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We all craft a syllabus for each class, but honestly what is a syllabus and for whom is it written? I hope to expand our vision. The quick and typical answer is: A syllabus is a plan for how we hope to engage students with content and practices of our field of study. Of course, a syllabus is a covenant of learning between teacher and student about the outcomes students might expect from the class. Yet syllabi have many other audiences, and their construction is a daunting task. Over the last two years, I have reviewed nearly a hundred introductory syllabi in my field (Christian religious education). By completing a content analysis of them, I hoped to discover what is at the heart of our shared discipline. I learned that two emphases usually guide classes in my field: attention to the art of teaching and to the congregation as a context for learning. I thank the colleagues who entrusted me with their commitments. As I read them, I was in awe of the quality of teaching. I honor their integrity. Despite this, many of these colleagues expressed anxiety with the way we often think of syllabi. They offered a challenge: We need to make a difference! That means, they said, we need to significantly change the way we construct classes. Above all else, they argued, syllabi are a plan for a journey that impacts lives and the wider world. That is not an overstatement. Person after person told me that “business as usual” could no longer be the case. Classes had to change! The COVID pandemic, the rush of classes online, the inequities revealed, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the continuing violence in the public square against people of color revealed challenges that have redirected the whole class-planning process. We write syllabi for students. We make our expectations and our commitments clear. We write syllabi for our colleagues, often following a prescribed form, to demonstrate how a class fits into a school’s curriculum. Moreover, we write our syllabi for colleagues in our guilds to show how each of us stands within the traditions of a field of study. But my colleagues told me that syllabi need to be more – much more. They have a wider audience and impact. Syllabi are a concrete and sacred expression of our vocation of teaching. They embody hopes for the future. Syllabi are our efforts to connect students, fields of study, a curriculum, and outcomes that make a difference in the world. Through our teaching, we want to influence the ways students live their vocations and interact with the wider worlds of church, faith, ministry, and public service they touch. We each make choices. We include some foci and ignore others. We emphasize some practices of learning – reading, study, analysis, creative projects, oral presentations, or written papers, to name a few. We seek to embody the wisdom and practices of a field of study. But more! From wherever we are located, from the wisdom of academic traditions in which we are embedded, and from faithful efforts to live a vocation, we join with our students on a journey. We choose what we will emphasize. We choose who we will serve. We choose what difference we will make. It is obvious, isn’t it? A syllabus is a concrete reflection of our hope to make a difference. Syllabi are filled with our passion for our field, with the liveliness of the worlds our students inhabit, and with our best efforts of teaching. Teaching is not the replication of what we did before, nor honestly what the authorities in our fields say it is. Teaching is our calling, and the syllabi, our promises.  By reviewing over a hundred syllabi, I saw similarities that define a discipline, I saw practices of good teaching, I saw colleagues struggling, but I also saw a passion to make a difference in a world that needs teachers and great traditions of hope and wisdom. Just as books and articles shape dialogue and influence policy, even more so do syllabi. Teaching cannot be “business as usual.” What difference do you hope to make?

In my early Caribbean childhood of the 1960s and 1970s after leaving England, the country of my birth, stories surrounded us. Often, they were whispered and overheard in partial, redacted fragments, or they were spit out into the air with force, the words ricocheting off the walls and buildings of our individual and collective histories and rebounding in fragments to listeners in myriad shapes and patterns. At other times, the stories were gently ladled—soft, soothing, and nourishing in the recollections of elder women and men who chose their words with care, deboning the sharp bits while maintaining the flesh of the experience for young listeners. As children, my brother and I were often reminded never to eat fried fish while simultaneously carrying on a vigorous conversation because the slipperiness and sharpness of the fish bones made them more likely to shift from between our teeth and lodge sharply somewhere between the first bite and the swallowing of piquant deliciousness. Fairytale horror always got our attention. I regard the silence of eating fried fish as one of the crucial lessons of conversation because it taught us how to listen carefully. Now while fish bones were discarded, the bones of chicken and other meat were often ground to a powdery mass—“down to the marrow”—the chewing of which was an enjoyment of the meal. In this way, eating bones were both cautionary as well as savoured metaphors about speech, listening, and enjoyment. We grew up with grandparents, people born at the turn of the last century, descendants of the enslaved, on small islands of the Eastern Caribbean in what was then a far-flung shore of Britain’s imperial project. At one time in the late eighteenth century, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his soldiers were stationed there in Antigua, at the naval dockyard built by enslaved folks on the south coast looking over the waves at Guadaloupe. Sitting on the front stone steps of our grandparents’ home, too young for school, we too were sentinels who drank in salt air. There were a few cars and trucks, but mostly we watched people; they embodied the world beyond garden gates, doors, and louvres (windows). We saw children in their freshly pressed uniforms going to and from school and grown folk walking by and calling out their greetings, selling their wares with snatches of song, including fish, ice wrapped in burlap, and salt peanuts. And if there were praises and curses belonging to dramas that began long before they walked by, we heard those, too. My brother and I traveled through the centuries, daily. We walked