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In planning a course, have you ever designed a creative learning activity that you thought was marvelous, and then feedback from others substantiated its marvelousness? But then, one or two people, naysayers, gave you a negative critique? And, rather than focusing on the marvelousness, your focus attached to your fear and those scant few negative opinions. You allowed the feeling of the praise to become flimsy, while the feeling of being chastised became more concrete. Along the same lines, have you ever read student course evaluations and the overwhelming majority of the opinions were positive while one opinion found the course lacking, and then your focus was upon the one negative word rather than positive feedback? These examples are quite common.  In these moments, we have allowed our good work to be eclipsed by the negative critiques. We surrendered our creativity, allowing negative voices to even drown out the praise of trusted peers and pupils. We allowed ourselves to be disconnect from our own ingenuity. Too often, we succumb to negative criticism, then decide to curtail our creative choices, rather than lean into the feedback that supports and celebrates our creativity. What would it mean to ignore the negative and, for the sake of effective teaching, pursue that which is imaginative, generative, and wildly untraditional in the classroom? I am glad I mustered this kind of courage. Here’s a story… In my excitement, I arrived at the building about 7:15 AM. I was meeting the carpenters in the atrium of our seminary building to hang our poster exhibit. Our exhibit entitled, “Basic Concepts of Engaged Pedagogy” was our semester-long aim.  My students, with my guidance, had made posters depicting the basic concepts of bell hook’s theory of engaged pedagogy. Their work was brilliant! From the first session of the introductory course until week nine when the posters were handed-in, we had been reading, discussing, debating, discovering, analyzing, and understanding Dr. hook’s work on teaching as a practice of freedom. In our grappling, we had incorporated Paulo Freire, Anne Streaty Wimberly, and Katie Cannon. Each of the twenty-seven students had created posters depicting the clarity and depth of thought they had gained for hooks’ politic of freedom. Our poster exhibit was an expression of their learning as well as a way to teach others about the power of pedagogy to bring liberty. Three carpenters arrived with ladders and tool boxes. With great care, they laid all the posters on the floor. In creating a cohesive exhibit, the carpenters and I discussed the best locations for each poster to hang.  Taking into consideration colors, forms, textures and ease of viewing, we mapped each wall of the atrium. Once the exhibit was mapped on the floor, the carpenters hung each poster. I was very moved by the amount of time and intension the carpenters took in arranging the display. By 9:00 AM the atrium had been transformed into a gallery filled with the concepts of pedagogy as freedom. It was a marvelous gallery exhibit! All day there was a buzz of excitement in the community about the exhibit. Students, faculty, and friends were very complimentary. Then, around 3:00 that afternoon a staff colleague came into my office. I was sitting at my desk. She began talking as soon as she entered. Her: The atrium is a shared space and should not be cluttered with one person’s course materials. Me: Cluttered? Her: I’m just afraid you will mar the wood. Me: Mar the wood? Her: I really think that all that busy-ness does not belong in the atrium. Me: Busy-ness? Her: I really think the posters should be taken down… At some point her voice became like those of the Charlie Brown adult voices in Peanuts cartoons. When I noticed that she had stopped talking and was now staring at me, I said flatly, “Thank you for your feedback?” She hesitated before leaving. I suspect she realized I was not going to take the exhibit down, so with that, she turned and left my office. The next day I was called to the Dean’s Office. The Dean asked me how long I had planned to leave the exhibit up. She said she was asking because she had gotten a complaint. The Dean said that someone was concerned about the exhibit marring the walls. I told her the exhibit would be up for four weeks – until the end of the semester. I also informed the Dean that the carpenters had hung the exhibit. The Dean looked surprised. She said she had been told that I had hung the posters myself. I did not respond. We sat in an awkward silence. Finally, I said, “Have you walked through the exhibit and admired the good work of our students? Their grasp of pedagogical theory is impeccable.” As I left her office, the Dean said if she had time, she would take a look at the exhibit. As you might imagine, I left that office feeling angry, deflated, and insulted. I am recalling this event from the early years of my teaching because my initial reaction was to allow the negative critique to curtail my creative approaches. Even though the students were extremely proud of their work and even though so many people in the seminary community were appreciative of the imaginative project, I considered allowing the nay-sayer to stop me from these kinds of projects. Deciding to ignore this negative critique was likely one of the best decisions I made as a young teacher. Now, years later, after having made creativity a hallmark of my teaching, I am full of gratitude that I did not allow the naysayer to eclipse my creativity, my teaching, and the good work of my student’s learning. This summer, as you design your new courses and reconsider old courses, think on the positive, affirming feedback more than the negative. Do not give-in to petty complaints or to controlling, dull complainers. Hear the good feedback for what it is--appreciation, admiration, and encouragement for a job well done. Use this summer to quiet the voices that would make you reticent, hesitant, or fearful. Plan to allow your own ingenuity and creativity to shine bright.

