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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.

Hospitality does not begin faraway, but near. We learn what hospitality is by reaching out to persons near to us—persons we pass by every day, persons who share our highways and hallways, our sidewalks and side streets. This past fall, forty-eight leaders from around our community gathered to tell “near stories” to one another about their experience of race and racism, privilege and power in their lives. These community leaders included local judges, superintendents and principals of schools, CEOs of health systems, business owners, college administrators, and, notably, police officers—the very leaders shaping the response to the unholy trinity of Covid-19, systemic racism, and misinformation. This group of busy, highly educated leaders committed to twelve hours of honest dialogue about the history and ongoing impact of racism in our country and our community. The dialogue followed what is known as a “caring circle” model—a model that requires participants, first and foremost, to listen actively to one another without judgment. That is, it asks us to “hear each other to speech,” as the racial justice activist Nelle Morton exhorted. The difficult realities of our shared life together in the United States—things like our biases, the past and present ways in which we have discriminated against persons based on the identities we decided were most important, the ongoing effects of racial violence and trauma—are not always easy to hear into speech among friends, much less among powerful community leaders. But the dialogues didn’t start with these difficult topics. The conversations begin with questions designed to reset the frame of the relationships in the caring circle. Participants were no longer their job titles or their positions of formal authority, they were human beings subject in myriad ways to the fundamental need to belong. The circle began: Tell me an experience of when you belonged? Tell me an experience of when you felt excluded? Participants start by relearning in a highly structured, formal way how to practice hospitality to one another, and this allows them to hear each other to speech about what we know to be some of our most profound, shared needs as human beings: the need to be recognized as whole persons with complex, unique stories that have something to contribute to the “we are” part of “I am because we are.” At the same time, circles emphasize the need to recognize in others something of the “I am”—something that connects who I am deeply to who you are you, to what it means to be human. That is, they start with near stories that illumine in their very particularity something of the universal ties that bind us together. Though some might quibble with the phrase, they are religious stories in the sense that they aim to “re-bind” (re-ligare) us together—to reaffirm our shared commitment to hospitality in the face of hostility and reinforce the threads that bind us together in the face of the threats that tear us apart. I would like to believe that these dialogues and the relationships they established prepared our community to respond with greater integrity and humility to the systemic and institutional racism at the heart of the racial uprisings this summer. Like so many things in this moment, the justification for my belief may only be confirmed with the advantage of hindsight. But as I turn my attention more fully to this fall’s syllabi, I am even more convinced that my tendency to fill weeks with content needs to be mitigated by the foregrounding of process and the centering of relationships in the classroom. It is not that content is unimportant. The “deep dive dialogues” among community leaders included content—presentations about systemic racism, health inequities, and implicit bias locally, for example—but this content was embedded in multiple processes of relationship building throughout our time together. In this way, the intimacy of hearing each other to speech in our small groups became the starting point for listening to what the presentations had to teach. What I have been describing is likely familiar to many who have attended (perhaps even led) workshops and trainings related to racial justice. But all too often the pedagogical insight does not quite make the leap from the workshop to the classroom. Even among well intentioned faculty whose courses are most amenable to flipping the classroom and devoting several weeks to relationship building and near stories, content always threatens to colonize the curriculum; the participatory language of covenant gives way to convenience, transposed into the more expedient and expected legalese of a learning contract. When teaching courses animated by issues of social justice (are there any that aren’t?), we knowingly enter into a charged space—even before we take roll on the first day of classes. As we enter a Fall semester in which pandemics, politics, and protests will be carried daily into our classrooms—by both persons and pedagogies masked and unmasked—this is the question I find myself returning to in the design of my syllabi: how do we help set the conditions for what Parker Palmer describes as a necessary paradox, namely, a charged but hospitable classroom, one in which the practice of hearing each other to speech is as much a process as an outcome? If our religious studies and theology classrooms are to be places of preparation for creative engagement in this imperfect world, to borrow from Faith Ngunjiri’s understanding of servant leadership, then we do well to make ample space in our courses for modeling discursive practices that counter hate speech with hospitality, callousness with compassion, and the pathology of violence with the promise of peace. For me, one way to do this with integrity will be to commit to the caring circle model as a pedagogical anchor for the course and not merely an ice-breaker in the first week of class.

