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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…   Romans 12:2a (NRSV) Students are stressed today, and Omicron is not the only culprit. Twenty-four-hour access to social media and our preoccupation with it has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With every posting that stirs divisive issues like Critical Race Theory, attacks on voting rights, or the “anti-vax” movement, what may have begun for students as an average day can quickly lapse into chaos. “This is really nothing new,” faculty might whisper to themselves. Educators have always been challenged by the effects of life’s storms that impact adult learners. What is concerning now is that tempests seem to be rising at an alarming pace. During the past two years we have witnessed: (1) The COVID-19 pandemic taking the lives of almost one million Americans; (2) The cruel public murder of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer; (3) The violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and (4) The brazen slaughter of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and subsequent criminal conviction of his unrepentant assailants. You undoubtedly have your own list that may include one or more of these tumultuous events. Consider George Floyd’s death. Students throughout the world were outraged by the inhumane treatment inflicted upon Floyd. Organic protests spread from Berkeley to Budapest. On the other hand, a vocal segment of Americans believed that Floyd caused his own demise because he unlawfully purchased cigarettes with a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. In a June 8, 2020, article in Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay McKenzie noted that many university presidents called for social change following Floyd’s killing but very few offered concrete ideas for implementation. That fact was not lost on discerning college students. So, what did you share with students and what did they share with you in the wake of these critical events? Perhaps the prospect of discussing the “COVID/Floyd/Insurrection/Arbery” incidents with students raised problematic classroom management issues for you. Did any of these events create anxiety for you personally? Were you transparent with students? Was it your first impulse to offer solutions or solace? Did you squarely address the tough questions raised or did you conspicuously sidestep the deeper issues? I regret that I was not actively teaching courses during this period. However, I personally experienced moments of reckoning in the classroom following the murder of Trayvon Martin and the mass shooting deaths of 20 precious children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I also witnessed the rise of disparaging racist speech leveled against Barack Obama and his wife Michelle following Mr. Obama’s first election as US President; I recall adult students arriving in class expressing despair or anger while others sat in relative silence. Those incidents led me to reexamine my responsibility as an educator in the aftermath of a social crisis. A number of my colleagues found themselves distressed by the feverish hostility expressed by competing political factions. Some faculty were reluctant to share with students because the subjects of controversy were outside the scope of their field of scholarship. Others found it safer to tread lightly on the periphery and not address contentious student concerns. But this message is not intended as a critique; now is a time for grace. In an era when student feelings of isolation often predominate, adult learners need a sense of community with their peers and with educators. We are listening to students, but do we hear them? If we can encourage students to boldly go into the world and speak truth to power, then we must also be willing to bear witness to each student’s truth—even when it is raw or unscripted. Effective teaching is essential, but it is not without limitations. When instructors teach, we facilitate student acquisition of information and the development of discrete skills. But when we endeavor to educate, we answer a higher calling; a calling rooted in a belief that each learner has the potential to experience growth and gain insight in ways that can ultimately transform the whole person. When we educate, we are not tentative—we are intentional. During times of crisis, we cannot permit ourselves to be constrained by the four corners of cherished syllabi. It is imperative that I operate “in the moment” and not become a hostage to the moment. We must seek first to educate; we can always teach tomorrow.

Every now and then I read a book for which I have such resonance and affection that I wish I had written it. One such book is The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, by Parker Palmer. Parker Palmer teaches that the bad days of teaching create a kind of suffering that only comes from attempting work that is loved, revered – work where our passions find expression and release. For many of us, teaching is the work our souls must have. (K. Cannon) When soul-rich teaching days are bad, then the teacher is anguished. Palmer encourages that when teachers endure unswerving bad days that that teacher must not attempt to escape, but instead, to get out of trouble, go deeper in Yes! I agree! Or I used to agree. Before the quarantine I thought Palmer’s words noble, admirable, aspirational and attainable. Now, in the midst of the yet on-going Covid pandemic, the unrelenting social violence against BIPOC people, the renewed awareness of war around the globe, the uptick of mental illness, the supply chain shortages, grieving, languishing and so on - while I am not rethinking this nobility, I am stymied by it in new ways. In the struggle with teaching-while-in-Covid, a refrain uttered by colleagues is the wish, need, outcry for withdrawal, maybe even surrender. In multiple forms, colleagues have reported their suffering with these words: I want to quit teaching every day. The series of bad days is stretching-out too long, too far, too much. A response of going deeper, doing more, reifying commitment, is not working. Colleagues do not possess the fortitude to meet their espoused loyalty. For many, the fires of passion have burned out. Some days, I count myself in this number. Lovers of the Courage to Teach are encouraged to read beyond the aforementioned pithy quotes, and focus on the grand picture of teaching and the teaching life for which Palmer speaks. We must remember that Palmer also wrote, If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. During the pandemic, the practice of nurturing an inner life, rather than for growth, might now be practices of survival. While it would have been better to have risked habits and practices of talking to each other about our inner lives before the current on-going crisis and malaise, doing it right now might slow our undoing.   