by structures, including the Anglican cathedral that we visited each Sunday, built and rebuilt over the last few centuries. Nothing was designated a historical site. I do not recall any plaques or markers. There were gravestones and cannons and cannon balls, material evidence from a colonial past. A woman selling fruit around the corner from our house greeted my grandfather in his mother tongue, Antillean French Creole, every day as he took his constitutional walk after lunch. I imagine her saying “Sa kap fet?” (How’s it going?). The scales on which she and other market women confirmed the price of her goods, accurately pre-weighed by her touch, were heavy dark metal forged before our time. When we returned to the house with longer shadows in tow perhaps my uncle would be there, his car parked outside and the gentle tick tock of his wristwatch marking modern time. We learned to move between these various eras. We were travelers seated on the front steps of the house, books and words and stories for fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere from which we took deep garden-perfumed gulps, sunglasses a barrier protecting our eyes from some alternate sun. After flying to Canada in the early 1970s in a giant version of the red plastic plane from the cereal box, we felt the shift and change, jarringly, in the unaccustomed motion of escalators and elevators and trains and buses and another English language. But the stories, we remembered the stories, and we learned to chew and spit and talk and write them. In my teaching and design of Caribbean and African Diaspora religious and cultural studies courses, these storying practices contribute to imaginative pedagogies. They are especially useful when engaging students in the study of topics which are potentially difficult and traumatic. Storying as a teaching method has the capacity to both disrupt and challenge as well as to protect. Storying invites multiple vantage points and critical assessment. Finding the story bones is a process of meaningful engagement with the past and holds the potential to connect our various worlds of being as teachers, scholars, and learners.   Photo by British Library on Unsplash Enslaved people cutting the sugar cane on the Island of Antigua, 1823. Download this photo by British Library on Unsplash unsplash.com

In striving to craft a trauma-informed pedagogy while teaching about social justice, my reflections have often circled around a central question: When is it appropriate to use tragic and traumatic current events as examples of injustice in the classroom? I’ve been pondering this question for the last few years, while teaching undergraduate courses at a predominately White, Catholic institute. The majority of students take my classes to fulfill a General Education requirement. Most students are from Christian denominations at varying levels of personal faith commitments, and few might elect to take a theology class if it was not required. On the one hand, making connections between course content and the world in which students live is effective. Tethering discussion to an event that every person in the classroom knows about (e.g., the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021) is an attention-grabber. When a well-known event, like the Atlanta spa shootings, affects a particular community more significantly than others—in this case, the AAPI community—discussing it in class signals to students that I take the trauma seriously and care about how they’ve been impacted by it. It can also be time during which my White-identifying students—especially those from predominately White communities—may be more open to learn a much-needed lesson about the reality of White supremacy and White privilege. On the other hand, I worry about retraumatizing students from communities affected by the event. I’ll never forget how a few years ago, after a 2-week unit on racism in my theology and social justice course, a Black male student told me: “I have to think about racism almost every minute in my life. I always have a target on my back. I drive to school with my wallet on the dashboard, just in case I get pulled over. When I get to your classroom, I want a break. I just want to talk about Jesus.” This student did not need me to cater to White students, in trying to convince them that Black lives really do matter. And it clearly added to his trauma when I did. This question of how often to bring traumatic current events into the classroom came to a head while I was teaching about theology and justice this spring, in an undergraduate class entitled “Just Theology.” My class is constructed around several modules, each analyzing a theme of injustice prevalent in US society, through a theological lens. Modules center around topics like poverty, war and weapons, global warming, sexism and patriarchy, racism, immigration, and homophobia and transphobia. My students were predominately White (around 10 to 15 percent BIPOC-identifying) and fairly gender balanced. In my 24-student undergraduate classes usually no more than one student (if that) openly identifies as trans or non-binary. In some classes, I’ve had up to 30 percent disclose to me in written work that they identify as LGBTQ+, but not all are open on campus. This last semester (Spring 2021), I had no shortage of options for bringing current events into our classroom discussions. But I was also deeply aware of how my students were living in a permanent state of instability and uncertainty, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Capitol attack, the US-Mexico border crisis, ongoing police brutality and murders, record high unemployment rates, and frequent mass shootings. Introducing students to disorienting dilemmas with conflicting theories and positions, as I usually tried to do in other semesters, almost seemed insensitive in a context already so unstable and polarized over these same issues. After chatting with some colleagues about this struggle, I came to articulate and adopt a pedagogical principle: discussing traumatic events in the classroom, in such an unstable time, necessitates a stabilizing scaffold to frame the events, that is, a theory or intellectual framework that is responsible to course content and objectives.[1] Remembering my former student’s words about wanting to “just talk about Jesus” in my class, I decided to include in my syllabus a piece by Kelly Brown Douglas which makes connections between the stand-your-ground murder of Trayvon Martin and the crucifying murder of Jesus.