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In Luke 1:20, an angel named Gabriel informs the priest Zechariah that he will remain mute during his wife Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Zechariah’s mistake was to doubt Gabriel’s announcement that they would have a child despite decades of infertility. Perhaps Gabriel made a mistake by reacting harshly to a question any reasonable human would have asked, but I have come to understand the priest’s silence as a prescription more than a punishment. I imagine a muted Zechariah growing spiritually and relationally as he listened more to Elizabeth, to their relative Mary, and to the Spirit who would guide and empower their son. I found myself identifying with Zechariah while participating as a learner in Dr. Mitzi J. Smith’s excellent course on African American Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke.[i] When we discussed my role prior to the course, Mitzi made it clear that I must not speak or write in ways that undermined her authority as the instructor. At her request I did not post any messages in the preliminary discussion forums in Moodle. One exception that Mitzi approved was a message explaining my relative silence and encouraging openness to womanist hermeneutics.[ii] When we transitioned to intensive sessions in Zoom, Mitzi sometimes asked my opinion, and she included me in breakout discussion groups. Even so, I remained one of the quietest learners in the class. Although I identified with Zechariah’s temporary silence, his privilege offers a more enduring analogy. My privilege has included a history of talking in class. My parents valued education highly and had resources to help me succeed, including my mother’s training and experience in early childhood education. With their encouragement, I became a precocious talker, quick to get teachers’ attention and give answers they wanted. Not all of my classmates were so advantaged. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi describes the anger he felt at biased teaching in third grade. A white teacher regularly ignored raised non-white hands while engaging with favored white children.[iii] The flip side of similar biases enhanced my education in many respects, but there were drawbacks. I missed out on what others would have said if I had not taken so much “air time,” and my relationships were often better with adults than with peers. I was oblivious to the injustice. The skills and habits I learned as a child helped me compete for attention, grades, honors, and scholarships all the way through a PhD program. An MDiv program that emphasized collaboration taught me to dial back competition and seek the good of a whole class, but I still talked a lot. I continue to do so as a seminary professor. Extensive research has documented the impact of implicit bias on students’ achievement at all levels of education.[iv] There seem to be fewer studies focused on the impact of implicit bias on students’ perceptions of minoritized and women professors,[v] but I am learning from Mitzi and other colleagues that it is a serious problem. For many (but not all) students, my race and gender lend me added authority, whereas the same students may discount the authority of professors who are not white or male. For Mitzi these biases are headwinds that impede her teaching. Patriarchal biblical texts and interpretations have long supported to the silencing of women, and Luke-Acts has contributed to that injustice because most female characters model traditional silent roles. Mary’s prophetic hymn in Luke 1:67-79 is an important exception, but the overall impression remains. In relation to that tradition, Mitzi’s strong leadership and my relative silence constituted a small dose of justice. Most prescriptions come with warning labels, and so should silence. When privileged people remain comfortably silent in the face of oppression, we perpetuate injustice by refusing to add our voices and energies to movements for change. Silence can also be a symptom of passive-aggressive relationships, where resentments fester without being addressed in a timely way. Like fasting, silence is only healthy when it is temporary. It is best when chosen, not imposed, and when rooted in trust, not fear. In academic settings, silent students might be hiding a failure to prepare, or they might be afraid that voicing their thoughts will lead to negative judgments. My own motives for silence were mixed. I was willing to comply with Mitzi’s wishes and eager to hear what others had to say during each of the challenging and engaging sessions. I was also anxious not to fit the stereotype of a well-intentioned but clueless white guy. I abhor racism and sexism, but I also recognize that I am not entirely free from them. I did not want to say “the wrong thing.” Dr. Marcia Riggs has wisely suggested that intentional, interpersonal work on race and gender would have been valuable earlier in our collaboration.[vi] The course was not an appropriate space in which to do that work, but I hope to do more in the future. I also hope that my experience of “stereotype threat” will deepen my empathy and strengthen my planning for students who may be silent due to fear.[vii] Discernment of when to speak and when to remain silent is an essential skill for theological educators and for everyone who seeks justice. Zechariah’s silence prepares him to prophesy like Mary, and I hope to benefit from the same prescription. Notes [i] For more information about the course and the related Wabash Center grant project, search for previous posts by Drs. Mitzi J. Smith and Daniel W. Ulrich, beginning with “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during Covid-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/. [ii] Thanks to Mary Hess for suggesting this step. [iii] Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 44-55. [iv] See, for example, the studies summarized in Rachel E. Godsil et al., The Science of Equality, Volume 1: Addressing Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat in Education and Health Care (Perception Institute, 2014), accessed August 28, 2020, http://perception.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Science-of-Equality.pdf. [v] On the impact of race, see Bettye P. Smith, “Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness: An Analysis of End-of-Course Faculty Evaluations,” College Student Journal 41, no. 4 (December 1, 2007): 788–800. On age and gender see Alison F. Doubleday and Lisa M. J. Lee, “Dissecting the Voice: Health Professions Students’ Perceptions of Instructor Age and Gender in an Online Environment and the Impact on Evaluations for Faculty,” Anatomical Sciences Education 9 (2016): 537–44. [vi] Marcia Y. Riggs, “To Teach Collaboratively or Not?” [vii] “Stereotype threat” is fear of acting in ways that confirm a stereotype of a group to which one belongs. For research demonstrating its negative impact on learning, including in discussions of race, see Godsil, The Science of Equality, 31-33.

