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I teach a course on the ethics of world religions which takes a narrative approach. Rather than just focusing on the text and tenets of religions in relationship to ethics, the course also highlights the life stories of “exemplars” from various religious perspectives. These have included civil rights activist Malcolm X, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and Liberian Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. The advantage of using this approach is that it gives flesh to sometimes abstract principles, demonstrating that all ethics are situational and depend on one’s positionality. These are complete human beings, so they show both human potentiality and human frailty. One particularly thorny exemplar we focus on in the course is Mohandas Gandhi. Students study his life, from his early years to his education in Britain, work in South Africa, and finally his years of leading the movement for Indian independence. They also read selections from his writing, delving into his views on ahimsa or non-killing, satyagraha or “truth force,” the caste system, and his tactics of nonviolent noncooperation. Gandhi’s negative views of Black South Africans when he lived there are an issue in his history that cannot be ignored. Invariably the question arises, was Gandhi a racist? Throughout the course, I emphasize the value of dialogue over debate when discussing religious perspectives; I wanted to create a forum where students could engage this question in a way that developed their ability to give careful attention to others’ perspectives—a space where dialogue around these differences could lead to greater understanding. The process I use to accomplish this learning strategy begins with dividing the students into pairs and providing them with two short newspaper articles on the subject. While these are not opinion pieces, each article has a particular bias—one towards naming Gandhi as a racist and the other towards seeing him as evolving on issues of race over his lifetime. Each student in the pair is asked to read one of these articles, and to identify the “slant” of the author and the particular points that support the author’s perspective. Each student in the pair then presents this view to their partner as if the view was their own. In other words, one student presents the view that Gandhi had racist views and should be held accountable for them while the other student argues that his views on race evolved and he remains of role-model for social change. We then move to a large group discussion where I pose the following questions to the class: How did you feel about the position to which you were assigned? How did it impact your reading of the articles? Did any point made by your partner make you think differently about the topic? Every time I lead this activity, students are able to name various points made by their partners that provide fresh insights into the controversy. Finally, I create a continuum in the classroom, with one end being “Gandhi was racist” and the other end being “Gandhi is a role-model.” I invite students to stand up and place themselves somewhere on the continuum and share the reason they have placed themselves at that point. I use the continuum because it permits students to nuance their opinion, to move away from binary, either/or thinking on the issue. This past fall, the activity took on added significance given that our campus is only a few miles from the site of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. Since the student population of Augsburg University is nearly 60 percent BIPOC, questions of race and racial justice are not merely academic ones. This activity provided students with a space to explore the mixed history of religions on racial oppression in a manner that neither excuses that history nor uses it to dismiss the positive impact of religions on social justice movements. In the final analysis, students may not change their views about Gandhi’s legacy around race, but their views often become more nuanced and they increase their ability to recognize complexity and ambiguity around these issues. The ability to embrace complexity, ambiguity, and the humanity of all is important for understanding religions as well as for our current fraught and polarized political environment.   Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash

I am consumed by grief. At home in Brazil, the situation is horrendous and bodies are piling up,  as it was here in the US last year.  We will soon surpass 3 million deaths around the world due to COVID-19. People who lived their lives in so many ways. So many people have been taken from us, dear friends that left us before their time. Just this week, the mother of a dear friend, Rosevarte, left us. His pain and mourning are raging rivers whose strength he does not yet fully understand. And David, who lost his entire family one by one, just like that. First it was his mother, then his sister, and then another sister. All in less than two weeks. His grief silenced him and today he struggles to find words that might stubbornly bring him back to life in the midst of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we are a world mourning governments that deliberately seek out, create, and cause death. A world whose governance takes the form of genocide and whose ruler is the primary cause of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, for many the virus is just another wave of well-known histories of colonization. Everywhere, we hear about the death of poor people, everywhere. While we feel like this pandemic is subsiding in the US, it’s not the same around the world. I hear 85 countries don’t have access to vaccines or money to buy them. This is a third of the world and at least half of the world’s population! Unless the whole world is vaccinated, we will continue to wrestle with an endemic situation. In Latin America there are estimated 231 million people living in poverty due to COVID, without access to clean water or food security, who will become refugees in the coming winter. We are a world in mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we have lived fully into many forms of dominium over people, the earth, animals, and oceans. Dominium brought us COVID. Our mourning is our perpetual banishment and our historic undoing. In our grief we learn that we are not what we thought we were and know that we will not be what we want to be. Our desires are trapped in our interdictions and are sabotaged by stories that we did not want to read, an economic system that both alienates us and intensifies our desires until they’re impotent. We destroy the earth with myriad forms of extractivism depleting so many forms of life, while financial markets skyrocket. No coincidence: the growth of financial markets demands extinguishing jobs, exploitation of people, erasure of social welfare, extinction of animals, mountains, and human lives. Grief is undoing our social fabric of relationality, solidarity, and mutual sustenance. COVID-19 has taken away our rituals of death and mourning. We feel more alone, feeling that there’s no one else to see us, hear us, or feel our pain. Our cry is simultaneously trapped in our throats and also released, like the sound of a cannon inside our chest, metastasizing our spirit, causing necrosis of life tissues that used to animate us. With each daily announcement of the number of deaths we need a defibrillator to start feeling life pulsing in us again. When we teach, we are drenched by many forms of grief. The loss is too much. How do we keep our heads up? So many people have lost their jobs, universities and colleges cutting positions by the thousands, tenured positions dismantled, and adjunct faculty teach eight classes a semester to survive.  