[2] Of course, in requiring reading like this, appropriate trigger warnings and alternative assignments need to be offered to students, especially during traumatic times. But the reading assignment seemed to help several students connect my class to the world around them in a personal way. By reading, discussing, and writing about Douglas’s connection between Jesus and Trayvon, most of my White students, who needed to, gained some awareness of White supremacy and White privilege. Some of my students of color commented on how they had never been introduced to a liberating reading of Jesus and appreciated this one that connected deeply to their current everyday struggles. The piece provided nearly all of the students a concept to evaluate—a stabilizing intellectual scaffold around which to consider disorienting and nonsensical tragedies and traumas. Teaching through 2020 and 2021 has been difficult, to be sure, but my students helped me to see how many of them necessitate and yearn for critical thought even more during times of tragedy, uncertainty, and trauma. [1] I am particularly grateful to my colleague and conversation partner, Dr. Kristi Law, Director of the Bachelor of Social Work program and Associate Professor at St. Ambrose University, for helping me think through this idea. [2] Kelly Brown Douglas, “Jesus and Trayvon: The Justice of God,” in Stand your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015), 171-203.  

One of the realities that the pandemics of the past eighteen months have brought home is how the different life situations of students change the impact of collective trauma on their bandwidth for learning. For some of our students, when the world ground to a halt, they found themselves with more space to focus, to engage with what they were learning, to connect with others. For many of our students, caregiving for children and sick relatives, loss of income and economic stability including access to safe housing, increased incidences of domestic violence, threats of racialized violence in public spaces, life-and-death struggles with mental health conditions, or the high rates of infection and death in their communities made focusing on learning nearly impossible. The dominant model of education that we work with in the United States is a factory model of schooling, developed within the shift to industrialization when we moved from a tutor/pupil dyad to a mass-produced improvement of worker skill. We put many bodies into a classroom with one teacher for efficiency, assume they all go through the same exposure to materials and activities for learning, and then grade the outcome on how well it measures up to some ideals set before we ever met the people who would enter our classroom. We started grading students at the same time we started grading meat and eggs, as products for consumption by the outside world. Those who don’t measure up are blamed for their lack of inherent ability or effort and failing them out is the responsible communication to the outside world of their individual deficiencies. It seems banal to have to name it, but this is a profoundly anti-relational and unjust mode of schooling. Again and again in working with early career faculty throughout the last year, we reminded each other of some basic realities: we had to focus on what is most important in learning; we had to respect where are students are in the moment and what they are capable of engaging given their lived realities; we had to remember that care for students as complex humans and getting through this season is as important as whatever we felt we owed some discipline, administration, or future employer in terms of measurable skill or knowledge outcomes. I have been reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ poetic marvel of a book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020). The collection originated as a series of online posts relating insights she had gained from learning about the colonizing classification and decimation of marine mammals in their encounter with white Western culture. She committed to becoming an apprentice to their wisdom in survival, adaptation, collaboration, and movement through the dangerous currents in which they found themselves. In a piece thinking about schools alongside marine mammals, Gumbs defines schools as “organizational structures for learning, nurturance, and survival, both intergenerationally and within generations” (55). When Gumbs reflects on the schooling behaviors of striped dolphins as they faced the decimation of a disease outbreak in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1990s, she notes: What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently. (55-56) I heard the community of scholars gathered in the Wabash early career digital salon asking similar questions. What if we turned this factory model on its head and instead asked how we could care for each other in the classroom and move together so that at the end of term people knew more about what was critical to know than they did at the start of the term, but did so in a way that honored the scale of care in the midst of a culture experiencing the concurring pandemics of novel coronavirus and not-so-novel systemic racism and wealth inequality? We learned a little bit about what it meant to “school” as a community committed to the survival and thriving of generations during a season of marked crisis. I don’t mean to romanticize this moment. Of course we did so in the midst of cultural calls for students to “go back to school” even as teachers at all levels were working tirelessly month after month to continue schooling despite enormous obstacles to learning. This public invisibility and cultural diminishment repudiated the ongoing schooling that was creating a “scale of care” for “learning, nurturance, and survival” from kindergarten to doctoral seminar. And, unlike Gumbs, whose work seeks to nurture emergent networks of activist belonging and communal resistance across and outside of institutions, in institutions of higher education faculty are embedded in late capitalist economies of exchange where investment and return, tuition and degrees, educational debt and faculty salaries are painfully and inextricably linked. To challenge the production models of social and economic capital in higher education for an organic model of caring for each other and moving together to adapt to existential threats is ironically to risk being called unprofessional, lightweight, irresponsible. However, developing such oceanic schooling may also be a revolutionary and adaptive response for survival in the midst of forces threatening to overwhelm the human species to extinction, from climate collapse to racism to economic inequality.