The first time that I taught a graduate-level class where anti-oppression work was a primary component of the learning, I made a major blunder. I structured the class with materials and exercises assuming that students understood that racism, sexism, and other forms of structural injustice based on identity categories and embodiment actually exist and had material, social, and intrapsychic impacts on the people who were most affected by them. At the time we were working on such concepts as how privilege functions in a variety of identity categories, understanding microaggressions, solidarity and co-conspirators, and other vocabulary and practices that would hopefully help students to work towards justice in their circles of influence in religious leadership. So the educational goals were about recognizing and intervening in situations where inequity and injustice are practiced in institutions, policies, and interpersonal interactions. We were a few weeks into the term before a brave student articulated what it turned out several other students were also thinking: namely, that racism and sexism had ended, and we were now in a post-racial age. So why were we spending so much time on what only a few bad people engaged in… on individual character flaws related to racism/homophobia/etc.? They personally were not racist (sexist, classist, or ableist). They were good people committed to social justice! But a significant number of the students in my classroom were convinced that meritocracy allowed hard work and good character to overcome any remaining barriers that might exist. Other students were familiar with how structural inequality worked in relation to their own targeted identity categories, but were less familiar with how this worked intersectionally or with other embodied experiences. Now, my hope is that in the more than a decade that has passed since this particular situation occurred, public protests and the increased access to perspectives beyond the mainstream have increased general awareness of ongoing racism and other forms of structural injustice. Certainly those with eyes to see and ears to hear should have had many examples in the day-to-day news of the last decade, where terms like misogynist and white fragility have begun to appear on major outlets such as National Public Radio, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and so on. Unfortunately, cultural polarization, the segregation of listening and reading practices, and the ways that online logarithms build echo chambers of like thinking means that some of our students have not been exposed to these kinds of conversations. Other networks and media outlets work to debunk the ideas of social inequality and define social justice not as a theological commitment but as a solely political term related to left-wing politics. Because of this, I still find that many students, particularly those raised in fairly homogenous white middle-class Christian communities and neighborhoods, have little nuanced awareness of the depth of structural inequality that is built into histories of policy, institutional legacies, economic pathways, educational access, and representation in media and leadership positions, and how these many arenas work together to ensure that this inequality replicates itself across generations. As a teacher in that moment, I quickly learned that simply asserting that structural inequality is a reality was not effective in challenging the common sense understandings of meritocracy and equality that students had heard all of their lives in their families, schools, churches, and other formative communities. Over the years, the many instructors of this first year class have developed a number of strategies to show, not tell, that structural inequality is very real and to help make connections across experiences where it manifests itself. Unfortunately, there is no quick solution to unlearning these “common sense” understandings, and learning the full interlocking force of inequality through a variety of contributing factors takes practice and careful attention over time for all of us, particularly when our identities do not force us to navigate those structures with attention. Here are some teaching resources that have been helpful in opening these conversations: Peggy McIntosh’s introductory piece “White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack,” provides useful directness in its listicle format of naming everyday indications of white privilege, although it tends to focus on individual experiences, albeit as they are embedded in social realities.  This brief video about wealth inequality in the United States has initiated helpful conversations about our perceptions versus the realities of economic equity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=youtu.be The video series Race: The Power of an Illusion by California Newsreel is particularly helpful in tracing complex relationships between FHA policy, redlining, urban development policy, and generational wealth difference, as well as exploring the history of defining race in Supreme Court decisions related to immigration and property ownership. https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/ Creating together a giant whiteboard-sized chart documenting historical events, legal changes/Supreme Court decisions, and strategies in the movement for full equality for LGBTQ+ persons. Looking decade by decade from the 1940s to the 2020s at interpersonal, institutional/communal, ideological/representational, and legal/policy changes over time (generally drawing on a range of websites that document the history of LGBTQ+ rights in the US), students begin to discern the depth of inequality built into these various levels of life for persons who are not heteronormative or living within gender binaries.