The final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission led by Justice Murray Sinclair, on the tragic impacts of Indian Residential Schools, was released in 2015. It included 94 Calls to Action, with several of these Calls relating directly to higher education. For instance, Call to Action number 62 urges postsecondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms. One way to begin addressing integration has to do with unsettling settler colonial worldviews, histories, and perspectives. How might this unsettling be done in a good way? Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall states that Two-Eyed Seeing is “To see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” ( 2012, 335). In using both eyes, my students and I need to locate ourselves in own stories of identification in the classroom. I would like to be aware, and I want my students to be especially aware, of the issues and history of self-identification. According to Anuik, “Self-identification has an impact on teachers’ practices, and understanding how people identify can help teachers to adapt learning environments to meet their needs” (2019, 107). One way to get at this is through stories of identification—my own and my students.’ I ask my students to identify two labels that others at school had used to describe them in the past. I then share my two identifiers and tell my story about teacher judgement and a school system’s misjudgment of an assessment. If one aspect of an indigenous way of knowing is about relationality and building relationships of trust with my students, it requires me to be vulnerable with my story. So, when I was in third grade, I brought home a report card that ranked me “below average” in relation to my peers. A row of failing grades ran down the report card beside each topic. The report card generated a meeting between my parents, the teacher, and the principal and a series of assessments. The meeting with my parents was awkward because my parents didn’t speak or understand English very well, and the principal wanted to meet after school and my parents, who worked at a Chinese restaurant, had to take time off to visit the school. The test results indicated that I was a slow learner (I didn’t understand and speak English very well) and may have a cognitive impairment. I knew this verdict made me different from my peers. I thought that every kid at school knew about my issue, and I felt shame. My parents felt shame as well because they came to Canada to make a better life for their children. I mixed up the assessment results with being stupid—what else was I to think since my report card showed that! I chose to disengage. If I stayed quiet, then no one would suspect I had an intelligence issue; I didn’t participate in class even if I knew the answers better than my peers. My style carried me through to grade 8, when my enthusiastic gym teacher said I was very quiet and needed to speak out more in class. That early assessment and teacher’s judgements failed me. As a child, I feared that if my teachers said I had a cognitive issue, then they would treat me differently than my peers—if only they knew where I am today! I then ask my students to look at their identifiers and ask if they accurately represent who they thought they were? In most cases, they were an inaccurate representation of who they thought they were. I show them this diagram: Discussing this diagram allows my students to begin to understand that indigenous students have identities conditioned by Canadian legislation which was historically rooted. Naming students “Indian” or “Aboriginal” had a negative impact because being labelled one or the other triggered fear that an educator would throw the student into a box that held a collection of negative stereotypes or misinterpretations of a person that needed to be fixed.  How might I move this further with self-identification? Going back to Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s concept of Two-Eyed Seeing has been a helpful way to reflect on my own teaching practices and course design, and the ways that they might impact my students’ own identity and spiritual formation as they move out into the wider world after graduation. For myself, I wonder at times if I simultaneously need a third eye to think and voice more creatively an Asian way of knowing as well?   References Anuik, J. 2019. “If You Say I am Indian, What Will You Do? History and Self-Identification at Humanity’s Intersection.” In Knowing the Past, Facing the Future: Indigenous Education in Canada, edited by S. Carr-Stewart, 106-117. Vancouver, BC: Purich Books. Bartlett, C., Marshall, M., and Marshall, A. 2012. “Two-Eyed Seeing and Other Lessons Learned Within a Co-Learning Journey of Bringing Together Indigenous and Mainstream Knowledges and Ways of Knowing.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 2(4): 331-340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-012-0086-8.

The first time I did this in class, my students looked at me like I was crazy. I wanted to try something new. The traditional rigid “academic dialogue” model was no longer sufficient to inspire courage and honesty about topics that were dividing the world right in front of my eyes. They expected me to throw some discussion questions on the PowerPoint, break up into small groups for discussion, and then have them report out into a larger class discussion. I use this method of discussion often. Today, I invited them into an embodied dialogue. I smile warmly and offer instructions for our dialogue together. “I’m going to say a statement. If you agree with it, stand on the right side of the room. If you disagree with it, stand on the left side of the room. And if you are unsure, don’t know yet, or want to say, ‘It depends,’ you stand in the middle.”   Embodied Dialogue is Generative The vitality in the room changes as students anticipate the first statement. Statement 1: “It is possible for a Christian to be racist.” The energy in the room is palpable as students physically take their stance. The movement creates a sense of generativity as students anticipate where their peers will stand. I wait for the movement to cease, for students to be in place. “Ok, is everybody in place?” I ask. I read their faces. Most students stand eager to engage. Others look about pensively, still trying to figure out if they want to move from one side to the other or to the middle. The statements fluctuate between levels of intensity. We move from less intense statements like “Education is the key to success in life,” to more intense statements like “Metal detectors keep schools safe,” and “Students should be suspended from school and arrested for violent behavior.” Then we move to even more intense statements like “God is at work in the government,” and “Protest is essential in America in order for justice to take place.”   Embodied Dialogue Prompts New Awareness The “take a stance” activity invites students to exercise agency during the entire process of dialogue. Each participant actually gets to choose where he or she stands, even if that stance is “I don’t know.” Perhaps the recognition that everyone is invited into a certain level of risk helps level the dialogical playing field. Choosing our stance is nothing new. We are always choosing where to stand. This activity makes student aware of that. When they are standing in place students suddenly become aware of their body. Not just their body, but the bodies of others. Many are surprised to see which side of the room their peers decide to stand. “Why are you taking this stance?” I ask students. “Please tell us why you are standing where you are.” The invitation to respond to the “why” question is one of the most effective ways to invoke critical thinking. Students hear from those who stand with them, discovering that even those who say “I agree” may choose this stance for reasons different than their own. Many even surprise themselves with their own inability to say why they have taken their particular stance. The embodied awareness of their stance invites them into further exploration, into further participation. In a developmental stage where undergraduate students are still making sense of who they are, what they believe, and why they believe what they believe, it seems unfair to force them to choose one position or the other. And yet, this pressure to choose one way dominates Western understandings of adulting. To be a mature adult, we must know the “why.” We must know the right answer. The either/or dichotomy sometimes traps students. Captive to the desire to please those they admire, or to feign intellectualism, students rush to an answer. When students rush to an answer, they rush past another’s perspective in a hurry to arrive at their own. Our dialogue is no longer participatory. Mutuality is exchanged for “right” or “wrong.” We don’t internalize what others say in order to examine our own thinking; rather, our way of understanding becomes the rubric by which we judge all else. We judge, assess, and evaluate what others say against what we already think.   