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Listen to Dr. Westfield read this blog in an audio format. My mother was deeply loved. She and my father came to live with me in 2008. Mom and Dad became known in the school community as they regularly attended chapel services, lectures and community dinners. Students who were my research assistants and teaching assistants were invited to dinner by my mom who still cooked dinner for our family. When invited by the Dean, Mom and Dad attended one faculty meeting (!!! Sweet Jesus!!! – a story for another time!). My mother, Nancy Bullock Westfield died on December 7, 2010. We funeralized her in the chapel of Seminary Hall. Many students and colleagues attended the service. I felt an outpouring of love for my family.  Mom’s homegoing service was a celebration of her life well lived. The celebration highlighted mom’s 81 years of service, artistry, nurture and audacious acts of justice on behalf of poor children and Black children in Philadelphia. And, the homegoing, like so many funerals, was the beginning of my family’s long-walk-through grieving our beloved. In the spring semester of 2011, I was teaching my introductory course. Amy, a brilliant doctoral student, was my teaching assistant. One day while class was convened, Amy, with reticence, asked if she could talk with me in the hallway. I had divided the students into small groups with reflection questions, so the class was, in this moment, on task. I said yes, let’s talk now. Amy looked untypically pensive as we walked into the hallway and away from the possibility of our conversation being overheard by our students.  Amy said, “Dr. Westfield…” (full pause; and holding her breath). “Umm…” (empty pause; and still holding her breath) Concerned, I asked, “Amy, what is it?” Amy said, “Dr. Westfield…” (taking a breath to gain courage) “Dr. Westfield, you’ve given that assignment before.” (looking me in the eye for the first time) I did not understand what Amy meant; I frowned to express my puzzlement. My thoughts raced in preparation to disagree. In nano-seconds, I recalled the week before, but I could not recall the learning  activities. I turned a half-pivot from her and looked away as I tried to remember, tried to think. Amy, in a gentle, low tone, said, “Last week you divided the students into conversation groups and gave the same reflection questions.” My immediate reaction was to be defensive and tell her that she was mistaken, but before speaking I looked at her eyes filled with such empathy that I knew she was trying to be helpful. My pause created space for her to speak again, “Remember. …. last week you gave the same assignment … and then the students reported in.” “Actually….”  Amy went on, “…. this is the third time you have asked them to reflect upon these questions.” As she said these words, I began to remember. I began to orient myself. I began to realize that, indeed, this was the third time I had given the same assignment for class discussion. Without allowing my body to flinch, I jolted from the realization. In exasperation and embarrassment, I whispered in a quiet and defeated tone, “Amy.” With a warm smile, Amy said, “It’s ok – the class understands you’re grieving.” Amy and I returned to the classroom and I called the class out of their small groups. When we gathered, I apologized without giving a reason for the thrice redundant learning activity. I quickly reminded them of the assignment that was due the next week, asked for any questions, then dismissed the class about thirty minutes earlier than our scheduled dismissal. Walking with my mother through her illness and then to her death had been one of the most difficult journeys I have ever taken. Even so, I underestimated the power of sorrow and the ways it can (and does) effect all aspects of life – even the teaching life. My mother’s death had taken a toll on me. Thankfully, Amy had my back. The vaccine for the COVID 19 virus promises an ease to the suffering in our country and around the world. Many of us, faculty, administrators, and students, have personally lost loved ones during this scourge. We grieve. Others will not have had family and friends who died, but will be part of the overall experience of malaise, communal loss, and shock that continues to grip the nation. We grieve. The Black Lives Matter movement’s demands go unanswered. We ring our hands, pray and grieve. The insurrection at the Capital Building on January 6 sent a renewed wave of fear, frustration, and the anxiety yet ripples through our nation. The feelings of loss, terror, and anxiety continue to pierce our awake and our dreams. In our uncertainty, we grieve. We have to acknowledge that we are, all, teaching while grieving. Who is the self who teaches? In this moment of loss, our corporate answer is that we are the people who are seized by sorrow, hurt, and anguish. We are people who are grieving. Teaching as usual is not possible! In recollecting this classroom experience I am not trying to be confessional - as if I had done something wrong. Rather, I tell the story to convey that  grieving necessitates additional support and care. Even the most seasoned and conscientious teacher, while grieving, needs help. I am appreciative to Amy for pointing out  that I was stuck. Had she not told me, my realization would have been much more painful and embarrassing. Or worse yet, I would not have ever realized. In teaching while grieving, who has your back? Who is your brave Amy? For individuals who are in touch with their grief, what grief counselor, spiritual director or therapist will you meet with regularly as you process the effects of 2020-21 upon your teaching? For learning communities who possess a depth of communal awareness and a sense of togetherness, what rituals, rites, and conversations will you design for this sad moment? What blues songs will you compose? What lamentation will you paint, sculpt, write, create? What new habits will you acquire to honor the dead and the dieing? In what ways will you take your grieving and be inspired, be made brave, be summoned to a deeper, more meaningful call of teaching? What new insights on teaching will you incorporate? Perhaps there will be new ceremonies for graduations, commencements and baccalaureates? Maybe new liturgies or rites of passage will be included in the senior send-offs, the spring dances, and the year books? Perhaps you will begin or end each class with a moment of silence, or of music, or ask students to plan a community-wide protest as a course assignment? Sometimes grief prevents reflection, prevents action – only affords paralyasis. Sometimes while we are grieving all we can do is the little bit we can do; one day at a time. Perhaps, simply keep a journal on your teaching until the grief subsides enough to reflect and plan for change. The courses I taught in the Spring of 2011 were not my best, but they were the best I had to offer at the time. I hope that the little bits I had to offer my students were enough. Thank you, Amy, for your care and support.