Throughout my twenty-five plus years of teaching I have most often declined opportunities to “team teach” (the terminology used in my institution) in the historically and predominantly white seminary I have spent the longest part of my teaching career. Why? Two primary reasons. First, I was the only full-time African American professor for a very long time. I had students questioning my qualifications because I was Black and female, so why would I place myself in a position to be judged worthy or not by students because my content and method differed radically from that of my white colleague? Second, I did not want to be patronized by a white colleague either defending my “right” to teach or “correcting” my position as That Womanist liberation ethicist. Some readers are perhaps wondering why I didn’t give my students and colleagues the benefit of the doubt? Well, I have spent most of my educational life as a student and teacher in historically white institutions. I have repeatedly been on the receiving end of well-meaning but white racially-biased surveillance and censoring by white students, professors, and faculty colleagues. Yes, I think that genuine mutual respect has developed now between me and my current colleagues. Still, implicit bias and racist socialization runs deep in ways with which my white colleagues are not yet ready to grapple. Thus, when Professor Mitzi Smith and Professor Dan Ulrich invited me to join them as a consultant (along with Dr. Mary Hess) for their project, “The Challenges of Effective Pedagogy of a Trans-Contextual Online Collaboration for an African American/Womanist Hermeneutics Course during COVID-19,” I was intrigued. The words “trans-contextual online collaboration” drew me to say yes. Given my reluctance to team teach in my context, I was impressed by my new colleague’s (Dr. Smith) willingness to teach with a white male colleague from another seminary while living into the learning curve for many of us in adapting to online teaching in response to the pandemic. Several questions came immediately to the forefront for me: Are Drs. Smith and Ulrich doing any pre-course race-gender-class work with each other? Or are they simply going to work through the inevitable race-gender-class tensions as they arise while the course is taught? How is “trans-contextual” to be understood? Is it an exchange across geographical borders and institutional boundaries and/or crossing dynamics of power between the two professors, between the professors and the students, between the different institutional norms for teaching and learning? This pedagogical decision of the course was ambitious: having an African American Womanist biblical scholar and teacher “out front,” while a white male biblical scholar was “a learning/teaching professor.” As a consultant, I worked hard to contribute helpful insights about the tensions that the two professors shared with us. Asking clarifying questions was my first way of engaging this. As both professors’ blogs revealed, they did honestly grapple with each other. My further questions were about whether students understood the roles and did not attempt to “force” a more familiar pattern of engaging the white male professor. After our last consultation, I remain convinced that it is necessary for professors to do race-gender-class work prior to and throughout trans-contextual or team teaching. In other words, teaching empathetically and justly with a colleague across race, gender, and class lines requires intentional dialogue to make explicit the race-gender-class assumptions of the teachers involved. This work must be as much a part of course preparation as learning the subject matter of the course from the perspectives and methodologies of each other. Most importantly, teaching collaboratively or team teaching adds a level of preparation and ongoing dialogue; reflecting with an African American woman and a white woman as consultants was a definite step in the right direction. COVID-19 necessitated teaching this course about homelessness online, and this created a barrier to direct engagement with persons who are homeless and with practitioners who work in solidarity with these persons. Professor Smith used pedagogical methods and reading assignments that created space for developing empathetic sensibilities for persons who are experiencing homelessness, rather than considering homelessness as solely a social justice issue. Likewise, she taught Womanist and African American biblical hermeneutical skills for teaching and preaching that can impact the lives of homeless persons through ministerial practice and can influence public policy. Lesson: Improvisation catalyzes online pedagogies, pandemic or not. To teach collaboratively, or not? I just might give it a chance, under the right conditions.

Regardless of how one may feel about online learning (now, during COVID-19, thrust upon us, the willing and unwilling), admittedly it is now a vital and critical academic and professional skill. Helping students become proficient in online learning has arguably become as important as mastering academic content in whatever discipline one teaches. One way to help students become more proficient at online learning is to actively assess their performance in online discussion forums. Most instructors at least provide a list of minimum expectations, something like: Post at least two entries for every forum; avoid non-substantive posts (“I agree”); post by a deadline for a session; cite references, respond to questions from the professor, etc. Some instructors place limits on word count. Some insist on complete sentences and proper grammar. In addition to assessing engagement with the course content (academic concepts and course texts, for example), and checking for adherence to minimum expectations as noted above, instructors can help students become more proficient online learners by assessing metacognition student performance, those transferable skills and competencies that will serve students well as they become lifelong online learners. Metacognitive assessment helps students become critically aware of themselves as thinkers and learners. Robert E. MacDonald refers to these as part of the “informal observations” [i] that instructors engage in as part of the evaluation of student learning. Here are examples of metacognition student performance in online discussion forums that you can look for, assess, and for which you can provide feedback to students: The consistency in the amount and quality of their posts. The quality and kinds of questions students ask during online discussions. The cooperative peer learning skills students demonstrate in discussion forums. The manner in which they receive directions and challenges from the instructor. The way students respond to questions from the professor and other students. Their ability to follow through on assignments and activities to completion. Their level of initiative in asking for help, seeking information, offering critique, and questioning assumptions. Their ability to uncover their own bias and prejudices. Their ability to recognize their misunderstanding and demonstrate corrective thinking. Their ability to come up with novel and original examples. The quality of their written skill in expressing and explaining ideas. Their ability to manage their time and participate in online discussion forums, as well as complete assignments, promptly. It is no longer enough to help our students master academic content related to our particular scholarship. Part of the work of teaching in this technological age is helping our students become better learners, and that includes becoming more adept at learning in online and virtual environments. Notes [i] Robert E. MacDonald,  A Handbook for Beginning Teachers: Facing the Challenge of Teaching in Today’s Schools (New York, NY: Pearson, 1999).