In the fall of 2018, I travelled to northern Spain and walked a 340 km stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, the ancient Camino Primitivo. At the time, I was on sabbatical, and I wasn’t planning on walking the whole route, but circumstances conspired to propel me on a two-week trek from the medieval town of Oviedo in Asturias to the city of Santiago di Compostela in the Galicia region and the shrine of St. James. As unprepared as I was, my experience on “the way” was both mundane and sublime. Following various signs and markers, I was guided along paths a thousand years old, over snow dotted mountains, through stony villages warm with hospitality, and across rickety bridges that spanned quick running streams. I remember, before setting out a friend said to me that the strangest thing about doing the Camino is that your job every day is simply to walk—not at all the usual multitasking chaos of Western life. Like many, on the trail I discovered the joy of new connections, both to fellow travelers and to the earth slowly passing beneath our feet. Communitas involved swapping stories, getting lost and finding our way, noticing things both strange and familiar, and lingering in the simplicity of a moment as if the act of walking was wiping away the past and setting us on a slow march into the future. Like many of my sabbatical projects, I worked my experience on the Camino into the development of material for teaching—in this case, a course on contemporary and traditional pilgrimage practices. And so, upon my return, I taught a fourth-level seminar course specifically designed to explore themes and issues associated with contemporary pilgrimage practices with my students. Because of the experiential dimension of pilgrimage as a physical action—and because of my own experience in this regard—I asked my students to keep a “walking journal” throughout the course. My intention was to open for the students a more physical, experiential component to balance the conventional, rather more abstract, and possibly less accessible scholarship on pilgrimage. I was hoping that the act of walking in this intentional way would provide unexpected connections and open ways of understanding the tradition and practice of pilgrimage not immediately obvious from their readings. I asked my students to walk 10 km a week and to keep a regular journal about this experience. While they looked at me strangely at the thought of walking that much each week, they set about the task with reasonably good humour. Fitting 10 km of walking into busy schedules proved to be a challenge. For some students, it was a matter of taking a long walk on a Saturday morning. For others it involved laps of their apartment or a series of meandering detours through town. Equally varied were their reflections. Their journals captured the surprising significance of their walking experiences: some described the walking as exploratory, taking them to locations they had never been before; others spoke of the physical sensation of walking and the growing importance of this weekly ritual and the comfort it brought during the first days of the pandemic lockdown; still others spoke of the way walking had become an important means of processing their experiences, to slow down, reflect, and take note of what they were dealing with, or the way their bodies had taken on the hectic nature of their lives. From the students’ feedback, the walking journals were clearly locations of significant learning in the course. As one student put it: One of the assignments for this class was a walking journal: we were to walk 10 km a week and keep a journal describing the experience. The assignment was surprisingly challenging but so rewarding! To get my whole self—body, mind, emotions—involved in a class assignment was unusual, but had an enormous impact on my learning. All of us in the class found that, though our approaches to the journal and what we took away from it were diverse, the walking journal deepened our learning and gave us a much fuller understanding of how pilgrimage works and why one might undertake it. For my part, it fascinates me that the students will likely remember what they learned from walking far longer than from any reading list I set. Moreover, I found that I learned much from their experience. For one thing, it was clear that my own perspective on Christian practice needed to be connected with ordinary and mundane experience—and not expect that the exotic environs of northern Spain would be the only locus of transformation. The power of walking is that in its pervasiveness it connects so much of one’s person, holding together experiences both commonplace and extraordinary. Within that unexpected mix, it allows for the kind of boundary-breaking moment that invites insight and creative inspiration. Walking is physical; it promotes solitude and reflection; it slows one down to a single moment; it can be an occasion of companionship; it traverses a specific terrain; it can involve searching as well as finding; it embraces encounter. I had hoped that walking would afford my students a different perspective on pilgrimage. I had not anticipated just how effective this would be. There seems to be no substitute for experience as a teacher, and for the simplicity of walking as a way of connecting to something as theologically elegant and seemingly far removed from the everyday as the tradition of Christian pilgrimage.

