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How are you doing with taking chances? Are you engaging the wonder in your students, or are you still grading participation posts? If you read part one then you know what I’m talking about. For today’s episode of what Miss Frizzle teaches us about teaching, we learn about making mistakes. Not learning how to make them per se (because let’s face it, we all have plenty of experience) but what to do when we make them.Mistakes are inevitable. They will happen. Part of the reason we fear them so much is because we are still recovering from the trauma of unrealistic expectations from our graduate programs, or from our education in general (I’m looking at you formerly “gifted and talented” students). It may seem redundant then to be told to do the thing that you have already done and will certainly do in the future. But the advice to make mistakes isn’t about intention, it's about adaptation (cough…taking chances…cough).  In a world where failure and risk are old friends…If I had to choose one thing that scientists and entrepreneurs have in common, I'd say it's that both understand that failure is information. Scientists have revolutionized their fields by using information gained from failed experiments. Think of the countless medicines that didn’t work for the illness they were intended for, only to produce an outcome that changed the medical field. In the same way, entrepreneurs are learning about trends, marketing, supply, demand, and a whole host of other things when they start something that doesn’t work out. If you are going to be a person to take risks (go ahead honey, take a chance!) then you will have to embrace making mistakes. But wait, you say, a failure and a mistake are not the same thing! A failure is when you do something and it doesn’t work out, while a mistake is doing something wrong. And you’d be correct. A failure focuses on the outcome, while a mistake focuses on behavior. This is why you can make mistakes but you cannot be a failure (go ahead and read that again). And while mistakes made along the way can aid to the result of a failed outcome, several other factors, many beyond your knowledge and control, makeup that failed attempt.  Let’s play a game… Where it's all made up and the points don’t matter.So, how and why would you be intentional about making a mistake? Remember, the lesson isn’t about intentionality per se, it's about adaptation. Being intentional about making mistakes means being intentional about taking chances and risks. One of the best and easiest ways to do that is through the act of play. Playing a game is about creativity and knowing which of the rules you want to keep, bend, or break (every UNO player understands this). You are willing to push the boundaries or cross them to meet the games’ goals creatively, or to make a better play experience. One of the best examples of this is improv. Improv thrives on making mistakes. Nothing is wasted, and the space feels limitless. You can say the wrong word, or get caught off guard by another’s response, or even fall off the stage, and there will be someone there, not necessarily to catch you, but to use your “mistake” to continue the time of play. This communal act of play creates a kind of generativity that encourages you to make mistakes. So, what does this have to do with Theological Education? Much of our objectives in theological education feel daunting. We want our students to say something meaningful about the divine, or about implications on our world. We train them to lead others in matters of the heart, mind, and spirit. We do deeply meaningful work. This is the kind of work where mistakes matter. Where we are held accountable for the implications of our theology. Our theological intentions land somewhere, usually in the lives of other people. I recognize that asking someone to make a mistake in this context is no small thing. But that is exactly why we need to encourage it in our classrooms. I approach all of my classrooms as part of a grand experiment. Students are encouraged to “say the weird thing” (IYKYK) then work-out what that means in community. If I didn’t encourage my students to make mistakes, then how am I preparing them to lead? Preach? Teach? How can I teach them to adapt if I attempt to create a space with no obstacles for them to adapt to? If students say or bring up concepts about God that cause tension, we work through it. I help them understand the implications of their theological actions. And yes, they make “mistakes.” So do I. But because we do not forsake play in the classroom we learn to adapt. Taking chances means making mistakes. And like scientists we learn from the outcomes. We discover the ways theology can help us change the world, especially in ways we didn’t originally intend. We do this because we’ve learned that mistakes do not automatically end in failure. They create a possibility to open up a new pathway we didn’t originally plan. They generate new lessons we didn’t know we needed to learn. And for that, they will always be worth making.