Since last fall, the theology department at my institution, St. Ambrose University, has been offering a new course called “Just Theology.” On the first day of class each semester, I like to poll the students to ask them what they think the title “Just Theology” means. Most of the students’ answers reveal that they assumed they had signed up for a basic theology class, one that covered religious principles only—without any math, science, or art mixed in. In actuality, the class is designed to introduce students to the study of Christian scripture and theology through the lens of justice. I’ve learned more from this first day activity than that my students are bad at puns. Many are surprised to learn that theology has anything to do with just action in the world. In an effort to analyze this trend more deeply and to see if the course is successful in teaching about the relationship between justice and theology, my department chair, Lisa Powell, developed a survey to distribute to our students on both the first and last day of class. The survey asks students to respond to five statements: (1) “Acting for justice is central to the Christian life”; (2) “Racial justice is an important part of the Christian message”; (3) “Christian teaching can have a liberating message for women”; (4) “Care for the earth is an important part of Christian teaching”; and (5) “The Bible shows God’s particular concern for the poor.” Students indicate their belief about each statement from the following options: “strongly disagree”; “disagree”; “agree”; “strongly agree”; and “I don’t know.” It surprises me each semester to learn that only about half of the students at the beginning of the semester select “agree” or “strongly agree” to each statement. In fact, around 25-30% select “strongly disagree.” I am always happy to see that nearly all the students select “agree” or “strongly agree” by the end of the semester. The surveys are helpful in gauging what my students’ preconceptions about religion and theology are, especially at the beginning of the semester, so I can identify the starting point for our conversations. This semester’s data was particularly noteworthy. To take just one example: only about 10% of my class indicated that they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Racial justice is an important part of the Christian message.” I asked the class, “Who has ever heard a sermon or homily that endorsed racial justice?” About 10% raised their hands. This was disturbing, particularly on the heels of a summer in which racial injustice and police brutality received heightened attention in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. I asked the students how many had attended a Black Lives Matter protest this summer: about 25% of them raised their hands. But when I asked how many did this from a religious or faith conviction, none raised their hands. About the same 25% of students raised their hands when I asked if they had watched Representative John Lewis’s funeral on television. Again, when I asked if anyone could give me an example of how his religious/faith convictions related to his social justice work, no one raised their hands. Of course, John Lewis’s life and funeral provides a heroic and exceptionally clear example of the relationship between God and just action in the world. But the students seemed to miss the connection. Instead, they told me that they understood his civic engagement (and civic disobedience) as stemming from his affiliation with the Democratic party. As a counterpoint and illustration of black liberation theology, I read the students this quote from President Obama’s eulogy: “Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those Old Testament prophets speaking truth to kings, John Lewis did not hesitate—he kept on getting on board buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mug shot taken again and again, marched again and again on a mission to change America.” [i] One student responded to the quote by mentioning that it was President Obama who delivered the eulogy. They seemed to be arguing that political party affiliations and values were more probable indicators of one’s work for social justice in the world than one’s theological commitments. This summer as I prepared for my classes, I knew this semester would be a complicated one for students in nearly every aspect. I revised syllabi and lesson plans to account for and to integrate the COVID - 19 pandemic and increased exposure to ongoing racial injustice, but I neglected to consider how deeply the pre-election, polarized political landscape would impact students’ assumptions about theology and justice. One student honestly explained to me that they responded “strongly disagree” on the survey because when they scroll through social media, they only see Christianity associated with injustice, and usually with the political “right.” Donald Trump’s photo op with the Bible in front of St. John’s Church offers a poignant example of such. After just one week of this fall semester, I’ve learned that I need to be more cognizant than ever before, about so many things—including students’ presuppositions about religion and politics, and theology and justice. Notes [i] “President Barack Obama’s Eulogy for John Lewis: Full Transcript.” New York Times, July 30 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/obama-eulogy-john-lewis-full-transcript.html.  

A few weeks ago, I had to put down my cat of 14 years. She was very sick and there were no roads to recovery. Her name was Regan. I got her my first year of graduate school, when I had just started at the University of Virginia, and I was living in a basement apartment, in a not-so-safe part of town, on my own for the first time. I was in a doctoral program with a bunch of older, married men, and I was lonely. Regan was my first friend in Charlottesville. If you’ve ever had a pet die—or had to make the decision to end their life—you’ll know the grief and guilt that I felt, feel still. We’re in the middle of a “triple” pandemic, which I’ve watched killing hundreds of thousands of people and disproportionately affecting those who are already most vulnerable, and I’m also sad about my cat. On its own, Covid-19 is causing all sorts of problems—and not just sickness and death. People are suffering from mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression; job loss; homelessness and food scarcity; domestic violence; racial