Blogs

Teaching-learning is often a perilous process. Occasionally, in the midst of delivering carefully structured lectures, facilitating balanced yet critically engaging discussions, or working with students one-on-one, life intervenes in a dramatic and direct fashion. Three years ago, I was teaching a summer course on Methodist church history for Master of Divinity students pursuing ordination at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Right after we began the section on Black Methodism, Dylann Roof walked into a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine people, including the pastor. The world was rife with shock and grief. We, ourselves church leaders, Bible study teachers, and ministerial workers, were actively engaged in crafting understandings of ecclesiastical history in order to refine vocational skills. Students (and instructor) processed painful emotions derived from a current event that hit close to home. Empathy with the victims and their families mingled with rage, disbelief, and ultimately, compassion for the tormented assailant.  Socrates reportedly once said, “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” For me, as instructor, a pedagogical opportunity had arisen. I found myself addressing a contemporary demonstration of the societal and cultural terror that necessitated the original founding of Black Methodism while teaching a section on Black Methodism in a Methodist history class.  In that moment, critical analysis of the broader sweep of church history and its convergence within the present was essential. It was important to help students utilize the historical information they were acquiring in light of current events. Balancing both sets of data, the historical record and the contemporary event, opened the way for collective inquiry, sharing, and judging right there in the classroom. This experience reveals a wider view of pedagogical method. By allowing students to ask and respond to critical questions, underlying assumptions are revealed. Students are then invited to further examine the nature of their assumptions. Have key events and concepts been adequately accessed? Does other relevant information exist that may shed light on these assessments? What are the logical implications of this view? Are there alternatives? If so, are they just as reasonable? Thus, one of the ways student-learners develop critical thinking skills is through the facilitation of teacher-learners who ask questions and respond to answers with more questions. While acknowledging the contributions of students equitably (and encouraging all to participate) facilitators move the discussion forward by engaging questions that maintain focus on the stated goals of the course. This includes summarizing the status of reflections, critical points, and remaining questions. However, it is also crucial to keep in mind that students may harbor feelings of trauma and stress sparked by the evaluation of historical knowledge and associated current events. Creating a classroom that nurtures the student voice through affirmation of shared experience fosters safe space. The use of critical thinking in analyzing history, which is oftentimes quite troubling, engenders the technique of practical engagement with personal and social traumas. And, sensitivity to cultural diversity, religious difference, and doctrinal belief is paramount in cultivating a healing environment. This includes the overt recognition and appreciation of differing and conflicting opinions. Paying attention to the energy of the class, body language of students, and other contextual signs will determine choice of direction that a teacher-learner may take, even while encouraging rational analysis of stated views. Taking a synergistic approach, that is, dialectical interaction among teacher-learners and student-learners, therefore allows room for reasoned critique of hypothetical assumptions as well as the emotional processing of potentially painful experiences. Effective execution requires heightened attention to the needs of students and patience with the flow of communication. This can be challenging, particularly when unexpected realities shatter benignly anticipated teaching moments carefully structured by course design. Instructors must, therefore, be gentle with themselves and practice flexibility in meeting the demands of challenging and/or controversial teaching moments. Although teaching does involve the transmission of knowledge, the ultimate goal of teaching lies in the cultivation of tools that allow students effective engagement in critical discernment of the world, leading to reasonably based decision making. In our Methodist History course, the shootings by a crazed supremacist at the historic Mother Emmanuel Church were a sobering occasion that offered the chance for systemic appraisal of institutional structures in church and society that continue to perpetuate racial violence. This unfortunate and deeply traumatic event provided context to evaluate broadly how various interlocking systems lead to experiential sufferings that are typically passed down generationally. As we grappled with the pain enkindled by this senseless act (which will reverberate in the annals of traumatic historical events) insightful theological and practical observations, deduced by critical analysis, were honed. Like the rest of the world, our class did not emerge emotionally unscathed by facing the horrors of history alive and well in today’s world that mournful day. We did, however, incorporate pedagogical tools, that, with repeated and improved use, are designed to foster growth and empowerment in teaching, learning, and living as responsible citizens.