A foundation stone of the Wabash Center is our cohort groups. We have learned that the critical role of the cohort groups lies in providing space for dialogue, networking, and relationship building. Participants often find old friends, make new friends, and deepen friendships (see our website for upcoming opportunities). Friends are the folks to whom we can pour out our hearts with the assurance that our words will not be weaponized against us at tenure or promotion processes. My hunch is that without friends in the industry of teaching, or friends beyond the industry of teaching, a teaching soul cannot make it alone, especially during this pandemic. It is in the intimacy of friendship where our inner life is discussed so that the suffering of our bad teaching days does not devour us. I have a friend I depend upon. We speak regularly. During the isolation of quarantine, we spoke every day – sometimes more than once a day. We needed to check-in, to be checked-on, and to feel connected. One of my favorite ways that we interact is to always say to each other such yammering of truth telling and troublemaking as --- you have done enough/you are enough/go take a nap/tell them no/did you eat today/ are you hydrated/go outside and sit/ set your alarm clock so you stop working/ you don’t have to reply to that email/that deadline can be renegotiated/I’ll call you later… These statements are not so much advice as they are gestures of soul tending and care. It takes friends to help with the daily work of refusing and resisting the messaging which tells us we should be fodder for the machine of misogyny, racism and the faltering capitalist democracy. We risk friendships because the alternative is madness. Mostly – my friend and I laugh! We laugh at our own foolishness, the foolishness of people who have annoyed, disappointed or angered us. We laugh about the absurdity of war and we laugh when a new binge worthy show is announced on Netflix. We remind one another not to take our jobs so seriously that we hurt ourselves, press ourselves too hard. We acknowledge that teaching in a pandemic has exacerbated the already hard struggle. On the days we want to quit, we never try to talk the other out of it.

At the heart of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is the dictum of “reading the word and reading the world.” As a literacy specialist who worked with Brazilian peasants, Freire learned from these students the necessity of making the connection with their lived experience. Teaching for social change takes participants beyond the “I am the teacher/you are the student” hierarchical model. I have learned that the democratic sharing of knowledges is more possible when a class connects the social justice issues, we are studying with the community just beyond our campus. Learning becomes a series of dialogues with texts and issues and the organizations who are working for immediate and systemic change. The social justice organization nearest to my campus is an emergency shelter for families less than a block from campus, Decatur Cooperative Ministry (founded in 1969). Their motto is: “Short-term shelter. Long term self-reliance.” DCM began as an interfaith response to poverty and homelessness in Decatur, GA. Their ministries grew with the gaps caused by economic inequality over the years to address needs of transitional housing, financial literacy, and food insecurity. They work toward the goal of permanent housing and family success. DCM is part of a local network of organizations addressing economic injustices in the Atlanta area. DCM’s emergency housing is aptly called “Hagar’s House.” For over twenty-five years, my introductory-level Bible class has worked in partnership with this shelter as a “practicum” or small internship that is supervised by DCM staff. Students provide various assistance: tutoring with children after school, serving as lead volunteers at weekly dinners or as overnight hosts, working the main desk, providing web and social media ideas and support, assisting in financial literacy classes, or collecting food from the local food bank. Students study poverty and housing inequities locally (through the Decatur Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights) and nationally (with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival). My classes are diverse, with South Asian refugees, first generation college students, and a few who have experienced homelessness at some point during their lives. We take risks as we engage the social issues in the world, and we prepare for our onsite work by engaging issues of race and class, along with our stereotypes and questions. This semester we are writing blogs for the DCM newsletter on the biblical Hagar from Genesis 16 and 21 (and beyond). Blog writing emerged during the pandemic as a need identified by DCM when we had to pivot to a virtual classroom, and working with young children onsite was not an option. Our partner organization identified their needs, and they wanted to highlight our blogging as a way to give something concrete back to the staff that is useful for their member congregations, staff, board, and clients. Students are writing these blogs on Hagar along with a reduced onsite practicum. We are first engaging the scholarship on Hagar from womanist and feminist perspectives. And we are reading poetry (Mohja Kahf) and a dramatic piece (Kathryn Blanchard). Hagar as Black, Egyptian, slave, surrogate, mother, aunt, homeless, bold namer of the deity (as El Roi, the One Who Sees), and matriarch of Islam are main areas of investigation. Our community partner would like its supporters to know more about their shelter’s namesake. Students will encounter Hagar in the biblical text, in scholarship and literary imaginations, and in their work in the second half of the semester with those who live at Hagar’s House. Students will serve and share meals, open doors and supply cabinets, play with children in the community room and design programs, and begin conversations. They will explore the root and systemic causes of poverty and housing and food insecurity in the US through one nonprofit organization’s commitment to meeting emergency needs and working toward systemic social justice. We are mapping the past—the biblical stories of poverty and displacement—as well as the current ones on our campus and in our neighborhood. What I have discovered over these years of partnership is that discoveries also happen beyond the classroom walls. Engaging the complex issues of systemic poverty and homelessness takes concrete form in the faces and lives of the staff and clients at DCM. The Hagar of the Bible and Qur’an continues her story—this time in her own words.