discrimination; you name it. But it’s not just that. We’re also all still experiencing whatever life would normally be throwing at us. Come fall, students will still be stressing out about projects and exams, still wanting to rush, still eating leftover pizza, still hooking up, still doing research, still missing their parents, still working out, still cracking jokes, still procrastinating, still singing in the shower, still praying, still volunteering, still playing ultimate Frisbee, still skipping class, still applying for jobs, still requesting accommodations, still sleeping in, still ending relationships, still feeling proud about their grades, still starting their own businesses, still asking for recommendation letters, still fighting with friends, still protesting, still driving with the windows down, still getting accepted into grad school, still cheating, still feeling like they don’t belong, still reading the news, still trying to earn money, still drinking, still shaving—still living, that is. And my life continues too. I’m still a mom. I still want to write and do research. I still want to support and uplift my colleagues. I’ve still got to create an online course for the fall. I have books to read, a stack of New Yorkers to finish. (One of my favorite bits on the show The Good Place is a conception of hell as “nothing but a growing stack of New Yorker magazines that will never be read.” I laughed a little too hard at this joke.) Dishes need to be washed, laundry needs to be folded, rent needs to be paid. My house could use a good dusting. I found out yesterday that I can go up early for promotion; there are a lot of forms to fill out, y’all! It’s my friend’s birthday today, I got the oil changed in my car this morning, and I have reservations at the local pool later on, if an afternoon thunderstorm doesn’t pass through. I wake up too early, I eat heirloom tomatoes with a shake of salt, and I don’t always put enough sunscreen on. I’m grateful, I’m cranky, I’m hormonal, I’m excited, I’m overwhelmed, I’m angry, I’m weary, I’m . . . . This is life, my life. And it’s, inexplicably, somehow, still going, amidst everything else. There will be some big stories in the fall—the pandemic, the presidential election, the Black Lives Matter protests, the federal arrests that are starting to seem more like kidnappings—and we must attend to them. They are devastating, deep rooted. We must not look away—or allow our students to look away. We can teach to these big stories, we can support one another through them. But our students will not stop having everyday concerns, needs, questions, and experiences, those seemingly “small” stories. We must allow for them too. After all, they will affect, as they always have, how our students learn, how motivated they are, how much time and energy they can or want to give to any academic pursuits, how they interact with us and their peers. We must hold the mundane and the massive together, in tension. For years now, I’ve kept a note in my wallet that my aunt wrote for me, for one of my graduations, I think it was. It’s frayed and faded, a quotation by author Grace Paley. I pulled it out recently, when I was grappling with the loss of my long-time feline companion . . . and so much more: “Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.” Life sure don’t stop. Not for us and not for our students. We must remember this, come fall. Thanks to Andreas Broscheid for offering important feedback to earlier drafts of this blog post.

One of the reckonings I have had to make five months into a global pandemic is that the grounds upon which our classrooms stand continue to feel unstable, confusing, and ever shifting. Educators across the country are once again welcoming into learning spaces amalgamations of stories, experiences, memories—and trauma. Teachers and learners are resuming virtual classes with bodies that have experienced too much, too fast, and are likely to be overwhelmed even before the beginning of a new academic year. So how might the design of our classes and pedagogies grapple with and take into account the profound and collective shifts, disempowerment, and emotional and physical challenges that COVID-19 has imposed on us? How might we design experiences of presence and regard using a practice I call “a pedagogy of affection”? In an effort to answer these questions, I have been taking a closer look at classroom interactions between March and May of 2020. Looking back at my notes, I notice an important pattern: a more open naming of how our heightened instability aroused feelings of helplessness, anxiety, worry, withdrawal, grief, preoccupation. Students also asked for (and were granted) extensions on assignments, opportunities to process their response to the pandemic via check-ins, campus ministry, zoom happy hours, chapel services, and so on. Our conversations expanded beyond so-called disciplinary boundaries to include questions like “How is your breathing today?” and “What kind of insecurity are you dealing with in this moment? Did you have enough to eat? Did you have a restful sleep?” and even “How is your undivided unit of bodyspiritplacetime?” as Patrisia Gonzalez put it. Some of us may have asked our students how their bodies were metabolizing fear and anxiety, housing and food insecurities, whether they had a computer to work from, a stable enough shelter. We may have encouraged them to occupy institutional spaces to speak and write about how they were envisioning us showing up for them in the most meaningful and regard-filled ways. One of my student-teachers, Jacob Perez, asked in one of our institutional meetings whether we would be willing to stretch our “understanding of pedagogy beyond what happens when a zoom link goes live.” Having co-created together a special reading course on “Queering and Decolonizing Pedagogies,” Perez invited reflection on the power of implicit pedagogies, affirming that they “occur in the contexts and contours of how we come to the classroom.”