It’s a relief to some professors to find that making their course antiracist is not simply about introducing heavy and sometimes politicized topics into class discussion. I find that moving one’s course further along the antiracism spectrum can, and should, start with the syllabus!None of the below suggestions can magically turn a course antiracist – my experience is that antiracism is a lifelong journey, consisting both of moments of inspiration and, perhaps more often, moments of face-palming as you realize the way you’ve done something for years is problematic, but you literally never noticed it until right now. This is part of why I think many professors shy away from explicitly naming their own journey in antiracist teaching – it requires you to feel embarrassed about the way you used to do things and then using that embarrassment to fuel something better. But the glorious thing is that it does produce something better!The first thing to do with your syllabus is to take stock of the racial representation of your authors. If you use one or a few textbooks, this will likely be easy. If you rely on a variety of resources, it’ll take longer, and often require a bit more research. When you tally up who students are primarily hearing from, what voices are most prominent? Do white men win the day? Or is there substantive authorship from people with other racial identities?In my department, we calculate these totals every semester based on course days. Basically, what days are students only hearing from white people, and what days are they hearing from people of color? (It could be advantageous to do this in a more granular way too – examining how Black authors compare to Latinx authors, etc., but unless your percentage of authors of color is fairly high, you may not have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions). We submit our percentages every term, and part of our annual assessment is examining if we’ve met our minimums and if we’ve increased racial representation or lost ground overall. The fact that we can work in hard numbers here also tends to encourage something of a gamification of our syllabi – seeing if we can beat our last “high score” is motivation to make our authorship more racially diverse each semester. A single replaced reading feels like a victory in this context – and it is!Once that work is completed for the term, the next step is to ensure that it’s visible to students and that they understand why it’s significant. I do this in two ways: including relevant expertise and identity markers, including race, along with the link to the course readings, and telling my students directly about what I’m doing with authorship in the course. The first involves setting up Canvas (or whatever LMS) with more than just links to required text. I include the link, and then provide context after it about the writer. For example, “______ is a Black woman and a seminary-level professor of Theology,” or “______ is a white male journalist who primarily writes on religious topics.” This is part of an overarching lesson that people’s context is always relevant, and that nobody writes without bias. It’s also a practice I royally screwed up the first time I tried it – I only included the racial identities of authors who weren’t white and didn’t mention race for white authors. You know, because white is… normal? White default bias for the fail. Thankfully I caught that one halfway though the semester and worked feverishly to remedy it on the day that awful realization struck me.Finally, I like being transparent with my students about the “why” of my teaching – it makes them feel trusted and included, and it helps hold me accountable for doing what I say I will. On the first day of class, I show the students our hard numbers for the course and explain that the field is historically and currently white-dominated, but that our program values students learning from a variety of perspectives and voices, so we’ve made a particular effort to use and highlight authors of color. For whatever reason, this is the moment on day one when students will actually take their eyes off their syllabus and look at me directly. I find that there’s power in critiquing your own field, and doing it right away – it helps students feel more able to offer critique and criticism when they feel it necessary.So, there you have it – if you want to be a more antiracist teacher and aren’t sure where to begin, start with your course authorship and make your choices explicit to your students. It’s far from perfection, but it’s a starting point for the journey.

Recently I attended the Wabash Center’s Curiosity Roundtable, where we heard from Dr. Iva Carruthers in one session. Her presentation was titled “AI and Ubuntu in the Age of Metanomics.” She had us thinking about what it means to be human and how we talk about humanity in this new age of AI—in all its forms—and what theology has to offer and how different sources of knowledge, different intelligences, all contribute to our being. Is being human about knowledge or about wisdom? About thinking or about relationship? It was a rich conversation that didn’t once bring up how we deal with issues of students using ChatGPT in class.As I thought about our prompt—what do I do with this conversation when I return to my institution?—my initial response was: resist the AI! And then I thought more deeply. The question is really how to ground ourselves more deeply in what it means to be human. The short answer is that we engage more in the world and with each other, but how do I do that? How do I help my students to do that?Unsurprisingly, my answer is to spend more time outdoors together. So now I have another reason in my backpack to use evangelizing for outdoor teaching. Hear me out.The best teaching happens outdoors because it’s a broader sense of teaching than mere lecture content. It’s the things I’ve been talking about in this blog. Students are more likely to play outdoors because they feel a freedom in the wind and the sun and “getting away with” not being “in class” as they’ve always understood classrooms. Play is a deeply important part of learning to be human. Children play at being adults long before they are adults, and the play, which is about imitation and experimentation in spaces of controlled risk, develops the skills of adulthood in the child. It’s similar for students. They play with ideas—imitate and experiment in a low-risk space—and so, grow into their understandings.In addition to content, they play with, students play with each other more readily outdoors. The freedom of movement makes getting into groups easier as well as interaction with group members. They sit closer together and find themselves more present to one another when they only have to focus on each other and the space—with its greens and blues, its warmth and wind—is calmer and less distracting than any video screen. Longer immersive classes do this even more (see my previous posts on the way immersive classes facilitate presence and community), but even shorter classes outside the normal environment will help students see one another as humans and create bonds.Play is also, as I understand it, an important part of learning to be an animal (see this chapter by Kay Redfield Jamison: “Playing Fields of the Mind” in her Exuberance: The Passion for Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004]). So, we learn to be more human and at the same time become more connected to other animals who also play, being reminded that we are part of creation. Along with this, when they are outside students are more immersed in the material world, and their phones are less attached to them. They are distracted by more interesting and more real things than whatever is on their screens. When people have a greater immersion in the real world, they gain more ability to discern the fake aspects of AI because they know the real thing.When students have to work together, especially in an immersive trip where they depend on each other physically (like on a wilderness trip), they learn what real friendship and connectedness look like and perhaps can distinguish the real from the fake in virtual worlds. In a good outdoor class—or a good indoor class that requires students to work together to create something—they learn what humanity looks like in all kinds of forms beyond what AI with its implicit biases is telling them. They learn empathy and compassion and relationship, the stuff that makes human beings human and which AI can only “know” about, or at best imitate. These are the things teaching outdoors and prioritizing interactions with the material world and with real people unmediated by screens does. My version is outdoor teaching, and I won’t stop evangelizing for it, but we can just as easily think of this as out-of-the-classroom teaching. Any place where we can encourage (or require) students to engage their worlds and the people in them is a place we are saying that our AI world is not the final word. Requiring some community engagement as part of the class or a museum visit or a technology fast or a group project that must be done only in person—all of these encourage play and presence and learning to distinguish reality from virtual reality. And if our clergy and theologians were trained this way, what a real world we might have. May it be so.