When I go to work in the morning, the first thing I do is read the Bible. I read a bunch of commentaries, take a bunch of notes, then prayerfully reflect on the text. Then I set to work coming up with a meaningful and compelling way of communicating my interpretation to my listeners. Then I lift the piano lid. You see, I’m a composer of sacred music. At its heart, my job is to present an interpretation of Scripture to my listeners in a way that is interesting, convincing, and spiritually valuable. Unfortunately, few Christians ever hear my sacred music. That’s because I don’t write choral anthems or praise songs. I write sacred concert music: classical works that responds to themes, ideas, and texts from the Christian tradition. I’ve written a piano trio inspired by the book of Job, a song cycle that sets Rilke poems, and a brass quintet that explores the concept of perichoresis. (Humblebrag: of this piece, Walter Brueggemann wrote to me: “I am not a great theologian but have pondered “perichoresis” for a long time. This is the finest exposition of that thick idea that I have encountered.” Be still my beating heart!) Now, if I wrote a lot of choral music, I wouldn’t be complaining nearly as much. But today, most of history’s great church music composers face the same problems as me. While we do hear choral works by Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn occasionally on Sunday mornings, the place where we usually encounter their sacred music is in the concert hall. This is an example of a strange irony: though most of us have nearly unlimited access to the corpus of great sacred music–either live or on Spotify-we Christians rarely have the chance to intentionally explore its spiritual value in the context of Christian community. As a result, we are missing out on the many ways sacred music can contribute to our lives as Christians–beyond its role in worship. In this post I’d like to provide a case study of a way that a different approach to sacred music can contribute to our work as educators. First, take about 15 minutes to listen to three new musical settings of Psalm 148 (scroll down for texts and info about each setting). Each was written in 2019 by a contemporary composer representing a different Christian tradition: Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and Armenian Apostolic. Now that you’ve listened, let me ask you a question: which of these pieces interpreted the psalm correctly? Obviously, this is not the right question to ask. Yet it’s a familiar one, as it’s the one that so many students initially bring to the task of Biblical interpretation. And as educators, we know that ridding a student of this hermeneutic habit is the very first thing we need to accomplish in our classes. Listening to these three musical settings makes this easy. Each piece is an authentic, honest, and personal response to a rich and mysterious text. Each provokes us to think about the psalm in a completely different way: not just encouraging us to provide different interpretations of the psalm, but to ask completely different kinds of questions about it–and of ourselves. Heard back-to-back, the three settings testify incontrovertibly to the possibility–and, I might add, the necessity–of complementary, mutually-enriching interpretations of the same text. If we are going to teach the next generation of pastors, theologian, and laypeople, we know that these are the attitudes toward Scripture that we need to promote. More than anything, we need to convince our students to devote themselves to a lifetime of continuous exploration and re-exploration of our tradition. Beyond that, we need to encourage them to develop an attitude of humility, an awareness of the contingent nature of our own interpretations, and the courage to ask complex questions and follow them where they may lead. Sacred music helps us accomplish these goals. It opens up the field of interpretation by inviting us to engage with the Bible in ways that are not ideological, simplistic, or narrow, but instead subjective, affective, and open-ended. But this can only happen if we think creatively about new ways to use it in our classrooms and our churches. My new organization Deus Ex Musica, which developed the project culminating in the videos you watched, is my own humble attempt. For more than a millennium, composers have given us unique, powerful, and provocative musical interpretations of Scripture. They continue to do so today. In a world that increasingly promotes simple, ideologically-driven solutions to problems, I think sacred music has the potential to remind us that our tradition is rich, mysterious, and resistant to easy answers. Whether you are an educator, pastor, or layperson, I encourage you to seek out opportunities to explore the ways it can contribute to your ministry and your life of faith. Thanks for listening!