[ii] In finding ways to navigate the spring of 2020, we began to ask how we could hold space for breath and feeling and truth telling; how we could mutually co-create spaces of presence, regard, and care, responding to the many urgencies named above. Some of us began to write love-lectures, began starting classes with breathing and stretching exercises or a more robust check-in where we could talk about anger, vulnerabilities, dissociations, isolation, the ongoing inability to concentrate, police brutality, anti-Blackness, grief. Some of us reconsidered dead-lines, exams, grades. Zebulon Hurst, for example, poeticized his longings through a publication co-authored with Perez, as well as this poetic piece, even before the uprisings began:“i wonder when my Black life will matter beyond a sign in the window/ i wonder when i will go home / i wonder where is home / i wonder if my aunties are safe i mean / i know they aren’t but / i wonder if anyone beyond the bonds of my genetic material cares about that. / i wonder if you love me the way you say you do.” This pandemic, the ensuing uprisings, the incapacity of governments to decently respond to the population’s most pressing needs interrupted our lives in unimaginable ways. We haven’t really recovered or adequately processed much of what happened in the first semester of 2020. And with that, a question haunts me: How are we to begin a new academic year integrating the overlay of stories and traumas that circulate in our bodies, histories, and memories? How are we to think about pedagogies of affection and presence with integrity instead of reinforcing pedagogies of cruelty and trauma response in minoritized students in higher education? A set of pedagogical choices that are trauma-informed may prove helpful in designing our fall courses as the global pandemic has barely subsided, our communities continue to be in danger, and as we brace ourselves for this year’s election cycle. 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. In Pedagogy of the Heart, Paulo Freire reflected on his experience of trauma: a forced exile after the violent Brazilian coup d’état, which took place in 1964. His warning that trauma is not simply something to be lived through—but rather, is something to be felt, to be acknowledged, and to be suffered—is fundamental for our times.[iv] He also warned about the dangers of creating disjointed communities during times of crises where members interact with one another through a “functional” system and a set of transactional interactions. For Freire, the only way forward is one that implicates us in each other’s well-being, with presence, integrity, solidarity, emotional roots, and communion. In order to develop such bonds of affection, presence, and regard, we would have to apprehend the “tragedy of ruptures” while acknowledging our collective crises, all while maintaining a lively political-pedagogical response-ability and epistemological curiosity. With Freire’s pedagogical charge in mind, a fellow co-conspirator and faculty colleague at the Pacific School of Religion—Dr. Aizaiah Yong—and I designed a course on spiritual formation that is mindful of such pedagogies of the heart via embodied, spiritual, and artistic practices. One goal of the course is to co-construct with students a “covenant of presence and regard” through synchronous and asynchronous exercises such as contemplative practices, writing prompts, artmaking, and a “Spiritual Care Package.” The required “readings,” aside from a curated multivocal range of scholars, are experimental and will include poetry, podcasts, documentaries, and the visual arts, delineating an anatomy of learning that leans more into instability and unlearning than inflexibility and certitude, as Clelia Rodríguez puts it.[v] Our hope is that these pedagogical choices will continue to affirm an educational journey that not only resists “the worst muck of racialized, ableist heterocapital” settler-colonialism, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs names it, but that is aware of our heartaches, our indignation, our agonies, and our political rage, with all our capacity to be at once “problematic and prophetic.”[vi] As the academic year of 2020-21 draws near, I hope we can continue to commit to pedagogies of affection, presence, and regard that gather the dismembered pieces of our bodies, stories, cultures, and existences so we can continue to imagine and create with a tremendous capacity to intimate this world differently. Notes [i] Patrisia Gonzales, Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), xix [ii] Jacob Perez (he/his) is a Master of Theological Studies student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and a Co-Chair of the Latinx Religions and Spiritualties Unit for the American Academy of Religion Western Region. Jacob also serves on the Board of Directors for the AARWR as the Student Representative of Northern California. He can be reached at jperez@ses.psr.edu. [iii] Zebulon B. Hurst (he/them) is a Master of Divinity student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. His work weaves together queer intimacies, pleasurepain, somatics, and poetics. Their continued research explores manifestations of fissure, domination, and self-sublimation. Hurst authored a chapter in the 2017 volume edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Erik Jeurgensmeyer, Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing, and Black Lives Matter in Education (New York: Peter Lang). He can be reached at zhurst@ses.psr.edu. [iv] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart (New York: Continuum, 1997), 67. [v] Clelia Rodríguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression, and Pain (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 1-2. [vi] Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 2.

In the early sixties, our three-generational family lived in a tight-knit African American community in north Philly. Van Pelt Street, just off of Diamond Street, was a long city block of home owners who knew each other, looked out for each other, and cared for all the families on the block.  Both sides of the street consisted of row houses – meaning all the houses connected together.  This version of architecture in NYC is called brownstone, but since Philadelphia houses were made of brick, they were called rowhomes. The entrance to the homes were marble stairs with stoops just outside of each door.  Neighbors would sit on their stoops like country folk sit on their front porches.  Sitting on the stoop was a daily activity for almost every household.  As children, my brother and I, once we knew not to run into the street, were free to wonder up and down the street playing and visiting neighbors on their stoops.  Visiting neighbors, while never being out of my parents’ or grandparents’ watchful eye, gave us a sense of interdependence and community.  