Like so many others during the pandemic I picked up a new hobby. Breadmaking was already claimed by two others in my family, so I decided to turn to houseplants. Gardening has always been therapeutic for me, so I sensed I would like getting my hands dirty indoors as well, and I had always found beauty and a sense of peace in homes filled with a variety of plants.I began pretty haphazardly, just buying plants I found on sale and watering them when they looked bad. I soon learned that water isn’t always the best solution for a dying plant. There is such a thing as overwatering, and I learned that lesson the hard way—by killing a lot of plants.It probably took me a year or so to learn the needs of different plants; for example, how much sun, humidity, and water they require. Now almost four years into my new craft, I rarely kill a plant. My eight-year-old daughter even recently declared: “Mommy, it’s starting to look like a jungle in here!” That’s when I knew I was getting good and that I had achieved the aesthetic I was going for.I’ve learned a lot of good lessons in becoming a plant person. In fact, I was reminded of my deleterious overwatering the other day, when I was making plans for my sabbatical this coming fall.This sabbatical will be the first one I’ve ever had the luxury to take, and to say that I’m looking forward to it would be an understatement. I’ve been teaching for fourteen years, and for the last two years I have been increasingly involved in administration.My fairly new administrative work has not left me much time for research. And when I think of that area of my academic life, I think of a wilted, dried out plant. I’ve pulled as much life out of my previous research as possible, and it’s parched.Always an overachiever, I know my tendency will be to over-plan for and overschedule my sabbatical time. I intend to write a new book. I want to read, research, and write; and I want to travel in Europe for my research. I also want to take pictures and videos during my travels for my classes.When I was charting this all out the other day, I was overwhelmed. My (too-high) expectations left me feeling panicky. I also started feeling the pressure of thoughts like: “Given the landscape of higher education, this might be your first and last sabbatical.” In short, I was setting myself up for burnout!Of course, this defeats the point of sabbatical. Isn’t it supposed to be a magical time in which one can finally achieve the sweet balance of rest and productivity?But how does one achieve this? I suppose the answer is different for everyone. It’s like caring for the different needs of different plants.Taking a tip again from my plants, I reflected on the following questions:1) What do I really need right now?What I need is some time to slow down and rest. I need some time to breathe, to re-center myself. I need to establish a new workplace (away from my institutional office), where I can be free from distractions. I need an easy routine with the time to be creative and to explore new ideas.2) What do I really want?What I want is to have some new life breathed into my intellectual project. I want to use the privilege of this precious time wisely. A semester free of classes and meetings provides me with the opportunity to travel for my research. I’ve always wanted to visit the monastic sites and places in Germany of the medieval writers who I study, and to talk and pray with the contemporary nuns that currently live there. Now I can!I also want to get several chapters of a new book written. This “want” competes with the other. Of course, planning for a trip and taking it will hinder my writing productivity, at least in the short term. I’ve had to come to grips with that fact, and remind myself that I can write anywhere and anytime. I can get some writing done on sabbatical, and continue the rest later.3) What will sustain me?What I need for my scholarly labor to be sustained, during this sabbatical and going forward from it, is for it to engage my intellectual passions. My last book was published four years ago. The world has changed since then, and so have I. One of the first things I need to do before starting in on a new research project is to give myself some time to reflect on some perennial questions. I have bookmarked Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield’s blog “Articulating Your Intellectual Project,” which contains questions like:     What is the intersection of your gifts/talents with the mighty needs of the world?     At the end of your life, when you look back over your long and illustrative career, to what did you say yes?I plan to use the questions she provides therein to help encourage and bring about clarity for the focus of my project and its intent.And then I plan to get to work (at a restful pace)!

