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Church history, may, at first glance, appear rather uninteresting to some seminary students. After all, hot-button issues in theology, ethics, bible, and pastoral care stimulate gospel-oriented revolutionary thinking, particularly in regard to contemporary needs in church and society. Individuals take graduate-level courses in ministry to make a difference. They seek biblical and theological knowledge, ministerial tools, and critical skills to engage a world burdened with injustice and suffering. Although a cursory acknowledgment of historical occurrences is surely helpful in constructing a general appreciation of our religious pasts, such material is ultimately not, quite frankly, exciting. However, there are times when course content, even in church history studies, may smash deeply held theological or biblical assumptions. In other words, some course material can threaten students. Acquiring knowledge can be iconoclastic. One’s understanding of the Christian faith reflects a psychological investment buried deeply within the context of familial beliefs, cultural identity, and social teachings. Such views may be supported by ecclesiastical or denominational institutions. Historical-critical methods and pedagogy designed to problematize traditionally established narratives in this setting may not only rupture foundational belief systems, but also elicit emotional reactions. Students may actually experience feelings of traumatic loss. Of course, this phenomenon is applicable to any field of study. Yet, as a church history professor, I have routinely witnessed first-year and other students grapple with the shocking prospect of a structurally non-linear, chaotically diverse, and relatively inclusive early Christianity. In fact, recently, I taught a number of students who were theologically invested in beliefs that the early church was doctrinally monolithic; moreover, these students held specifically that women’s subordination in church leadership throughout history was a natural occurrence. This religious view is quite standard, in fact, in many religious traditions. Hence, the emergence of women’s voices calling for church ordination and equality in recent centuries is interpreted as novel. But in my class, students were required to critically engage literary and physical evidence that squarely challenges these assumptions. I did not predict the reactions some students had one day. To put it mildly, class discussion became heated. Individuals expressed shock and dismay over information in primary historical sources. They became defensive and emotional with regard to the implications for contemporary ministry. Some began talking at each other.  For me, James Baldwin’s words from The Fire Next Time suddenly came to mind, “our entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things.” In that moment, it was immediately necessary for me as instructor to quell the rising tide of emotion in that space. I talked about the controversial nature of claims on all sides, noting even the historical dissension those precise questions had caused. I reiterated the goal of critical examination in that context: to substantiate one’s positions using critical research methods, not to establish historical fact. Weakly, I even tried (emphasis on tried!) to crack a joke or two. Miraculously, the students responded. They articulated their feelings of trauma at the thought of modifying cherished religious understandings. As they expressed it, part of the fear lay in the thought of sharing those ideas among their families and religious communities. They ministered to themselves and to each other right there in the classroom, even as they wondered how to appropriate this knowledge. Through ongoing analytical reflection as the class progressed, the students, with some guidance, were able to find their way. Indeed, pastoral and pedagogical methods proved effective—by admitting the sensitive nature of the subject matter, emotionally combative feelings were calmed. But when class was over, I needed self-care! What had I done wrong? How could I have prevented the outbursts from occurring? Why did the critical engagement of material become so emotional? By sharing the day’s events with a colleague, processing the steps taken, and outlining improved techniques for broaching challenging course content, I embraced the experience as a learning opportunity for better teaching. In subsequent class gatherings with the students, we continued the process of critical, scholarly engagement with sources, while reflecting on the social-cultural, theological, and religious implications of debatable historical conclusions. Hence, that initial emotionally ridden event was not isolated as a singular, unhealthy occurrence. Instead, it became part of praxis-driven ministerial development. What better way to learn navigation of potentially explosive religious-social environments than in theologically-charged history classroom debates? Just as in church history, icons have and will be broken in seminary classrooms. Just as in church history, these events will likely trigger emotional responses. However, unlike some notorious iconoclastic chapters, also in church history, this doesn’t have to be earth shattering. For students and teacher-learners striving to maintain cohesive, yet flexible, class settings, even broken pieces can be reassembled with newfound beauty in the cracks.

