit these spaces of co-learning and co-teaching with an invitation to cultivate your own pedagogical practices of being and becoming, even in the face of multiple crises and impossibilities. May we remember to laugh, rest, regenerate, and seek tenderness so that we can continue to bless the spaces between us.   In togetherness, Aizaiah and Yohana       [*] https://thomashuebl.com/what-is-global-social-witnessing/

As a student in North American classrooms I learned about punctuality, sometimes the hard way. It became so ingrained in me that I am now always early for everything; I am present fifteen minutes ahead of time before the start of church, class, or any mundane event. I reflect on this and find that I am a Latinx individual who has become acclimated to life in the US. However, I now find myself teaching in classrooms that are increasingly diverse. As I interact with these diverse students, I find myself reconnecting with my roots and learning that my heritage as a Latinx person allows me to make connections to the culture of many of my students. Punctuality is a strong Western value. Time is money. One of the greatest resources people have in their possession is time. Yet this is one of the things that sets Western thought apart from other cultures around the world. An example of an attitude that contrasts sharply with this idea is the Latin American saying: “hay más tiempo que vida” (there is more time than life). This saying can be interpreted in two ways. First, one can say carpe diem, seize the day. Life is short, therefore one must make the most of his or her time on earth. The second way this can be taken is that there is plenty of time. Time will go on, and one must therefore invest in relationships rather than fret over punctuality and time. This second interpretation is the way many Latin Americans behave and think consciously and subconsciously. It obviously conflicts with the expectations of Eurocentric culture.[1] I spent three weeks teaching two courses in Zambia last year. One area that I was able to build bridges from my Latin American background with my students from Zambia was through the principle of Ubuntu and its implications for time. Ubuntu is a term that cannot be translated because of the density and depth of its meaning.[2] It is a term that may be described as meaning “humanity for others,” “I am because you are,” “I can only become a person through other persons,” and “to become a person.”[3] A term from Latin America that is similar is the Oaxacan concept of nakara. It is translated as “a willingness to take responsibility for another by providing what is needed for a healthy life.”[4] It indicates a strong collective bond. Rather than being disjointed individuals pulling away from each other, this invites us to see our connectedness and relatedness to one another. My actions affect another person and their actions also affect me. We do not live in a vacuum. Even in our most individualized Western mindset our actions have consequences, whether to an organization, our society, to the environment, to those of a different nationality or race, etc. As I reconnect with my own Latin American roots and simultaneously interact with my Zambia students, I realize that we may be so concerned over the things we must get done and material that needs to be covered that we forget that as teachers we must model an empathic humanity to others. I knew I had a lot of things to get done for my intensive courses in Zambia. However, the first day there, I realized that the students had only participated in asynchronous class sessions and that their only connection to me was a computer screen. The students vocalized the difficult time they were having with this type of education, learning our LMS, and the culture of online courses. These were very foreign. They were in a state of learning shock, longing to establish a close connection with their professors and the seminary. This was the reason that I decided to improvise and to be flexible with my goals. The first day of class, instead of beginning to lecture, I asked them about themselves and the deepest held innermost values related to their own culture and way of being in the world. The students timidly warmed up and began to share from their own point of view. During my personal time at the hotel, I designed some activities that involved teamwork and group discussion. I have often seen my students in the North American context groan and complain about these types of activities. They seem to be very practical and just want the instructor to disseminate information. They also dislike working in groups because they are oriented to doing well for themselves first. Group work may reduce the importance of their individual work and consequently impair them from getting a good grade. But my students from Zambia thrived in this type of environment. They laughed, shared, and opened up to one another. The second thing that I had to adjust was to slow down and spend time on those concepts that I thought could make a positive influence on the students. I learned that I do not have to cover everything. My students are intelligent and responsible for their readings. It was as if my students had to come to a sense of corporate satisfaction with the material covered. I was surprised that when something deeply impacted them that they demonstrated their concern and appreciation for the course content by keeping silent. It is as if they had to digest the material and take their time doing so. Their silence was a mark of comprehension, a sign that they were processing their thoughts and were satisfied with what they were learning. If I can describe it, it was a silence that in Western contexts might be perceived as uncomfortable, but for them it was meaningful. It was the silence of awe and wonder. As I strive for cultural competence and modeling the right relationship with others, Ubuntu has become an important relational term that helps me build a rapport with my students from Zambia. While I may not be the best model of it, for me it means that the classroom must have a strong relational component. My students not only want to receive the right information, but they also want to exist in the right relationship with the instructor and their classmates and course content. I found myself learning from them. Ubuntu has the potential to cross socioeconomic and cultural borders. I find myself thinking differently of my role as a teacher, the class dynamic, and my relationship with my students.   [1] Disclaimer: this does not mean that the class is unstructured or that there is no time limit for student assignments. [2] John D. Volmink, “Ubuntu: Filosofía de vida y ética social,” in Construir puentes Ubuntu para el liderazgo de servicio, edited by the Consortium of Building Bridges for Peace (Canterbury: ImPress, 2019): 45-66. [3] Ibid. [4] Paula E. Morton, Tortillas: A Cultural History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 34-36, 138.