(Part Five of a Five Part Serialized Blog) Art is a midwife of transformation and transmutation. Art transforms us through our encounter with it, both in the world and out of our hearts and hands. Art also transmutes what we’ve created into something meaningful and powerful for people other than ourselves. How many times have we written something, taught something, shared something, only to hear our students share with us that they received and heard something we would never have guessed? A midwife helps to bring forth new life, but soon afterward, the midwife departs, and it is our responsibility to nurture and care for that new and sacred life. Something I can’t quite name occurred in this class, and I don’t know if there is a map or a listicle that can help me or you recreate it. Perhaps the beginning of the map emerges from the questions I began to pose in the midst of the chaos and death of 2020. Is what I’m teaching, what I’m asking students to internalize and wrestle with, speaking forward into our futures? Whose futures? Is what I’m teaching meeting the needs—embodied, individual, and communal—that are making themselves known in the classroom? Or is my teaching, my agenda, burying those needs, diminishing what is being excavated and surfaced in student’s lives and in mine? Are participants, including myself, having to disengage with their innermost needs, their generational needs, to “learn”? I don’t know if I’ll ever teach the Spirituality and the Arts class again. It was suspended time. A unique experience that I am still processing and trying to understand. I am transformed by it. I will never see my students the same way again. The way they taught one another and me out of the wealth of their experiences, through what their heart and hands made, astounded me. Teaching art as theology and spirituality was a remarkable pivot from the face-to-face classroom and from the online classroom space that I had learned to carefully curate over the years. Centering art and art making as teacher felt like liminal space where the conditions, needs, questions, and urgency of the moment converged to build something that maybe couldn’t or shouldn’t be repeated. In many ways, this course took more out of me than any other class I’ve ever taught. It was also the pivot each of us needed in teaching and learning in theological education for these times. The course was a shift into the now and the immediacy of our collective consciousness and bodies moving through painful and joyful times together. The class was a shift into thinking beyond isolation, beyond death and death-dealing, into growing and truth telling. Art, both the process of making and sharing what we made, midwifed our anger, sorrow, grief, and joy in ways that a traditional course might not have made possible. It felt raw and holy. As a spiritual practice, our time together learning about the connection between art, spirituality, and theology became a collective prayer in many voices, uttering both similar and dissonant cries, chaotic and beautiful at the same time. We are each still discovering the ways in which the course, now complete, is ushering forth transformation and transmutation in our lives and being. And yes, everyone received an “A,” whatever that means now.

Unprecedented. The current communal struggle to live through the viral pandemic is often called – unprecedented. In choosing to use this word, we are not so much trying to communicate that this moment of prolonged upheaval has never before happened. Historians routinely remind us that viral pandemics are part of United States history (e.g., Spanish flu pandemic, 1918). By using the word “unprecedented” we are trying to communicate, through our fear and uncertainty, that our experiences from before, our knowledge from before, our underpinnings from before are inadequate to inform us here and now. What is unprecedented is our lack of knowledge and our inability to make meaning. We can no longer make certainty stick. Decisions are reduced to flimsy guesses, uninformed hunches, or heartfelt wishes. This urgent time is unprecedented because our language fails to communicate this gargantuan experience of ambiguity, liminality, communal grief and loss. We say unprecedented because we are afraid. In other words, “…. when the crisis is upon us and the ‘ordinary’ collapses, life gets complicated very quickly.” (Barbara Holmes, 2021) The current complications have left us stymied. How do scholars teach when the ordinary has ceased? How do we teach when we are plunged into a space of unknowing? The vantage point of the Wabash Center allows my staff and me to dialogue with a wide swath of colleagues across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. From multiple sources, we are being told that colleagues are exemplifying the behaviors of exhaustion which more typically occur during the last portion of the semester. We are in the first weeks of the semester – we are just getting started, yet we are teaching tired. What does it mean that the faculty is fatigued in the first quarter? How do you make it to the end of the semester? What happens when those tasked with meaning making come up short? Education is a matrix of traditions, routines, habits and schedules. Our syllabi lean into the teaching arc; we begin the semester, then we look to mid-term, then finals bring the eager closure. Typically, by week 3 or 4 of the semester, colleagues are realizing the weaknesses in their syllabus design and becoming aware of the students’ capacity to manage the course. In the past, and given the semester arc, it is in these early weeks when adjustments are made, adaptations and corrections are formulated. Good teaching makes course corrections along the way. Good teaching adjusts to the students in the conversation. Good teaching is flexible, responsive, nimble. However, this semester, we are getting the message that colleagues are too tired to adjust, too weary to listen for their students. Colleagues are reporting that the distraction of the viral pandemic is keeping them from noticing their students; keeping them from being fully present in the classroom. Colleagues are looking for the finish line and the semester is barely underway.  