Democracy, in its essence, and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement. ~ Marilynne Robinson[1] These words hung like a silent invocation on the threshold of my Truth, Beauty, and Goodness class this fall. They appeared overnight as the election neared, scripted elegantly on a scrap of paper and tucked with intentional inconspicuousness into the door plate of our fifth-floor classroom. Robinson’s words were a sentiment I had shared with students often throughout the past years as we tried to make sense of, well, everything, I guess. I was grateful for the daily reminder—and the “guerilla gardening” of the student who planted these seeds of wisdom in hallways and stairwells around campus. For weeks, this class of mostly first-year undergraduates checking off their philosophy credits had been carefully cultivating our capacity for dialogue across difference, employing a weekly community of inquiry model to probe issues like kneeling for the national anthem, the removal of statues and monuments, and the place of religion in the public sphere. The weekly community of inquiry was set up with a short, accessible article that provided an example of the theoretical perspectives we were exploring that week. For example, during a week focused on public memory and art, we read a local news article on the removal of a large artistic rendering of a Native American chief that had, for over half a century, looked out over the Mississippi River, just a mile from our campus. I have attempted versions of communities of inquiry before but not as the primary pedagogical ground for a course. This, however, was a new class in a newly designed major, Ethics, Culture, and Society. And, well, it was 2020. It would be too much to claim that this consistent, student-driven, structured conversation resulted in the airing of all perspectives on an issue, though based on student evaluations, I do think we often approached that Aristotelean “mark of an educated mind”: the ability “to entertain a thought without accepting it.” In so doing, perhaps we bent a little bit further towards Robinson’s generous vision of democracy—if not love for, at least identification with those whom we disagree. If any class was primed, then, for a post-election conversation on November 4, it was this one. But an hour before class, I balked. Walking into class, I pulled the Robinson scrap (secular mezuzah?) from its perch, read it aloud to the class, paused, read aloud passages from books I had hastily pulled from my shelves—books that had always grounded me and helped me to understand, in the words of Ellen Ott Marshall, “moral agency under constraint.” I told the students we were not going to talk about the election. Instead, I tasked them with finding poems and passages, songs and speeches. We were going to animate our classroom space with the voices of those who help us imagine and bring into being the world we want to live in—in my mind’s eye an attempt, however naïve, at some kind of performative utterance. After ten minutes, students read aloud from their excavations of hope; no commentary, just the words given audible breath. There would be time and space later for inquiry and dialogue—for example, a letter to the next president expressing their individual hopes for binding up the morally wounded nation, a group project focused on the possibilities of truth and reconciliation processes as response to specific events in the U.S. But for the moment, we needed to be a community of invocation, not inquiry, (re)making our classroom as sacred space insofar as it was set apart from the distorted vocabulary and disordered pathos of our contemporary political discourse—distortion and disorder that make identification with, much less love for, those with whom we disagree an improbability. Walking out of class that day, like many other days, I wasn’t sure if I had made the right choice. There were no obvious, immediate signs from students. They had participated dutifully, the mood of the class largely subdued—in part, I suspect, because many of these first-time voters had stayed up most of the night watching, waiting for a certainty that has, until recently, remained frustratingly elusive. Later that day, though, I received an email from a student: “I was nervous to come to this class after all the election stuff going on because others are very out there with their opinions and it sometimes freaks me out to talk in the class. So, wanted to say thank you!” As seems true of most classes, this student had other kindred spirits in the classroom, peers hesitant to make publicly known their perspectives during the semester on a politically fraught topic. But this day in class, many of these same students found their voice for the first time by invoking the words of others, a tentative first step, perhaps, in the movement towards exercising a kind of moral agency under constraint. And this has given me pause to consider the conditions necessary for creating and sustaining a community of inquiry in our classrooms during this tumultuous time. Going forward, one of those conditions in my classroom will be consistently holding open space for students to perform public speech acts that give voice to their perspectives, not merely as imitation, but as invocation. Notes [1] Marilynn Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Picador, 2013), 27-28. Also excerpted and reprinted at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/imagination-community

I am often asked some version of the following question: “How has it been teaching online now?” For those of us who teach at schools with in-person learning, I imagine this is a common query from friends, family members, and colleagues. Initially, I gave answers that highlighted the sensations of newness, uncertainty, and adventure. Over time, I either expanded my answer to share what I was specifically learning or shortened my answer to a succinct summation like “it is going okay,” or “it is what it is,” based on the context of the conversation. For example, I opted for the latter replies, despite their triteness, at the beginning or the end of virtual meetings. What else is there to say when awkwardly waiting for other participants to join a Zoom call? Now, after approximately ten months, my answer is that my transition has not been from in-person to online education. Rather, I am continuing to adapt to pandemic education, which is occurring in an online environment to ensure safe conditions for productive learning. Pandemic education and online education are not synonymous. As someone who is new to fully online instruction, I have certainly benefited from consultations with educational design experts at my seminary and engaging resources in the forms of best practice summaries, advice guides, podcasts, and more. Fortunately, wise counsel and practical guidance are a few clicks away on my web browser. At the same time, I cannot escape the multiple pandemics we are experiencing across public health, systemic racism, white Christian nationalism, and political polarization. When so many people are suffering and dying, and so much hate and falsehood infects our civic life, it feels small and strange to invest my energy in making a weekly online forum more accessible and interactive. Therefore, I find it more generative to center the notion of pandemic education in my planning. As a theological educator, my students and I are constantly engaged in a collaborative learning process that seeks both comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter and concrete inquiry of why the subject matters in everyday congregations and ministry contexts. Teaching amid multiple pandemics has sharpened my focus on cultivating a pedagogical environment that thoroughly and precisely interrogates how the content in the syllabus intersects with what is actually happening in our churches and neighborhoods. One example in my teaching as an historian of American Christianity is to trace with students the legacies of racism, sexism, nativism, and heterosexism within some of our denominations and traditions. If my students and I only study the best of the past, exclusively reading the theologies and testimonies of those striving for justice and equality, we would be ill prepared to face the hard realities and complex challenges of Christian witness and leadership today. It is not enough to express perpetual shock at what actions, whether political insurrections or public health dismissals, bear the name of Jesus Christ. We must be able to identify origins and construct counternarratives. Some counternarratives will be rooted in the past, others will be adapted from the past to meet present conditions, and yet others will emerge as new creations. I have found transitioning to pandemic education also requires a heightened awareness of the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health of my students. One of my teaching principles, which I share freely and often with my students, is to exhibit compassion without compromising academic integrity. I do not hesitate to grant extensions, seek creative solutions to problems with assignments, and offer as much pastoral care as I can. Yet, I also strive to fully honor the contributions of students who meet deadlines with meticulous attention to requirements and expectations. The context of theological education, with its wide diversity of adult learners, some carrying significant congregational, familial, or other personal responsibilities alongside their academic coursework, makes this principle necessary but sometimes complicated to practice. Pandemic education has certainly stretched this principle of practicing compassion without compromise. I have witnessed students produce remarkably brilliant work and experienced invigorating synchronous discussions abounding with insights over the past ten months. Yet, I have also encountered deep pain, loss, doubt, exhaustion, and hopelessness in my classroom. Not only in my interaction with students, but also in myself. In these dark moments, I am especially reminded that pandemic education is not the same as online education.