I ask students to laugh at death with me. Rather than treating death as off-limits or something that must be approached with absolute solemnity, I ask students to laugh. And when I make jokes about death and they stare at me with horror, I remind them that it’s ok to laugh about death. I like to think that they eventually get used to me. Discussions about trauma often coalesce around healing, but this orientation forecloses the (im)possibilities inherent in trauma. Quick movements from trauma to healing also assume the inherent value of life as opposed to death. Rather than treating life and death as opposites, the death positivity movement suggests that death is a part of life and the ongoing ecosystem. Death becomes something active, something that can be done (and done well), instead of avoided until it overtakes the agency of a body (or mind) that is actively attempting to remain alive. The death positively movement maintains that individual human lives may not continue forever, but life does. I teach about this movement in my course “Religion Outside of Religions,” a course that draws on theories and methods often used to study religious traditions to explore aspects of contemporary U.S. culture that aren’t considered overtly religious. The death positivity movement, therefore, serves as an example of an orientation to the so-called natural world that occurs outside of overt religious traditions. Students explore the myths, rituals, beliefs, and ethical systems that guide this movement, especially as they develop in contrast to broader medical and funerary practices in the U.S. Through this process, students often confront their own assumptions about death, especially as these assumptions tend to be informed by the medical and funerary practices opposed by the death-positivity movement. These confrontations push students beyond life-death binaries and some even learn to laugh at my jokes (I keep wondering if I should start listing that as a learning outcome). Might we, as teachers, adopt this posture to trauma? What would it look like to push ourselves past the binary of trauma and healing? What if we accept and adapt to the trauma that is always already in our midst? What if we refuse to tidy up traumatized psyches behind the closed doors of licensed counselors, much like the corpses made to look eerily lifelike in funeral homes?   Teaching about different approaches to death can reorient the assumption that trauma is bad and healing good. This is a particularly important reorientation within a context where trauma is often ongoing and not a one-time event. The death positivity movement recognizes that some people live in closer proximity to death than others and that the deaths that result from this proximity can and should be avoided. As Everything Dies: A Coloring Book About Life! says, “I know everything dies, but there seems to me to be a big difference between something dying to feed another living thing, and this strange knack we have for needless death. These are deaths that don’t feed life. These are deaths of entire species and peoples and places. Humans seem to do this a lot.” (58) Recognizing that all deaths (like all lives) are not equal given our current political systems, the movement argues for breaking the culture of silence around death, including the culture of silence around systems that locate some bodies closer to death as a result of race, sexuality, gender, disability, class, or location. By opening these questions, the death positivity movement pushes us to teach recognizing that trauma is often ongoing and systemic, rather than a one-time event. The death positivity movement encourages us to ask why life is necessarily better than death. It also begs the question of whether trauma must end with healing, suggesting that trauma, like death, is ever-present and not something to be avoided but, rather, to be engaged. These are ideas to bring to students and to let challenge our own assumptions about teaching, particularly around the place of trauma in the classroom.

When I was invited to participate in this blog series, I was preparing to teach, for the first time, a course on the Catholic sex abuse crisis. I had wanted to teach the course for quite some time but was held back both by my sense of not understanding adequately the massive amount of material that comprised the crisis and my anxieties about how this material might impact students. What about students who were survivors of sexual violence? What about students who understood themselves as faithful Catholics? Or who had left the Church angry and bitter? What about students—and this is particularly relevant to my geographical context—who were suspicious of Catholics as an exotic, mysterious, pseudo-Christian sect?  I taught the class. I had students who identified with each of these subject positions. Neither their written work nor their in-class participation nor our informal one-on-one conversations contained any evidence that they were unduly troubled by the materials or unable to grasp with the questions they raised. In fact, it was our collective sense of inadequacy as we grappled with the enormity and complexity of what we were trying to interpret that left us feeling overwhelmed. But, as those who go to the gym more than I do—which wouldn’t take a lot—would say, it was a good kind of pain. This semester, as I am writing my contributions to this blog series, I am teaching, for the sixth time, a course focused on Jesus films. This is one of my bread-and-butter courses. It is popular with students and it works like a well-oiled machine. The films require us to grapple with questions about gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and violence, but I have never paused to worry that the course might run the risk of traumatizing my students. (Although the level of brutality in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ comes awfully close.) Given my experience over the years of teaching this course, however, I should know better. A few weeks ago, I got an email from a student who self-identified as a fundamentalist Christian, as someone who had been taught that the Bible was inerrant, literally true, and harmonious. The comparative, rhetorical analysis of the gospels that comprises the first few weeks of this course were challenging him in profound and unsettling ways. He was having to grapple with the idea—and the evidence—that the Bible did not speak with a uniform voice and that it may, in fact, contain tensions that simply could not be reconciled. This student was seeking out a conversation. Since I grew up in a very similar religious context, I am able to talk about these types of concerns, without undermining the perspective of the course. As I tell all of my students, they can enter and leave my class thinking that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God, but they will have to grapple with the fact that we only have access to that word in a complex, rhetorically sophisticated document with multiple perspectives on who Jesus is and why he matters. Every semester I’ve taught this course, I’ve had at least one student with these concerns. Sometimes several. Some have sought out conversation. Some have worked through their concerns in assignments. Some have probably dropped the course—or just kept their worries under wraps. Some have been more open; others have been more hostile. Some have clung to an apologetic task; some have offered to pray for me. Some have the greatest trouble when we talk about the Bible; others face their Waterloo as we start talking about the films. Still, others find the greatest challenge when we review the history of American Christianity. My experience with this class reminds me that what we, as scholars of religion and theology, take as our baseline—that religious ideas, texts, and practices have a history, that they have been subjected to a variety of interpretations, that they have ugly legacies, that they vary by time and place—is a profoundly disturbing perspective to some people. Just as we have come to realize that “objectivity” is never truly neutral and that “secularity” entails a normative vision, we also need to grapple with the fact that the foundational moves of the academic study of religion and theology might be the most traumatic dimension of our courses for some of our students.