Like many of you, perhaps, I’ve been involved in a lot of race-related conversations at my institution lately. These conversations are usually among folks who I might, if pressed, call “allies,” “accomplices,” or even “co-conspirators”—well-intentioned, social justice advocates who are wanting to make real change at our institution, particularly in the ways we support the learning, sense of belonging, mental health, retention, and success of our underserved student populations. Yet I’ve noticed a trend in these various conversations, which, frankly, I find troubling. The trend is this: the problem (and thus, implicitly, any solution) always seems to be located elsewhere, outside the meeting space, in the ones who are not “woke”—that is, students, colleagues, and administrators ‘over there.’ This move, and it is a one I recognize and have made myself many times before, only serves to distance ourselves from the need for critical self-reflection, for taking responsibility, for offering apologies, for tough internal change. Exploring, even confronting, ourselves is a crucial step in doing any kind of social justice work, including what we might want to be doing with students in our classes. How can we effectively lead conversations about, for instance, antisemitism or Islamophobia when we ourselves haven’t done the necessary inner work of racial justice? Professor of Law Rhonda Magee offers an “ecological model of social change,” which, yes, aspires toward interconnectedness and collective transformation, but which, first, depends on the work we do within and on ourselves. For Magee, the focus is on mindfulness, awareness, self-compassion, and resilience. What are our physical sensations? What are our emotional responses? What are our fears? What are our immediate judgments? For me, such increased awareness leads me to ask some tough questions: How am I complicit? How is my department? How is our discipline? A few years ago, I read Irving’s Waking Up White and, I’m embarrassed to admit, realized for the first time in my life that I was, in fact, white. This set me on a course to better understand “white privilege”—how being white has affected me, what paths it has smoothed over for me, what barriers it has removed for me—invisibly, seamlessly, without me even noticing or trying. I’ve read Oluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race, DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, and I’ve been unsettled, even disturbed, at some of the things I’ve discovered about myself. I won’t record them here, as I imagine they would be upsetting for some readers, but I assure you that this aspect of my social identity invariably affects how I show up as a friend, as a neighbor, as a colleague, as a team leader, as a teacher. When we talk about implicit bias, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about microaggressions, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. When we talk about the problems, it’s not just “them,” it’s me. Ongoing self-exploration, “fierce moral audits” as a friend of mine likes to say, is necessary as we work with and alongside our students. There are wonderful tools and resources available online, such as this Anti-Racist Educator Questionnaire and Rubric. Folks of color (like those at yourblackfriendsarebusy) have been generous in curating, writing, talking, protesting, singing, illustrating, imagining. For me, these efforts are not to (continue to) center whiteness or to get kudos and congratulations for doing what is essentially the bare minimum; it is to better ourselves before attempting to better anyone else. In a recent blog post, Sarah Farmer wrote beautifully of her experiences with students: Justice-seeking conversations challenge students at the core. Students aren’t just grappling with social justice concepts theoretically; they wrestle with their very identities. I invite that wrestling in the class. I want the class to be a space where they can explore, discover, challenge, reconstruct, and dream of a better world and their participation in that world together. But each of these actions require courage. I imagine my classroom as a stage, one where students are invited to “try on” these new courageous ways of doing and being socially just. Her words work just as well if you replace “students” with “us” or “we.” This work is challenging for us. We are wrestling with our very identities. We are (or should be) exploring, discovering, challenging, reconstructing, and dreaming. Social justice requires courage—not just of them, but of us too.

Effective online teaching requires applying sound pedagogy, the same as those practiced in the classroom experience. One such practice is induction–and, you can never overdo it. When I was in parish ministry, our staff met weekly to do worship planning. In addition to reviewing text, sermon topic, music, hymns, and other components of the worship service we would always decide on the questions, “how will we enter the room?” and "how will we close the service?" That is, how and when would the worship leaders (choir, pastoral staff, etc.) enter the worship space so as to lead the congregation into the worship experience? How would we signal the "start" of the worship experience? We wanted to “set” the tone, affect, and focus of the worship experience by creating expectancy at the start, helping the congregants know how and what to pay attention to during the service, and moving them toward response and closure at the end of the service. The same principles apply to learning. In a learning environment, induction (or, “set induction”) refers to those actions by the teacher designed to introduce the students to the learning experience, be it a course of study or a lesson. Induction helps the learners relate their experiences to the objectives of the lesson or course (building on what they know to acquire what they do not). Using set induction will orient your students to the course (or lesson) and put them in a receptive frame of mind that will facilitate learning. Two purposes of set induction are: (1) to focus student attention on the lesson or course–-its purpose and relevance to the student; and (2) to create an organizing framework for the ideas, concepts, principles, or information which is to follow. Effective application of set induction will provide important instructional functions for your students. It will serve as an advanced organizer, create expectancy, and identify why the content is meaningful, which is an important motivator for learning. In a classroom setting many instructors use the course syllabus as a tool for course induction. Walking your students through a well-designed course syllabus will provide a framework for helping your students