Embodied Dialogue Illuminates the In-Between What I have found essential for this assignment is the in-between space. I tell students that at any point during this activity they can move from “I agree” to “I disagree” or from “I disagree” to “I don’t know.” It never ceases to amaze me how often students move in between these spaces. They exercise the muscle that enables critical thinking in real time. They demonstrate with their bodies that our opinions and perspectives can change and can also be changed in dialogue with others. How many times do we only provide two options for students? Yes or no! Democratic or Republican. Liberal or Conservative. Providing the either/or inadvertently communicates that there is only one right answer, and we are required to know it. We must choose a side, the right side. Our thoughts have to be settled. The incessant need to box people’s thoughts into categories does not leave room for everything else that comes between right and wrong, yes and no. It leaves no room for the nuances that exist in the liminal space of not yet, not sure, uncertain. It hides the continuum that always exists when it comes to peoples’ thought lives and rationales. What has fascinated me the most in this activity is how students create their own continuum. The three clear positions I offer somehow get stretched out during the game. Students who are not quite in the “I agree” category may lean there but may stand in the middle between “I agree” and “I don’t know.” They make the invisible visible through their bodies, helping us to see that even three clear positions cannot capture the complexity of some topics. The invitation to the in-between space is an invitation to sit in the “I don’t know.” To acknowledge that we exist in a world of unknowns and uncertainties more often than not. Yet in our rush toward certitude, we sometimes miss the process that gets us from “I dont know” to “I know,” “I feel certain,” and to “I agree” or “I disagree.” What if our desire for questions and answers was really an attempt to simplify hard, unanswerable questions? What if a more faithful way to seek understanding is through “questioning and wrestling?” [1] What if we refused to settle into the comfort and assurance of our “I knows”? What if we were required to embrace our “I thinks” and allow ourselves to be formed in and through our wrestling with God? These are the questions that emerge for me as an educator when I facilitate this activity.   Embodied Dialogue is Participatory Participation is inherent in the word “dialogue;” thus, participatory dialogue should be a given. But it’s not. Not all dialogue is participatory. Too many students get lost in large group classroom discussion, are never really challenged to reflect critically. The one or two students who have something to say speak. Those who are more reserved remain silent, keeping their thoughts to themselves. It is possible to be invisible even in dialogue. Embodied dialogue makes it difficult for students to hide. This activity invites even the quietest students to be actively engaged in the dialogue. Academic dialogue may also be one-sided, where students tend to talk at, about, and over other students. Embodied dialogue is about talking with others. It invites not just participation but mutuality. To invite others to engage with our thought life even as we engage with theirs. Additionally, it models visually that our deepest beliefs often put us in proximity or out of proximity to certain people, especially when the conversation centers around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hot-button topics remain easy to avoid in the classroom. This activity has become a regular part of my pedagogical toolbox, especially when engaging topics that are intense. After saying a statement, I hear students respond, “Woah, that’s tough.” In other words, the “hot” doesn’t disappear from the topic when using this approach. Students still exhibit passion and conviction. At the same time, students are less cautious with sharing. Something about the approach itself is disarming. This approach to dialogue offers the learning community space to reflect on controversial topics in a generative way.  Dialogue was never intended to be passive. Rather, dialogue is an active, dynamic process where students are invited to explore, discover, and come to know themselves, others, and the world differently.      [1] Carol Lakey Hess, “Echo’s Lament: Teaching, Mentoring and the Danger of Narcissistic Pedagogy,” Teaching Theology and Religion 6, no. 3 (2003): 135.

In my last blog on this site (the first of three parts) I reflected on what difference it could make if theological education institutions focused on formation of students rather than imparting information to them. That blog generated some interesting comments, questions, and feedback, so I thought I might dig a little further here. In my seasoning as a scholar and a teacher it has become clear that my focus is not on the students in my institution per se. It is not even on the material I want them to learn. As a pastoral theologian, I focus on the suffering in the world, and God’s longing for the wholeness and the flourishing of all that can only happen through justice, reconciliation, and the labor of peace. I think about my students concluding their time with us at Brite Divinity School and facing anew the world and all the impediments to the flourishing of God’s world. I want to empower them to see what those impediments are, to name them and call them out. I want them to leave Brite with the capacities to envision new possibilities, excite others about those possibilities, and get others involved. I want them to move forward with the knowledge and the tools to offer healing care, to lament and attend to suffering, both personal and systemic, to create genuine community. I want them to have grown and changed personally and to have become better integrated during their time with us. I want each of our students to have the chance to become more whole themselves as they prepare to contribute to the healing and wholeness of others and of communities, no matter where their lives take them. It became clear to me many years ago that no amount of reading Sigmund Freud (or his daughter Anna), no amount of systems theory, or object relations theory, or even narrative theory could accomplish these goals for them. Saying this does not negate the importance of those theories (and my syllabi continue to show my firm commitment to the idea of reading as fundamental to learning). But it does shift how I understand my work. I now ask myself how any course I teach will help students understand what wholeness can look like, what flourishing might taste like. I hope each course will help them understand better how to affect that, both for themselves and for others. Perry Shaw argues in Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning that good teaching invites students into deep learning (Carlisle: Langham, 2014). Deep learning, as Shaw defines it, is the learning that continues to affect people 5, 10, or more years beyond the classroom. Deep learning creates space for students to wrestle with the implications of Freud or Heinz Kohut for the world they are facing themselves and the world others are facing. Deep learning teaches students how to connect ideas with lives, practices with change, and gives direction to hope. Deep learning shapes the way students think, how they feel, act, reflect, and engage, more than it relates to what they know. Deep learning changes the way people live and move in the world. It dares to help people figure out what it means to participate in the life of God in the world, to discern what God-as-life-force is doing already, and to magnify that. This is a shift, Shaw asserts, from education-as-teaching to education-as-learning, -changing, and -growing. This kind of education asks less what we are teaching and more what students are taking with them. It teaches them how to assess what is valuable and what is “fake news” in a world inundated by “information.” It helps them sift through the noise to what is most important and meaningful, especially from a theological perspective. This kind of education-as-formation will still require some foundational knowledge, but less of that and more of the work of applying that knowledge to the challenges people and communities are facing. Formation focused education invites much more wrestling, struggling, and deepening than education-as-teaching might. Education-as-formation helps students understand how content relates to and can perhaps be used to change the worlds that they are in. It is funded by the conviction that the God of Life longs for the flourishing of all that is, and that our calling as theological educators is to figure out how to respond to that longing and to do the hard work of living into flourishing; understanding its impediments in ourselves, in others, and in our world; and developing practices (including teaching practices) that nurture flourishing. Deep learning, then, requires that we educators join students where they are and encourage them forward a step or two and much deeper than learning for information does. It invites us to listen to them and the challenges they and their communities are facing. It requires that we faculty get out of our heads on occasion and into our own hearts and souls. It means that we ourselves must be willing to enter ongoing processes of growth and formation, too, as we seek to live more fully into our own wholeness and lean harder into our own flourishing. Deep learning happens best in the context of institutions that understand their role in teaching the formation of effective community, where staff and faculty model growth and integration, and where students can experience a taste of what each of us ultimately seeks.