The call for educational practitioners to be critically self-reflective is fairly common today. This is in large part due to the work of pedagogical theorists, such as Stephen Brookfield, who have challenged educators to routinely assess and hone our teaching practices. Indeed, since the beginning of my teaching career, I have been encouraged by mentors to reflect critically on my teaching through the four lenses Brookfield identifies: (1) students' eyes, (2) colleagues' perceptions, (3) personal experience, and (4) theory.[1] Recently, however, I have noticed a pattern in my critical reflection: it becomes all-encompassing and far-reaching during the aftermath of national traumas. For example, in these few weeks following the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I have been thinking, “What are we doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? What else should I be doing?” The sickening coincidence that the shooting occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent according to the Christian liturgical calendar that I observe, added an unavoidable urgency to my usual Lenten critical reflection. Because the main area of my social engagement is through my teaching and writing, the tragedy of yet another mass shooting prompted me to reconsider everything I have ever done in the classroom. Similar moments of wholescale critical reflection were stirred within me after other tragic events over the past few years. For example, I vividly remember this process of questioning all of my pedagogical assumptions and practices after the presidential election of 2016 and the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.  In the genre of educational theory, I believe Jack Mezirow would define each of these events as a “disorienting dilemma.”[2] He has poignantly described how traumatic events can often lead us to scrutinize previously unquestioned assumptions and to identify how our assumptions have limited our thought-processes and actions up to the point they occurred. For me, each of these national tragedies has led me to uncover my previous assumption that “I need to be an expert in what I teach.” Based on this assumption, I had believed that my expertise in the area of “systematic theology” did not qualify me to teach about civic action or politics at all. So, if I wanted to teach about anything that engaged in social or racial justice (which I desperately did), I would need to go back and get another Ph.D. in critical race theory. However, through my critical reflection, particularly through Brookfield’s fourth lens of theory, I have come to understand the inaccuracy of my previous viewpoint and have begun to embrace a much more accurate alternative: all teaching in higher education must entail “ideology critique.” Indeed, I have taken a tip from Brookfield’s own theory. As he defines it, “Ideology critique is part learning process, part civic action.” It “focuses on helping people come to an awareness of how capitalism, White Supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heterosexism and other ideologies shape beliefs and practices that justify and maintain economic and political inequity.”[3] I now understand ideology critique as a necessary and central component to critical reflection. National traumas led me to intuit this assumption, and Brookfield’s theory led me to embrace it. Moreover, through my critical reflection--specifically through Brookfield’s first lens, that of my students’ eyes--I know that it is not just me that is questioning everything I have been doing (cognitively and behaviorally) after a national tragedy, but my students are too. I have found that leading them through a critical reflection, which entails ideology critique, is helpful for them as well. The three core assumptions Brookfield identifies as comprising ideology critique are helpful for framing such discussions about the unjust ways the world is organized: “(1) that apparently open, Western democracies are actually highly unequal societies in which economic inequity, racism and class discrimination are empirical realties; (2) that the way this state of affairs is reproduced as seeming to be normal, natural and inevitable (thereby heading off potential challenges to the system) is through the dissemination of dominant ideology; and (3) that critical theory attempts to understand this state of affairs as a prelude to changing it.”[4] Of course, this activity of leading students in a reflection on these assumptions is not the primary focus of my lesson plan in every class. After all, I am responsible for teaching them theological methods and theories—that is, the areas in which I have been trained. But what I know now for sure is that I can and necessarily must lead them in a critical reflection concerning dominant ideology, especially in the aftermath of national tragedies and traumas. I am curious to know how and to what extent others engage in ideology critique in the classroom: In what ways and in which theory do you frame your discussion? How do you balance the demands of the course content for which you are responsible and the demands of the students and contemporary society begging for ideology critique? [1] Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (San-Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995). [2] Jack Mezirow, Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000). [3] Stephen Brookfield, “The Concept of Critical Reflection: Promises and Contradictions,” European Journal of Social Work, 12.3 (September 2009): 298-299. [4] Ibid., 298.