answer the Ws that are anxiously rattling around in their minds: who, what, when, where, and, how? Admittedly, most instructors do not take enough time using this technique. Which is why you may get asked several times during the course, “When is the final exam due, again?” Or, "what should I write my paper on?" When setting up your online course environment practice I.R.A. and use the Ws. I.R.A. stands for “Information Reduces Anxiety.” When your students begin a course, they have a level of anxiety and are looking to understand what the course is about and what will be expected of them as a learner. Front load your course site with as much information as your students need to answer their questions; but no more than that. When you design your introduction/orientation page, embed the Ws (who, what, when, where, why, and how). These are the questions for which they are seeking answers. As your course progresses, cut back on the course orientation content, reduce content coverage, and increase learner engagement activities and opportunities. Does your course introduction or orientation answer the following for the students? Who is this course for? What is this course about? What is its focus? What is the big idea? What are the expected student learning outcomes? What background knowledge, skills, or competencies does the student need to succeed in the course? What does the student need to do first to begin the course? When will this course start? When will it conclude? When are the assignments due? Where can the student find information and resources (course syllabus, schedule, handouts, readings, rubrics, links, etc.). Why is this course meaningful? Why is the focus of study important? How will the student successfully complete the course? How will the student demonstrate attainment of learning or mastery of skill? How will the student's work be assessed?

What comes to mind when I say the word “predictable?” The comfort of knowing that you will walk into the same class every day? Or perhaps repeatedly teaching the same (boring) thing? Often the latter negative interpretation wins out. But I’ve never thought of predictability as inherently bad, and the current pandemic and scramble to move into new modalities reinforced the importance of predictability as a stabilizing mechanism in times of crisis. Students crave a sense of normalcy in the classroom, which becomes apparent any time you want to try something new. It was particularly evident last spring when we had to swiftly switch to remote teaching and learning. I was able to make the transition relatively smoothly in large part because my courses were based around a few easily replicable principles: predictability and flexibility. Predictability during Normal Instruction Creating classes from the outset with these ideas in mind can help ease transitions between in-person and online learning. The most salient points are to: Integrate the Learning Management System: Use the LMS as much as possible in order to familiarize students (and yourself) with online course structures. Post all class readings, handouts, and PowerPoints and make students submit quizzes, papers, and tests 100% digitally. Use Diverse Teaching Strategies: Mix activities in every class to engage student learning: shorter lectures, primary text reading and analysis, recall of previous course content, brief videos, and small and large-group discussions. This variety creates students who can navigate quickly among many different activities by drawing on a relatively large repertoire of familiar course activities. Utilize Universal Design for Learning: UDL principles are key to shaping flexible in-person and online course structures. This can be done in part by using Backwards Design which helps eliminate extraneous work and streamlines classes down to the essentials to quickly convert between in-person and online instruction. Predictability in Crisis When we moved online, students adapted quickly, even remarking that they were happy the class could return to “normal” within three days, despite being completely asynchronous for accessibility reasons. To do this: Draw on Your Diverse Teaching Strategies: In Spring 2020, I gave virtual lectures of about 20-35 minutes with enhanced slides, additional outlines, and at-home activities. I also posted videos and readings we would have had in-class with guided questions. Engage Directly with Students: To replace in-class discussions, I created discussion boards on the LMS that I monitored and responded to once a week. I also created daily journals on GoogleDocs that I would respond to 2-3 times a week; this gave students predictable interactive time. Keep to the Schedule: Aside from pushing back a few students’ presentations, I kept all the due dates in the class the same. Students responded well by filling out their journals, turning (most of) their work in on time, taking quizzes, writing papers, etc. Accept Your Imperfections: One of the key things to my success was that I did not try to make anything perfect. Instead, I was predictable; I was the professor I was in class, complete with silly jokes, awkward pauses, and mistakes. By the time we made the switch, we had established a predictable yet flexible routine for learning that students could follow online. In fact, my classes were so predictable that when my videos didn’t appear one day by 8 PM, I got multiple emails from students asking if I was alright. What Predictability is Not I want to be clear, however, that being predictable does not mean avoiding crisis. Addressing crisis can take many forms within a predictable structure: discussion questions linking course content to current events or forums dedicated to student views on what is happening. Predictability means acting like the class we have is the one we want to have. As instructors, it is important to remember that we might be the one solid thing in students’ lives when everything else feels beyond their control. Making this fact central to pedagogical practice means being predictable yet willing to change the class in predictable ways when necessary. Using Predictability Wisely In times of crisis, it is natural for people to seek something steady, and our classes can be this. Still, I’m not going to pretend this was easy because it wasn’t. Predictability was and is in short supply, and the emotional and physical toll of the pandemic and recent campaigns for racial justice are extremely taxing, especially for Black, Latinx, Native American, and other minority groups. But the sense of normalcy in the class was good for both students and myself, giving us a structure to our days when everything seemed so strange. I’ll take this into the coming year which is bound to be (un)predictable.