How can we not worry about losing jobs? How can we support our students when we ourselves are eroding inside? How can we have necessary discussions in the classroom when the world is falling apart and our students’ worlds are discretely crumbling? Capitalism has made us think individually, just as Social Darwinism made us think our cells were essentially selfish, fighting to survive. However, as we now know, our cells work together to sustain the whole body. If we could think and act like them, we could care for each other, instead of feeding a culture of merit and rank. Perhaps we could start thinking how absurd it is for a president of any school to get so much more money than teachers. Or for tenured teachers to get more money than adjuncts. I just heard from an adjunct professor who on top of teaching sells his blood every week to make ends meet. I am reminded of how my school, Union, once thought differently and its faculty donated 10 percent of their salaries to support an unknown scholar from Germany named Paul Tillich.  To think like this today is absurd. We are taught to fend for only ourselves: I care for me and you care for you! Perhaps I have COVID-19 and it is affecting my brain. In the same way that our mourning is a political act of resistance, as Judith Butler told us, our living together in mutual care could also be a collective act of political resistance. Our mourning is a gesture of continuity in the war against death in the midst of death itself! Our mourning is the refusal to accept what the governments want: that we forget about our dead, and our social structures. On the contrary, our mourning is a constant reminder, an announcement that, once and for all, we will not surrender to death and the neglect and normalization of sick and dying people! It is a reminder that we must care for each other somewhat somehow. It is good to say out loud that death will not kill us! At least not all of us! As my beloved Mercedes Sosa sings in Como la Cigarra So many times, they killed me So many times, I died And yet here I am coming back to life Thank you for your disgrace And your fisted hand Because you killed me so heartlessly   And I kept singing Singing in the sun like the cicada After a year under the earth Just like survivor What a war  As we walk around dead bodies, may we make mourning the death of our people our most subversive act!  Even in our teaching! For we fight for ourselves and also for our dead. If we lose, they lose too!

One of our most time-consuming and dreaded tasks as humanities faculty is grading student papers. We’re making it worse by writing too many comments. Some of my colleagues correct every single grammatical error. Others fill the margins with thoughtful suggestions, noting all the misunderstandings of the text, the lapses in logic, and the awkward expressions. Of course, extensive feedback is sometimes appropriate, for instance, in commenting on a draft of a strong students’ capstone thesis. But over the years, I’ve come to think that for a lot of undergraduate papers, especially in gen ed courses, it’s counterproductive. I understand the temptation to write a lot of comments because I used to do it myself. I fell into it while I was a teaching assistant at a big university. I was just a few years older than my students, and they kept challenging my grading. My extensive comments were armor, intended to prove to my more obnoxious students that their papers were ridden with errors and deserved an even lower grade than I had assigned. I continued writing extensive comments for many years afterwards. The colleagues that I admired the most did, so I assumed that it was good practice. If I don’t show the students their errors and to explain how to correct those errors, how will they ever learn? I wrote and I wrote. It took forever. And my students’ writing didn’t improve much. They kept making the same mistakes even though I had corrected them in previous papers. Judging from my colleagues’ complaints, they didn’t have better luck. I started understanding why extensive feedback doesn’t work at my Taekwondo dojang. I was watching two intermediate students show a beginner how to turn and do a low block. The beginner’s block was wobbly and weak, and the intermediate students kept shaking their heads and offering lots of helpful suggestions. The beginner kept trying, they gave more feedback, and he tried again. He was looking increasingly confused and his technique started getting worse. After a few minutes, Grandmaster Kim walked over. He quietly watched and then said: “When you turn, step 3 inches wider.” The student tried again and it worked. He wasn’t wobbling, and his block was much more powerful. The move suddenly looked OK. I laughed at the two student-teachers until I realized that as I was acting just like them. What usually happens when we write a lot on student papers? Most students don’t read the marginal comments, especially not in gen ed classes. At best, they read the end comment. If they do read extensive comments, they become overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. They focus on the wrong things. My students frequently focus their revisions on minor issues, ignoring the larger and more important ones. They do this even when I write that comment #1 is very important and that #2-5 are less important. Reflecting on the taekwondo experience made me realize that I was focusing on the wrong task. My job isn’t to provide a thorough critique of the paper; it is to help the students write better next time. A long list of errors won’t help them do that, but brief and simple feedback might. “When you turn, step 3 inches wider.” Focusing on helping the student and not on critiquing the paper is a fundamental shift. I’m no longer assessing an objective product. Instead, I’m interacting with a fellow human being who can get hurt, flattered, or angry, somebody who can listen or tune out. I aim to write so that they will hear, understand, and then choose to act on what I’m saying. It’s a delicate balance. My comments need to be brief and focused because if I overwhelm them with too much information, they’ll get confused and tune out. But if I say too little, they don’t get enough guidance. If I’m too harsh, they get defensive and they’ll stop hearing me altogether. But if I offer empty praise, they won’t understand that their writing needs work. After years of experimenting, I’ve landed on the following approach: I read the whole paper without writing any comments. Sometimes I sit on my hands to keep from writing. (Yes. Seriously. It helps!) I think: What is this person already doing well? What is the next thing they need to learn? And then I comment accordingly: I use their name I mention one specific thing they did well. I give them one or two specific things to work on, and I mark examples of those in the body of the paper. I offer my criticisms clearly but gently, favoring phrases like “I lost you here!” over “this is incoherent,” and “cool, say more about this!” over “poorly developed.” I offer encouragement. I ignore all the other problems in the paper. (Yes. Really.) Commenting on papers is still time consuming, but it takes less time and it’s more rewarding because I sometimes see that my comments help students improve their writing. They’re less likely to repeat the same mistakes in the next paper. And when they revise, they’re working on the more significant problems.