It has been my experience that some of the most exciting, innovative, life-giving, and life-altering activities occur at the edges of established institutional life. Similar to the generation of new faith communities within denominations that look and feel nothing like their long-standing churches, the peripheries of theological schools often hold some of the most exciting projects, usually called “experiments” by those at the center. (Even further removed from established theological schools themselves, new places of learning and formation are arising that challenge the very existence of the centers of theological education. But that’s a subject for another time.) I’ve been thinking about this recently in terms of the work of teaching and learning within educational institutions. In dialoguing with a colleague on some of the most pedagogically creative and impactful courses that we as MDiv students took several years ago, we observed that many of them were taught by adjuncts or visiting instructors. Furthermore, in my own praxis of teaching, some of the most compelling tools and resources that I return to again and again have come from talented adjuncts and administrative staff who have taken thoughtful care in their course designs. Such treasures rarely penetrate the course designs of core faculty but have been incredibly formational for students. For instance, some of the online discussion practices and guidelines that I continue to draw upon and adapt were shared with me by a senior administrator, an adjunct instructor who has spent years developing specialized knowledge around online instructional design. I credit a former staff colleague and senior adjunct lecturer with my now standard use of visual, web-based, interactive infographics for all of my syllabi (designed through Piktochart and linked within a Canvas LMS). Students have found this type of content presentation to be more accessible, organized, and clear in terms of expectations, as well as easier to navigate. For an increasingly diverse learner population in theological education, this small, yet fun-to-create tool has also added an element of playfulness to courses that contain quite serious content (like postcolonial and decolonial theologies). People on the periphery may have more freedom to experiment beyond the harsher lines that come with being closer to the center. However, with this so-called freedom comes real constraint and injustice. For many, this is due to institutionalized power dynamics that place staff colleagues, adjuncts, and others beyond the core faculty as categorically “less than.” Core faculty privileges in the forms of greater compensation, full-time employment and tenure, more flexible work schedules, and increased access to scholarship and research opportunities certainly exacerbate this center/periphery dynamic. In addition, it might be argued that adjuncts and visiting scholars are more responsive to learning needs because teaching evaluations more readily determine whether they can continue instructing students from term to term. As someone who is considered an “early-career” scholar and teacher (i.e., newer to theological education yet whose many years of higher education and denominational leadership experience aren’t often recognized in academia), and as one who resides on the border between the center and the periphery as administrative faculty overseeing contextual education, I have spent a lot of time observing colleagues at the center (i.e., well established, tenured associate and full professors who have spent their entire careers in the academy) in order to adapt those elements most fitting to my own teaching and course design. I figured that because they were at the center, they would be doing things that were innovative and more adaptive to student learning needs. While many of them are indeed experimenting in exciting ways, I have concluded that the periphery is where my gaze needs to focus more often than not. As a scholar-practitioner committed to anticolonial pedagogies I should have known better, but the lure of the center can be quite powerful. The center is where acceptance and respect are found, and who doesn’t want to be accepted and respected? The alternative would be to have one’s teaching practices called into question as not rigorous enough, too practical (the horror!), or outright deviant (the delight!). Where do we situate ourselves in terms of our teaching—at the center or at the periphery, or perhaps in the in-between borderlands? Most binaries fail imaginations greatly but noticing loci of power and pedagogical authority unmasks boundaries so that they might be breached. Institutionally, we may find ourselves in very different roles; but for the collection of individuals who engage in the teaching and learning lives of our respective institutions—adjuncts, scholar-practitioners, practitioner-scholars, lecturers, student support staff, instructional technologists and coders, librarians, field education and Clinical Pastoral Education supervisors, spiritual life leaders and advisors, and core faculty, among others—our vocation is a shared one. A pedagogy of the periphery requires all of us to be attentive to the edges of institutional and communal life. What is happening in those spaces and places? What are the practices that not only invite innovation to seep into the cracks in the center, but also subvert the very notion of a pedagogical center? How might such practices transform the whole of the institution’s pedagogies and, more importantly, spark the very edges within students? For many a weary educator, it feels comfortable to stay close to the ways that one knows best, especially after the last two years. But I continue to ask myself whether those ways are the ones that genuinely nurture and challenge students. The periphery is simultaneously terrifying and invigorating, and so I must continue to go/be there and learn.