“No. I’m not telling that. I don’t care if it helped. Naw!” It was the end of the second year of COVID teaching, and I was telling a friend that the semester had been the first time in a long time that I felt like my students were really learning. They dug deep and came up with something solid: thoughtful pastoral care practices that were intellectually sound and soulful. It wasn’t just them… teaching had become new. He asked me what made teaching different this time. I cackled out loud and told the truth, “I brought somebody in to teach with me so that I could breathe when I wasn’t ‘on,’ I dropped a lot from the syllabus, slowed down to the speed of understanding, and acted like I knew it was hard out here (for them and me).” My friend told me I had to write about it. Uh, no. Nope. Until now, I was on some strange fence about talking about what I was doing differently. I vacillated between puffing my chest out to defiantly proclaim what I was.not.going.to.do, and passive aggressive silence in faculty conversations about teaching in an era of change brought on by COVID/COVID enlightenment. The truth of the matter was that I made those changes for the sake of survival. Like many of us, I was exhausted. You know those social media threads that show students cute and fresh on the morning of their first day, but by 3 p.m. they look like the bottom of somebody’s shoe? Well, the closer I got to the start of the semester the more I felt like 3 p.m. before the first class of the semester even started. I took my sanity and teaching seriously and made changes that I believed in. I was so excited about shedding the weight of trying to teach an entire semester by myself, and I invited a Mental Health First Aid instructor to embed a training as the meat of my pastoral care class. In light of all of the trauma and subsequent mental health challenges triggered by COVID losses, it only made sense. The course ended up heavy on mental health awareness and skill-building for mental health accompaniment, and lighter on theology and theories about practice. It was a challenging shift at times, but it was also the only thing that made sense. Right along with that came a willingness to create assignments but then modify and unapologetically drop them if other ways of nurturing and assessing learning became more apparent and relevant.   More than a few times, I looked at the class and asked them, “Where are we with this? Is this going to be helpful, or do we need to do something different? This doesn’t have to take us out.” I tap these words out on the keyboard with fervor right now, and I was clear that this was the right thing to do for the sake of survival and learning. Even with that, there’s still a mélange of voices I’ve internalized tapping on my shoulder: “What do you think this is, a free-for-all? Who do you think you are to give up how you were taught and try something else?” Even worse, I hear my own voice telling me, “You’re dumbing it and yourself down. Folks (including yourself) need to step it up.” That last voice—my own—that’s the one I was probably hiding from the most and perhaps it has and continues to have the most to teach me. What does it tell me about my formation in and for the task of higher education? Why have I equated shifting my pedagogy, reading load, and teaching strategies to correspond with the real-time challenges of life and learning with dumbing down? What manner of elitism was this, and what was I going to do about it now that I knew it was alive somewhere inside of me? I’m writing about it to exorcise it. In writing, I hope to gather with others who will themselves to be wide awake about what the challenges of COVID have prompted us to examine within ourselves about why, what, and how we teach. This blog is the first of three, the next of which will have to do with our sense, experience, and use of time in teaching. Time… who owns it?