“Write your name, for me, please,” she asked, a sturdy index finger tapping on a piece of paper, on the table at my aunt’s house. She was my paternal grandmother, Johanna, or Teacher Kate, as many people called her, and she was visiting her family in Toronto from Guyana. She would have been in her sixties then, a compact Black woman with flawless skin, a kind, steady gaze, and a resonant alto speaking voice. You could hear the mixture of crisp and precise British-influenced English that would have been expected of schoolteachers of Teacher Kate’s generation, born before World War I, in a corner of Amazonia and at the edge of the British Empire. You could also hear the rhythms of Caribbean creole speech, reflecting Guyana’s cultural legacy of majority populations descended from enslaved Africans and indentured folk from the Indian subcontinent and China, among others. Teacher Kate’s work in classrooms with children began before 1930 as a pupil-teacher, a form of teaching apprenticeship of young teenagers that was regularly practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the early decades of the twentieth century. “Write your name, for me, please.” It was a directive, an invitation, and a question all rolled into one as we gathered around my aunt’s dining table. This was the late 1970s, pre-Internet, and I was in my early teens and already in high school. At that point, I had attended school for almost a decade split between Antigua and Canada, having spent my infancy in England, the country of my birth, as a child of the Windrush migration. The late 1970s was a magical transitional time in Black musical cultures as it was the era of the earliest commercial hip hop recordings, disco, funk, and R n’ B. We also listened to reggae, dancehall, calypso, and soca, Caribbean popular musical genres as well, new wave, punk and pop and rock n’ roll on AM and FM radio—our musical choices reflecting our transnational existence between recent Caribbean memories, the larger social context of a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape, contemporary Black Toronto realities in the Caribbean diaspora with close sonic and familial ties to major urban centres in the US and England to which Caribbean people had migrated. My friends and I emulated the look of the Pointer Sisters, The Emotions, or women lead vocalists in Chic. In our stylistic ambitions, we existed on a continuum of retro 1940s, church, and our imagined Studio 54. Our looks were achieved through making our own clothes with Simplicity and Butterick patterns, and reworking and mending heavily discounted seconds (discarded mass-produced clothing with what we considered minor and correctible mistakes like crooked seams and missing buttons) purchased cheaply in the garment district in downtown Toronto. That day I wore a belted, light beige, cap-sleeved dress in a shimmery fabric. My hair was still natural, a few years away from its 1980s curly perm, and picked out into a ‘fro. This was the late 1970s and in Black diasporic girl stylistic cultures in my corner of Toronto afros, cornrows, and other natural styles still reigned supreme with the occasional hot comb pressed straight styles for special occasions. I wondered why Teacher Kate would want me to write my name as an introduction to who I was as a student and her granddaughter. Why not ask me to read out loud or to recite memorized passages of poetry, bible verses, or dramatic plays? I had already had lots of practice in public speaking at school and in church, in Canada, where my first recitation was Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom.” I remembered the church assembly in the Jamaican Pentecostal congregation that met in the basement of a mainstream Protestant church in our Toronto neighbourhood, now called Little Jamaica. We were Anglicans but my mother insisted that we go to the church down the road and around the corner from our house that we could reach without crossing a major intersection, and where our friends from school, recently arrived kids from the Caribbean, also went to church. “Write your name for me, please.” So, I picked up the pen and I wrote my first name in cursive and print. “Write your whole name.” I wrote my first and last name. My grandmother inspected my writing and complimented it while also giving some pointers to improve the cursive. “Write it larger,” she said. I wrote my name several times and each time I did so with more confidence than earlier versions. Now, I wrote my name every day in school on assignments and had done so for years. My friends and I even practiced our autographs. I had written my name years ago in my British passport as an elementary school student. This occasion, however, felt different. In the analog world of the late 1970s, just a few years before the launch of the digital age, my grandmother was inviting me to come to the table of knowledge, to take up space, and to write myself into the narrative in my own hand, boldly and confidently and with style. Words mattered. I got it. I created my signature in that moment with its large cursive letters. Teacher Kate lived for over three decades after that night, in total just over a hundred years. By the late 1970s she had already taught several generations doing the hard work in the post-slavery and British colonial era of the first half of the twentieth century of teaching literacy. Many had entered Guyana and other Caribbean territories as transports of empire through the forced migrations of the slave trade and indentureship, without signature—perhaps an “x,” or even a thumbprint for the latter. I was only Teacher Kate’s student for that one evening but I learned a crucial lesson of accepting the invitation to take my place and to write my name and write myself into being. Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