Recently a colleague shared with me the concept of “ungrading,” written about eloquently in a couple of blog posts by writing instructor Jesse Strommel. You can find Strommel’s posts here and here. (I highly recommend his blog, in general, as well as his @jessifer twitter account.) Strommel asks us to consider why we grade, what we want grading to do, what letter grades really mean, how grades and feedback relate (if they do), and what would happen if we didn’t grade. As the name “ungrading” suggests, this approach can encourage or empower instructors to grade less or even not at all. Here are some complaints about grading that I’ve heard (from colleagues, students, and the literature) and shared over the years, which make the idea of ungrading appealing to me: We get so easily behind on grading We don’t grade fast enough for students’ taste Grading takes up so much of our time Grading feels like a joyless, soul-sucking burden Grading has nothing to do with why we became teachers The burdens of grading limit us in the kinds of assignments we think we can give, especially in large classes (and especially without TAs) Grading often pits students against each other (e.g., when they are graded on a curve) Grading is used to gatekeep Grading is a measurement, which is subject to error, and can have a huge impact on students Grading does not always measure what we intend (e.g., we intend to measure learning, but we instead measure test-taking skills, which students may or may not have acquired from our course) Students disagree with and complain about our grades Grade grubbing The standards or criteria are not always clear, which then makes it difficult to know what grade to assign Students don’t know how to understand or interpret our grades Some students don’t seem to care when they get a low grade; others care too much about a slightly-less-than-perfect grade The grades, and any accompanying feedback, aren’t always reviewed by students Grading doesn’t necessarily yield improvement from one assignment to the next Grades can be arbitrary, discriminatory, and unfair Grades become an extrinsic motivation that detracts from the real focus of the course experience—learning So, Strommel says, “If you’re a teacher and you hate grading, stop doing it.” What a freeing idea! Strommel has stopped grading entirely in his classes (though obviously he still has to submit a final grade for each student at the end of the semester, as he, and I bet most of us, are required to do by our institutions). It took him many years to arrive at this point, a journey he describes in his blog, and it’s a change I wouldn’t recommend anyone making all at once. There are ways, however, that we can dip our toes into the ungrading waters and find out how it goes, both for us and our students. Strommel offers several suggestions in his blog, including self-assessment, portfolios, authentic assessment, and peer assessment. I am trying the self-assessment route this semester in my Religion and Pop Culture class, with students’ attendance and engagement grade. This is a small, upper-level course (enrolling majors and nonmajors) and I always lead it like a seminar, expecting students to learn just as much from each other as they may from me. If they’re not there, prepared, and ready to engage, a heck of a lot of learning is just not going to happen. This is why it’s always felt important to me to attach some kind of percentage to this part of the course. Yet grading attendance and engagement has also always felt problematic to me, given its reliance on attendance, which, especially during the pandemic, has seemed inflexible and even inhumane. I also hate getting into the business of having to decide what an excused vs. unexcused absence is (e.g., I don’t want to be looking at doctor’s notes or deciding whether going to your brother’s wedding is excusable). Ungrading has the potential to accomplish my goals while alleviating my problems with this part of the course. Here is how I am describing, excerpted, the expectations for “Attendance and Engagement” this semester on my syllabus (which will be worth 10% of their grade): Reliable attendance and active engagement will be crucial to our learning community. Students can learn just as much from each other as they can from any professor, in a well-designed class. We will decide together what we expect from one another in terms of attendance and engagement by co-creating a set of “community norms” that will guide our time together; it won’t just mean talking a lot! You will then use these community-created expectations to give yourself an attendance and engagement grade at the end of the semester, justified by a reflection letter you will write to me. This is an experiment for me. I think it’s really important to question, experiment, reflect, and iterate as teachers (this is the heart of the scholarship of teaching and learning or “SoTL”). So I do have some questions that I will be looking to answer at the end of the semester: Will there be any patterned differences in the grades among the students (e.g., will the male students grade themselves higher)? If so, what am I going to do about that, for this class and in the future, if I continue to ungrade? Will I need to change any grades, up or down? If so, how many? If so, will this defeat the purpose of ungrading? Will attendance be different (worse, I’m assuming) in this class than my others? This may be difficult to tell, because we’re still in the pandemic and a lot of students are out right now for health reasons. I also typically experience absences throughout the semester anyway. Will the reflections that students write be any good? (What do I mean by “good” anyway?) Will I need to have taught them how to write good reflections? I’m not planning on devoting class time to doing so—and also not intending to grade (!) the reflections—but this is how they are going to justify their grade, so this may matter to me. Instead of alleviating anxiety for students, will ungrading provoke or exacerbate it? (Students often don’t handle such open-ended assignments or responsibilities well.) This is certainly not what they need right now! What did I and my students think about this approach? Were there other unintended benefits or drawbacks, for them or for me? How will I decide whether to continue this kind of assessment? I’m looking forward to finding out how this experiment in ungrading unfolds.