Like most construction projects in the neighborhood where I live, education rarely takes place on an empty lot. A building is already present. It can be demolished and replaced, repaired, or enlarged; but a successful builder will not ignore it. Learners and teachers alike need to consider how new information relates to learners’ prior understandings. Learners ordinarily integrate new ideas and experiences within existing knowledge structures, but sometimes new information causes enough cognitive dissonance to motivate either a replacement of old understandings or a rejection of the new. Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am participating as a learner in a course on womanist hermeneutics taught by Dr. Mitzi Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary.[i] Dr. Smith knows from hard experience that teaching womanist hermeneutics typically requires much deconstructive as well as constructive work. Her most recent post, “Decentering Biblical Interpretation is Anti-Racism Work,” testifies to the taxing nature of that challenge, especially for an African American woman teaching in a majority white context. As a learner, I have the freedom and responsibility to decide whether and how I will change my understanding of hermeneutics. This work, too, can be emotionally and intellectually taxing. It can involve modifying or discarding beliefs that have been central to my identity and sense of purpose. Or it can require negotiating tensions while moving toward synthesis and integration. With the intensive portion of the course about to begin, I would like to survey some of my prior commitments in order to test their compatibility with womanist hermeneutics. Along the way, I will mention some pedagogical implications of those commitments. I interpret the Bible as a Christian immersed in the Anabaptist and Pietist streams of the Radical Reformation. “Seeking the mind of Christ together” is an essential goal in this tradition, and Bible study is one means to pursue that goal. For me, seeking the mind of Christ is analogous to other interpersonal relationships in which I attempt to learn how someone feels and thinks. Along with other disciples, I ask the living Jesus, “What do you think of this text, and how do you want us to respond to it now?” I ask similar questions when the interpretive process begins with a contemporary situation instead of a biblical text. For example, “What do you think of unjust policing, or of the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on people of color? How do you want us to respond?” Christ-centered hermeneutics allows for prioritization and critique of biblical texts. It is not a matter of doing whatever we want with scripture, but of prayerfully discerning what Jesus wants. When asked about a text, Jesus may answer, “You have heard that it was said . . . , but I say to you” (Matt 5:21-48); or “Go and learn what this means:  ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’” (Matt 9:13; 12:27). Justice, mercy, and love are essential values in Jesus’ reading of scripture. Jesus is especially inclined to reject scriptural reasoning that reinforces unjust privilege and marginalization. Dr. Smith has offered a similar thought about African-American hermeneutics: “Critical engagement with the Scriptures could involve a resistance to and/or a rejection of some biblical texts and yet leave ‘my Jesus’ intact.”[ii] To imagine Jesus faithfully is often counter-cultural work. Although incarnated in a male body, Jesus does not conform to societal expectations of gender. Jesus has never been white. Thus, I am especially drawn to the image that Dr. Smith put at the top of her Moodle page:  Jesus, who is black, covers his eyes in dismay at the injustice around and within us. Although students may or may not share my Christ-centered approach, it affects how I teach them. I assume that another Teacher is present in the classroom (or wherever the students are). Jesus may speak through anyone, most often through people who have been marginalized. My academic training is a resource for students, but it gives me no claim to superior authority. Instead, my primary task is to lead students in the formation of an intersubjective and intercontextual community of inquiry where they can learn from one another, from me, and from a range of other interpreters. In such communities we can all hope to stand corrected as Jesus uses conversation partners to raise insights, questions, or objections that we might have otherwise ignored. The communal emphasis of Anabaptism warns against a complacent, individualistic approach in which any interpretation is deemed valid regardless of its impact on peoples’ lives or its relationship to the text. We need loving communities to correct unloving interpretations while teaching and modeling better ones. I am aware, of course, that communal interpretation is not a panacea. Entire communities might be wrong, and majority votes at church conferences might or might not bring people closer to the mind of Christ. Systemic injustices (racism, sexism, etc.) are endemic to many communities, including many denominations, congregations, and seminaries. These injustices distort both the processes and the outcomes of our discussions. In such circumstances, Jesus often speaks through prophetesses, iconoclasts, and activists to call for repentance by the majority.