Mystagogy, as a practice of leading an initiate into the deeper mysteries of Christian life and faith, occupies a central place in learning about Christianity. But in a secular religious studies classroom, to what degree is this exploration possible or even permissible? And more practically, how does one go about communicating, or indeed “translating,” elements of praxis, devotion, and commitment for students who do not necessarily share in the faith tradition being examined? This past fall, as part of my course on Christianity, I arranged for a Russian-trained iconographer to run a five-day workshop showcasing the process of “writing” an Orthodox icon. Under his guidance, my students followed the traditional process, used authentic materials, and implemented time-worn techniques to create their own icon. My hope was that the path through this workshop would in some small way illumine the path of mystagogy and as such, connect these students to core elements of the tradition in multifaced and embodied ways while still preserving the secular context of their learning. The image of an icon can be puzzling enough for those not familiar with the tradition. To many students, the stylized appearance of the saint or holy figure can seem alien and inaccessible. Every detail is replete with meaning and mystery and every gesture is deliberately and precisely positioned to communicate that meaning. And yet, despite the shrouding layers of tradition, a face has a remarkable ability to drawn one in. Similarly, while the ancient process of creating an icon, with its numerous steps and specialized techniques, seems even more mystifying, there are many elements that are surprisingly familiar. Creating the tempera paints involves getting one’s hands dirty separating eggs, removing yolk membranes, adding wine, and grinding in pigments on a sheet of glass. Applying gold leaf and the divine light it represents involves the use of squirrel hair, grease, beer, and bread. It seems that reinscribing the mysteries of incarnation involves everyday tools and common resources from the kitchen and garden. Working eight hours a day for six days, students spoke of the process as being unlike any other project they had done, a process that was all-consuming and meditative in character. Indeed, the very experience of time took on a markedly different quality. Students spoke of how the investment of this kind of time and energy created a deep sense of value. This was value that didn’t fit within a typical financial or economic sense of things. It was not monetary. For example, they could imagine gifting their icons but not of selling them. “After spending so much time working on this project, I value it in a way that I do not value many other objects… After experiencing first-hand the patience and diligence required to write an icon, I understand the value of those gifts and how significant they must be to the recipients.” In this example, value was not bestowed by a sacred authority but rather from the immediacy of the creative experience. The icon was valuable to these students not because it was deemed sacred but because it was part of a process of investment where its value and beauty steadily increased through the various stages of its creation. Within the secular learning context, this experience resonated with the students far more than an intellectual or theological account. For the students, the icon became a thing of value but also a thing of beauty. Interestingly, this beauty was not something they claimed credit for, a product of their individual creativity, but rather it emerged from a prescribed process into which they had little if any input. Students spoke of setting aside their role as author and creator, of moving into the background and being at the service of a tradition that surpassed their own interests and ownership. They wouldn’t be signing their icons as the artist signs their painting. From this altered vantage point, students were able to appreciate details of the tradition in different ways: the play of light and shadow, the cast of the gaze, the creases in the robes, the vividness of the pigments, and the many stages of illumination. The experience of beauty included the aesthetic features and the meaning communicated but also a certain sense of investment, of labour, and the time taken to carefully move from one stage to the next. In all, the experience of creating the icon communicated values and perspectives that are key elements of the theological and spiritual landscape, but in ways that were more immediately accessible. In the end, the process of creating the icon provided a rich and evocative path through some of the central mysteries of the Christian tradition in ways that went well beyond the repertoire of traditional instruction. An icon involves transforming a piece of wood into something sacred and in this journey, this process, we see the path of mystagogy unfold. Students followed this path towards the mystery of the image where the icon is a combination of simplicity and complexity, of the abstract and the everyday, of something small to look at and at the same time something enormously meaningful to behold. It took time to create and the layering of process and meaning resulted in an object that speaks much louder and with many more voices than its compact appearance might suggest. Despite the secular context, this workshop was a moment of connection with a vast sacred tradition, translating notions of incarnation and revelation in ways that were deeply felt, transformative, and very much at the heart of Christian identity. “The paint physically went on very thin, meaning that to get a solid colour required upwards of 20 layers of paint. This is where the reflective nature of the creation process really began for me. As the layers go on, you lose count of how many you’ve done, and time begins to bend. I found myself becoming so engrossed in the process and wanting to see that opaque colour that hours would pass without me realizing it. It is in this time that I understand there was space for a divine connection.”