Like higher education in general, religious or theological education also pursues forming and informing not only religious leaders but also responsible citizens. The concept of citizenship here is not necessarily understood in legal terms. In this time of globalization, we need to consider what global citizenship means. While globalization brought interconnectedness and benefits through economic and technological developments to our world and into our homes, it also heightened inequality—especially in the Global South—since the 1980s. The classroom concerned with social justice and civic engagement should stretch beyond the classroom to the global dimension. When I came to the U.S., I realized my theological training in South Korea had been thoroughly “Western.” I did not arrive in a “new” world. Instead, what was new was my arrival, signifying otherness. Such dissonance began to reveal how distant I am from such West-centered knowledge. As a person from a geographically non-Western world and a non- English speaker, I often feel that Western knowledge is limited and tells only one side of the story or one of many truths. I was fortunate to have a doctoral advisor who helped me seek not only alternatives, but also an “alternative thinking of alternatives.”[1] I count myself lucky for having taught at a theological school that welcomes such thinking, as well as a global perspective in my teaching. The first course I created was the Global Read of the Bible. The main purpose of this class was ambitious—it explored how the Bible has been received and read not only in the West but also in the Rest. I wanted to introduce students to other ways of reading in global Christian communities, as well as in racial/ethnic minority Christian communities in the U.S. When a professor teaches this kind of course, she may be overwhelmed by the amount, scope, and weight of potential course materials. Contrary to Westerners’ presumption that the non-Western world is void of theological and biblical knowledge, one can’t possibly approach the wealth of knowledges that the Other has produced.   An alternative way of thinking can emerge when perceiving globalization’s impact on the university system or higher education. Under neoliberal capitalism, universities have been privatized and corporatized. The commodification of universities has facilitated the global disparity in academic and education systems where scientific knowledge can be easily appraised for its market value. Some notice that the humanities decline because they have no market worth. What about disciplines such religion and theology? I am amazed, in these circumstances, at dominant biblical scholarship’s claim of scientific value-neutrality of interpretation. Biblical scholars who identify themselves as historians value the original texts in the ancient languages and their objective meanings. Early Christian studies has particular significance because Western civilization is founded on ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Medieval Western Christendom…; the list goes through the Reformation on to liberal democracy. We are fascinated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but few are interested in the Chinese ancient scrolls, a seventh-century reconstruction of the historical Jesus as the Sutras. What about the Mughal Jesus in India? One may be surprised by the richness of Asians’ portrayals and biographies of Jesus produced in Asian soils of Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and minjung, let alone the historical presences of ancient Christianities in Northern Africa such as Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia from the first century on. I do not intend to degrade the significance of the text, interpretive tradition, and the authority of Western scholarship. However, alongside Santos’ concept of the “epistemologies of the South,” I wish to challenge the assumption of the “Eurocentric epistemological North as the only source of valid knowledge,” in contrast to the South as “the realm of ignorance” or absence.[2] While racial justice demands acknowledging the white privilege of white people, our teaching promoting global justice and civic engagement should likewise recognize the epistemic privilege of the West or the Global North, and plurality of knowledges. Global learning has been available for universities and theological schools with resources in developing international outreach programs, but since the pandemic, our teaching and learning is even more accessible to global, indigenous, and vernacular traditions and knowledges. How do we alternatively think of alternatives to West-centered, capitalist, and elitist educational environments? We must embrace cultural humility, practice deep listening, and being open to solidarity with those struggling for a more just global world.   [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), viii. [2] Ibid, 7.