COVID-19 forced a long-overdue reckoning with various problematic aspects of the academy. Ranging from creating equitable classrooms and workspaces to securing meaningful job placements for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx faculty, the issues that we are now dealing with “out loud” are ones that many of us have been contending with for a long time. Considering the challenges students face in this COVID-19 world, I suggest that we take close stock of how we communicate with one another. What kind of language is in the welcome sign we are holding out for our students during these unprecedented times? I propose that we begin our journey toward pedagogical justice with our syllabi. Specifically, I want to remove punitive language in higher education syllabi. For context, I arrived at this topic as a result of the move to online learning in the spring of 2020. Due to the pandemic, higher learning institutions across the country quickly transitioned to online learning when it became clear that social distancing must be enacted immediately to “flatten the curve” of coronavirus transmissions. The summer offered a reprieve from the chaos of the spring. Many institutions launched programs to equip faculty to teach online, some for the first time in their careers. I was hired as a facilitator by a university to learn and deliver a standardized online teaching curriculum to a cohort of nearly thirty professors in the humanities. The end goal was for professors to revise their fall syllabi to reflect some of the best practices they learned during their three-week crash course. While reviewing the syllabi my cohort submitted, I noticed a trend that starkly stuck out to me because of the temporal proximity to the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks. Professors, both junior and senior in tenure, were using punitive language in their syllabi. I was shocked by the use of words like “penalty” and “penalizing.” This made me wonder, “Are professors actually comfortable using punitive language and punishment as a fear tactic for control of their classrooms when instead they could say “points will be deducted?” The etymology of the word “penalty” originates circa 1500. By the 1510s, “penalty” came to specifically mean “the punishment laid out by law or judicial decision for a violation of the law.”[1] The etymological example for “penalty” suffices to get my point across without going down a rabbit hole about the origin of other terms or on a Foucauldian tangent about punishment. The words we use matter. As a scholar of religion, this concern is about more than semantics. The discipline of religious studies spends an inordinate amount of time defining terms and unpacking language. Personally, I have lost count of the number of classroom hours I spend debating the meaning of terms and arguing for the continued use or disuse of certain words. Like other disciplines in the humanities, religious studies is one where language and context matter. In light of the pandemic, issues of social justice, and police violence against Black bodies that arose in 2020, I want to understand why professors continue to use punitive language—which clearly ties into the penal system—in their syllabi. I also want to advocate for removing punitive language as a necessary first step of pedagogical justice. The words “penalty” and “penalize” convey that the power differential between teachers and students is so great that teachers not only have the ability but somehow the right to inflict punishment on students if they fail to perform to a certain standard. I am equating the use of the words “penalty” and “penalize” to punishment not just based on etymology or contemporary definitions, but instead based on how I saw them used in syllabi. The samples below illustrate my point: “Late assignments are penalized.” “You may miss one meeting without penalty.” “I will penalize students who merely pretend to be present in the synchronous meeting…” No matter what privileges a teacher has bestowed upon them, punishment should never be one of them. Effective and just pedagogy is a two-way street where learning and teaching are always in constant motion, coming and going side-by-side. This means that while the academy might differentiate between teacher and student, the apt educator knows that this difference is arbitrary and detrimental to the dialogical nature of effective teaching. While this issue of language should have been addressed before the pandemic and the most current police violence events, we must tackle this head-on as scholars of religion at this particular moment in history. As a result of the pandemic and the needs of her students, Yohana Junker suggests, “A set of pedagogical choices that are trauma-informed may prove helpful in designing our fall courses as the global pandemic has barely subsided, [and] our communities continue to be in danger…. A trauma-informed approach would not only affirm that suffering, pain, and distress is present among us but would also seek to actively mitigate or foresee potential challenges.”[2] Through an approach like Junker’s “pedagogy of affection,” the real-world concerns of students take center stage in the classroom. Socially-just pedagogies are crucial, particularly in times of peril. In order to heed the reminder by Cornel West that “justice is what love looks like in public,” we must show love for our students and communities by changing syllabi language.[3] bell hooks reminds us that “all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.”[4] Love is the root of pedagogical justice. According to Paulo Freire, the dialogical nature of effective teaching and thus pedagogical justice would not be possible if love were absent from its core, “Because love is an act of courage, not fear, love is the commitment to others.”[5] My commitment to pedagogical justice is rooted in love, both for students and the field of study. Through this commitment, my pedagogy seeks to contribute to liberatory practices that counter oppressive systems that invalidate and devalue ways of being and knowing that differ from dominant educational paradigms. Punitive language in syllabi impedes us from crafting pedagogies that allow our students and ourselves to heal. Ultimately, if we want to practice socially-just pedagogies, then we have to understand the impact that our communication choices have on students. Syllabi are the first encounter students have with their instructors. As such, we must be mindful of how we construct these documents for this particular COVID-19 moment and for the long term if we are interested in pedagogical justice. Removing punitive language from syllabi is one of the first steps we must take towards pedagogical justice. By taking this step, we begin to break the cycle in the use of violent language as a means of disciplining or coercing students to comply with constricted ideas of what it means to provide and receive education. Using exact language to say what we mean, which in most cases is a grade deduction, shows our students that language matters. If syllabi are contracts between instructors and students, they must reflect the type of world that we want to see for ourselves. Words that are life-giving instead of punitive allow us to create learning experiences that help our students flourish. If there are consequences for students who turn in late assignments or miss class sessions, let us name them using clear and precise language. We must never forget that we are educators, not judges or wardens. Punitive language has no place in the classroom, pre- or post-COVID-19. The pandemic and the circumstances it engenders make our awareness and attentiveness to these issues much more critical. The worlds we create are formed by the words we use. We carry our socialization into the classroom. Therefore, we need to change how we use language and the language we use if we want our pedagogy to embrace and contribute to social justice. Notes [1] “Penalty," Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=penalty&utm_source=extension_submit. [2] Yohana Junker, “Pedagogies of Affection: Designing Experiences of Presence and Regard,” accessed October 20, 2020, https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/08/pedagogies-of-affection-designing-experiences-of-presence-and-regard/. [3] Cornel West, "Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public," Facebook, October 28, 2010, https://www.facebook.com/drcornelwest/posts/never-forget-that-justice-is-what-love-looks-like-in-public/119696361424073/. [4] bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000), xix. [5] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000), 89.