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my first-year students’ reluctance to argue with each other. Several years ago, I started asking my classes where these sentences change from being OK to not OK: I agree with Peter. I want to add to what Peter said. I disagree with Peter about this. Peter’s view has some serious problems. Peter is wrong about this. Peter’s view is silly and naïve. Peter is an idiot. Years ago, first-year students here at my small Catholic college in the Northeast usually said it was around 4 or 5. But these days, they generally draw a line between 2 and 3. Expressing disagreement is no longer okay. It’s a significant loss. As an academic, I know that defending our position from challenges helps us hone our own position. It sharpens our wits, and it makes us revise and improve our arguments. My students are no longer getting this practice, and it shows in their papers. They don’t anticipate basic objections and their arguments are weaker. For years, I tried to reverse the trend. I explained the value of academic arguments, and I pushed my students to express disagreement with each other. They resisted. I pushed harder. One day, a student looked at me and said, “We know you want us to fight but we don’t want to!” Of course I didn’t want them to fight. Did I? The comment shook me, and I started thinking. Why did they think that I wanted them to fight? Were there downsides to classroom arguments that I wasn’t seeing? Could I reach my pedagogical goals without having students argue with each other? What might that look like? I kept thinking. I studied Buddhism and thought about the downsides of an adversarial approach: It makes us focus on winning, so we listen for flaws and weaknesses, ignoring the strengths of positions. We risk becoming less open to alternative views and less able to see the flaws in our own thinking. I studied feminism and considered reasons why some won’t enter a combative discussion. Not everybody has the confidence and inclination to speak up if they believe that they’ll be attacked—and they might see what I consider rather mild disagreements as attacks. I wondered how many had not dared enter those lively discussions that I so fondly remembered from my past classes, and I squirmed. I have increasingly come to see my students’ distaste for disagreement and argument as healthy reactions to an overly angry and combative culture. My students years ago could playfight in class and trust that things would be fine. My students today have seen too many discussions turn nasty. Too much is at stake for them socially. They don’t have that luxury. I rethought my approach. I want them to “fight” because I want them to get better at building and examining arguments. Could I treat “fighting” as the means, not the goal, and then reach that goal in a different way? I started shifting the focus away from students arguing with each other towards us together examining and arguing with the text and its author. I let them work together to identify flaws and to devise ways to improve arguments, and we discuss better and worse ways to communicate what we discover to an author. It’s not as effective as arguments with each other for teaching students how to improve their arguments and respond to objections. But they like having a class in which they talk and figure things out together. And I like the care and sensitivity with which they investigate the views of others, finding things to appreciate and ideas to consider—even in arguments that I thought were rather bad. I worry that by letting them avoid “fighting,” I am ignoring something crucial. Students need to learn how to disagree civilly—heck, most of us could use some work in this area! I worry that they only have two modes: polite avoidance of conflicts in person, and then fights, name-calling, and cancel culture online. I’m still figuring out how to get students out of those two modes. I’ve had some success with role-playing, assigning them a position to argue for and sometimes even assigning them a confrontational personality. That makes it safe. If disagreeing and being disagreeable is their assigned job, it’s my fault, not theirs, so their performance in the role won’t harm their relationships. They tend to go at it with some enthusiasm. It still doesn’t have the energy and fire of real arguments where students defend their own position to people who disagree. I worry that I’m babying them, but it seems that they need that safe space. And sometimes, the dissonance between what they are saying in their assigned role and what they believe becomes too much for them. They fess up, stating out loud that they disagree with the position I’m making them argue for and explaining why. It’s a roundabout approach, but it may get the job started.