This semester I am teaching a class called Theology and the Arts. In this class we are engaging the earth with the five senses of the body. During our last class we engaged the sense of vision and read about it. To see is modernity’s main sense; to see is to know, to define, to control, to classify, to order, to establish regulations and distinctions, rules and limits. To see is to establish or hide delineating social markers such as color/redlining, gender and sexuality, class, abled bodies, citizenship, and so on. Colonization is the mastering of a certain vision over the others’ vision. You have to see what I see. A view of the world means a way of living in the world. The panopticon is now the 24/7 surveillance that watches everyone. Control of vision is among the new forms of coloniality in the social sciences and scientific work as well, all marked by objective lenses and detached views. After our discussion we went to The Shed in New York city to see the exhibition Particular Matter(s) by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition has several rooms showing particles and spider webs, but I will just describe the one named Free the Air: How To Hear the Universe In a Spider/Web, 2022. A huge round courtyard is organized in two levels of wire mesh nets, one suspended 12 feet above the floor and the other very high up at 40 feet. After about two minutes of walking on the net, you lay down, the doors are closed, and darkness takes over the room. You feel a mist flowing and you start to hear sounds from microphones attached to the net as well as vibrations throughout the net. Saraceno describes: Unheard voices become felt vibrations in this arachnid concert in four movements. The first movement of the concert is a quiet period, providing an opportunity to detect subtle signals from subsurface seismic sources that would have been concealed in noisier times… These vibrations were created from recordings of the Earth, including the movement of air particles and the spider/webs on view in the exhibition. [The sounds are like] an aria from Grandmother Spider, played by a solo Trichonephila clavipes, as she plots and maps her web of life… The rhythm of vibrating spider/webs—more audible since the pandemic-affected reduction of anthropogenic seismic noise—invite visitors to extend their senses towards new forms of embodied cognition. Yes indeed: new forms of embodied cognition. Spiders do taste and smell but their strongest sensorial organs are their legs. They sense vibrations through hairs and can “hear” these vibrations from 10 feet away. This “sixth sense” helps them discern the size and weight of things caught in their web. The students and I were trying to learn about cognitive variations by considering cognition from a spider’s perspective. Or perceiving or knowing the world through varieties of senses. (There were no spiders anywhere and we did not engage any.) I had to prepare myself before we went. Just knowing that I was going to be locked in a totally dark room produced a lot of anxiety in me. I had to decide if I could face it, so I meditated in darkness throughout the week. I talked to my psychoanalyst about it and asked my brother Greg Snyder, a Buddhist priest and scholar, to teach me how to wrestle with my fears. In our exchange of text messages, he wrote this for me: Breathe. Feel the energy of the anxiety in your body. Don’t concern yourself with the thoughts. Treat them like phantoms. Feel into the actual energetic force without needing to call it anxiety. Then allow that energy to be swept up by the current of the breathing, as if the banks of a river were eroding into the river itself. As the energy joins the breath, it will find the rhythm of the breath. Syncing the energy of the anxiety with the rhythm of the breath will give space and movement to that energy in ways that allow the system to calm down. Any excess anxious energy that cannot join the breath can be channeled down into the heart of the earth. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your connection to the earth. When you exhale, train yourself to exhale down into the earth. So you are inhaling energetically up from the center of the earth and exhaling down into the earth. As the anxious energy joins your breath, exhale that energy with the current of the breath down into the vast warmth of the earth. Inhale the vast warmth back up into the body. Exhale the anxious energy back down, each time the energy dissipating into the vastness and warmth of the earth, each time inhaling vastness and warmth, spaciousness and strength. This guidance truly prepared me for the experience. When we got there, I was tense but still determined to go. We were divided into those who would go into the 40-foot-high web or the 12-foot-high web. I was the only one on the 12-foot web. I told my students this was a huge challenge for me and they were very compassionate. I was embarrassed to be so vulnerable with my students but they were a group I could trust. We hear “Never trust your students, you never know what might come to you!” on the grapevine. This can be true. But sometimes it isn’t. They were immensely gentle and kind to me. While laying down on the net I had an incredible experience, one I cannot fully describe. It was an experience without feelings. I didn’t feel anxious, fearful, or joyful. It was close to feeling happy. The web felt like an earth womb; I felt I was laying down in the vastness of the universe. The sounds of the earth were sparkling sensations. The net vibrated and my body felt that intensely—almost an out-of-body experience lived fully in every inch of my body. Everything was in movement but at its own pace. It was as if the sounds and vibrations and forms of relations manifested in the dark had always been in my body and I was visiting the earth at its very formation. No anxiety, no hope, no fear, no desire, no love. Just a sense of what I could call fullness: past, present, and future disappeared. Another experience was very distinctive: I felt the wonder of perceiving the world from the perspective of another species. Well, sort of…. I have never before felt a sense of otherness so powerfully in my body. The awareness of that totally different world made me feel absolutely distinct; foreign and lost in every possible way. The worlds of the spider are truly something else. The way they live, connect, build their nets, perceive, engage, protect, hunt, hear, and see—everything has its own wisdom and language. The wonder was that in all its strangeness, the spiders’ worlds live in codependence with mine and with so many other worlds. A multiverse! In my house, they are building worlds in different places and they can sense my presence 3 meters away. As much as I might fear spiders, my awe and wonder for them now moves me towards respect, honor, and reciprocity. After the event my body was completely exhausted, like I was carrying the tiredness of all the years of my life. It took a whole week to go away. The connections between this experience and my classrooms are so many and I am still pondering it all: if a classroom is a web, we are literally entangled together. Hopefully not to eat each other up but to foster “net-works” of care and refuge. I need to learn to perceive my students not just with the objective eye of academia and checking their written work. I also need to perceive the pulsing of their hearts, the sounds they make, the fears they bring, the hopes they have, the anger they carry, the longings they vibrate. The classrooms as webs are like many worlds interlocked and we as spiders are catching the various sounds of the worlds, of people, and other species around us. Mostly blind to what we can’t see, we are trying to figure out sounds, vibrations, and temperatures around us. Depending on each other, different worlds making space for each other, holding each other in deep care as we discern how to live. I wish I was a spider! And my classes were spider webs!