How can theological education help students deepen their empathy for people who lack permanent homes even while a pandemic makes face-to-face conversations on streets and in shelters unsafe? Dr. Mitzi J. Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary and I have reflected on that question together with Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary Hess as part of a small grant project funded by the Wabash Center. This post contributes to our answer by reviewing another resource that Dr. Smith employed effectively in her August 2020 intensive course on African American Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke.[1] The resource is Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home, a 72-minute documentary directed by Thomas Napper in 2010 and available on YouTube.[2] Based on students’ survey responses, this film was very effective in deepening students’ empathy for people experiencing homelessness (ave. rating of 3.9 on a scale of 1 to 4, n=14). It also effectively informed students about homelessness, including its causes, consequences, and possible solutions (ave. rating, 3.7). The documentary describes the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles through interviews with eight residents interspersed with video footage of those residents negotiating life on the streets. Also included are interviews with researchers who have studied the neighborhood and with leaders of local nonprofit agencies and ministries. The documentary makes a strong case that Skid Row “is an endangered low-income residential community”[3] where many people struggling with poverty, addiction, prior incarceration, and mental illness have found the only housing options they can afford. Gentrification is the principal threat to the availability of affordable housing. The city government supports gentrification through discriminatory policing that essentially criminalizes homelessness. The Safer Cities Initiative, which began in 2005, was proposed as a solution to crime but in practice functioned as an effort to displace poor residents. Much money was spent on policing but very little on the social support that had been promised for residents. The added officers confiscated property and harassed residents with fines for such crimes as jaywalking, carrying alcohol, or possession of illegal milk crates. Resident Kevin Cohen (called K. K.) observed that poor people cannot survive on Skid Row without breaking the law, whereas in richer neighborhoods police smile and wave at people who are doing similar things. K. and his close friend Lee Anne are among the most sympathetic people interviewed in Lost Angels. Lee Anne, who had lived on the streets for twenty-four years, appeared elderly and walked with a stooped posture. Her mission was to make sure that the neighborhood’s cats and birds had clean water and food. K. K. empathized with her love of animals and never judged her other eccentricities, such as collecting and storing trash. In addition to accompanying Lee Anne, K. K. often welcomed homeless friends to shower and eat in his apartment. It was, he said, “how I get my blessings from God.” Another Skid Row resident who impressed our students is General Dogon, whose story in some ways mirrors that of Malcom X. While spending eighteen years in prison for armed robbery, Dogon formed a commitment to work against injustice. He became a human rights organizer for LA Community Action Network and a bold prophet against abuses by the police. Residents like General Dogon belie the title of the documentary. Although “Lost Angels” is a clever play on the city’s name, it wrongly implies that the people featured in the film were “lost.” Most of them were working, despite many challenges, to make Skid Row a better place to live. To illustrate the impact of Lost Angels on students’ learning, let me refer to Hope Staton’s excellent paper on Luke 6:37-42. Hope is an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary who has given me permission to discuss her work. She interpreted the Lucan text against the backdrop of judgmental stereotypes that are rooted in racism, sexism, and classism in too many white middle-class Christian communities. One of the logs that we may need to take out of our own eyes is a tendency to judge people experiencing homelessness as lazy or sinful. Hope also engaged in critical dialogue with the good-evil binary that appears right after her passage in 6:43-45. As part of that effort, she used General Dogon and K. K. as counter examples to the idea that people can be classified as either good or bad trees who consistently produce good or bad fruit.[4] Citing a comment in Lost Angels, she asked, “What does it say about the state of the church that those in situations of homelessness often find more comfort and welcome with less judgment on the street than they do in our congregations?”[5] Although several students addressed judgmentalism, issues of personal safety were not as prominent in their writing. In a post-pandemic context when we can again require face-to-face interactions with people experiencing homelessness, discussions of safety might surface more readily. While continuing to prioritize physical safety for everyone involved, we could ask more explicitly how racism and classism influence the ways we, our students, and our institutions perceive danger. Lost Angels would be a useful resource for addressing such issues. For example, a critique of the Safer Cities Initiative could include a conversation about whether “safer” is code for “whiter” or “more affluent.” We could also ask to what extent fearful but false stereotypes keep us from engaging in meaningful ministry with people like Lee Anne, K. K., and General Dogon. Notes [1] See also my review of Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/11/a-resource-for-building-empathy-and-understanding/. [2] Thomas Napper, director, Lost Angels: Skid Row is My Home (Cinema Libre Studio, 2010). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB_P3eljq1Y&feature=youtu.be. [3] Alice Callaghan of Las Familias del Pueblo offered this description in Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home, minute 41. [4] Hope Staton, “Removing the Log of Systemic Racism, Sexism, and Classism from the Eye of the Church to Enable Healing for the Homeless” (unpublished paper, August 28, 2020), 10. Staton is an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary. [5] Staton, “Removing the Log,” 13.