What does it mean to teach during long-term crisis? How do you stay healthy when the crisis stretches out into years? What does it mean if your personal tiredness negatively impacts your teaching?  Fatigue is a symptom of anxiety, prolonged uncertainty, and sorrow. Faculty communities cannot ignore, nor take for granted, the wellbeing of its members. Even if your institution has a mobilized response to the pandemic, the emotional and spiritual effects upon individuals and communities cannot go unattended. We must notice the hardship and toll placed upon our colleagues during this academic year and design new measures of faculty care. We need faculty wellness strategies and practices which heal crisis fatigue. In this urgent time, contemplation might be a communal practice to employ. Barbara Holmes’ latest book entitled Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village provides insight, guidance, and wisdom for our not knowing and tiredness. Dr. Holmes writes on page 57: As it turns out, contemplation that arises from a crisis or collective trauma is a displacement of everyday life and a freefall into ‘what comes next.’ As the crisis sweeps away our former life together, our arrogance and fantasies, all we can do is reflect on the memories of another and more tranquil existence, and accustom ourselves to a new and welcoming darkness. The darkness to which I refer is not a space of fear. It is an involuntary centering in a reality that is not always available to use when our egos are lit. Crises open portals of a deeper knowing. When the crisis occurs, the only way out is through, so we take a cue from nature and relax into the stillness, depending upon one another and the breath of life!” The only way out of this crisis is through this crisis – together. Learning to accustom ourselves to a new and welcoming darkness requires intention. Stepping into the portals of a deeper knowing takes courage. Dr. Holmes instructs us that rising to this occasion might mean doing less. This might be a time for introspection, stillness, silence, mindfulness, contemplation. Rest! Take time out and off! Do less! In this crisis time, let us slow down.

(Part Four of a Five Part Serialized Blog)  There’s a difference between mending and healing. When we talk of healing, we are talking about going back to the “before” times, back to the time before harm occurred. However, we can’t always return to those places, can we? When we talk about mending, we are describing something being patched up but still bearing the scars of the injury or wound. During the process of learning how to teach and participate in this course, I witnessed the power of art to mend. At the end of each two-week period, our classroom of artists would upload images of their pieces to our course page. We would meet together for two to three hours to share our work, to discuss together the challenges of making each piece, and to mark the spiritual shifts taking place through the practice of making art in the midst of everything happening in the world and in our personal lives. Darci and I facilitated the conversation and took the posture of co-learners with the artists in the space. We realized quickly that the process of making and sharing art was a spiritual practice for our class in this pandemic learning time, because of the way it reconnected the threads to one another that were severed through online learning and lockdowns. It also connected us by holding space for the ongoing rage and grief we felt. During the semester, Black people were continually murdered by police and vigilantes, and as we witnessed together the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings of Asian women. Art and the process of creating art did not allow us to cover up our feelings. Art exposed the anger and grief we felt, utterly and viscerally. Art did not make room for short cuts and avoidance of those experiences and reactions that felt raw and painful. Every two weeks, we gathered to witness, learn, and confront what art had brought out in us and through us. We participated in visible mending. Art stitched us together in our grief, joy, and gratitude in a time that felt like crisis and chaos. As part of each bi-weekly project, I posted a podcast discussing the material for the week together with current events and personal stories. The week of the Atlanta spa shootings hit me especially hard. I saw my mother and grandmothers in the faces and names of the women who were gunned down. Everything I knew and taught about U.S. imperialism, militarism, and the historic and policy-based sexualization of Asian women across the trans-pacific and here in the U.S. felt incredibly close. I kept thinking of every instance, and there have been many, where I or someone I knew was on the receiving end of anti-Asian racism and violence. I thought about the systematized invisibility of anti-Asian racism and violence and the gaslighting of Asian people at the denial of our histories and experiences. All of which were glaringly evident in the way police and the media reported on the Atlanta spa shootings. The rage bubbled over then, intermingled with the physical pain of grief, a burning spot in my chest that had been there my whole life, but felt suddenly unbearable. I wanted to cancel the podcast and cancel our class meet up for that week. I didn’t have the energy or the filter to proceed as normal. In a fog of grief, I swiftly wrote out the class cancelation email and the apology for the missing podcast, but I never sent it. After I wrote out the memo, I remembered what this class had shown and taught me through our weeks together. Art doesn’t cover up. Art radically reveals. Art calls us to bear witness to the truth-telling limited by words alone. I showed up that week when it would have been perfectly acceptable to disengage. I reframed the podcast around the texts of the lives of Asian women throughout U.S. history and trans-pacific history. What did it mean to un-colonize the image and embodiment of Asian women through the eyes of the divine presence? To unmake the lies about Asian women as only flesh for white supremacist consumption through the practices and processes of art? What would that mean to and for me as an Asian and Korean American woman? At the end of our class meeting, we closed with a practice I call the Gaze of Gratitude. A practice I’ve developed as an online teaching ritual, for times when words fail. We used Zoom in gallery mode to scroll through each square, to behold each artist’s face and without words, to gaze upon each person with gratitude and to allow that gratitude to peer and shine out of our eyes and expressions. I wept. I couldn’t help it. I was once again in awe of the space that making and talking about art could facilitate; a space to reveal and contribute to necessary mending in community.