Developing a more learner-centered course design does not have to mean pulling everything up by the roots. A good start is to examine the activities already happening in your courses, finding where good learner-centered design principles already exist. Here, I look at two versions of an activity that is common in my own course designs: Peer Review. The first example is simple; the second example is more complex. Both are fully asynchronous, allowing learners to manage their time as their lives require. (Honoring learner time and agency is a learner-centered principle.) Along the way, as in the last sentence, I keep an eye out for learner-centered design principles that I can identify and name. Example One: Peer Review and the Short Writing Prompt: In small groups on an online discussion forum, learners write a short weekly post in response to a writing prompt asking them to integrate course readings with their own contexts and insights. (Constructivism is a learner-centered theory.) During the week following a due date, small-group classmates offer each other 2-3 sentences of substantive informal engagement, followed by a peer review embracing three yes-or-no elements: Balance (every element of the prompt receives attention); Engagement (the whole work is engaged substantively with the course and its materials); Mechanics (spelling, grammar, organization, citation). For the first 1/3 of the term, peer reviews are purely diagnostic: no revisions are needed, but learners MAY reach out to the instructor for guidance in response to feedback. (Learners taking responsibility for learning is a learner-centered principle.) For the middle 1/3 of the term, learners getting two or more "No's" from peers must reach out to the instructor. For the final 1/3 of the term, learners getting any "No's" must reach out to the instructor. In practice, my role as instructor is mostly to provide guidance in the early weeks, rewarding (via recognition) social goods like risk-taking and commitment. (Guide-on-the-side-style facilitation is a learner-centered practice.) Example Two: Peer Review and the Final Paper: Bear with me on this one. There's this final research/thesis paper, see? (My course is "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," and this is the notorious exegesis paper.) But a complete draft is due at the midterm...and by "complete draft" I mean Complete Draft: it's at the full word count and includes all of the expected elements of the final paper. Why? For many reasons, but relevant here: your small-group classmates need something complete to be able to peer-review it! So that's the "bad news" on the draft: it must be complete. What's the "good news"? The draft does not have to be particularly good! Because the Complete Draft does not count toward the student's grade in the class: this peer review is a formative evaluation, not a summative evaluation. (Formative evaluation is a learner-centered practice.) So, learner: in your draft, take risks! Try things! Get out on a limb! Pull out all the stops to try to articulate the things you are trying to say. (Creating conditions for student voice is a learner-centered principle.) In order to promote informed, substantive peer review--something more illuminating than "I liked it; it was good"--students are armed with two (2) rubrics. First, there is the rubric for the final paper itself, made available to learners at the start of the term. (Instructor transparency and accountability in assessment is a learner-centered principle.) If reviewers have so far neglected this document or struggled with it, now they are put in a position to have to get to know it better and work with it constructively and ask for help if needed. The second rubric is the rubric for the peer reviews themselves. (Are the reviews engaged with the draft being reviewed? Are they engaged with the final-paper rubrics? Are they constructive as well as affirming?) Here I include one coercive element: 20% of a student's peer-review grade requires that *their own draft* be complete and on time, and this element is a binary: you get 20 points, or you get zero points. And here's the thing: the evaluation for peer reviews is not formative, but summative. This thing must go smoothly and tightly, or the wheels fall off. (Don't ask of learners more self-motivation than reasonable for their level: scaffolding is a learner-centered principle.) Closing notes: Learner-centered course design principles didn't descend from the sky on stone tablets. Rather, they arose from the reflected-upon experiences of educators like yourself. By joining in this process of reflection and discovery, you join in the construction of applied learner-centered pedagogy. Where can you discover some more of the learner-centered principles that you're ransacking your course designs for? Do a web search for "student centered learning"; "learner centered instruction"; "learner-centered assessment" (or "student-centered assessment"); "learner centered teaching"; and so on. Good luck and have fun.

When the pandemic hit, everything changed overnight. We were in a state of crisis. Crisis has a way of exposing our frailty. Our vulnerability rises to the surface without our permission. Lack of control, uncertainty about the future, and anxiety about the unknown work together like a torrent, forcing us to let go of certitude. We know in part. That’s how it’s always been. But crisis beckons our confession of not knowing. Crisis humbles us, allowing us to see life from the vantage point of the powerless. Crisis reveals what busyness can hide. Crisis can be a pedagogical tool. What lessons have I gained from the pandemic crisis that will stay with me when vaccines and face masks are no longer a point of division? This vignette helps me explore this lesson. [text_only_widget] Vignette I opened an email from one of my students who said she needed to speak with me in person. Despite the growing number of safety protocols on campus, I agreed to meet with her. When she arrived, she sat in my office chair. Her shaky leg indicated her restlessness. “How can I help you?” I asked. She could no longer remain on campus. Despair had stolen her will to complete work, hang with friends, and ultimately to continue. Being home with family, she shared, seemed to be her best option. At home, she would be surrounded by those who knew how to love her well as she navigated depression. After sharing her concerns, she looked me in my eyes, and invited me to be honest with her about what I thought. Now, it was my chance to love her well as her professor. I wrestled with my thoughts: “Couldn’t she just figure it out?” “Is it really that bad?” “Is this just an excuse to go home?” At the core was my own selfishness—I wasn’t ready to lose one of my top students. Despite my inner wrestling, loving her well meant letting her get the help she needed. She didn’t really need my blessing, although she wanted it. “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole,” I told her. My insistence that self-care was nonnegotiable offered some sort of release. That was my last time speaking with her in person. She disenrolled from my university. Her sense of urgency to preserve herself was quite admirable and brave. [/text_only_widget] As we continue to remain in the pandemic crisis, these narratives show up in my office, emails, and coffee conversations repeatedly with many students who are navigating similar concerns. Depression, stress, anxiety, insomnia, and fear of returning home describe a large number of students. Counseling services are so full that they find it a challenge to adequately