(And audio recording of this blog may be found here.)Creative teachers are sometimes labelled as people who run wild --- meaning we are people whose boundaries are too wide, whose disciplinary habits and practices are too flimsy, whose appetites look beyond what is safely seen, commonly known, or conventionally acceptable. I am a creative who has, for many years, made a practice of fostering wildness in my classrooms.I believe that the invitation of teaching is for students to join-in with running wild, i.e. create new worlds, grapple with unsolvable problems, cross boundaries as a gesture of connection and justice seeking, build stairways as we climb to uncharted heights. I have met many colleagues who concur with the aspiration of running wild! - but who are too afraid, too anxious, too self-conscious, too hobbled to risk shaping classrooms from this vision. Teachers fear that if they move from a content driven classroom to a classroom which is learner centered that then the students will run wild over the teachers! The fear is that the wildness will make a shambles of the intellectual endeavor, embarrass the teacher, and shame the institution. This fear can be tamed.Before joining a seminary faculty, I worked for many years as the minister of Christian Education at a NYC church. I revamped their large Sunday School. In this seven year process, I learned about teachers’ eagerness to teach freely, with creativity and openness and the ways that that eagerness can be snuffed out by fear of losing control of the classroom.Before the start of our fall classes, the church school teachers participated in three weekends of teacher-training using a laboratory method. During this training, we rehearsed the curriculum through practice sessions. This allowed us to get acquainted with one another, do lesson planning, develop new skills, and have fun. We learned to teach by teaching.At the first teacher meeting of the fall, I gathered the teachers to discuss their work and to reflect on the first three Sundays of teaching. After having observed their teaching for the first three Sundays, I had an overall negative criticism of their teaching. I was nervous about giving this feedback. I was anxious about their reaction. I decided to be straightforward. The eighteen of us were seated together at the table. I spoke in a warm but firm tone. I said,When I walk the halls listening to your classes, I mostly hear your voices. This means that, primarily, you are learning the materials you are teaching by rehearsing the lesson – out loud to the students. Remember our teacher training  sessions? We do not want classrooms filled with your voice. We practiced activities that invite the students into energetic lessons.(I paused in hopes they would remember the training and practice)I want to hear the voices of the students. I want to hear the children’s voices engaging the lesson with their questions, concerns, laughter, reading aloud, talking to you and one another. When the children are the primary speakers and doers in the classroom, they are more likely to learn, retain, and be engaged with the lesson.I felt the nervousness in the group rise. Two teachers pushed their chairs back from the table. One teacher folded his arms across his chest. The 5th grade teacher spoke up,Lynne, I need to be honest. You give us creative activities to do with the children, but I am afraid of losing control of the classroom if I let the children do too much talking or move around the room too much. If I do the talking, I am in control. I’m afraid they will run wild!I threw up my arms like someone had made a touchdown and shouted,YESSS! Thank you! You are exactly right! Thank you for your honesty and good observations. Thank you for disclosing your fear.This playfulness lowered some of the tension in the room. The 10th grade teacher still sat with his arms folded across his chest, and now a scowl on his face.I continued,You are right. We do not want chaos in the classrooms with children running amuck. Nobody learns when students are out of control. But we know that students learn best when they are the ones engaged in activity. The various learning activities allow them to take hold of the stories and learn by participating. Sitting quietly teaches them to sit quietly, and that Sunday School is an uninteresting and voiceless place. We want children to learn by doing, interacting, questioning, exploring, investigating, wondering, and playing. And I need you to teach in these ways.I paused for pushback. But no pushback came. I continued,Please, try some of the more creative activity options in the curriculum. I assure you that chaos will not ensue. The children will have fun and so will you.The fears articulated by the Sunday School teachers are the same kinds of fears I hear from colleagues about their adult students in college, university and seminary settings. That is, teachers fear that if they loosen their grip on a session that the students will say or do something Wild! - something unanticipated, unwanted, unhelpful, unplanned that will embarrass the teacher or show the lack of a teacher. Teachers fear that loosening control will put them in danger of being exposed as frauds or imposters. These fears are real. Sometimes these fears are paralyzing or debilitating. These fears can be calmed and overcome.Teaching, with practice, can be improved if you are willing to give up control. For many professors, this teaching tactic feels counter-intuitive and too risky, but my experience knows it to be true.If we surrender content driven approaches – then what will happen?I am pleased to report that none of the Sunday School teachers stormed out of the meeting that day. Each teacher, in their own way, slowly over the years of their commitment, learned to select the learning activities that involved arts, crafts, a wide assortment of storytelling methods, and even trips to other parts of the building. I noticed that the primary motivation for their risk taking was the feedback they received from their students.When the learners were invited to become the story tellers replete with costumes, paints, and instruments their glee was palpable. Enthusiasm grew when the students knew the lessons could include map making, puppet designing, interviews with pastors or baking the communion bread. Excited children began arriving at Sunday School before the start time and asking to stay after the end time. Teachers moved from being reticent to feeling confident when they discovered learners were not there to judge their efforts but were there to benefit from their teaching.Over the seven years, we moved away from being a place of instruction and toward becoming a community of learning – the teachers were the agents of that wild move!Consider these reflection questions:What are your creative or artistic interests and how might you bring those interests into your classroom’s learning activities?What amount of time do you need for course preparation when planning for learning activities that are multidimensional and creative?What funding is available for supplies, resources, excursions, and exhibits?Who can you partner with to create a more vibrant experience for your students?