[caption id="attachment_250814" align="alignleft" width="335"] Gesture drawing, charcoal on newsprint[/caption] I remember sitting beside a piece of blank newsprint, clutching a twig of willow charcoal, looking at a table covered in all sorts of objects—a shiny chrome blender base, a bleached cow’s skull, yards of loosely draped fabric, old pieces of driftwood, a single ice skate and various pots, pans, and kitchen bowls. We were doing “gesture drawing” and my task was to use my charcoal quickly and loosely to sketch the vaguest and most general shapes I was seeing. I had to look beyond the detail of the objects to the ways in which overall shapes emerged from the play of dark and light. My attempts looked ghostly and out of focus, primitive and unskilled. The truth was that I had never done this before, and I felt completely out of my depth. I was taking a drawing class in our Fine Arts department. This was my first undergraduate class in more than twenty years, and I was taking it for credit. I registered as a student at my own institution, going through a registration process where I was even asked to produce my high school transcripts. And here I was, sitting around the table with my charcoal twig and my newsprint along with the other students in the class, completely out of my comfort zone, remembering what it was like to be learning as an undergrad. I decided to take this course because I was becoming increasingly interested in the creative process and the ways in which creative expression could function to connect students with complex ideas and abstract notions.  But in exploring this creative entry point, I also wanted to remember what it was like to be coming at these issues as a student and to be learning about things that required one stepping beyond one’s usual range of experience and expertise. A drawing class was something I hoped would improve my drawing, but also allow me to consider with more empathy the experience of students in my classes who encounter challenging ideas and practices all the time.  I learned a lot in this drawing class. I learned the difference between drawing what you see and drawing what you think. I learned that the creative process is often about following one’s nose, taking cues from what is in front of you and then taking the next step. I learned that inspiration often happens in hindsight, arising from consistent and sometimes less than inspiring routines. And I was reminded that learning involves taking risks and being vulnerable, ideally with the support of others around you. In my own classes, I include a lot of creative expressions of religious ideas and beliefs from the history of art and literature. I have always found these examples invaluable as ways of further illuminating what can otherwise seem counterintuitive and elusive notions. Sometimes, even for the cultural Christian, notions of incarnation, sacred mystery, and ineffability, for example, can appear both overly familiar and bewilderingly abstract. Creative expressions from the tradition can serve to span the distance between ancient, paradoxical notions and provide a location for ideas to play out in connection with more familiar, contemporary experiences. And yet, even the greatest work of art, the greatest masters of Western culture, from the past and present, can sometimes fail to bridge the gap. Sometimes connecting what is counter-intuitive to what is creative means taking a risk. It means being out of one’s depth and feeling one’s way forward, exploring the link between mystery and possibility. My attempts at gesture drawing were disconcerting, for sure, but in the end, they proved to be quite liberating. I had to let go of my preconceptions of what constituted “good art,” to quiet my internal art critic and trust my eye and my arm to do the work. I was forced to draw what I saw rather than draw what I had in mind. Stepping out of my comfort zone meant discovering new ways of seeing and new ways of doing. I could see that taking creative risks had the potential to open richer veins of insight and to reveal the invisible limitations of convention and culture that can sometimes limit inquiry and stifle growth. But does this exercise work in the other direction? Drawing what one sees rather than what one thinks is one thing, but what about the reverse? What happens when we draw what we have in mind and turn this idea into something others can see? A simple exercise I have used to connect the abstract with the creative involves asking students to draw the concept of belief. I ask them to draw something that doesn’t easily translate to a discrete object in the world. In effect, I’m asking the students the impossible task of giving a complex, abstract idea discrete and specific form. Everyone knows what belief is, but what does it look like? While the results can be clever and are often surprising, they also reveal how obscure and unfamiliar the term was from the beginning. Drawing an abstract concept involves being creative, for sure, but it also means committing to something specific, making choices about what to put on the page versus what to leave out or unaddressed. Every picture is but a gesture of the totality. While, a single picture is always a limited account of a larger idea, when the resulting pictures from the class are gathered, a wonderful richness emerges, still fuzzy around the edges, still indistinct and relatively unformed and yet collectively, they are evocative, rich, and real. In this way, drawing involves embodying an idea, giving it a certain kind of flesh and form in ways that depart from the goals and achievements of writing alone. It is not that a picture tells a thousand words so much as pictures and creative expressions have the capacity to speak differently. The vividness of this creative act, the grappling with impossibility and the inspiration of a collective perspective prompts a learning journey that I view with renewed respect as deeply creative, slightly unnerving, and open to immense possibility. 

The day after the Atlanta spa shootings in March last year, my class on Asian and Asian American Theologies met via Zoom. We had scheduled to discuss worship and preaching for that class. But I knew that the murder of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, would weigh heavily on the students’ hearts. I sensed that this communal crisis would be an undercurrent in whatever we were going to discuss, and that students needed a space to process their thoughts and feelings. It turned out that several students lived close to one of the spas. One student passed by it almost every day. These students were particularly hard hit by the murders. [caption id="attachment_250943" align="alignright" width="476"] Students at Candler School of Theology held signs outside Gold Spa[/caption] The next day, two Asian and Asian American students in the class went to one of the spas to protest the shootings. One of them held a sign saying, “Stand with the Asian Community.” A New York Times journalist took a photo of them and wrote about their protest in the newspaper. Later that weekend, other students also visited the site to remember the victims and speak out against anti-Asian violence. Prompted by the students’ activism, I gathered the Asian and Asian American faculty of my school to find ways to respond to rising anti-Asian hatred in the country. We decided to organize a webinar and invited scholars and a local activist to address “Anti-Asian Racism and Christian Responses.” The response was beyond our expectations. More than 600 people of different racial backgrounds from across the US registered for the webinar and more than 430 people attended! During the webinar, some clergy and leaders of white churches asked for resources on the Asian American community and churches. I felt the need to educate the public about the long history of discrimination against the Asian American community and the people’s resilience. Living in the South, the discussion of racism usually follows a black and white binary, such that the oppression of Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans becomes invisible. Orientalized stereotypes