There’s a case to be made for rigor in teaching, which is a practice grounded in both art and science. Rigor in instructional design is particularly necessary for online instruction. The more we learn about the cognition of learning, most notably from the neurosciences, the more we appreciate that our ways of teaching must align with the ways of learning. While we may like to believe that learning is natural and intuitive (and it is to a certain extent) two insights from the neurosciences are that (1) learning is not easy (it takes a lot of energy and attention), and (2) learning follows certain pathways—from the cellular level to metacognition, or from organic brain processes to the awareness of mind. Rigor in instruction calls for following specific schemas to aid the learning process. Educational psychologist Robert Gagné pioneered the science of instruction. His schema for the “conditions of learning” demonstrates that different instructional methods should be used according to the demands of varied learning challenges (“A blinding flash of the obvious,” you say. Maybe, but he said it first!). He categorized distinct “varieties of learned capabilities” or categories of learning. These represent the purposes for which teachers provide instruction: To impart basic intellectual skills (“procedural knowledge”) To extend verbal information (“declarative knowledge”) To facilitate development of cognitive strategies (metacognition) To develop attitudes (values, affections, attitudes) To enhance physical motor skills (competencies) Different internal and external conditions apply for each type of learning. For example, with cognitive strategies students must have a chance to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments. Therefore, it is necessary to know what kind of learning we are seeking to bring about. In addition, Gagné’s theory outlines a schema of nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes in the teaching-learning process: Gaining attention (focus and reception) Informing learners of the objective (expectancy and motivation) Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval and connections) Presenting the content (“stimulus”) (selective perception) Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding) Eliciting performance (responding and acting on the new knowledge) Providing feedback (reinforcement) Assessing performance (retrieval) Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization and application) These steps provide the necessary conditions for learning and serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media, methods, and learning and assessment activities. Gagné suggests that learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a hierarchy according to complexity: stimulus recognition, response generation, procedure following, use of terminology, discriminations, concept formation, rule application, and problem solving. The primary significance of the hierarchy is to identify prerequisites that should be completed to facilitate learning at each level. This learning hierarchies provide a way to organize the learning experience in online course design. Example The following example illustrates a teaching sequence corresponding to the nine instructional events for the objective. In this example students are guided in a sequence to learn the concept of triangulation in relationships. Gain attention: show a variety of examples of triangulation (case study, cartoon, film, dialogue script). Identify objective. pose questions: “What function does triangulation serve?” “What are the causes of triangulation?” “How may triangulation hinder a leader’s effectiveness?” Recall prior learning: review definitions of triangles. Ask students to share examples of triangulation from personal experience. Present stimulus: present refined definition of triangulation. Guide learning: present examples of how triangulation is caused and motivated; how to identify it; its effect on functioning in relationships and situations. Elicit performance: direct students to create different examples of triangulation in work, ministry, or family situations. Or direct students to find and share triangulated scenarios in films, stories, news features, etc. Provide feedback: review student examples as correct or incorrect (or to what extent they are correct or not). Assess performance: provide feedback in the form of scores/grades and remediation. Enhance retention/transfer: review examples and non-examples of triangulation and ask students to identify qualities for identifying whether or not the example fits criteria for triangulation. Summary Effective online instruction requires rigorous application of pedagogical principles in course design. Gagné’s schema of “instructional events” is an effective model for organizing online course design. Different instruction is required for different learning domains and their outcomes (intellectual concepts; attitudes, values, and affections; skills and competencies). Experiences of learning operate on the learner in ways that constitute the conditions of learning. The specific operations that constitute instructional events are different for each different type of learning outcome. Learning hierarchies define what domains are to be learned and the sequence of instruction necessary to bring about their outcomes.

Listen to Dr. Westfield read this blog post in her "I'm Just Saying" audio blog series “Will somebody please Hold My Mule,” might sound like an urgent plea for animal restraint. Spoken in the African American vernacular tradition, it is a warning of a pending ecstatic release. But, here, context matters.  Today rustic moments that involve a sun whipped sharecropper harnessed to a mule are only to be found in murals of Charles Wilbert White – and even those are rare. It is in the deep Black folk wisdom not, yet, hushed by the street flow of our urban youth, that “hold my mule” signifies a breakthrough – joyous, adoratious, shoutlicious and affirmatious Truth revealed. In the face of such sanctified Truth, every atom must come to rest, yet, without being stilled.  A moment of creative insight, clarity of purpose, any critical happening – “Hold my mule” is a peroration to pause for deep prayer, praise, worship, cry and give thanks. Let me reiterate, “Context matters.” “Please somebody hold my mule” can signal a moment of urgent trouble. It can, also, be a call to gather for defense, diplomacy or a piece of curative business. In either case, to say Hold My Mule signals a leave-taken, a break from or with whatever occupies you. It presages a moment of intensity, sometimes transcendence, and always urgency. My most recent Hold My Mule moment happened in the Wabash symposium with Victor Wooten. We were discussing improvisation – something I thought I understood. As a group exercise, each participant defined and/or described improvisation, then said the feeling(s) associated with it. By the end of the report-ins our group had verbally constructed a tapestry of understandings and feelings about improvisation; very beautiful and informative. Victor, adding to our tapestry, offered this wisdom (I am paraphrasing): Improvisation is in our DNA…. for example, those of us who grew up in poor households learned from our parents to improvise…Our parents were models for improvisation and how to create something new. As human beings we are all really good at improvising. It is who we are.  To be alive, you have to improvise… We can improve upon improvisation but there is no need to learn to improvise because it is what we already do all the time. Babies do not have to be taught to laugh, walk, cry – they improvise based upon how they feel. Your body does not have to ask what or how to feel; it just does… Then based upon those feelings we decide how to create, improve, and change. Improvisation is about taking what we know and using what we know to produce the unknown. (Victor Wooten, December 2, 2020) “Hold My Mule!”  It was all that I could do not to get up from my chair in front of the Zoom screen and I run around my house praising and thanking God for this wisdom, this insight, this moment of exuberant joy (audio and video on). This was a moment of ah-hah! When the lightbulb goes on. The thick white clouds part.  The Red Sea splits. Eureka! Before Victor’s teaching, I had reduced improvisation to a technique that was separate or apart from daily life activities or a tool occasionally deployed when needed in music or in teaching. (My Lord!) I had thought improvisation was what the “greats” of music are able to achieve after years of study and performance. (I once was lost!!) I had been operating as if improvisation was something that was utilitarian and reserved for those who worked tirelessly to develop this specialty. (But now I am found!!!) Victor opened my eyes to see that improvisation is intrinsic. All of life’s decisions are acts of improvisation. (I was blind!!!!) When we have the where-with-all to take what we know and put it in service to discovering, exploring, and coming to know what is unknown – it is then that we are living into the fullness of our humanity.  (But now I SEEEE!!!!!) Allowing what we know to pull us into and guide us to the unknown is a risky proposition. Teaching to produce the unknown will not be satisfied with regurgitating the known – by learner or by teacher. It requires teachers who are capable of being aware of, and able to be flexible, limber, and open to seeing the miracles, not when they come, but as they come. Teachers who understand their improvisational nature and the improvisational nature of their learners, create through discovery. They understand that in a sense, it is discovery that teaches. In teaching with this knowledge at the forefront, we are not following a way of teaching or of learning, but creating a way of being that revels in the joy of the unknown and the newly created. (Through many dangers Toil and snares We have already come Twas grace hath brought Us safe thus far And grace will lead us home)

As the fall semester draws to a close, I reflect on how our classrooms continue to absorb the dense impact of exhaustion, grief, and so many unknowns. The isolation and physical distancing brought by COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 have remained a reality for much longer than any of us could have anticipated. We have hardly been able to metabolize our grief, frustration, fatigue, and the toll the lack of contact and sensation has had on our bodies. Along with COVID-19, we have continued to somatize the woundedness of profound inequalities in our communities, as I have written elsewhere. From election cycles in the Américas, to ongoing anti-Black racism and violence, white supremacy, settler/extractive colonialism, racial capitalism, and cishet patriarchy, we continue to survive systems of exploitation, dominance, and oppressions of all tenors. In light of this historical moment, my colleague at the Pacific School of Religion, Dr. Aizaiah Yong, and I chose to codesign a syllabus that engaged formation through the lens of spirituality and leadership, in an attempt to deepen our lives individually and collectively. It intentionally centered the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color. We created a compendium aimed at sustaining our vitality, rootedness, and creativity during this period of remote learning where we surveyed practices and scholarship from varied religious traditions, geopolitical contexts, and artistic modalities. Throughout the last four months, our virtual classroom became a collaborative learning environment where coconspirators “identif[ied] and valorize[d] that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies,” as de Sousa Santos puts it.[1] By privileging experiential epistemologies, we attempted to interrupt the dominant politics of knowledge and made every effort to enflesh sensorial experiences, understanding that they are fundamental in the shaping of knowledge and students’ formation. Corporeal ways of knowing presuppose contact, sensation, concrete, emergent, and living bodies, in all their capacity for suffering and healing, copresence and distance, for knowing-with rather than knowing-about. The semester’s various activities ranged widely: we created centering and closing moments where we could collectively breathe, built sacred spaces, performed an archeology of our joys, recollected our ancestral connections, our ecostories, ecomemories, understood land as formation, as pedagogy, thought about emergent strategies for transformation, engaged with how we metabolize anger, and how to develop a keener experience of tenderness.[2] Students were invited to imaginatively cocreate workshops, artworks, reflections, engage one another via a “spiritual formation virtual café” suggested by one student, raise difficult questions via online forums, and come up with field guides for spiritual formation with spiritual practices, reflections, centering moments, devotionals, rituals, meditations, art-making, embodied work, and much more. And yet all of these strategies seemed somewhat insufficient in our attempt to foster bonds of copresence, sensation, and contact that body-with-body classrooms offer. How could we respond to the urgencies, the sense of isolation, fragmentation, and the intensities of the present moment through remote learning? How could we open up the nexus of space-place-time to embodiment? How could we be responsive to Lama Rod Owens’ call to embodiment as a returning home to our bodies, in this moment and context, opening up some kind of spaciousness that could allow us to respond to both the woundedness and the joys of the now?[3] How could we cultivate embodiment in a virtual setting with a deep understanding “that disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained,” because we become desensitized to the conditions around us, to our emotions, to our sense of vitality, to that which deeply moves us and puts us back in touch with ourselves, our joys, pleasures, hopes, and dreams?[4] How would we subvert the logic of isolation and “presentify” zoom rooms so that a confluence of encounters, contact, and embodied sensation could transpire? How could we create a classroom experience based on a poetics of presence and intimacy as the artist Elisa Arruda invites us to create? By turning to creative practices and the arts, we were able to weave, potentialize, and ignite a process of contact and sensation. Each week, students received what we called Spiritual Formation Care Packages (SFCP), which were designed based on the readings for that week. They became a series of centering and creative exercises that invited us to meditate, embody, and create for about one full hour per week. The intention of these exercises was to provide support and an opportunity for creative embodiment, integrating what students learned in class with their own lived experiences, creative processes, spiritual traditions, and research. The SFCP ritualized and generated containers allowing students to tap into the power of their spiritualities and creative vigor. Inspired by my own art practices and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the packages afforded us an opportunity to sense how our skin, viscera, and psychosomatic bodies carry knowledge that—in moments of pain, dis-ease, conflict, and unknowingness—yield us the capacity to see, touch, and create in expansive and incendiary ways. Art, as Anzaldúa puts it, is the “locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments.”[5] It allows us to become anchored in our bodies, to “shock ourselves into new ways of perceiving the world,” to “feel our way without blinders,” to “touch more people,” to evoke the personal and social realities through blood, pus, and sweat. Our creative practices afford us the opportunity to access, re-member, and revive “what most links us with life.”[6] Art practices, as shown in the work of Elisa Arruda, embolden us to reclaim our processes of formation, fully embodying our shadows and desires for presence, joy, pleasure, restoration, expansion, contraction, proximity, sensation, and connection. [su_image_carousel source="media: 244745,244746,244747,244748,244749,244750,244751,244752,244753" limit="100" slides_style="photo" crop="none" align="left" max_width="2000" captions="yes"] About the Artist: Elisa Arruda is a visual artist who was born and raised in Belem do Pará, in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Currently living in São Paulo, Arruda investigates the poetics of intimacy, moving quite freely through several mediums. She pays particular attention to the realms of the domestic and the public as well as the tensions sheltered in dynamics of strength + fragility, endings + beginnings, intimacy + alienation, loss + growth, proximity + confinement. Notes [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. [2] For more on this, please refer to Eros and Ideologies by Laura E. Pérez, Voices from the Ancestors edited by Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ecowomanism by Melanie L. Harris, The Way of Tenderness by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owen. [3] Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020), 119-120. [4] Rod Owens, Love and Rage, 121. [5] Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 177. [6] Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Writer to Third World Women Writers,” 34.