Jesus H. Christ: Be Aware of What Students HearI was walking into the Den at Le Moyne College when I was accosted by a colleague in the English department. He asked, “What the hell are you teaching in your religion classes?” While I often ask myself this same question, I decided to ask what he meant. He told me that a young woman in his class was also in my Introduction to Religion class. The students in his class were discussing Coleridge’s “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” and they came across this line:          Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye          Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earthHe asked the students what they thought Coleridge meant. The student we shared in our classes was quick to say she thought it was an allusion to Christ. Intrigued, my colleague asked her how she came upon that idea. She replied that Professor Glennon had said Jesus’ middle name was Howard and that Coleridge was talking about the comfort Jesus continues to give to us from heaven.I chuckled. I told my colleague that this notion came up in a discussion on the Gospel of Mark when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Of course, the question of identity is often related to one’s name and one’s family. With tongue-in-cheek I asked the students what Jesus’s last name was. While many admitted they didn’t know, others said it was Christ. I suggested that, while it is true that title, “Christ,” is connected to Jesus’s identity as his disciple blurted out, it was not really his last name. It is more likely that his last name was bar Joseph, son of Joseph.But I pressed them further. I asked if any of them had ever heard their parents or grandparents, in a moment of anger or frustration, say “Jesus H. Christ”? Many students had. So I asked, “What does the H. stand for?” As you might imagine, no one knew. I decided to enlighten them and told them that the H. stood for Howard. Warily, they asked how I knew that. I responded that it was right at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”Obviously, most students recognized that this was a joke. In case you are wondering, the actual prayer says, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” But somehow this young woman didn’t catch on and took me seriously. She stored this “fact” in the back of her mind. When a few weeks later her English class discussed Coleridge’s reflection, she was delighted by the insight she could offer; the tear came from Howard’s eye because he was the one who lifts those who die from earth.The student and I, and even her mother, laughed about this for the rest of her time at the school. She learned that it is always good to check the information she received for its reliability and trustworthiness. I learned to be sure that whenever I tell this joke in class, which I do at times, that after I reveal the middle name, I look to make sure the students know it is a joke, just in case.Driving the Bus: What is Hell Like?In my classes, I want to make sure that the religious and ethical questions students bring to the classroom find their way into our discussion. I use a strategy I call the Question Bag. The students’ first homework assignment is to anonymously write any religious or ethical question they have that they would like us to talk about during the semester on a sheet of paper. At the beginning of the second class, I collect the questions in a paper bag. Periodically, we draw a question from the bag to discuss at the beginning of the class period. The discussion can take a few minutes or even the entire class period depending on how important the question is to the class.In one introduction to religion class, the question we pulled from the bag was “What is hell like?” I asked students to say out loud what their responses were. Some had obviously read Dante’s Inferno and so talked about the terrible suffering sinners could expect at the hands of Satan’s minions. Others, feeling a bit more enlightened, said it was the experience of forever being apart from the presence of God. Still others suggested hell didn’t exist. When you die, you die.At this point I interjected a few thoughts into the conversation. A few times during the semester, I had referenced the adage, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I noted that some people who had religious and ethical disagreements with me declared that I was heading down that road; in fact, I was probably driving the bus. I mused that some people even say that we are living hell on earth. If so, I pondered aloud, is this really a terrible road to be on? After all, I was a tenured, full professor. I lived a relatively comfortable life, making more than enough money. As a department chair, I only taught two classes per semester with plenty of flexibility and free time. I even had four months a year to do the other things I wanted to do: travel, write, volunteer. I say things in class and people actually write them down!One student in the class, Becca, was a physically challenged and bound to a wheelchair. Although she had overcome many obstacles to get to where she was at the time, she faced them with courage, perseverance, and a good bit of humor. She was a young woman with deep faith and hope in the God she followed. She told the class that this was her question and she blurted out, “Fred, can I ride the bus with you?” Most students smiled but some eyes filled with tears. The students were very supportive of Becca within and without the class, and I would often see them talking with her, eating lunch with her, and encouraging her. Le Moyne students overall are really kind. They knew the challenges she faced and they offered help whenever she asked for it which, given her independent spirit, was very seldom.A year later, Becca decided to have surgery that, if successful, would allow her to become even more independent. She knew the risks, but she insisted on going through with it. Becca died on the operating table.When I think of her, which is often, I recall that classroom conversation and her response. A part of me wishes I had never come across as glib about this life being “hell on earth.” While we all have challenges in our lives, mine could never compare to hers. I never confronted what she did daily, nor have I faced the risk she chose with her surgery. Her faith in herself and in God was strong; I wish I had a fraction of the courage she showed.But one thought continues to give me hope. If the Christian understanding of God, Becca’s God, is a God of love and the promise of abundant life beyond death is true, I am certain that Becca is now living eternal life to the fullest, hopefully driving a bus down that heavenly road welcoming all on board. And, when my time comes, I hope to be waiting at the bus stop as she pulls up so I can ask, “Becca, can I ride the bus with you?”