accommodate our students. “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole,” I told her. That brief response embodies a lesson I’ve been trying to learn ever since the pandemic started. That lesson is on self-care. The crisis of self -care did not start because of the pandemic; rather, the pandemic simply exposed what has always been burgeoning beneath the surface, exacerbating it so it can no longer be hidden. Lesson 1: We are not fragmented. All of me in one space. That’s what the pandemic did. Fragmentation is only an illusion. I am guilty of trying to live under that illusion. During COVID-19, I could no longer live a fragmented life. I could not put motherhood on a shelf until I finished teaching; my children were with me. The bedroom became a makeshift office as I tried to supervise my children’s e-learning while also teaching a Zoom class. My children offered no apology for competing for my care. Lesson 2: Wholeness is the new cool. I don’t want to only pursue wholeness for the sake of my own sanity and peace. But, I must do it because my students need to know that wholeness is a worthy pursuit. Lesson 3: Self-care is the new norm. Self-care recognizes that we are not fragmented. I’m learning how to create space for myself. Self-care requires intentionality. It requires permission-giving. It requires discarding the guilt. Self-care does not equal selfishness. It requires exorcising the lie that I should have superhuman strength. Our students do not possess super strength; nor do we.   “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole.” My own hypocrisy is appalling. If actions speak louder than words, what would it look like for my assignments and classroom space to reflect self-care as a priority for my students beyond COVID? How do we model self-care without crossing boundaries? Possibilities include: Normalizing a mental health day as an excused absence. A Prioritize Yourself Day, where I invite students to engage intentional practices of self-care during class time. Stretching before or after a heavy topic or exam. Inviting gratitude into the classroom. Encouraging students to reach out to other students when they notice someone is missing. Celebrating hard work, even if it is not an A. Creating a culture where students know that failure and disappointment is expected as part of the learning process. How do we make self-care the norm for both teachers and students post-pandemic?

The following axiom is often met with solemn nods, sad sighs, and knowing looks of empathy and understanding: “Church hurt is the worst hurt.” At every seminary, there are students with deep wounds from the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual abuse they experienced in congregational contexts. Seminary communities understand that a church can be the site of terrible harm and heartbreaking pain. There are also powerful testimonies of resolve and resilience. Our students are not satisfied with the status quo and are seeking the kinds of theological education that will equip them to lead ministries of healing, hope, redemption, and transformation. Some are called to work within existing congregational and denominational structures. Others are participating in new church developments and enacting their convictions to form religious communities in places and among persons that have been ignored and forgotten. But what happens to teaching when seminary hurt is the worst hurt? I find that the seminary classroom is more responsive to church hurt than seminary hurt. Faculty in theological schools are generally open to acknowledging the trauma and affliction that people encounter in congregations. Some of us share our own scars and wounds. Many of us are theological educators because we too have not given up on all the good that is possible in churches. We are quick to assign readings that address pastoral leadership. We encourage our students to make connections between the theologians in our respective syllabi and congregational praxis in the “real world.” However, the seminary classroom is sometimes slower to respond to the harm and pain inflicted upon students within our own learning communities. The remainder of this reflection focuses on three specific forms of seminary hurt that I have encountered in my classroom. The first results from a student harming another student with deleterious commentary that assails the dignity of persons within our learning community. My seminary is committed to the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons in Christian leadership and society, but we also welcome students from religious communities that do not share our conviction. A few of these students have been outspoken in their opposition to our position and have utilized classroom discussions to express their disagreement. Other students are unfamiliar with queer theology and grapple with the practical implications of our commitment to LGBTQIA+ justice. My approach to these instances of harm is to respond promptly and firmly with direct intervention. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to maintain a respectful learning environment. It is my role to hold my students accountable when public professions of their personal beliefs are hurtful. Even if the bulk of these interactions with students occur outside of the classroom in private conversations, there must also be a public acknowledgment of the harm done inside of the classroom. The second form of seminary hurt is more difficult when I encounter it in my classroom. How do I respond when my colleagues harm students? There are few secrets at a freestanding seminary like mine. With a smaller student population than the nearby high school and an entire faculty collegium that is the same size as a computer science department at some universities, my seminary inhabits an intimate and fraught ecosystem. When I teach about racism within the history of Christianity in the United States, there are occasions when my students discuss the racism they have experienced in other classrooms at the seminary. In doing so, they are rightly underscoring the pervasive realities of racism within Christian institutions today. Studying history is not just about the past, it is also about helping us better understand how the past reverberates in our present. But what is my responsibility to my students? When matters move beyond my classroom, I must navigate multiple layers of collegiality, mutuality, hierarchy, and power. The third form of seminary hurt revolves around institutional decisions that harm students. My teaching often pivots to engage current events because I seek to be responsive to what is happening in the actual lives of my students. Sometimes, the events at hand deal with controversial matters in our seminary community. There has been confusion and anger when beloved colleagues are dismissed or depart because of arduous conditions. There has also been dismay and frustration regarding policies, procedures, and the pace of institutional change. In my classroom, I have engaged the following challenge from my students: “What I have dealt with at this seminary is worse than what I have experienced in the church. Shouldn’t the seminary be better than the church, or at least as good as the church?” In these moments, I wrestle with ambivalence. On the one hand, I am further motivated to grow as a teacher and determined to do better in my classroom. On the other hand, I know that participating in pathways toward institutional change requires that I venture outside of my classroom. And some of those places are where seminary hurt awaits and abounds.