When I began my first full-time professor gig in 2008, I quickly learned to be fiercely protective of my own time. I understood that the long game of an academic career necessitated the publication of my first book. I loved teaching, but I intentionally restricted my own preparation and grading time in order to turn my thesis into a book. This protection of time was particularly difficult as a new faculty member embodied as a Korean American, and facing the faculty service minority tax. Over time, I published that first book, received tenure, and eventually promotion to full professor. With the security of tenure, I was more open to paying the minority tax, but not out of burden. I would happily serve in ways that are generative for Asian American communities, while protecting the time of junior scholars. I understood this service as an expression of my vocational call as a theological educator and biblical scholar. In 2020, I accepted a position at a new institution in Atlanta. In the midst of pandemic, nearly all of my classroom and service interactions were online and via Zoom. These circumstances severely limited my visibility to the dynamics of my new school. Accordingly, I deliberately planned to spend my first-year learning and acclimating to the institutional culture. But the horrific events of the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings forced a pivot. All of a sudden, my institution had to confront this terrible tragedy within our city limits that symbolized anti-Asian racism, patriarchy, Orientalization, and class oppression. I no longer had the option to sit back, learn, and acclimate. With my vocational call and protection as a mid-career faculty member, I pivoted to accelerate my own service to the community. In the ensuing days, I made sure to mention the shootings in each of my classes, if only to allow students to see my own grief and anger. I recognized that many of these students had limited exposure to AAPI perspectives. This tragedy begat a commensurate responsibility at the institutional level. I was grateful to be part of diverse faculty with several fellow professors of Asian descent. I ended up doing quite a bit of public and private care in the week following the shooting. I had speaking events on three consecutive days: recording a sermon for a future chapel, giving the devotional message at a prayer vigil of remembrance, and participating in a panel discussion on anti-Asian racism with over four hundred participants. Of course, I was also teaching a full-time load. By the end of the third event, I was exhausted. The weekend after the panel, a national organization held a major AAPI rally in Atlanta to address the shootings in the context of the surge of anti-Asian violence. A friend flew in from Chicago to speak at the event. Another friend was driving in from Nashville to attend. The rally was held fifteen minutes from my house. I did not attend the rally. If you are anticipating that I used this time to catch up on grading or work on my research, then you are going to be disappointed. I did none of those things. I used the time to rewatch episodes 7 to 9 of Star Wars and cook Korean pork belly for the family. I needed that time to restore my emotional and physical strength. A pivot is not a 180 degree turn. Rather, a pivot is merely a shift. Although the shootings compelled an urgent commitment to service, I did not abandon my commitment to a vocational life that is centered and sustaining. I have tried to honor these values from the beginning of my career. I plan to continue to honor them in the future when I pivot to senior scholar. This is how I commit to the long game.

For the past twelve months, I have made several pivots in my teaching to meet what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified in his 1967 speech on the war in Vietnam at The Riverside Church in New York City as “the fierce urgency of now.” Dr. King began by affirming the activists from Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam for their moral vision in organizing people together with the following call: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King then connected the organization’s call with his own challenge to act for peace in Vietnam and join in the global struggle against poverty and racism: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” In addition to teaching through a global pandemic, we are tasked with the responsibility to educate toward racial, social, and intersectional justice. We teach in different disciplines and at diverse institutions, but we inhabit the same world. We live in a world where millions marched to protest the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, anti-Black racism, and police brutality in May, June, and July. We all witnessed the violent insurrection and mob violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. More recently, we grieve and rage at the horrific murders of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels across several spas in metro Atlanta on March 16. In meeting “the fierce urgency of now,” my teaching pivots, as an historian of Christianity in the United States, to reveal that the scourge of hate and violence against Black, Indigenous, and other Persons of Color and the sins of white supremacy and misogyny have roots in Christian traditions with long records and unjust legacies of nativism, settler colonialism, sexism, and slavery. I have pivoted to share honestly with students about how my education at a predominantly white and theologically conservative seminary left me unprepared to confront the challenges before us because of several pedagogical imbalances and gaps. The pedagogies of my professors overemphasized the courageous ministries of Christian heroines and heroes who strove to combat injustice and underemphasized the complicity of Christians in perpetuating discrimination and hate against women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons. These pedagogies also elevated white men by treating their perspectives as normative and either erased women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons or reduced the presence of “diverse” voices to recommended (versus required) readings or one isolated lesson under a mishmash of topics. With this pivot, I am implicitly prompting students to assess what they are learning in my classroom as well as in the classrooms of my colleagues at our seminary. Is my pedagogy as a teacher better than what I experienced as a student? Does the teaching and learning at my seminary connect in meaningful ways with the congregations and ministry contexts our students inhabit? In reflecting with my students over the past year, I can offer two insights. The first insight is that pivots to address anti-Black, anti-Asian, and other forms of racial injustice are most helpful when they reinforce and strengthen existing course content. When a course syllabus already contains multiple lessons about communities of color with assigned readings from many scholars of color, pivots to cover urgent events are organically integrated to the foundational structure of the teaching and learning. When a pivot requires the introduction of different lessons or a sudden detour to new assigned readings, it may reveal a larger imbalance or gap in the course syllabus specifically and teaching philosophy more broadly. The second insight is that pivots are generative and effective when they cultivate collaboration in the classroom. In other words, a pivot works best as an invitation to learn together with students rather than an opportunity to be the “sage on the stage” with all the prescriptions to the world’s most pressing problems. One of the most useful prompts in my pivots is to ask students to share what is happening in their families and communities of faith and to discuss together how certain religious beliefs in our diverse Christian traditions have shaped different responses to racial, social, and intersectional justice in the forms of righteous activity, passive inactivity, and hateful violence. Heeding Dr. King’s message, we seek to confront “the fierce urgency of now” through genuine, vulnerable, and collaborative dialogue engaging the challenges, prejudices, and opportunities in our communities of faith.