Being Triggered as a ProfessorI have noticed that some students are quick to throw loaded terms without knowing exactly what they mean, or they erroneously assume they know what they mean. Maybe you can relate. For example, I was teaching a Contemporary Theologies course and I was discussing German theologians during and post-World War II. One of my students did not know the difference between fascism and communism. This student basically stated that the Nazis were socialists and by extension communists because their name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). The student could not get past the “Socialist” in the name and described anything left-leaning as fascist. As you and I know, the fascists and the communists could not stand one another. The only thing they had in common was the totalitarian form of government with strong dictatorships in power. However, their foundation and aim were different. I pointed the student to basic Encyclopedia Britannica articles on the political spectrum, fascism and on Nazism so that this student could better understand the difference between the two.I was taken back by the student’s confidence in his position and his willingness to correct me when he was so sure I had made a mistake. In the end I was surprised by having to endure a student like this who did not want to listen. In this case, this particular student came to the classroom with a mind already made up and not willing to dialogue with different or diverging ideas, or even those based on facts. Rather, this student was there wanting to reinforce preconceived notions of what is right and wrong, and in this case, what was left and what was right.I had another student in a different semester’s offering of the same course that really set me off—I lost it. This student refused to acknowledge racism and the effects of racism in US society. I had students of color who were emailing me of how deeply offended they were from the first day of class until the last day of class. This particular student firmly believed that the US was completely free of any type of racism. Consequently, Black people were lazy, Hispanics/latin@s liked to blame Caucasian people like him for all their problems. The student refused to acknowledge history, of things that happened in the Civil Rights Era, and problems that continue to affect minorities and people of color.I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but I lost my patience with this student on the second day of class. Oh, my! It was going to be a long semester. I could feel my blood pressure rising. My muscles began to tighten. My heartbeat went up a few notches. It seldom happens, but at that moment I began to ask this student a barrage of questions and making statements about being intolerant and closed-minded to considering the perspectives of others and those from different communities who have suffered under unjust housing practices, and deeply ingrained attitudes and postures from those in power in society.[i] I wanted to say (but thankfully I did not), what in the world are you doing in graduate school if you don’t want to learn anything? What are you doing in graduate school if you already have the answers to life’s great questions?It is not a good place to be, being triggered and going off on a student. It sets a poor example. We are to model hard intellectual reasoning. Also, as a teacher, my vocation is to model a hospitable classroom environment—even with those that do not agree with me. Nothing gets accomplished in the heat of the moment with tense exchanges or when we get angry.As I was wrestling with this student and his lack of engagement, and taking into consideration our students of color in the class, I finally realized that I was not going to change this person. All I could do at this point was not react in the way that this student expected. The student was actually getting pleasure from being the unmovable object in the class. It was reinforcing his victim mentality and it was reinforcing his own belief that he was blessed as he was persecuted.Education is not going into a classroom to reinforce one’s own ideas or point of view. Part of the value of education is observation and the ability to take on multiple perspectives, having the common decency to put oneself in another person’s shoes and having empathy. Education involves some level of contemplation upon the world and my neighbor. It is a continual question included in the Gospels, “who is my neighbor?” in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). One cannot help but realize that no matter the ethnic, cultural, or racial origins of my neighbor, that we are interconnected. Humans are spiritual beings and that compassion is one of the core values that we must demonstrate towards one another. There must be empathy, kindness, and humility towards the other. It is on this road that we can establish some kind of spiritual enlightenment about living in an increasingly diverse society. Either we enter with fear defending our way of life to the very end, or we enter with a holy reverence towards the other as a fellow human being in the imago Dei.In the end I also had to examine myself. I had a long day. The class was at night, I was tired. The other issue I had was that I had to try to defuse the situation. I had to model my sense of tolerance even for those who have different perspectives from my own. It is not the first time that this has happened nor will it be the last. Finally, I decided to trust the institution and my colleagues, knowing that through the whole process at any serious graduate-level institution, the student will continually be challenged to have a rational, modern, and well-informed outlook. We are seeking to form individuals who are deeply, spiritually aware of their vertical-horizontal relationships—to God, to others, and the self. In the meantime, I prayerfully continue to teach, knowing that transformation is ultimately not left up to me. So, I tried hard to let the conversations continue to be frank and honest and to let history and hard rational discussion tell the story, ultimately trying to model a positive affective disposition towards the other.Notes & Bibliography[i] See for example, Robbie W.C. Tourse, Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, Nancy J. Wewiorski, Systemic Racism in the United States: Scaffolding as Social Construction (Cham, Switzerland: 2018).