Rubem Alves was a Brazilian theologian who became a psychoanalyst, educator, and writer of children’s stories. In one of his short stories called Happy Oysters Don’t Create Pearls, he tells the story of an oyster that was different from all the others. This oyster could not be happy like the others and was always very sad. The cause of his sadness was a grain of sand that had entered his body. He felt that excruciating pain day and night. As a way to survive the pain he sang sad songs. His songs were so sad that they tormented the oysters that sang happily. “Why is he so sad?” they asked. But the truth was that he had to live with the pain caused by the arrival of that unexpected grain of sand that was plaguing his life. One day, a fisherman threw his nets and took all the oysters, the happy ones and the sad one too. At dinner, the fisherman was eating oyster soup with his family when he felt something hard inside his mouth. When he took that stone out of his mouth, he realized it was a pearl! And he gave it to his wife. Rubem Alves then says that happy oysters do not produce pearls, only those that suffer a piercing pain in the flesh. In the Bantu and Yorubá traditions, it is said that the Orixá Obaluaê, also called Omulu, is the Lord of the Pearls. There is a story where Iemanjá, the Orixá of the seas, adopts Omulu when he is sick. She washes his body and heals his body with the water of the sea. But Omulu, who goes around the world offering healing and producing plagues, is poor and sad. Iemanjá takes compassion on him for she doesn’t want to see her son poor and his body covered with wounds. Iemanjá gets all her riches, her pearls, and makes beautiful necklaces to cover Omulu’s body so he could go around shining. These two stories can help us figure out a certain pedagogy of astonishment. Four ways to think about it: First, education as an oyster space that listens to human suffering The stories of Alves and Iemanjá and Omulu, in such different and diverse ways, tell us that pain and suffering are central issues of our existence. We must be attuned to the ways of suffering in our time. We are seeing so much suffering everywhere and COVID-19 has not only eroded so much of what we knew but also expanded poverty, stretching the already frail social threads of our communities. Our political and economic organizing systems are creating forms that deny the ways we recognize pain. We live at a furious pace of life, giving more to get much less. We are so alienated from nature. Our illnesses shift and expand in uncontrollable proportions. We live in a world of depressions, refluxes, panic attacks, heart attacks, barbiturates, anti-depressants, antihistamines, and painkillers. We medicate every form of feeling and morbidity, we lose the capacity for wonder. More than ever, we need to find “oyster spaces,” to transform our sadness into pearls and songs of sadness and joy to sustain our lives. Education thus can be this oyster space, when hearing and exchange provides possibilities for the remaking of ourselves. Education becomes this oyster space when the hearing is also seeing, understanding, going deeper, creating empathy and compassion. When that happens, the classroom becomes this oyster-like environment, conducive to the metabolization of pain in other forms of life, sustenance, imagination, resistance, and forms of living in the world. For the pearl is that amalgam of the body, mind, heart, and soul that learns from itself, and is able to remake itself from the experiences of pain and suffering. If the oyster is that place of astonishment that turns itself into pearl, the attentive classroom can also help us wonder, turning the pain of life into a delicate and strong stone, rare and beautiful. In this way, each teacher who feels and even perhaps can come close to understanding the pains of the world and the pains of the students, is also a therapist who listens and engages in the process of transference; the teacher is also a healer who offers symbolic exchanges; is also a clown who activates other forms of lightness and laughter; and is a magician at reordering worlds so that the life inside the oyster can continue the symbiotic movements of life. In this oyster space, the pearl becomes the capacity for continuous amazement with the potential of life that is continuously remade. Second, education as the oyster place to produce beauty Omulu had his body covered with sores and that is why he lived hidden under his straw clothes. Iemanjá, as an affectionate foster mother, wants to see her precious son shine with his healing gifts. The queen of the sea creates pearl necklaces that cover Omulu’s entire body so he would be honored, and live happily and proudly. His body would continue to be marked by the wounds of his scars, but now he shines the light of pearls, that like white flowers adorn his skin; the shiny stones made from the pain of oysters now caress his skin and adorn his suffering body. From here, we can regard education as the care of Iemanjá for her son Omulu. Education as production of beauty that helps us to move around the world. Educators as oysters, who use their own pearls, gestated by the symbiosis of their bodies in pain, and offer their precious, beautiful, luminous pearls to decorate their student’s lives. The same way in which students offer their own beautiful pearls to decorate their teachers’ lives. Often educators cannot change the situation of their students, but they can pay attention to their wounds, hold their bodies in care, enlarge their thoughts, help their knees to walk and fly, strengthen their hands, illuminate their eyes with the sparkle of astonishment, bewitch them with words of life in resonance with the words of death, and pace their heartbeats in a rhythm other than the destruction and annihilation that often surround their worlds. The educator is not all-knowing of everything. The hope is that the educator has already learned to be in awe with life and has been astonished in many ways. If that has already happened, then the educator becomes a double path, or a bridge, that helps others to be astonished and is wide open to be astonished by others. If the educator is ready to engage this double path, pause and listen, be astonished by the very presence of the student, the educator will see this encounter always as a thrilling surprise, as the production of desire that changes and transforms, creates mutuality, brings spells, charms, and chistes to life, providing tools of defiance and self-sustenance, building paths for new trajectories. In this way, the educator and the classroom as this oyster space will not be voyeurism of one’s suffering, but rather be a mutual singing of songs of sadness, a mutual creation of