While there are moments in the classroom in which trauma prevents learning, to suggest that a traumatized student cannot learn turns the classroom into a space that privileges students who are protected from trauma as a result of being rich, white, male, and heterosexual. Accommodating traumatized students is not just an accessibility issue, it is also about teaching and learning in and about the material worlds in which we live. Rather than thinking about how to get ill or traumatized students out of our classrooms, we need to think about how to make our classrooms more accessible not only for students with visible disabilities but also for students with illnesses, including psychological illness. What are some of the concrete actions faculty can take in order to make classroom spaces more accessible to students with illness, including those with PTSD? First, faculty members should create learning environments that are accessible to ill and/or traumatized students by, first, establishing clear deadlines well in advance of an assignment due date and, second, being flexible about those deadlines. Flexible deadlines do not change the learning outcomes of the classroom but, rather, offer students the opportunity to complete required work. Ellen Boucher describes how she gives students an automatic two-day grace period on any paper. If a student cannot complete the work by the end of that grace period, they must meet with her in order to review the assignment. Policies such as Boucher’s make learning spaces more accessible not only for students experiencing illness and/or trauma but also for students who have to juggle other life commitments and don’t have the privilege of being only a student. Second, in order to make the classroom more accessible for ill or traumatized students, I recommend that professors use some kind of content or trigger warning for classroom material. For me, this is easily incorporated into the last few minutes of class in which I preview the next class and any upcoming assignments. This preview gives students an opportunity to prepare for upcoming content. Previewing content prior to the class in which it will actually be discussed also gives students an opportunity to approach me individually if they have particular concerns. Trigger and content warnings are not about excusing students but, rather, about helping students prepare to engage difficult content.    Finally, faculty members can make classroom spaces more accessible to traumatized students by holding space during intense or emotional discussions. Stephanie Crumpton describes this method in “Trigger Warnings, Covenants of Presence, and More: Cultivating safe space for theological discussions about sexual trauma.” In this article, Crumpton argues that a trauma-sensitive pedagogical strategy includes having grounding exercises prepared. She states, “It is important to have a process in place if the classroom tilts out of balance as stories are shared” (145). Gently walking students back from a text, clip, or argument reminding them of where they are, and holding the space through practices such as asking students to take a deep breath are practices that can help ground students in the moment. This grounding not only enables traumatized students to continue participating in the learning process but also helps other students to realize the gravity of the material. This is not an exhaustive list of possibilities but incorporating these practices will create a classroom that is both more engaged with material realities and more accessible to students experiencing illness and/or trauma. All of these suggestions, of course, require work on the part of faculty members. This work is, to be frank, often unpaid. Different faculty will have to parse this out depending on institutional contexts and personal needs, but different institutional contexts and/or personal needs are not an excuse to maintain inaccessible classrooms. Making classrooms accessible to the illness and/or trauma already present in the learning experiences of students offers a direct route to “engaged” teaching.