In my family’s tradition, dreams, visons, symbols, and signs are part of our knowing, understanding, and meaning making apparatus. I grew up with nightly dinner table conversation which effortlessly included sharing dreams, seeking out interpretations, then the habit of reordering a decision based upon spiritual in-sight. Our “cloud of witnesses” is a vivid and active part of our spiritual practice. We depend upon prayer, ancestral visitations, angels’ interventions, the protection of guides, and warnings by ancestors.My family’s religious and cultural tradition teaches that the world is more enchanted, magical, whimsical, unusual and unpredictable than typically is made room for by the wider culture’s narrow understanding. And since our classrooms are not siloed away from the world—I think that our classrooms, if we would learn to pay attention, are enchanted spaces. Along with this provocative assertion, I want to also say that I do not know, absolutely, what coaxes adult students into learning. I suspect learning, especially for adults, might be dependent upon enchanted happenings in our classrooms.My grandmother, Vyola White Bullock, was an elementary school teacher in the early 1900s. My grandmother use-to say, “All that is is not visible.” She would say this adage is particularly important in understanding our classrooms and in seeking more effective methods of teaching.If we are to consider the dynamism of the intangible (i.e. enchantment) in our classrooms - what do we pay attention to, respect, and do? In other words, what if more is happening in our classrooms than meets the eye? What if those happenings are more responsible for student learning than we know?  What if that which we ignore, or that which we have no knowledge of, is the catalyst for student learning and our successful teaching?Some teaching is known to open doors, create bridges, inspire students to realize and participate-in enchanted endeavors of learning. Equipping students with new ways of meaning making, allowing students to access ideas of freedom, connecting students’ dreaming to actuality and healing, can create sparks of intrigue, can create the fire of imagination and wonder that immerse students in new realities. Sometimes, encounters with new knowledges are so palatable that students are moved, literally, into other spaces and other times. My experience as a student, and more recently, my experience as a teacher, has shown me that from time-to-time, portals open. Some learning causes portals to open allowing brave enough students to step through.  I have seen portals open in classrooms.As a student, I have, many times, stepped through portals which opened during my study. I was introduced to the work of bell hooks in graduate school.  Studying hooks’ work was like time travel. I had experiences of remembering what I had not previously known. Learning from hooks’ work was a dialogue across the years, across the geographic divide. The first time I read Sisters of Yam I felt as if my bone marrow recognized an ancient truth. I was transported into her world which quickly became our world. I knew what I knew, even more.As a teacher, I have learned that portals do not always invite us into elegant spaces. Some portals offer struggle, fight, confrontation. A vivid encounter happened while teaching my Introduction to Educational Ministry course some years ago. At the beginning of a lecture in the second session, a student raised her hand—interrupting my lecture. She had a scowl on her face, her lips pursed, shoulders tense with anxiety. Seeing her raised hand, I stopped my lecturing, met her glare with a faint smile and invited her to speak. She said that she had read the assigned reading by bell hooks from Teaching to Transgress. As she spoke, her voice was shrill and loud. She said the reading infuriated her. She said the reading was so maddening that she hurled the book against the wall. Her declaration of angst and anger instantly shifted the mood of the other students in the room to one of caution and concern. I heard one student sigh in impatience not wanting to give time for this woman to speak her experience of disorientation and pain.I paused before I answered her. I asked the woman what she had done after throwing the book against the wall.The student said, “I walked over, picked it up, and kept reading until the end.”I shouted, “YES!”My shout startled the class. The student’s sour expression turned to wide-eyed confusion.I said, “We must, even if it breaks a hip, wrestle with these ideas until daybreak in hopes of receiving the blessing. And you did that! You wrestled! You went through the portal and wrestled for your blessing!”  (This, for Bible reading students, was a recognition that the woman had had the experience like that of Jacob in Genesis 32:22-32.) I recognized this student’s report as an experience that had taken her into a portal.From the tradition of my family, this student had been transported and blessed and was telling the story of learning through consternation and dismay.  Some portals teach through skirmishes and brawls for understanding and growth.Portals operate through words and beyond words, with explanations and beyond explanation, with knowledge of the possibilities and beyond our imaginations. Students yearn for vivid experiences that connect them, make them more voiced and more visible. Stepping through the portals provides an immersive experience where the intangible becomes tangible with clarity and needed purpose.Reflection questions for communal dialogue:How do teachers recognize when a portal opens for learning?What would it take to plan or choreograph a portal to open for learning?If portals cannot be choreographed, what does it take to coax or summon open the doors of the portal?What kind of teaching stops portals, that would open, from opening?What do we do that closes the portals prematurely?