When I was doing my PhD, I remember being anxious about the readings to be done. Union professors used to assign hundreds of pages to read every week. I am a slow reader and I would always come to class with my readings incomplete. That generated an enormous anxiety that made me fear classes rather than enjoy them. I kept myself very quiet, trying to hide from my teacher as much as possible. Other students, who didn’t do the readings either, would open the text on page seventy-six, read it, and make a comment. These comments were clearly made up on the fly but at least these students participated. I was notably quiet. Only when I was able to read the texts would I speak. I remember a class for which we had to read one novel per week. My goodness, I couldn’t even get close to finishing the novels. I remember the amount of anxiety during that semester. I didn’t know about Cliffs notes and we didn’t have YouTube or Google. One day, when we were discussing a novel in small groups, I mentioned that I had not finished the novel and couldn’t participate. The TA was present in that group. Sure enough, my final evaluation came with the statement that I didn’t read the novels. I was devastated. When I became a professor, this is what I knew how to do: give many readings to my students. It was the way I had been taught. I was shocked when I was at Louisville seminary and Professor Amy P. Pauw told me: one hundred pages is enough. I was shocked. In my first years of teaching I thought it was very poor educating! For me, the amount of reading was proportionally related to the success of the class. But not only that. I realized that my anxiety transferred to the students. Would they read? I never did quizzes, I abhor quizzes, mostly because they were traumatic in my early learning years. Every quiz was a test of my inability, an entrance into my real fake world, a door that would show how stupid I was. Every quiz/grade was a litmus test of who I was and what my future would be. And in that cloud of anxiety, I had to make sure students read all the assignments. I would question some students if I felt they had not finished a reading. I developed ways of knowing when students didn’t read. I could never penalize them, but knowing that students would have not read made me anxious and angry all semester long. It took me a while to understand that my anxiety was not about my students but about my own self, knowing I didn’t do the readings when I was a student. Embarrassing. Fast forward to now; I am just now learning to assign less readings. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it gives me some sense of security. However, I have learned to do things differently. Now I tell my students: There is a lot of reading, but you read what you want, what you can, or what interests you. All the readings have to do with the issue at stake but differ in how they approach it. I have also added movies and art as different resources. Some classes are more successful than others. But what is most important now is that I tell my students they don’t need to read the texts. I stress how important it is to read and that without the texts the class will be boring and less engaging, but that I understand how life is and how difficult it is to make it all work. It is not only that texts will create a great class, but a good class will entice students to read the texts. If therapy has helped me see how much I cast a net of my own projections, fears, and insecurities over my students, teaching has helped me see that I need to constantly change. My forms of knowing and doing change, so my classes change too. However, these changes are necessary not only because of what happens to me but because of the ways societies shift and how methods of educating are becoming obsolete. The transmission of information is no longer critical. Information is everywhere now and easily accessed under our scrolling fingers. We have way too much information. Thus, our classes have to be different. If a class is the same passing of information and content as the scrolling of news, it doesn’t really matter if the class is online or in person, if the class lasts three hours or fifty minutes. The time and medium are different, but the transmission is the same. What makes education unique is this fantastic time/space together when something happens that cannot be gained elsewhere. A time not to create results but to be transformed. To learn and educate each other is to venture into other pedagogical forms that will engage learning differently. We go from passing information to being fully there and bless each other. We then engage knowledge as something to know and to savor, to heal and to transform. We carry something else in our heart and if we can somewhat remember these times is because our bodies loved it. To know comes from a precious moment when we learn together, in a territory, a shared place; living in an eco-system, with other beings. To know as to rediscover the learnings we already carry within us, and recover ancestral forms of knowledges. And classrooms become a place where knowledge is both in me and in you, but most fundamentally, between us. THAT is the place of education! Tião Rocha, an educator from Brazil says that there is a difference between the teacher and the educator. The teacher is the one who teaches, and the educator is the one who learns. Then, how can we all, professors and students, become teachers and educators? Tião Rocha says that the educator needs to know three things about their students: how each person engages their forms of knowing, their doings, and their desires.