The narration below is my recollection of a typical interchange between my mother and my father when I was a child. Be mindful that we lived in a large home and invariably during these conversations my father would be on the first floor and my mother would be on the second floor.  So, as you read their exchange imagine loud voices between two people who cannot see one another.   “Nancy, where is the wah-wah-wah!” said my father standing at the bottom of the staircase. My mother, likely sewing, or making beds, or doing some household work on the second floor, answered, “Look in the kitchen; in the drawer under the cabinet with the water glasses; it’s on the left-hand side.” Dad goes to the kitchen, opens a drawer, and rummages around the drawer, but cannot locate the wah-wah-wah. Dad returns to the bottom of the stairs to ask to my mother again. “Nancy, I don’t see it. It is not there.” “Yes, it is! Look in the drawer – the one with the red handle; the wah-wah-wah is on the left-hand side.” said my mother. Dad returns to the kitchen. He checks to see if he had previously opened the correct drawer. He had not. This time he locates the drawer with the red handle, opens it and rummages around in the drawer, but does not see the wah-wah-wah. A third time, he returns to the bottom of the stairs and in a louder, frustrated voice says, ‘Nancy! It’s not there. I can’t find the wah-wah-wah!!!” My mother, in a calm, and loud voice replies, “Keep looking!” My father, convinced my mother is mistaken about the location of the wah-wah-wah, gives up. Acquainted with my father’s sensibilities, my mother stops the work she is doing, and goes downstairs to the kitchen. Hearing my mother’s movements on the stairs (and our dog running ahead of her as she walks), my father waits in the kitchen for my mother – glad she has come to find the wah-wah-wah for him. My mother walks past my father, pulls open the drawer under the cabinet with the water glasses, the drawer with the red handle. Seeing the jumbled contents of the drawer she makes a mental note to reorganize the drawer at dinner time. She reaches into the drawer, near the left-hand side, and pulls out the wah-wah-wah. Shocked, my father takes the wah-wah-wah and contritely kisses my mother on the cheek as a thanks for finding it for him. My question for reflection is not so much about my mother’s skills of household item curation, but about my father’s inability to see. Why could my father, even with the most specific directions, not see that for which he was searching?  Or, why cannot our students, even with detailed syllabi, thick instructions for assignments, accomplish assignments? In other words, what does it take to see when searching?   One answer is perseverance. Keep looking! My experience is that adult students want to Google once and call it research. Or they want to read once and expect to understand dense materials. When my mother instructed my father to keep looking! she was calling for skills of perseverance. “Keep looking!” means that even if it is not in your experience or imagination, (or the drawer you are rummaging through) it is in the imagination and knowledge of your teachers, so endure until you get to the end. As teachers, providing opportunities for our students to develop perseverance – the ability to keep looking until you can see it, find it, know it, understand it, get insight from it - is invaluable. The inability for students to see is often vividly expressed in introductory classes. Teaching introductory courses often means that newly matriculated students’ conveyance of what they know and the ways they approach the course is primarily through life experience or learnings from other degrees in other schools. New students grappling with new materials, new approaches, new vocabulary, and new praxes often make for frustrated learners and fearful adults. Adult learners, for the most part, do not like attempting the new. They prefer being affirmed for what they already know. For some, learning anew feels insulting, uncomfortable – as if it is personal judgment for not knowing what they should know. Studying religion and theology exacerbate these feelings of judgement – woulda’ known, shoulda’ known’, and coulda’ known - are haunting experiences which free float in classrooms. For students who come from traditions steeped in particularly exacting ways of knowing sacred texts and sacred ways, the experience of not knowing can be devastating. There were semesters I would assign one critical essay to be written over the duration of the entire semester. Incrementally, students would need to turn-in drafts of the essay. Without assigning a grade, I would edit the draft then return for further research, thinking and rewriting. At the end of the semester, the essay, now polished by the drafting process, would be submitted for grading. Many students let me know that this iterative process was emotionally very difficult. They did not want to keep “re-doing” the essay.  They saw little value in moving from a weak version to a stronger version, especially if each version did not receive a grade. They found it challenging to keep looking for the same thing until it was found, created, written - well. This assignment exposed the narrow edges of their skills of perseverance. At the risk of overworking an illustration, the previous scene of my parent’s typical conversation has its limits concerning teaching and learning. Consider that my parents, as spouse of one another, did not have the contract of teacher and learner. A contract between student and teacher is a different contract than between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee. The contract between teacher and learner has its own distinctiveness. The contract between teacher and learner is meant to create space so the learner can disclose, be vulnerable, expose their curiosity, and their want to expand and find insight. In return, the teacher provides opportunities for new knowledges, and maturity. So, here is the judgement call unique to the teacher/learner contract and the notion of perseverance. In the moments before sight (understanding) by a learner, in the moments of frustration when what is searched for cannot be located or seen, the teacher has got to allow the learner the honor of the moment of not-knowing – the moment of struggle. For the teacher to rush in with the answer (rush in to rescue) is to deny the learner the moment of ah-hah! The ah-hah! moment of magic, achievement, and growth when what was searched for is found is why, in part, students want to learn. Teachers must be willing and able to stand in the moment when the student is frustrated and not act. In this moment it is easier to simply rescue them from the pain of learning, but resist. This is a truly difficult moment for teachers to hold. In these moments, we must learn to persevere.