In October 2024, the Wabash Center hosted a “Curiosity Roundtable,” which I was honored to attend. The goal was to offer us experiences to help us; to encourage us to think outside the boxes that trap us as scholars, institutional citizens, and pedagogues. It was an amazing time, with voices that I am still thinking about, but, oddly, the experience that resounds, again and again, in my thoughts is the Porsche Experience.The group toured the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, GA. Those of us who did not get motion sickness—not me, dang it!—experienced driving the Porsche of our choice in the Simulator Lab. It was the tour, however, that had the impact on me. As the informed and enthusiastic guide showed us around, we were able to see, for example, the elements of making a Porsche. We saw a wall with the multiple tones of paint one could use on a Porsche body—some so subtly different that the guide said all buyers were urged to use a specialist in car design. We handled the key fobs and touched leathers used for interiors—just a few items among drawers of exquisite features. Then, we saw beautiful cars, on loan from collectors. What struck me was the flawlessness of these machines, but also, that they had very little mileage. These were cars that barely had been driven, mostly under 200 miles—they were tested, I thought, loaded for delivery, and put in a garage to gaze upon. Beautifully wrought, but, to me, kind of useless, except as possessions—though sort of like the excess of books in my library, I had to admit.It was the race cars, however, that made me see why the Wabash Center’s Executive Director, Dr. Lynne Westfield, brought us there. These cars tied the remarkable beauty of the collectable cars to function. One Porsche slogan is “Passion in Every Detail.” The Porsche desire includes “detailed craftsmanship, cutting edge innovation, and sheer passion.” That, I think, is what, we as devoted and innovative teacher-scholars practice and is what I saw in in the race cars. Those cars, like the Rothmans Porsche 962 on exhibit, were banged up, used over and over, and were examples of design reworked. These were the workhorses—like us professors—driven in 24 Hours of Le Mans, an endurance sports car race. I learned there why my daddy always bought Goodyear Tires. The Goodyears were so sturdy in the Le Mans that they had to be changed only once. These tires marked an adjustment, and what fascinated me were the adjustments: the redesigns. In the Rothmans we saw, the engine, first, was under the seat—not a great placement.As the guide talked about that, I said, “Someone died,” and he nodded.So, without losing speed or power, that one had to be adjusted.Beauty and function brought about through knowledge and innovation and carried out with passion—that is what kept running through my mind as we walked around. Every teacher in that group has been recognized, I know, as passionate about his or her subject matter and skilled: we are beauty in action. Beauty and function, carried out with passion, are the goals of great teaching. As teachers, I think we aim for the good, the true, and the beautiful. The classical Platonic understandings of those may not be same as they were for Plato, perhaps, but we seek to craft the vehicle that is so beautiful that it is utterly compelling—beauty draws and improves us, Plato argues--to our students that they will take the ride with us and risk encountering what we consider to be good and true. As Elaine Scarry reminds us in On Beauty and Being Just, a liberal arts education is the perpetuation of beauty. As human beings, we seek to copy the beautiful, and as we do so, we revise our own locations and beings. The beautiful, Scarry argues, helps “incite the will toward continual creation” (8). And, fairness, in terms of beauty, can lead to fairness, equality, in terms of justice: to being fair, to seeking “‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to one another’” (95).The design of intellectual experience, as Patricia O’Connell Killen calls it, is the same as the design of those Porsche cars in another space. We go from finding and observing beauty to creating it ourselves in our syllabi and classrooms, to, as we teach, helping our students to see and create beauty themselves. Every piece in the collectable cars was a masterpiece of beauty—from the door handles to the key fobs. As a craftswoman teacher, I want my classes to be that way, beautifully constructed. The beauty embedded in the experience of reading, writing, and, yes, testing, which, as we saw in the Rothmans, is a dangerous but necessary process. Porsche made me see that our work is a wrought beauty: one made from years of doing and redesigning. I really want my teaching to be like those race cars, able to be adapted so that it can hug the ground—as Charles Long used to say, face the nitty gritty of human experience, and round the track.Those battered race cars stay in my imagination. The other day, I looked at my teaching notes for my Theory and Methods course, which I have taught, now, for over thirty years. The notes carry a lot of my late professors, Charles Long, Ruel Tyson, and Nathan Scott, and of others who taught me, but they show my growth in understanding and my adjustments, as my voice emerged and changed. Marginal notes, updates from my reading, and new thoughts that my students had as we rounded the track add more pages and sticky notes every year. These beautiful pieces gather. My teaching, if it were a Porsche, would look, I hope, like those race cars: a beautiful thing, the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering, yet banged up in use and adjustment. What I teach is remade different every time I encounter a new group of students from a new generation or read something that challenges and changes me. I must move the engine or change the shape of the seat or stop and figure out how to find my own, nearly indestructible Goodyear tires.The guide told us that they do not open the doors on those race cars because we would smell the odor of the drivers, embedded in the cars, even after all these years—drivers who had done twenty-four hours of duty in a car. That fact stuck with me hard. That smell is a mark, a reminder or memory that the beautiful and functional thing needs a driver, and that the driver bears the pain—marks and is marked. I thought of the odor of sanctity that comes, particularly, from the wounds of saints.We teachers are the like these drivers, these cars, but most of us do not get what we either need or deserve for the work we do. As my Peer Mentoring Cluster and I found during COVID and as one of my dear colleagues, one long out of this business, reminded me recently, institutions spend a lot of time thinking about students and about the institutions themselves. Most are not as committed to beauty as Porsche, and they do not spend much thinking about those driving the car—us teachers. But I think we prevail. Plato argued that the children of dreams outlive the children of the flesh. In the beauty we make, we are and put the first instrument of our dreams in children’s hands.*My drawing teacher said: Look, think, make a mark.Look, I told myself.And waited to be marked… She said: Respond to the heaviest partof the figure first. Density is form. That I keep hearing destiny is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimageonce morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid.Mir-aage, Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose awry into her microphone, triumphant. The figure to be drawn —not even half my age. She’s completely emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour. Look. Okay. But the little dream in there, inside the thinkthat comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life is charcoal, the wood already burnt,a sacrifice.[1] Notes & Bibliography[1] Marianne Boruch, “Pencil,”https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55555/pencil.