It is no secret that the arts are powerful tools that can be used in any classroom to challenge, liberate, expand, complicate, and even heal aspects of our educational practices. The visual arts, in particular, not only allow us to connect in deeper ways with the content and context of our studies but can also function as a portal to what is hidden in our deepest recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. From rage to grief to wonder and joy, the arts help us access emotions and educate our affections while inspiring us to resist, denounce, agitate, connect, conjure, and generate tools for speculative imagination, for integration of embodied and intellectual knowledge for the healing of all our relations. As a site for world-making, art lends itself to dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and acting in the world. Artists and works are poised with the capacity to enhance our understanding of how historical and cultural amalgamations circulate our bodies, shape our culture, and inform our experiences, while also offering opportunities to assess and integrate multimodal processes of learning. What follows is a series of suggestions on how to bring the arts into the classroom to activate and enrich multimodal learning. When I am presenting an artwork within the context of classes in art and religion, I like to begin by providing historical information based on my previous research of the work. I find the work’s curatorial files which, depending on the artist, are broadly available online. Many contemporary artists use their own websites as archives of works, exhibitions, ephemera, press clippings, etc., so be sure to check those as well. Then I consult chapters, articles, catalogues, and reference works which provide context for the creation and reception of that particular artwork.[i] I also provide the artist’s full name, the work’s title and date, the collection to which it now belongs, how it was acquired, and how the museum or gallery’s curatorial practices participate (or don’t) in “unlearning and changing the base of colonialism in the concepts of private property, Manifest Destiny,… Eurocentrism, Cartesian dualism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, positivism, sexism, racism, individualism, extraction, classism, violence, and control,” as Wanda Nanibush, the assistant curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, puts it. The goal is to deepen and expand the experience of engagement with the works—not so much to define, constrain, or limit the contours of interpretation. In other words, the contextual information we offer on any creative work should not limit the personal connections, emotional reverberations, and embodied experiences that teacher-learners may develop with the work. Beyond the artist’s and work’s contexts, I ask teacher-learners to describe in detail what they see and what they understand. For example, if I share a painting, I ask them to describe the color, contours, textures, contrast, movement, proportion, composition, medium, size, dimensions, and how the lines appear in relationship to one another. This step reveals to us how we have been conditioned to take in a lot of images hastily, spending a very short amount of time looking, identifying, and savoring what the works are doing, and how the textures, colors, and rhythms of the composition have been carefully arranged by artists to elicit responses in us. Only after exhausting our capacities for naming what is in front of us, do I ask teacher-learners to progress in the interpretation of “what is” to “what it might mean.” We often claim that artworks mean something without carefully tracing for our class participants where these meanings are visually located or where they originated within the work. The last question I engage with is the “so what?” that Gilda Williams proposes in How to Write About Contemporary Art.[ii] What are the echoes for the context of our class? How does it invite us to look at our subject and discussions differently? How does it open up a space for the poetic to guide and allow us to access our deepest, sometimes hidden, recesses? Works of art are powerful in connecting us to our emotions, in helping us understand what it means to be human, to be whole, to be here. As theological educators who are laying out the blueprints for sacred, embodied, planetary change, we must remember to have the arts in our toolboxes. The arts are never far away from what matters most in life. Artistic productions participate in decolonial efforts—are capable of doing what Macarena Gómez-Barris names as “the erosion of the extractive gaze” while “affirming the diversity that resides within the matrix of coloniality.”[iii] As antidotes to Empire, visual arts are sites of subversion that promote imagining and shaping into being other emergent worlds. They also require from us, as Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak puts it, an acknowledgement that we are co-responsible for maintaining our capacity and responsibility to keep the dreams of our ancestors alive.[iv] As apertures into worlds of the not yet, artworks also welcome wonder, openness, diversity, reciprocity. Allowing a careful looking, engaging, and sensing what the works are activating emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in us is generative way to amplify learning in our classrooms. Part II of this series will provide practical examples of engagement with artworks. Available April 27, 2022.   [i] A helpful resource for helping in the design of the experience with works of art is Teaching at the Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rikak Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2014. [ii] Gilda Williams, How to Write About Contemporary Art (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2014). [iii] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 133. [iv]Ailton Krenak, Ideias pra Adiar o fim do Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019), 47.