It seems to me that, in order to create truly democratic and equitable classrooms, we need to first think about how to create classroom “communities”—something that, as Anna Lännström has noted previously, is especially hard to build right now. Communities that create space for all people and perspectives don’t just happen randomly or necessarily; they require a great deal of intention and attention. Rules, norms, guidelines, or whatever you want to call them can foster a democratic learning environment in which students feel like they can bring their full selves, ask questions, share misconceptions, try out new ideas, debate, create space for others, plan for action, and grow. I try to build community in lots of different ways in my classes, but an essential activity early on always involves the co-creation of a set of community norms that we all commit to upholding for the semester. As an initial homework assignment, to prime the community building, I have students fill out a “getting to know you” questionnaire I have fine-tuned over the years. One question, near the end, prompts students to fill in the blank: “As a learner, I do best when my peers….” Then, in class, I ask students to share what they wrote. (In-person, in the past, I would use an anonymous polling software like PollEverywhere. On Zoom, I just have students type into the chat box) As we review and discuss their responses, we all start to get a sense of what kind of support students would appreciate from each other. I then put students in groups (breakout rooms in Zoom) of about 3-5 and ask them to brainstorm answers to the following: What would it look like if we were to bring our “best selves” to class every day? What standards do we want to uphold? I tell students to keep in mind the responses they all shared to the “As a learner, I do best when my peers….” prompt. Each group types their ideas for norms directly into a shared Google Doc (no log-in required) and, once they are finished, we go through each proposed norm, one by one, making sure we all understand what it means, we all know how it would manifest, and we all can “live with it.” I usually lead this exercise on the second day of class; sometimes it flows into the third. We discuss for as long as it takes to reach agreement. Along the way, I actively encourage discussion and even dissent; right from the beginning, students know it is okay to critique and disagree. Generating community norms together not only starts the very process of building a democratic classroom community, but it also provides many “teachable moments.” For instance, students will often propose a norm like “respect each other.” But what the heck does this mean? I ask them to clarify: how do you understand this word, “respect,” and how do you know when someone is “respecting” you—or vice versa? A culture of politeness and “civility” reign at our institution, so I am particularly invested in ensuring that any expectations of “respect” don’t serve to stifle or silence. Many typical standards, like “respect,” are so vague or generic as to be useless and all too often end up centering the dominant groups or perspectives; this in-class activity allows us the space for this discussion. It also gives me a chance to suggest some norms of my own, since I’m a member of the classroom community too. I will usually propose some from AORTA’s Anti-Oppressive Facilitation Guide or “Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education,” such as “Strive for intellectual humility. Be willing to grapple with challenging ideas” and “Identify where your learning edge is and push it.” The community norms that the students and I co-create then stay with us over the course of the semester; this is not a “one and done” activity. We revisit them regularly. I project the norms at the beginning of different class periods. I give students a chance to review them and ask if we need to make any amendments. I check in every so often to find out how we think we are doing with the norms. The community norms guide all of our time together. (They also make it much, much easier to address any problems that might emerge in class, because I can simply refer back to the norms that we all agreed to.) At the end of every semester, in their final exams or their final course evaluations, students routinely remark on the “community” feel in my courses, with appreciative comments such as, “The class really seemed like a community, which made it easy to share and participate, and it was clear everyone liked the class and wanted to be there.” Without such a community in place, the difficult work of teaching for, about, and toward democracy would, I fear, be a non-starter.