Our only chance to achieve collective happiness comes through extensive conversation punctuated here and there with votes, which will themselves over time, in their imperfections, simply demand of us more talk. ~ Danielle Allen [1] I grew up during the transition from handwritten comments on high school report cards to a pre-populated set of options for teachers to deploy each quarter in a tidy, standardized font. The most frequently deployed comment on my cards: Talks too much in class. Reading Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration, a lively and provocative defense of the centrality of equality in the Declaration of Independence, I have come to appreciate that perhaps I was just a budding democrat, joining the timeless quest to “achieve collective happiness” through “extensive conversation.” I am not sure my teachers saw it through quite the same lofty lens. While the college classroom is no stranger to the phenomena of the student who talks too much—and most often, those students look a lot like me—it seems the more pressing concerns have to do with the stifling (or alternatively, trifling) of conversation. We can’t talk about the election, the protests, the mask mandate, the insurrection, the [fill in the blank with any issue of collective importance] because. . . it is too polarizing, it leads to cancel culture, it offends. . . . Or, in that familiar, euphemistic sleight of hand in every professor’s tool belt: we have too much content to cover, too many lecture slides to get through. We might well ask, are we doing enough to encourage that most fundamental habit of a democratic people: talking with one another? What would it mean to organize our syllabus around the conditions for conversation? This does not mean content drops out. But in this particular moment, I have found that a little content goes a long way—that what many students appreciate most is simply the opportunity to talk, or more accurately, to be heard. I spent the month of June piloting a college-level course for local high school students. Though there were several elements that made this course idiosyncratic—small class size, embedded mentors, self-selected three-week summer intensive—it was a reminder of how our classrooms can promote the habits of the heart de Tocqueville and those who followed him saw as the seed from which formal democratic institutions arise and are sustained. At the start of our second week of class, I invited another student to come in and facilitate a talking circle process, to model the underlying circle logic of restorative practices we had been focusing on. I rarely use circles like this in class, aware of, among other things, the fine line one walks between modeling conversation and group therapy, as well as the problems of scale and trust in classes that tend towards the 25–35 student range rather than the 5–8 range. But in this unique setting, the circle process worked well on many levels including, most importantly, modeling the relationship between speaking and being heard—of having a voice. Critically, I was a participant in the circle, not the circle-keeper (or facilitator). This meant that conversation did not flow, as too often happens in seminars, from professor to student to professor to another student. After finishing the circle, the students requested that we do another one before the end of our three weeks together. This time the students designed the questions, skillfully constructing a set of guiding prompts that moved back and forth between lighter fare (funniest memory from class) and self-evaluation (how will you bring what you learned in this class into your life after class ends?). A consistent refrain in that closing circle was how different this class was than what they have experienced in high school. Here they were co-creators, rather than passive recipients of knowledge. Their views were sought out, heard, and had an impact on the flow and content of the class. The passion with which they critiqued their high school experience gave me pause to wonder about what models students entering our college classrooms have for “talking too much” in class, or, rather, “achieving collective happiness” through “extensive conversation,” that is, for becoming participants in a democracy. It is easy to dismiss the unique features of a college classroom as not applicable to the wider forums where fellow citizens struggle to recognize one another as the “we” in “we, the people.” But I take some hope from the other consistent refrain in our class: these students were hungry for practical advice on how to have conversations with people with whom they disagreed about the issues we are facing as a society. In a class on race, resistance, and reconciliation, what they most wanted was to be heard and to learn better how to hear others—a request for the very thing college seminars would seem to be designed for, the very thing that democracy demands of us. That is hopeful: A generation cognizant that they do not have good models for this, that the hegemonic social media landscape in which their communication skills are being developed are not up to the task. Circles, of course, are not a panacea; they, too, are threatened by the same hyperbole of many trending “solutions” to the ills undermining our democratic experiment. I am under no illusions that the work we do  in our classrooms will magically solve the crises of societal and institutional trust, or even that it will hold at bay the forces intent on undermining the conditions that make the work of democratic habit formation central to the academic mission and our classrooms. Nonetheless, I am committed to finding ways our classrooms can “demand of us more talk”—but not just talk by me, the professor. The last thing I want on student evaluations is: Professor talks too much in class. [1] Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2014), 82.