My parents knew that the farther from home we wondered, the more loving eyes watched us, watched over us and kept us safe. One of our favorite neighbors was Mr. Joe.  Mr. Joe had salt and pepper, closely cut hair and smelled of motor oil. His hands were large and rough and his voice was warm and round. I can’t remember a time Mr. Joe did not smile when he saw me. Mr. Joe wore blue coveralls, and in the pocket of his coveralls, we soon learned, was candy. Mr. Joe would come home from work, go inside, then in short order, return to sit on his stoop. When my brother and I saw Mr. Joe on his stoop, we would go for a visit.  Mr. Joe never disappointed – he was always glad for our visits and always offered us candy.  If my brother was offered a piece of candy while I was not with him, he would say to Mr. Joe, “Can I have one for my sister?” And, Mr. Joe would say of course, reach back into his pocket and give my brother a second piece of candy.  Brent would run home and give me my piece candy.  If I was visiting Mr. Joe without Brent, and Mr. Joe gave me a piece of candy, I would simply say, “Thank you” to Mr. Joe, then run home and give my brother my piece of candy.  Brent, seeing I only had one piece, would ask, “Why didn’t you ask for one for me?”  My brother and I soon learned I was too shy to ask, too shy to say anything other than “thank you” even to beloved neighbor Mr. Joe. As a child, I was unable to voice what I needed.  Sometimes saying what you need seems intimidating and scary. By the way, Brent never took my one piece of candy for himself.  Years later, I was in a conversation with my Dean. The Dean had just taken the administrative post a few months before, and had scheduled conversations with each faculty person. The conversations were to get acquainted and to talk about curriculum participation. At my appointment, the Dean and I were having a congenial conversation.  Then, his last question stumped me.  The Dean asked me, “What do you need?”  The question halted me. My hesitation was as much due to the way he asked the question, as the question itself.  The Dean asked the question as if he intended to act upon my answer.  Feeling the sincerity of the question gave it more gravity.  In the moment, I felt disappointed that I had no real answer. This was not like the moment with Mr. Joe when I was too shy to say what I needed. By the time I sat with the dean, I was a well-voiced scholar. The question posed by the dean revealed that I had not done sufficient reflection or imagination work to rise to the level of his inquiry. Indeed, what do I need to teach well, better, or differently? The question was not a question of supplies.  The Dean was not asking if I needed ink pens or a new desk chair. And, he was not asking about such things as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, nor was he making an inquiry about the existential nature of my being. The Dean was asking me - what do you need in order to improve your teaching? What do you need to further immerse yourself in your own pedagogical project? What support do you need to engage the issues of your work? What can our intellectual community do to support your teaching agendas, practices, habits, or experiments? In this moment, I realized I had been so busy doing my project, I had taken little time to imaginatively reflect upon the doing of my project. I did not know what I needed and, in that moment, I could not say what I needed.  Knowing what you need takes meditation, contemplation, inquiry, investigation, consideration, creativity and maybe -- conversations with friends that may involve drinking brown liquor, eating fatty foods and dancing. At the risk of stating the obvious, change is here to stay.  In this moment, to engage the question “what do you need?” requires a more than cursory understanding of the context our work inhabits.  The changes wrought in higher education, in general, and in our classrooms, specifically, are many and large. This season of COVID 19 quarantine, the Black Lives Matter movement, the extraordinary dilemma of government leadership, the shifting weather patterns, the US and global economic volatility, and global transformations are here to stay and have critical bearing upon our teaching lives.  Even the notion of change being here to stay does not mean we are now static – in any way.  The changes themselves are still changing.  This dynamism, shifting, twisting and uncertainty is the new normal. We are surrounded personally, corporately, and nationally by grief, loss, and uncertainty. Our classrooms, our students, our selves have changed and will continue to change. We cannot be too shy or voiceless in engaging the question of need, and we cannot be unprepared or lacking critical reflection and imagination to answer this question with depth, guts and heart. Brothers and sisters, what do you need in order to teach - right now? In the midst of this ever-deepening flux, what would it mean to create space for conversation which can hold liminality and certainty as creative tension so that the emerging educational paradigms our society spawns now, and into the future, is nurtured? The Wabash Center has been working toward creating space so that colleagues can reflect and plan for what is needed in the right-now and the soon-to-be.  Here is some of our work product: Launch of the Digital Salons in September. The six Digital Salons, bringing 95 colleagues into conversation to talk about what is needed. Improving The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching Creating online symposiums to be in conversation with major artists Webinars dedicated to antiracist practices Podcasts with more than 5,000 downloads Partnership with the Collegeville Institute about creative writing for scholars who want to speak into the public square Our staff is doing our own training in cultural competency Searching for new associate director Expanded online resource pages and materials created Three new blog series were created: Teaching for Social Justice and Civic Engagement; Teaching and Learning During Crisis; Director’s blog series “Teaching on the Pulse.” and more to be announced soon… It took me a couple months, but I did answer my Dean’s inquiry about my needs.  The answer I gave him was thoughtful, generative, and, suggested my need for a new trajectory in my teaching project.  Strengthening the ecology of our schools likely means providing one another with what is needed.