[iii]  My claim that some interpretations merit rejection does not mean that there is only one right interpretation. Jesus is free to inspire the multiple understandings that different interpreters need at different times. When communal conversations uncover more of a text’s “meaning potential,”[iv] interpreters are better able to discern which possible meanings are just and faithful for their contexts. As a professor I accept responsibility for designing and leading courses in ways that maximize the potential and avoid the pitfalls of communal interpretation. I strive to avoid any hint of systemic injustices in my courses, but I am not perfect in that regard. Sometimes I have allowed a few students to dominate discussions instead of ensuring that all voices are heard. Sometimes the best I can do is repent, apologize, and work to improve in the future. This survey has revealed some common ground between my Christ-centered, communal approach to hermeneutics and what I am learning from Dr. Smith. I, too, decenter the Bible to some extent, and I understand Christ to have an ethical agenda like hers. [i] Earlier blogs have introduced this learning opportunity. See Daniel W. Ulrich, “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during Covid-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/, and Mitzi J. Smith, “Change and the Baggage I Bring to This Collaboration” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/change-and-the-baggage-i-bring-to-this-collaboration/. [ii] Mitzi J. Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 66. [iii] See Mitzi J. Smith, “‘This Little Light of Mine’: The Womanist Biblical Scholar as Prophetess, Iconoclast, and Activist,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 109-127. [iv] Brian K. Blount, “The Souls of Biblical Folks and the Potential for Meaning,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138 (Spring 2019): 6–21, esp. 14.

In a webinar on “white allies” moderated by Dr. Lynne Westfield, her guests Drs. Melanie Harris and Jennifer Garvey discussed their collective anti-racism work. Dr. Harris stated that she feels called to work with white colleagues around anti-racism, but that white colleagues must do some preparatory anti-racism work before engaging black people in conversation or enlisting their help. I do not sense a call to anti-racism work with or for white people, but I find myself in the thick of it every time I teach a class open to all students and more so in a seminary where white students are the majority. When white students arrive in my courses, they find that black and brown scholars and our scholarship are centered, thereby decentering whiteness. A question that some white colleagues and students ask after reading my womanist work for the first time, which is the case with this “African American Biblical Interpretation and the Gospel of Luke” course I am currently teaching, is “how do we know when we have gone too far?” (implication, you have gone too far?). Or they assert that “we must find the original meaning of the Bible before we can apply the truth” to contemporary contexts. I have never expressly articulated my work as a womanist biblical scholar as anti-racism work prior to this collaboration between a white male professor, Dr. Dan Ulrich (as learning professor in the course) and the dominantly white Bethany Theological Seminary/Earlham School of Religion where he teaches. This collaboration is my most labor-intensive anti-racism work in the classroom to date. Teaching biblical studies as an African American female has never been without the challenges of sexism, racism, and classism. I am sure that this isolation required of me during this pandemic has lowered my threshold for racism, but I maintain my composure. Whether it is intentional or not, decentering whiteness while teaching as a black woman is emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically taxing. White people in general are oblivious to the impact of anti-racism work on black scholars as teachers and colleagues. In one breath, many white people position themselves as both progressives and gatekeepers of Eurocentric approaches to interpretation. When the participants (white and black) in this course were polled about how many books they had read by African American biblical scholars prior to this course, many named black theologians like James Cone or Delores Williams. One white male participant wanted to use his knowledge of Martin Luther King Jr. to demonstrate how radical my work is. King is only palatable to most white people and many nonwhite people post-mortem; in his later years King was regarded as radical. To racism, black bodies are easily interchangeable. As the instructor, I can muster the bandwidth to challenge racist assumptions and ideas or I can preserve my energy for other things. Dr. Harris asks herself “what is the garment I must place on my mind, my body, on my spirit to work with white students today?” Yes, so true.  