[1] Students already hold many forms of knowledge. What are they? How did and do they go about knowing the things they know? Students already do things and engage life practically. What are they doing and how do they do it? Students already have many forms of desire in them and they go about life desiring and living life from these desires. What are these desires? What are the desires to unlearn, what are the desires to learn? Education only happens when we learn about each other’s knowings, doings, and desires. That means that we learn the theoretical/practical ways of living so we can give contours to life, can change our realities. That also means that the format of classrooms should change. Our syllabus should be an unfinished map. Teachers must offer different forms of learning, different configurations of classrooms, different forms of engaging texts, different ways where bodies can actually think, different strategies to do assignments. That is when art can help us by expanding the venues of learning and doing. I offer my students creative forms of engagement with the class. A student once offered a dance as a final project and wrote about it, and it was fascinating. Final papers done together. Half of my class is discussion. The other half is practice. As we think/do/desire this craft we do, we can’t forget that the vortex of energy behind us is capitalism and the key and center of anything is the production of stuff. We have to produce good classes with good results and the students must produce good results to feel that they have accomplished something. We end up striving more for the diploma than for the journey. We are all hooked up into this modulation of learning. And it is hard to change. When we go to AAR or other guilds for instance, the pedagogy is the same: three to five people sitting at a table in the front talking for three hours to an audience who stays seated until they can say a thing or two. After a whole day going from one seating to another we are exhausted. Nonetheless, we produced a good day of learning! To change this would be to fall into wishy-washy stuff. And yes, I understand, there is a lot of that around. But I wonder how we move from the producing of things for the sake of results to a form of knowing that creates community where being together, telling stories, and sharing about the struggles of our lives is more important than the outcomes. My quest is to discover how texts and ways of teaching and learning can help turn our experiences into learning together that orients the practices of our lives. Not experiences that take us into forms of autonomy but rather, into what Derrida once called “heteronomy without servitude.” I wonder how we can find a way together in class when our stories are woven into a form of a certain common tapestry, when what we speak about ourselves is not as narcissists but as collective knowers, implicated into each other’s lives. If education is about desire as Tião Rocha said, then this is something we can strive to do: Passion above all creates a dependent freedom, determined, bound, obligated, included, founded not in itself but in a first acceptance of something that is outside of me, of something that is not me and that that, precisely, is capable of falling in love.[2] That is the place where we are grounded, in that classroom, in that neighborhood, in that environment, with many forms of living. That is the place of coexistence and dependent freedom. That place is the “in between” place as we teach and learn together with all of our knowing, doing, and desires. Assigned readings then, are invitations to join much larger communities, made of those who we might know a bit but also, made of those we have no idea or have nothing in common. They are just that: invitations! With these invitations (intrusions) we build a class, a village! Perhaps that is what we might call a good class: a village! Or as Brazilian thinker Alana Moraes says: A good class invites us to think together, including what the best texts can be to accompany us on this journey. Obviously, professors play an important role in this choice, but there needs to be space to think with students about the best paths for a unique collectivity. It is more difficult, it requires more openness, but it is no longer possible to defend democracy in the abstract if we are not able to radicalize our everyday ways of teaching and doing research in any way.[3]   [1] A Arte De Educar Com Tião Rocha, https://www.cpcd.org.br/portfolio/a-arte-de-educar-com-tiao-rocha/ [2] Jorge Larrosa Bondía, “Notas Sobre A Experiência E O Saber De Experiência,” Revista Brasileira de Educação, Rio de Janeiro, Jan/Fev/Mar/Abr 2002 Nº 19, 19-28. [3] Alana Moraes, Twitter, August 26, 2022, https://twitter.com/alanamoraes_x