Classroom discussions are never to be used as therapy – by student or by teacher. While I believe teaching and learning has the capacity to summon the elements of healing, I do not subscribe to asking teacher or learner to participate in classroom sessions structured for therapy in any respect. The doing of therapy must be left to the psychological professionals. No assignment or classroom discussion should invite students into a therapeutic contract. I make this declaration because personal disclosures are often part of the teacher/learner relationship. Choosing authentic and healthy ways of revealing one’s self to students is a part of teaching, and it requires reflection, intention, planning, and great care. Parker Palmer has taught us, “we teach who we are,” so it behooves us to take great care that in sharing ourselves we do not share our craziness, our brokenness, our hot-mess-selves. We should resist any temptation or impulse to disclose personal, raw stories of pain, trauma, and personal wounding under the guise of providing conceptual examples or building trust with our students. Students do not deserve to be burdened by our emotional or psychological fragilities. Equally, we must take care not to coax students into personal disclosures that continue, or compound, their wounding. In other words, too much shared personal information is never a way to strengthen the dynamics of a classroom discussion, lesson plan, or teaching relationship. I have a colleague who does not subscribe to Palmer’s line of thinking about the teaching of one’s self. Instead, he subscribes to the notion that we teach through a series of personas that can be created, crafted, and honed. Then, over the years, by cultivating these personas, we can convey, portray, perform the self who is needed to be a good teaching presence in the classroom. This perspective reminds me of the poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The first stanza reads: We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. While I don’t think this is what my colleague intends, I suspect our adult learners are savvy enough that they recognize a good persona or a flimsy persona for just what it is - a persona. The irony is that even your choice of persona reveals a bit about who you are. Regardless of your philosophy of self-disclosure, the key is not to over-share. Only a few of us are reckless and blindly cross boundaries or wantonly choose to participate in inappropriate disclosures that lead to inappropriate behaviors. Most of us are not in danger of harming students. Most of us simply want to find ways of portraying our healthiest selves for the good of the learning ecology. The month when my mother was dying (2010), I was teaching as best I could - that is, only just barely. I thought I was doing an adequate job. One day during class my teaching assistant, Amy, pulled me aside and told me I had assigned the same small group exercise the week before. She looked at me with eyes afraid she had told me the wrong thing. I thanked her for her feedback. When I gathered the students back from the small groups, my first impulse was to explain myself, which would have meant telling the class I was distracted because my mother was dying. I recoiled from this disclosure feeling that it was too intimate, too raw, too much sharing. My next impulse was to continue with the planned discussion and end class a few minutes early. I went with my second impulse. Being authentic in classrooms does not mean telling all your business. Students are not in our classrooms to take care of us. Similar practices and sensitivities are needed for student disclosures. I have had moments when adult learners launch into telling very personal, sometimes painful stories, about family situations. In these moments I ask them to “STOP!” I try to be light-hearted in my command to cease, but I ask that traumatic experiences not be told, then I ask the student to tell us the point of the story, rather than the detailed story itself. If needed, I talk with the student after class in an effort to refer him/her to counseling. Referral is a needed skill in teaching. Additionally, I ask that in written assignments, care be taken not to disclose anything to me that they would not disclose to the entire class. Reading the stories of pain and trauma in assignment form can be worse than hearing the stories told in the classroom setting. I have a friend, brilliant scholar, who has chosen only to lecture in classroom sessions. Occasionally, she will turn to questions about the lecture in the last few minutes of the session. She has intentionally decided never to allow for student discussions. This strategy was deployed because she was weary of the personal stories of students that were nearly impossible to redirect toward the course agenda. She was unnerved by the disclosures of gossip which were used to thicken the discussion and entertain. She found it a waste of time to listen to students who had not done the readings and instead chose to filibuster by over-sharing. While I do not applaud her decision, I understand her decision. The best strategies I know for helping students and myself not to lapse into disconnected, personal storytelling is to be clear about my aims, objectives, and goals for each course, each session, each learning activity and then to keep those goals central to all discussions. It takes a precision of discipline to stay on-target with the aims and to train students to respect these parameters of disclosure and discussion. It takes a strong, even hand to set and maintain a climate that encourages strong discourse (even personal stories which are applicable to the conversation) and discourages over-sharing. I start the first day of the class with this kind of climate setting in mind. I tell students that we do NOT have a contract of confidentiality in our discussions and to consider anything said in this space as shareable with the world. I tell them that if they need to speak confidentially, then please see their therapist, spiritual director, or counselor, as I will be doing the same thing. I have gotten considerable feedback from students that they appreciate not to be asked to over-share in classrooms.