Just the thought of failure, either in anticipation or in loathsome memory, causes many to recoil, wrench in pain, or feel ashamed. The big red-inked “F” on the exam, either literal or metaphorical, sends chills down spines and contracts sphincters. Fiasco, disaster, confirmed lack, or found-out mediocrity, humiliates and destroys. Failure is unavoidable. As they say, “we learn more from our failures than from our successes.” Rather than stigmatizing those who fail, it behooves us to embrace those who are brave enough to make attempts and normalize the help needed to strengthen efforts. Still, normalized help is not easy to come by. For many students, for many reasons, one of the first things they do in undergraduate or graduate school is fail. A student who exceled in high school courses will not necessarily ace the first exams in college. Comparable to students, teacher failures are as varied as teachers. Early career fiascos, mid-career blunders, late career mistakes and poor judgements – confirm that we are persons who are fallible. Humanness is messy. Our teaching failures remind us that an expert in any field does not necessarily make for a good teacher of that field. Learning to teach the methods, approaches, practices and literature of any discipline requires as much attention as learning the content of that field. Any seasoned teacher will tell you that there were (many) failures along the way to becoming a competent teacher. The ways schools respond to failure is a key element in the formation or deformation offered in our educational enterprise. Students and faculty are more formed by the ways they are accepted or rejected during failure as they are by any course in the curriculum. A climate of help, support, applauding of persistence, and reward for courage, tells students if they are worthy of the degree they are attempting to earn. It tells teachers that the community where they teach has their backs. Higher education colleagues report that they survived an educational process which told them that failures were to be rare/never and were intolerable. Out of self-protection, many of us learned to pretend we do not fail. Or we have been taught to hide the failure. We masquerade or just never quite own up to any failure. School ecologies which are intolerant of failure are climates which are deforming of spirit and shallowing of imagination. Without healthy spirit and deep imagination education becomes rote, wooden and hollow. Our students, then, are ill-equipped to leave our classrooms. Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful (wo)men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” In classrooms, it behooves us not to lower standards, inflate grades, or dumb down curriculum so there is little to no failure, but instead create ecologies of learning where moving past failure is integral to learning, encounter, discovery, boundary expansion and new experiences. Asking for help is not cheating; it is not a show of weakness; it is not a declaration of permanent inadequacy or insufficiency. Failure does not foster mediocracy or create indelible flaws. Asking for help is difficult. Asking for help has to be re-learned. I first met Ariel as a student enrolled in my introductory class. His habit was to sit quietly, listen attentively and participate actively in small group activities. I noticed that he was smart when I read his first submitted essay. His writing was strong, his grasp of the course material was solid and his conjectures concerning implications and applications was superb. By mid-term of the semester, Ariel’s engagement in the class showed that he was, consistently, a capable and talented student. During a break in a class session Ariel came up to me to talk. He said he had a proposal. I was intrigued and listened attentively. His proposal was that since he had done so well on the first three writing assignments, that I would allow him to forego the remaining three assignments. I told him to let me think about it. At the end of class I pulled him aside to talk. I told him that in order for me to forego the three pending writing assignments, he would have to agree to help students in the course who were struggling. I told him he would not have to do the remaining assignments in the syllabus, but instead he would use his time to lead a study group to help failing students. He said he would think about it. During the following week he emailed me and said he would take my offer. I emailed back and told him to meet me in my office an hour before our next class. Before the next class and my meeting with Ariel, I emailed three other students who were also doing quite well in the course and offered them the same deal. If they were willing to keep up with the reading of the course, in lieu of writing the remaining three essays, the four of them would help other students who were struggling with the materials. When we met I told them that their help with other students was not mandatory and they could complete the course as outlined in the syllabus. Each chose to create a study group with other students. The study groups worked well; help was given and grades came up. After the last class session Ariel came to my office. He thanked me for the class then said, jokingly, that the deal I struck was unfair. I smiled at him and waited to hear his rationale. He said that the task of creating the study group, and helping other students, was much more work than had he simply written the remaining essays. I smiled wryly and reminded him that it had been his choice. I asked him if he had learned from helping. He said yes. I told him that there were students who he helped who would not have taken help from anyone else. And I thanked him for his good help. Ariel told me I owed him lunch. Gladly, I obliged. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ― Winston S. Churchill So, we ask these reflection and invitational questions. To whom do you turn for help with your teaching failures? What systems of help do you build into your courses for your students? In your school, is there an ecology that normalizes failure and regularizes help, support and resilience and if not, what would it take to create one? Who are your collaborators and conversation partners when you fail and when you need help? What failures in teaching are weighing you down and need to be forgiven and healed?