portray Asian women as obedient, compliant, and hypersexualized. Popular media casts them as the long-suffering Madame Butterfly or the seductive Suzie Wong. During the Vietnam War, sex tourism flourished around American military bases in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Asian women’s bodies were exploited by American GIs for their “rest and recreation” during the brutal Vietnam war. Sex tourism created the myth that Asian women’s flesh is available and there for the taking. Robert Aaron Long, the white killer of the spa shootings, said that he has a “sex addiction” and that he thought the spas owned by Asians were “safer” than paying for sex elsewhere. A member of a Christian church, he has struggled with his addiction and lashed out at the spa businesses, which he viewed as sexual temptation. To provide opportunities to learn about Asian and Asian American women, I facilitated an online course on Asian and Asian American Feminist Theologies in the summer of 2021. I invited guest speakers from both Asia and the US to speak about feminist theology, interpretation of the Bible, Christian ethics and sexuality, interreligious learning, and leadership and ministry. The online short course attracted hundreds of participants from Asia and North America. It provided a forum for dialogue across geographical, racial, cultural, and religious differences. The pandemic forced us to shift our teaching online in the past years. While we lament the disruption and long for in-person contact, online teaching enables us to reach a wider audience. Millions are accustomed to using Zoom as a learning platform. My short course was truly transnational and the discussion was rich and riveting. The recordings of the course were uploaded to YouTube so that people can use them as resources. As scholars we have to begin thinking about the “community” we teach in a much broader sense. It is important to remember that Asian feminist theology emerged during the height of the Vietnam war. Some of the pioneering theologians, such as Mary John Mananzan from the Philippines, addressed the sexual exploitation of women, sex tourism, and militarism. Today, Asian and Asian American female scholars and activists continue to protest sexual abuses and harassment of Asian women by militarism, the police, and other powerful men. [caption id="attachment_250944" align="alignleft" width="425"] The altar created at the vigil service in the Cannon Chapel at Candler School of Theology[/caption] Close to the anniversary of the March spa shootings, I organized a vigil for the victims at my school’s chapel. During the vigil, we prayed for other victims of war and violence, especially those who died in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and their families. When the Korean hymn “O-So-So” was sung by a student, I invited the community gathered to place Japanese peace cranes on the altar to symbolize their prayers and solidarity. On the altar were two paintings by a local Korean American artist, Connie LaGoy, who painted them in response to the shootings. She has sold prints of the paintings to generate funds to donate to the victims’ families. When a community tragedy disrupts our classes and teaching agenda, it opens a window for rethinking our teaching and vocation as a scholar.

One of the many joys of reading poetry is the fluidity of meaning to which poems lend themselves. Mary Oliver’s poetry allows the reader to imagine their own situation, ponder, then gain dynamic insight. From A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (Mariner Books; August 15, 1994), Mary Oliver wrote: For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Teachers! Can we make this declaration with firm regard and assuredness about our courses, our teaching, our livelihood as faculty? What would it mean if, with the help of Mary Oliver, we whispered one to another:   For courses are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry?   Often, I wonder what a course is, or what it is for. I know the mundane of why courses are taught. The curricular obvious and the institutional mechanics are part of my understanding; I am not asking about the obvious or the mechanical. Instead, I wonder if courses matter? Are courses important, impactful, and when they are – what makes them so? What makes a course fire? Rescue? Or sustenance for the poor? Mostly, when I was enrolled in courses, very few experiences had the gravitas of the comparison with Mary Oliver’s provocative images. Like most folks with a terminal degree, I was enrolled in formal course work for over twenty years – if I start counting from kindergarten. In most cases, the teacher did not do anything wrong, but neither had they done anything like bringing fire for my warmth or letting a rope down when I was in a pit. And, I have inhabited cold, dank, pits. It is too easy to recount experiences of flimsy teaching, but their commonness is crippling to our students. By the second week of a required course in college, my friends and I figured out that the lectures of the professor were excerpts from the primary text. During the weekly hour-long lectures, we sat quietly in class and highlighted the passages she read aloud from the re-typed pages she laid on the podium. Occasionally, the teacher would skip pages in the text causing us to, with a flurry, turn pages until we found the passages to which she had jumped. I always wondered if she noticed that we were not taking notes, but highlighting the textbook, and if so, what did she think about this. At mid-term and final, in preparation for the tests, my friends memorized the passages in the book. I, thinking that a waste of time, got a “B” in the course because I refused to “study.” I was bored in the course. We have all survived teaching that has been reduced to words, facts, and data. Mary Oliver bids us to take stock of the possibility that teaching could be, after all, life changing and lifegiving. Given this opportunity, it would behoove us to set our intentions as if we are about course design with transformative power. The power to feed the hungry, locate the lost, and set the captives free.  I have been a student in several courses where I received healing, inspiration, and renewed agency to meet my vocation well prepared. Some courses shifted my core values and deepened my commitments. Some courses were exemplars of a call to action for the rest of my career. In 1985, one such course was titled Ministry and Mission of the Church in the World Today. It was co-taught by Jack Seymour and Robert O’Gorman. I found the course interesting, and equally, I was fascinated to watch the two scholar/friends as they taught. I learned as much by watching them teach as I did by being taught by them. Three sessions before the end of the semester, I found myself sitting in the classroom quite frustrated. Near the end of that day’s lecture, I raised by hand, and fumbling for words, asked a question about implication and application. As was the established practice, each professor took a turn responding to my question. Both responses said that questions of implication were not part of this course. My frustration deepened. I furrowed my brow, frowned my face and spoke back - vehemently. I, in graduate student authorial voice, informed my teachers that our conversation had to include conversation on implication because without that, I said, “What was this course for?” The two men were surprised by my outburst, but not deterred. They said they would discuss my request. At the next class session, Jack and Bob informed us that they had adjusted the course syllabus for the final weeks. The new design now included two sessions focused on implications and applications. At the announcement, the class cheered! I was amazed and changed by having had my curiosity taken seriously. I am not suggesting that all courses should include questions of implication. I am suggesting that, if we are intentional, courses can become spaces for teachers and students, who together, learn to kindle passions, braid ropes to lower sojourners over sheer cliffs, something as necessary as cool water in drought. Thank you, Mary Oliver.