As we begin thinking about our fall courses (sorry!), we may again find ourselves facing unfamiliar teaching contexts; some of us may be teaching courses that are online or hybrid or “HyFlex” (*insert brain-exploding emoji here*) for the first time; some of us may be trying to make in-person classes work, under the totally compromised conditions of social distancing; some of us may be anticipating a pivot, yet again, as we watch the Covid caseloads rise in our states. Now, more than ever, it is important for us to be “transparent” in our teaching. Transparency will help students learning online for the first time, students for whom the college experience is one big “hidden curriculum” anyway, students at some remove from their instructors and peers, students in generally uncertain times. The concept of “transparency” in learning and teaching in higher education emerged out of the work of Mary-Ann Winkelmes, now at Brandeis University. This Faculty Focus article also offers a helpful synopsis, but, essentially, when designing assignments, it’s important for us to be clear, explicit, and direct about the “purpose” (i.e., why have students do the assignment), “task” (i.e., what students are being asked to do and how), and “criteria” (i.e., how their work will be assessed). One thing I love about this transparent teaching intervention is that, while it benefits all students, it has been shown to especially help students from underserved populations succeed. It’s not always easy to be transparent, so some reflection and excavation may be needed here. There are a lot of differences between experts and novices, but one distinction is that so much for experts is tacit, intuitive, hidden, seamless, “natural.” I recently picked up bike-riding again, for the first time in 25 years, and it has been astounding to discover how many difficult, intricate, and unexpected steps are involved in what seem to be the simplest of actions: braking entails figuring out which foot to put on the ground when I stop, and not toppling over as I do so; signaling entails being able to take one hand off the handlebars and still maintain balance (while not toppling over as I do so); riding the mile and a half to work entails being able to make it up previously unappreciated hills with a complex arrangement of gear switching and leg burning (and not toppling over as I do so . . . are you noticing a theme?). Yet my cyclist friends make this all look easy! So, when I lead workshops on transparency, I encourage all of my expert colleagues to think about the following questions in order to unearth their assignments: Purpose (the skills practiced, the knowledge gained): What are the learning objectives for the assignment? Do these objectives align with any of your overall course objectives or goals? Why is the assignment important for students to do? How might this assignment have importance or relevance beyond the course? What would be an “authentic” assignment for this subject matter, field, or associated profession? Task (what to do and how to do it) Does the kind of assignment make sense, given its purpose? What is the genre or type of assignment? Who is the audience and what role(s), if any, should students take on? Is there a sequence or “scaffolded” series of steps that students should follow? Are there any pitfalls to avoid along the way? Criteria (what excellence looks like, with criteria in advance to help students to self-evaluate): By what standards will the assignment be graded? Is there a rubric or checklist that students can be given, at the outset, to guide their work? What opportunities will students have had to practice before the final deadline? Who will give formative feedback besides you? Are there any excellent examples (especially annotated ones) for students to learn from? I began to incorporate transparency into my own assignments several years ago. Check out this “movie review” assignment, from my Religion & Film course, to see how I tried to clarify purpose, task, and criteria. What might this look like in your classes? Going further, some colleagues at the University of Virginia and I developed an assignment rubric to help faculty gauge the transparency of their assignments. We wanted to be as transparent as possible about transparency! Good luck.

When our courses went online in the spring, many of our students kept their cameras turned off in class. It was eerie. When my students wouldn’t say anything, I felt like I was speaking into a void, and my imagination started running wild. Was anybody else really out there? Maybe they had all just . . . left? Even when most students were talking, I wondered about those who weren’t. Were they still paying attention? I had no idea. It’s tempting to address this problem by adding a strict camera policy to our syllabi for the fall: Students must keep the camera on during online classes. Several of my colleagues are doing just that. I understand the impulse, and I agree that we need to find ways to help our students stay focused in our online classes. Making sure that we can see them and that they know it would be a simple start. But let’s think more before we add a camera policy to our syllabi. Why do students want to turn their cameras off in the first place? I’m sure some of them do it so that they can goof off without their professors noticing. But not all of them: Some students are embarrassed about what people will see in their homes: Poverty. A mess. A crowded space. A virtual background will hide all that, but students can only use one if their computer meets certain system requirements. On an older computer with older software, the virtual background won’t work. And of course, poor students are more likely to have an older computer. The camera makes some students acutely self-conscious, which makes sense given that it broadcasts a closeup of one’s face to the entire class for the entire class period. My favorite description of the experience is from “Why Zoom is terrible”: “You feel like every eyeball is on you, like a very intimidating job interview." I share this experience. Honestly, just reading the line from the New York Times makes my heart race. After the first painful month of Zoom meetings, I began turning the camera off as often as possible. It made the meetings less exhausting, and it became much easier for me to focus and to listen to what people were saying. If students are feeling overly self-conscious, they won’t learn well and won’t speak much. Are there other reasons for keeping the cameras on? We might think that seeing each other’s faces improves communication. In non-virtual face-to-face interactions, it does. Without noticing it, we process and interpret a flood of subtle facial cues, adding to what we learn from the other person’s words and tone of voice. But on Zoom, the imperfect video feed obscures those crucial small cues. We just don’t see the faces well enough, and so, we get faulty cues which can mislead us. We might communicate better with the cameras off. Requiring cameras to be on probably helps some students pay attention and the cameras allow us to see that our students are still there. But seeing their faces probably doesn’t improve our conversations, and the cameras make other students self-conscious, and thus less likely to participate and pay attention. So, can we find other ways of checking that our students are paying attention? I think so. In my class, we’ll develop a set of norms together. I plan to ask them: How do we normally show each other that we’re paying attention and that what others are saying matters to us? If we have cameras off, most of our usual ‘I’m listening’ signals won’t work, so what should we do instead? I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with! In the meantime, here are some ideas of my own for confirming that they are paying attention: Gentle cold calling (soft-ball questions). Have them type questions, comments, and answers to questions in the chat. Mini quizzes or mini papers partway through class. Exit slip at the end of class: “What was the most important thing you learned in class today and what question do you have?” All of these will be low-stakes assignments; and students will get full credit if it looks like they paid attention. Like the rest of us, I am looking forward to seeing my students’ faces again, but my Zoom class is not the right time for that. I’ll save that for office hours and small group discussions. In class, I’ll settle for their profile pictures and their voices. Note: I wish the idea about developing a set of norms was my own, but I got it from one of my esteemed colleagues at Stonehill.