(Part Three of a Five Part Serialized Blog) Pivots or shifts in our thinking away from western and colonially oriented epistemologies are hard. The academy is a colonial entity. It is invested in colonizing us, thoroughly and into generations; colonization of thought processes and embodiments, the way we collect knowledge, our communal epistemologies, and the way we assess for learning. For BIPOC this is especially painful because we are familiar with these processes of systematic and structural erasure. We know intimately the violence of colonial erasure on our bodies, our tongues, our names, and even our food. The colonial academy, as an extension of supremacist ideologies everywhere, strives to domesticate our expression ourselves and our experiences, the way we analyze those experiences, the way we believe, create, and recreate the same tools that keep us bound up. The academy has convinced us that measures and rubrics can help us determine if what people create holds meaning or value. Meaning and value for whom? I’m not saying we need to throw away all the rubrics. I don’t hate rubrics. I am saying, we might consider that there are other ways to reflect back to students and ourselves how and what we are learning. However, the shift away from what we’ve asked ourselves and students to do from our earliest school years requires a lifetime of undoing. Often, we are learning and unlearning along with the students in our classrooms. The good news is that we can practice that cultural classroom shift together. Art can help us pivot if we let it. Our artists found the pivot from a reading and writing classroom to a maker’s classroom, disorienting at first. We could tell students felt like we would pull the rug out from under them at any moment. We were shifting from accountability to rubrics and grading scales to accountability to community and relationships. We practiced showing up for one another in vulnerability where one person’s art was not better than another person’s art, but just as meaningful, even if differently expressed. We were shifting from ordered time where we scrunched learning into one week after another with posts and responses as proof of learning, to a more suspended understanding of time and internal and external processing and contemplative time as work At first, this type of conversation occurred frequently: Artist: “I don’t have to write a research paper on this material?” Professors: “No, it’s there to inspire your creativity and challenge you. Show us what you’ve learned through your art and in your check-ins.” Artist: “So, I only have to purchase art supplies? There’s no booklist?” Professors: “Yes. Only art supplies. You are going to read, listen, and watch things in class, but we will provide them.” Artist: “I’m not a real artist, so does that mean I won’t do well in this class?” Professors: “You are a real artist. Did you do the piece? Did you colleagues and co-artists learn from your piece? Did you learn from their pieces? Show us how you are growing and being challenged. Push yourself and you’ll do well.” As they started each piece, we asked artists to reflect on themselves, the tangle of pain and joy in their lived experiences, the world, current events, and what Spirit was saying to each of them through the work of their heart and hands. How was what emerged as a work of art both of them and of the divine presence? How was it both meant for themselves and for the community beyond them? Students started making art in their comfort zones, many of them started the course leaning on familiar mediums, sketching or painting. By the end of the course, artists had pressed themselves into using other mediums. At the conclusion of the semester, we had digital art, sculptures, wire art, woodwork, poetry, and photography. We incorporated oral storytelling in small and large group synchronous sessions. Artists told us the stories that inspired their work, their daily experiences, their theological reflections on the world, and even shared ancestral wisdoms with one another. Sometimes, in response to the stories and the histories, there was only silence. We silently and carefully held one another through our little zoom boxes on the screen. Silence also teaches. Silence is also part of the process.