Twenty-five springs ago I sat in a class on African American literature. On a small, rural midwestern campus, this course was taught by a white professor. Two of the seven Black students on campus at that time were in the class, the remaining twenty-five or so students reflected the demographics of our predominantly white institution. One Monday we filed into class and learned that a fight had taken place over the weekend. The details were still emerging, but one of the seats in our classroom was empty. The one detail that had been confirmed: racist slurs were a precipitating factor for the physical violence. In this moment, the professor faced a choice: to continue apace with our scheduled reading of Beloved, A Gathering of Old Men, and other, now canonical works, hewing close to the text; or, to break the fourth wall and talk about what happened, call us to the uncomfortable acknowledgment that we could not confine our discussions of race to the characters in books that could be sold back to the bookstore when the course ended. Like most students, I suspect, I was largely unaware of all that went into that deceptively simple choice. This past week, as I prepared for a class discussion on Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist and Fania Davis’s synthesis of racial justice and restorative justice, my class and all other classes were canceled by our administrators in a show of support for a student organized walk-out. The walk-out was a response to a blatant act of racist hate speech that targeted one student. Hundreds gathered on our main courtyard to listen to their peers speak their truths about being a person of color on our campus. For many students at our predominantly white institution this was, as they later acknowledged in class, the first time they had heard unfiltered, unmediated stories about the lived experience of blackness from people they actually knew (or thought they knew?). The night before the walk-out, I thought about my own professor’s choice twenty-five years ago. I had no doubt we would center the incident and the campus response in the coming weeks in our class discussions. And I have no doubt that my immediate clarity on this choice owes a debt to the professor who chose discomfort over distance, modeling the way in which good teaching demands recognition of the explicit and implicit ways the world consistently breaks into our classrooms. With so much political hand-wringing about conflating activism and academics and looking over the shoulder as some iterations of  “cancel culture” paralyze our classroom discussions, tempting us towards pedagogical paths of least resistance and convenient half-truths, I am left to wonder if our classrooms can still serve as activating spaces, as spaces where the world doesn’t just break in, but where we prepare students to break out into the world. I want to believe that this is possible, realizable, and not just part of the trite, pedagogically elusive language of university mission statements and branding slogans. But I confess that one-on-one conversations with students after class this week—in a course intentionally focused on racial equity—have tempered my optimism about the classroom as an activating space. Or, perhaps it has once again reminded me of the perennial, now hyper-polarized and politicized, challenge of teaching: what activates one student often deactivates another. With its now ubiquitous undercurrent of subtweets and their offline consequences, is the classroom the right place for these conversations? For the moment—no, for the movement—my answer has to be yes. The impossible possibility of conversations about race in the classroom remains for me a pedagogical, even if paradoxical, imperative. Like Reinhold Niebuhr’s impossible possibility of the love ideal, conversations about race in the classroom confront us with what we know to be true and right in our assertions of basic human dignity, even as these conversations remind us of how often we fail to fully actualize the ideal by which we are guided. In recognition of that gap and our moral obligations as teachers to stand in it, I share, with no small amount of trepidation, the email I sent to my class the night before the walk-out, my own attempt at reclaiming the classroom as an activating space not in spite of, but in the midst of its impossibility. Message to Living in a Diverse World Class, March 2021 Hello Students, I had planned to address the hate incidents in our class discussion tomorrow. The tragic irony is not lost on me that our focus in this week’s reading is the intersection of racial justice and restorative justice as outlined in the chapter by Fania Davis. In the days and weeks ahead, I ask that you consider what is your role to play in supporting students directly and indirectly impacted by this incident as well as in addressing the elements of our campus culture that give rise to these types of incidents. The framework of restorative justice centers the needs of the victims even as it makes clear that harms caused by acts of hate and violence extend out into the community and, therefore, require both individual and community responses. We are all trying to sort out how it is that we have come to this moment in history when hate speech is too often conflated with freedom of expression. And, tragically, we are bearing witness on our campus and in our wider culture to the normalization of violence this conflation inevitably leads to. In this moment, I want to challenge us to move back into the uncomfortable space of talking directly about racism and anti-racism as they manifest offline in our very midst; it is, for me, one necessary way we must hold ourselves accountable. This is not about reducing these incidents to a “teachable moment.” This is about the distance we too often try to maintain between the classroom and the world. And how these incidents reveal this distance for the illusion that it is. The “world” breaks into our classroom, regularly. Our denial of this fact is, itself, a form of white, heteronormative privilege. In these moments, I think it is also imperative that we ask: can the classroom also break into the world? Can what we do together in class the remainder of this semester be responsive to, and a form of taking responsibility for, the injustices that shape individual students’ lives on our campus in radically disparate ways? At a minimum, I think we owe this to one another in our class, but more importantly, we owe this to those targeted by the hate and violence. In closing, I offer I drafted in response to national racial and religious hate incidents over the past couple of years, words I had hoped (perhaps naively) would never be needed as a response to incidents on our campus: Let us stand together committed to forming our lives in this community, daily, through practices of hospitality and not hate, in acts of compassion and not callousness, and as witnesses to the promise of peace and not the pathology of violence. While our various religious and spiritual traditions call us to imagine a world when this daily work is no longer necessary, they are not naïve to the world as it is. As wisdom from the Jewish tradition reminds us: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to refrain from it.”