Trauma is like a mirror that we don’t want to look into. It captures us at our worst angles. It accentuates what we want minimized and overlooks what we wish to be prominent. In trauma, we see projected the unwanted aspects of our realities in such a startling way that we forget everything over which we might have control. Sometimes we don’t have control over a lot. And if we are lucky, we are graced with a reminder that less can be more. To be clear, I don’t mean to make asceticism a virtue. Rather, I want to honor the irrelevant revelation where many on the brink find humor and solace—the fleeting thought of how “it could be worse.” On the flip side of that sentiment is an appreciation for the chance to no longer take what one has for granted. It is this latter posture that I think we teachers should become more accustomed to inhabit. If you follow me on social media, then you know that half of my best pedagogy comes from lessons learned while parenting. As I write, my six-year-old is wrestling in his first tournament. Kid Newton loves the sport. I like that he loves it. But the anxiety in the gym is as airborne as the body odor. And as these children face off, I can read the look in their faces. They are not scared of each other. They are afraid of their own limitations. Throughout this tournament, I have seen a lot of different coaching styles. I don’t have the foggiest idea about wrestling technique, yet I do know enough about teaching-learning to see what isn’t working. And the number one way to fail seems to be throwing a lot of new information at a student/athlete in the midst of a stressful situation. This results in a lot of takedowns, tears, and tantrums. I’ve also picked up some practices that seem to work on the mat, if not in the classroom. When trauma finds your students, consider having them do the following: Breathe. At a Wabash consultation, my colleague Dr. Melanie Harris would frequently lead my cohort in a few moments of collective breathing before we dove into the topic of the day. This may have been the single greatest takeaway from these intensive professional development experiences. In just a few silent moments of respiration, I found assurance that I had survived the previous moment and could be present in the current one. My mind stopped wandering to the future. My thoughts stopped dwelling on the past. So when I sense that my students are stressed or at dis-ease, I push pause on whatever we are doing and have us breathe. When we reenter into the activity, we are so much more prepared for what may come. Have space to be heard, read, and seen. Just like athletes need to breathe, people in trauma need a moment to vent. This doesn’t necessarily involve conspicuous expression, but perhaps just a moment to acknowledge what one has observed can go a long way. If I have a sense that we are in the middle of a traumatic moment, I like to start punctually but give students a chance to release their thoughts within the formal classroom time. This gives them license to work through preoccupation rather than be consumed by the trauma occupying them. Sometimes I just quickly name the event and have students free-write individually as they see fit. Other times I announce that we’ll take three minutes to talk about (or not) whatever they think needs to be discussed. In this situation, I move to the side of the classroom so that students can relate to each other as peers instead of to me as their instructor. When we move to our next activity, students seem to be calmer and more collected. Relax in their strengths. The traumatic moment can be a teachable moment, but not for skill acquisition. This is not the time to trot out radically new content. Instead, consider how you can bring out the things students know. What are the things that have been practiced, drilled, and rehearsed? Giving students a chance to bring these out will orient them toward the “more” ahead. Leaving a little room for free association or creative application can even bring a little hope in the midst of despair. As students rise to the occasion of just one task, they can remember that they have risen before and will rise again. None of these activities are novel. In fact, if you incorporate them into your regular teaching practices, they’ll be that much more effective in moments of testing. At the end of the day, the challenge isn’t ending the trauma. It is dealing with it. Just remember that you, in fact, do have the tools to begin doing so.

At many schools, the new academic year will begin with an interim Dean at the helm of the academic administration office. That's not a stretch for a guess as most deans in theological schools have a 4.3 to 4.5 year tenure. In most cases the interim deans will have come out from among the faculty---these are well-meaning, generous people willing to step up to the need of the moment. Most will likely not have previously served as dean, but will do a good enough job keeping the academic enterprise of the school going smoothly to some extent or another. They are to be thanked, for they'll give up a lot during their interim, and take on a responsibility that is critical to the institution; challenging, often thankless, and at times, overwhelming. Meanwhile, another group will step up to a different task: searching for the next dean. Before coming up with a list of questions to ask the candidates, the search committee will do well to answer the following questions for themselves: 1. How do we define success? Getting clear about what success means in your context and offering that vision to prospective deans is more fruitful than asking the question of them (e.g., "What is your vision of success for our school?" The honest answer to which is, "I can't know that yet."). What constitutes success is contextual to your school. The answer lies in the culture, shared values, academic intent, and the aspirations of your particular school. Some indicators of success are measurable, while others are aspirational. The one will keep you grounded, foster accountability, and inform strategies; the other will pull you forward---especially during difficult times. The clearer you as a search committee are about these, the more helpful in discerning your best choice among candidates. 2. What are the biggest challenges we face? While a search committee will put on a good face for a prospective dean and share all the good things about the school, a dean needs to know what challenges she or he will face coming to the position. To the extent the committee has done due diligence in identifying those challenges, has avoided self-referencing ("We're a great school because we believe we are."), and can be transparent and honest, will be the extent a prospective dean can discern whether or not there's a good "fit." That "fit," however, goes beyond personal likability, transactional familiarity, or cultural affinity. The best "fit" for a dean goes more to function than to role. All deans play the same role (they all have the same job description). Function, however, goes to the needs the school has at a particular point in its trajectory and within its contexts. A school in the midst of an institutional transition requires different functions of its dean than a school entering a period of development. A school requiring significant strategic re-organization needs a different dean than does a school in the midst of a crisis. No mature or experienced dean will be naive enough to think the job will be smooth, easy, or challenge-free. But deans need to know what the school requires of them that may not appear in the job opening announcement. The "right" dean will be the one who can help the school address its challenges. 