Our consultants to this collaboration, Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary Hess, asked me how I plan to create empathy among my students for people experiencing homelessness. My response was through stories, guest speakers (one of whom experienced homelessness and is now the founder/director of Love Beyond Walls in Atlanta), and Matthew Desmond’s book, Eviction. In a Consciousness-Raising document I constructed, one of the questions is “have you ever experienced trauma?” and “… or homelessness?” Quite a few said they had not. In Eviction, Desmond shares the stories of poor white people (living in a trailer park in the North side of Milwaukee) and poor black people (living in an apartment building on the South side of Milwaukee). Through their stories, readers witness the violent intersectional impact of systemic poverty, racism, and sexism. The question that also arises is how does one create empathy for the plight of black people? The deaths of too many black and brown women and men have been videotaped and circulated on social media; they were suffocated or shot to death by police officers ‘before our eyes.’ George Floyd was not the first; the killers of Breonna Tylor have yet to be arrested. It is unclear whether most white people marching with BLM and SayHerName protests empathize with black people, it is popular now to do so, and/or the pandemic allows for and compels their participation. In this course, how do I create empathy for black people and encourage a need and desire for becoming anti-racist when white people believe they can have their Eurocentric exegesis cake and be progressive or progressing toward unmitigated anti-racism that both empathizes with black peoples and their lived realities with systemic racism and acknowledges (and exposes) sacralized rituals that perform whiteness? John Warren argues that “education relies on maintenance of imagined purity, that education effectively treats and reproduces the cultural logic that bodies of color represent a disturbance in a culture of power, a contaminant against the performative nature of whiteness as a pure and perfect ideal . . . education is a social process and that social process often works in violent ways to erase and inscribe violence on the bodies it encounters.”[1] Whiteness and its performance must be named, made visible to be displaced. One cannot empathize with black people and marginalize the black people’s stories, epistemologies, wisdom, and historical and contemporary experiences. Feminism centers women’s experiences and voices; this alone is troubling to exegesis born in the womb of eurocentrism, androcentrism, and racism. In a recent womanist reading of the story of the so-called “woman caught in adultery,” a white male biblical scholar asked why I must rescue all women. Yesterday, I made the comment “Yoho Must Go” on the YouTube video of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Rep. Yoho. Someone responded to my comment by calling me a “FemiNazi.” I laughed out loud, but sexism, racism, classism, and homo/trans/queer phobia are no laughing matters; oppression is traumatic, debilitating, and death-dealing. The majority students in this course have been indoctrinated to believe that exegesis is the scientific method that yields the truth and/or truths about the Bible; it is the sine qua non to biblical truth. In another student poll, I placed in the Moodle course for the week of July 20, majority students responded with certainty that exegesis is the opposite of eisegesis, as reading out of the text versus reading into the text. How does one encourage empathy for centering black women and our communities, our epistemologies, and our approaches to biblical interpretation that challenge what students believe is objective science (or subjective but superior)? There were no scientists at the table during the Enlightenment when European white biblical scholars invented exegesis as the antithesis of eisegesis. We all read into texts; we bring our biases, our training, the impact of our culture and ecclesial affiliations, to the task of reading. Most students believe exegesis is a skill; a few responded that it as a gift. Exegesis is a skill that is taught and with much practice is learned. But it, of course, is not a science with a guaranteed outcome/truth provided one uses a set formula, as evinced, at least, by the hostile arguments among biblical scholars over in/correct exegetical truths. Let’s be honest; few students leave theological schools with the ability to write a good exegesis paper, but our institutions persist in their efforts to inculcate the notion that exegesis is the best and/or only legitimate approach to biblical interpretation and to claim to be doing anything but exegesis is unacceptable; only the uneducated or miseducated perform eisegesis. Seminary graduates interpret biblical texts variously on Facebook, for example, and label them ‘exegetical’ and themselves ‘exegetes’; often they are doing anything but exegesis. Labeling their efforts at interpretation as exegesis legitimizes them and their readings. Religion often dismisses common sense questions as not spiritual, but I am committed to challenge students with probing questions, such as “what is at stake?” “who loses?” and “what is the impact?” I hope to encourage or compel them to re/consider their assumptions and assertions. But it is also necessary to directly refute or challenge racist beliefs, assumptions, and assertions. [1] John T. Warren, “Bodily Excess and the Desire for Absence: Whiteness and the Making of (Raced) Educational Subjectivities,” Performance Theories in Education: Power Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, eds. Bryant K. Alexander et al., (NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 86.