pearl necklaces for mutual survival. The healer in history is not Iemanjá. Omulu receives healing from the forest and from Olorum. But it is Iemanjá who takes care of the healing symbology, covering Omulu’s wounds in beauty so his joy would be full. In the same way, we educators must strive to be like Iemanjá, looking for beauty, for pearls in the sea to put on the wounded bodies of our students. Pearls that come from inside our own bodies like oysters that learned to make pearls, pearls that come from the history of our people and other people, pearls from ancient wisdom, pearls from below, and pearls produced by the students themselves. The pedagogy of astonishment is thus the crafting of necklaces of thousands of forms of beauty in multiple pearls and of several places for entire bodies, both individual and collective, to shine. Third, education to open ourselves to engage the different, the uninvited grain of sand Fourth, education that helps us hear the suffering of nonhuman forms of life. To be continued…

Teachers are people who plan. We cross classroom thresholds with worn briefcases bulging with written lectures clearly forecasted in thick, detailed, syllabi. Entire curriculums are planned three, four, five years into the future. Course learning outcomes are carefully aligned with degree programs and degree programs are carefully align with budgets – all well in advance of students’ enrollment or matriculation. Planning insures a cast iron tradition. Long-range planning, predicated upon long-ago decisions and forgotten needs, makes institutional change challenging, or even impossible. It is ironic; the very attribute which lends stability is also the albatross around our necks. The need to rethink our reliance upon long-range planning and strict adherence to hollow tradition has been exposed during this moment of pandemics. The year 2020 has been a year when plans have gone awry. In this moment, I have a proposition. While this proposition might feel like reckless abandon for those who depend upon the established traditions, reputable standards, and conventional methods of the used-to-be academy, in this protracted moment of pandemics, I want to suggest that this might be a moment to resist the impulse to plan, reflect and analyze. Consider waiting. Resist the impulse to presume how the end will be. Resist the impulse to attempt to go back to business as usual, business as normal, business that no longer serves the students in our care. If we can move past our panic, we will remember we needed to overhaul our educational system before the pandemics snatched us, halted us. If we dare risk surrendering romanticized views of our educational standards, we may recall that many of our traditions, while noble, were often begun arbitrarily. And, given the slowness of institutional change, consider that adult pedagogies have advanced while so many yet cling to outmoded, outdated, and uninformed pedagogies for adult learners in a digital age. Perhaps in this moment the courageous response is, rather than plan, to wait. Just like it is ill-advised to pause and reflect in the middle of a hurricane or surgery or any life-threatening catastrophe, so it is ill-advised, during the 2020 pandemics, to rush to meaning making and gestures of clarity; to rush to return to how it was; to rush to assuming where we will be and how we will be when the pandemics subside. In this moment, if we were the biblical character Noah, the bird we sent out to search for dry land would return having found no place to land. We are not yet close to shore. The waiting is not meant to be idle. In the waiting, carefully ponder, contemplate, imagine - what of the current change will you keep? A colleague who heads an IT department at a liberal arts college said that by his faculty going to online courses (albeit crisis pedagogy) in spring of 2020, he estimates that this sped up the faculty moving to online teaching by ten years. Ten years was gained for a desired change! Perhaps our moments of quick and dramatic shifts to online teaching showed us that our educational institutions are not as calcified as previously reported. If that is the case, what will it take to lean into the new found limberness? What is at stake if we choose to re-calcify? Like you, I am getting pressure to plan for summer 2021, and all of 2022 & 2023. I simply cannot. I do not have a crystal ball.  And I do not want to pretend that even when the vaccine is distributed (2021?2022?) that we will return to how it used to be. I do not want to squander this moment of waiting with worry, anxiety and stress for a future I cannot predict nor control. I tell people that I am waiting. Once we can return to face-to-face work, I want, then, time to reflect.  Then, I will want time to take stock and study.  Once we are no longer in the midst of multiple waves of quarantines, I will want to assess where we are, and learn the new/needed ways to move forward. I will need time to be creative. The waiting that I need right now is the mustering of courage for new visions.  In my not-idle waiting I am looking to what historians have said comes after a social upheaval. Historians tell us that after this kind of societal phenomena there is typically a renaissance. Oh – I cannot wait! There will be newly designed everything! There will be new architecture, different clothing styles, and new music and poetry. There will be new academic disciplines and reimagined ways to be school, to do school, and to get an education. There will be new painting, new sculptures, and new modes of transportation. If we truly engage in the reflection warranted by the moment of 2020 and 2021 (hopefully not into 2022), then our renaissance will be spectacular with new technology accessible by those who are impoverished, will bring end to global hunger and provide language translation fitted for everyday interactions. The post-pandemics renaissance will be marvelous! I want to participate in the renaissance with my own new thinking, renewed imagination and creativity. I want to reserve my energies to participate in the renaissance and not pour myself into reestablishing what needed to be changed. So, I wait. What would it mean to allow our innovation to be a primary mode of meaning making – rather than our traditions being the only mode of meaning making? What would it mean to shift to reliance upon creativity rather than dependance upon tradition? In what ways can we create real innovation rather than simply settling for imitations of change meant for other people in other times or places? What is the toll to the institution should there be a call to attempt to return to normal? What is the price of going back? What changes will we maintain, expand, and normalize?