3. In what areas must our new Dean create change and development; and how much change can we stand? Helping a school address its challenges will mean bringing about some level of change. A worthwhile conversation with a prospective dean will be about how well the school handles change and responds to challenges. If a school has change-fatigue from recent developments or transitions, it's not likely it will respond to an energetic, enthusiastic dean who sees herself as a "change agent," or to the impatient dean who "wants everything done by yesterday." Deans will of necessity bring about change in the institution---it's the nature of the job. How much change a school can stand is a product of capacity and willingness. Let the dean know where you stand. At the end of the day, one can only lead the willing. When it comes to making changes and following through, how willing is the school (Faculty, administration, Trustees)? 4. In what ways will the new Dean add value to our school? Let's face it, the hiring interview process is a process of seduction. Each party does its best to look good and be desired. Even the best-prepared search committee can get snookered by a slick candidate or fall in love with a personality. Secondary characteristics, inconsequential capacities (she's a good skier; he's an avid hiker; she knows Brad Pitt!), and "good feelings about" the candidate can tip the vote in favor of a safe, cool, or comfortable candidate. One question that can provide a corrective to bias is being clear about what value a particular candidate will bring to the school. What will the prospective dean bring to the institution that you need and which another cannot provide? 5. What was the President's relationship with the last dean? What will be the new relationship? While the search committee cannot take responsibility for the relationship between a president and dean---past or future---it is critical that the importance of the relationship be recognized. To a certain extend, a President's relationship to the dean will make or break the job. A common question during the search interviews with deans is about the triangulation between dean, president, and faculty. Typically, the question is couched in terms of "How strong an advocate will you be for the Faculty?" While insecure faculty members may wish to hear that will be the new dean's primary focus, a seasoned dean will likely take a different perspective. Certainly an effective dean will be supportive and a resource for the Faculty in its work of research and teaching. But deans are stewards of the institution, and not advocates of one group over others. At the end of the day the dean needs to ensure that decisions benefit the institution in order to benefit all. That stance inherently sets the dean up for dealing with perpetual internal competing interests and needs. To the point, "Making Faculty happy is not my job," may be the most honest response. Happy interviewing! There's a good dean out there for your school. Choose wisely.

When I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, everything seemed to cave in on my body as questions narrowed: first, what to take out via surgery, then what to put in via chemotherapy and food, and eventually, to possible internal causes due to genetic flaws. Although everything and everyone seemed to be focused on my body, my thoughts were occupied with things outside of my body--from environmental carcinogens, to students, to writing deadlines. While much of the focus on trauma in the classroom has been on how to deal with traumatized students (links below), there has been less discussion of traumatized faculty, as if professors are somehow immune to the trauma students bring into the classroom. Yet, professors, like students, are embedded in environments that often cause trauma. How do we teach not only in the wake of the trauma of students, but also in the wake of our own traumas? Moreover, how can we shift individualistic narratives about trauma toward a cultural narrative, particularly in the context of the classroom? While we might idealistically like to keep personal trauma separate from the classroom, the realities of trauma tend to be messy. Trauma exceeds the boundaries we have worked so hard to establish. This is as true for professors as it is for students. To tell or not to tell When I was diagnosed, I was teaching two courses: one entirely online as part of the Council for Independent Colleges's Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction and one at a correctional institution using the inside-out model. I knew that I would not be able to continue shuttling students back and forth to a correctional institution following my surgery and that it was going to be difficult as I started chemo. My online students had grown accustomed to near-daily interactions in the spaces we had created for dialogue. My options, as I saw them, were to tell the students about the diagnosis, tell the students that I was sick, or not to tell the students anything. Regardless of the choice I made, my diagnosis would affect students and classroom dynamics. Do we invite students into our personal traumas or keep them out? What do we risk by putting students in proximity to personal trauma? What do we risk by trying to keep them out? What might students learn from watching their professors deal with illness or other personal traumas? Both classes had fewer than 20 students enrolled and I had formed connections with many of the students, so I weighed the options in this context and decided not to shield students from the details. I would be as honest as I could. Shifting the narrative One of the things that students might learn if we invite them into our personal traumas is how to shift the narrative of trauma from a narrative about individuals to a cultural one. In the case of my cancer, this means considering the "how did this happen question" without resorting to blaming my genetic line, the decisions of my parents, or my decisions about food and exercise. It is easy to like individualistic reasons for trauma. If you can figure out why I got colon cancer, you feel like you can protect yourself from this particular trauma by making better decisions. This is not unlike feeling that you can avoid rape by dressing modestly and not walking alone at night. While many have recognized the problem with responding to rape by calling on potential rape victims to change their habits, people with cancer continue to be advised to change their personal habits. Such advice shields the broader collective from having to make difficult decisions about the way we have organized our lives together, how that organization might be contributing to the rise in cancer, and the effects of a politics that marginalizes people with pre-existing conditions. Because my diagnosis coincided with the first-full scale attempt to dismantle the ACA, bringing my personal trauma into the classroom created space for students to see how collective decisions shape what might appear to be individual trauma. By naming trauma in the classroom, we invite students into the kinds of questions that can shift the narrative of blame from individuals who experience trauma toward systemic problems that reveal an economy willing to sacrifice some for the benefit of others. In shifting this narrative, students learn how to think about trauma as something that affects individuals, but often does not have individual causes. Trauma is often rooted in social decisions. Links: The Ethics of Trigger Warnings in the Classroom No Trigger Warnings in my class You Are Triggering Me!

Is there a pedagogical responsibility to traumatize our students? I’m not thinking of some unbridled notion of “tough love” in grading, or an exaggerated insistence that actions have consequences, or even routine attempts to challenge assumptions and perspectives. Rather, is there a pedagogical responsibility to make students feel less safe, less secure, less stable, to insist that the world is more sinister, more dangerous, more potentially harmful than they might at first suspect or admit?  I grapple with this question in many of my courses. For example, I teach a course focused on cinematic representations of Jesus that strives to enable students to read such films rhetorically, in conversation with their own historical and cultural moment as well as the current one. To do this well, we have to tease out the ways in which the films support (and resist) anti-Semitism, nationalism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, erotophobia, and Christian imperialism.  In a general education course that explores American histories of race, gender and sexuality through horror films, we grapple with very similar issues. Students resist ideological critiques of these films claiming that such analyses read too much into them or make too much out of minor details or simply exaggerate the importance of “mere entertainment.” Students also emphasize their historical distance from these films—racist and sexist imaginaries may have infected the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies . . . even the early aughts, but those problems have been resolved, and we occupy a more enlightened moment. Part of my work in these courses is to push back, gently but persistently, against these defenses and resistances and force an encounter with ugly, painful, dehumanizing energies. Part of my work is to help students see what they might be unwilling to see about the ways various cultural representations try to prevent them from seeing.  Questions about confronting students with potentially traumatizing material are often resolved by appealing to students’ identities. In a recent Facebook conversation, a group of colleagues discussed whether it would be appropriate to screen video of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in class. There was a concern about protecting students of color and a desire to confront white students. While these priorities made—and make—sense to me, they aren’t fully consonant with my experience as a teacher. I have had female students challenge claims that an argument or analysis is sexist, had queer-identified students champion fairly optimistic assessments of the presence of religious homophobia, and had students of color contest of racism in representations.  By no means am I suggesting that my assessment of the cultural, political, and ethical dynamics of materials is always correct—and I certainly try to create classroom spaces where students can respectfully challenge interpretations offered by course materials, their classmates, and me—but it seems important to note that it may very well be those students who are most likely to be targeted by certain systems of unjust and injurious power—i.e., those students who we worry most about (re-)traumatizing—who may be least willing to acknowledge their vast reach. These challenges were most pronounced in a course I co-taught a couple of years ago entitled “The Violence of Hope.” This course interrogated the ways in which discourses of progress, restoration, healing, and redemption—in politics, ethics, and religion—disguised, perpetuated, or intensified violence. The course pressed the notion that we are all inevitably and inextricably implicated in and complicit with systems of violence and that our attempts at amelioration are often mechanisms of acceleration.  Many of our students had deep activist commitments. Most of our students confessed feelings of hopelessness and frustration as the course progressed. Ultimately, what I think made the course work—what I think makes my film courses work, my Queer Theory coursework, my courses focused on sexuality and religion work—is that there was an acknowledgment of the enormity and seriousness of the questions raised by the materials under consideration and a genuine, patient attempt to grapple with them. In my teaching, I heed the call to traumatize my students. I work to make them more paranoid—or paranoid in new keys. But this is never the goal of my courses. By the same token, it is never my goal to solve the problems I raise, answer the questions I pose—or even offer palliative care for the injuries I may inflict. Instead, I seek to help students develop the skills, the habits, and the dexterity to negotiate the fraught, uncertain, and ever-shifting terrain that comprises their world. Consistent with my sense of responsibility, the only way to develop such capacities is to enter hostile territory.