Early adopters of instructional technologies, for years, have been trying to raise awareness of the need for theological education to be adaptive (never mind innovative--that just seems not in the DNA of most theological schools) to the emerging realities of learning in higher education. Many have been warning that "the Digital Natives are coming!" Well, the Digital Natives are here, and as a result, most theological schools are obsolete; they just don’t know it. That is, the way most theological schools teach is obsolete. Students have changed, and as a result, so has the nature of education and learning. Here are some characteristics of the incoming students in seminaries (adapted from Beloit Colleges "Mindset" lists): They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal. Having a chat has seldom involved talking. Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents’ screens grow ever larger. Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car. A tablet is no longer something you take in the morning. Threatening to shut down the government during Federal budget negotiations has always been an anticipated tactic. Growing up with the family dog, one of them has worn an electronic collar, while the other has toted an electronic lifeline. Plasma has never been just a bodily fluid. With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address. There has never been a national maximum speed on U.S. highways. Their favorite feature films have always been largely, if not totally, computer generated. They have never really needed to go to their friend’s house so they could study together. They may have been introduced to video games with a new Sony PlayStation left in their cribs by their moms. A Wiki has always been a cooperative web application rather than a shuttle bus in Hawaii. They have always been able to plug into USB ports Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing. Since they binge-watch their favorite TV shows, they might like to binge-watch the video portions of their courses too. “Press pound” on the phone is now translated as “hit hashtag.” The water cooler is no longer the workplace social center; it’s the place to fill your water bottle. There has always been “TV” designed to be watched exclusively on the web. Yet another blessing of digital technology: They have never had to hide their dirty magazines under the bed. Attending schools outside their neighborhoods, they gather with friends on Skype, not in their local park. They have never used Netscape as their web browser. “Good feedback” means getting 30 likes on your last Facebook post in a single afternoon. They are the first generation for whom a “phone” has been primarily a video game, direction finder, electronic telegraph, and research library. Electronic signatures have always been as legally binding as the pen-on-paper kind. They have largely grown up in a floppy-less world. XM has always offered radio programming for a fee. There have always been emojis to cheer us up. Donald Trump has always been a political figure, as a Democrat, an Independent, and a Republican. Amazon has always invited consumers to follow the arrow from A to Z. In their lifetimes, Blackberry has gone from being a wild fruit to being a communications device to becoming a wild fruit again. They may choose to submit a listicle in lieu of an admissions essay. By the time they entered school, laptops were outselling desktops. Once on campus, they will find that college syllabi, replete with policies about disability, non-discrimination, and learning goals, might be longer than some of their reading assignments. Whatever the subject, there’s always been a blog or a Youtube channel for it. A movie scene longer than two minutes has always seemed like an eternity. As toddlers, they may have taught their grandparents how to Skype. Wikipedia has steadily gained acceptance by their teachers.(1) Closer to home: The majority of your incoming students have taken at least one online course, in elementary school, high school or college; they don't need a "tutorial" or orientation to using an LMS (but many of your Faculty do!). A paper syllabus is useless to them. They expect that most of the information they need for your class will be on a digital platform (an LMS, a website, or an app) on a  screen (a laptop, a tablet, or their phones). Whatever they produce in your class, for whatever subject, will be digital to some extent. And, they are better at Powerpoint than you. The reality is that as theological schools we hold on to an industrial-aged model in a digital world. Furthermore, the imagined future students we push our admissions office to find to fill our classroom seats and residential halls don’t need us to learn. Classroom instruction as a signature pedagogy is obsolete. That may seem an overstatement, but here are examples of how Digital Natives challenge ideas of how you learn and from whom. At 13 Patrick McCabe learned robotics from the internet. He even demonstrates how to teach a robot to learn. Amira Willighagen was seven years old she took it upon herself to learn how to sing opera music. Growing up in Pakistan, there were no instructors in town that could teach Usman Riaz how to play percussive guitar, so he learned it from the internet. "I wanted to learn more about that so I just let the internet be my teacher," Usman said, "You learn from exposure and you learn from watching other people and that's exactly what I did except that instead of having the person physically in front of me I had a portal to them through the computer." He says, "There's so much out there available for everybody that they don't need to sit and worry about whether they don't have a teacher or not, you just need an internet connection and the desire to want to learn something and that's really it." Arguably, the most important role of a dean is to be the visionary that shapes the educational values and enterprise of the school. Does your vision for your school align with the realities of a digital world? Is your Faculty teaching in the ways Digital Natives need to learn? Expect to be taught? Is your Faculty preparing ministers with skills for a world that no longer exists? Is your Faculty as attentive to the ways of teaching and learning as much as they are to what they teach? Will your next incoming class find they've signed on to an industrial age system of education that is obsolete? Where is your school situated in the landscape of online theological education? (1) Adapted from Beloit College's "Mindset" lists.

We can define the syllabus with precision, but our best-laid plans are subject to the moments when life simply happens. Questions arise. Frustrations are felt. And the sages on the stage better have something to show for all their high-falutin’ learning. At least this is how I feel when teaching in the midst of traumatic events. I can usually triage the syllabus—shuffling assignments around to give space to the moment. I even know well enough to leave room for the inevitable crisis within my course planning. But what do you actually do when you’re in front of students who have come to class just as raw as you? There’s no media bulletin that will solve the problem. Trauma doesn’t care about public relations. There’s no master lecture that will bring a master solution. Trauma doesn’t leave room for satisfying answers. But I’m here to tell you that all is not lost. Every Christmas break, I go home to Houston. My most recent trip was the first time I had been since Hurricane Harvey. And in the days following my return to Pennsylvania, friends wanted to know what I saw. I didn’t have much to respond with except for the watchwords of the human story. We rebuild. We heal. We grow. We learn.   This is what we do in the face of natural disaster. It too is what we can do in the face of psychosocial trauma. But it’s going to take some time. Unfortunately, I have found myself in the position of consulting a number of institutions enduring the perpetration of prejudicial affronts, most frequently concerning rampant sexism, homophobia, and racism. The biggest mistake I see is the grab for a big fix or antidote to make the situation go away. I have to explain that trauma is an immediate crisis that takes hold of us for the long haul, so our job is to equip our communities to rebuild, heal, grow, and learn as best as we can manage, moment by moment, day by day. For teachers, this means reminding ourselves and our students that the more we know, the better we can manage the crisis before us. When life happens, I tell myself to adhere to the following protocol step by step. Gather your composure. Find your footing even in the midst of your insecurity. Claim your own humanity—the right to feel, the right to hurt, the right to grieve. Eat nutrient-rich foods. Drink plenty of water. Meditate, do jumping jacks, practice yoga, or walk around the block. Your first step is to regain your sense of self. Reconnect. Take a moment to let a trusted colleague or companion know that you’re about to go into the fray. You have a community. A simple text message or phone call can remind you that you’re not alone. Lower the bar. When it’s go time, your job today is to “be you” and “do you” with the students. This will equip them with the confidence to do the same. Before you know it, you will fall back into the role of teacher. They will fall back into the role of student. And you’ll together develop a new stasis. Preach what you have practiced. Have your students take a few minutes to do a version of what you have just done. Lead them in a moment of silence or even a quick stretch-break. Let people grab a drink of water and return to class. Let them check in with each other as they trickle back into the room. Your acknowledgment of their humanity will go a long way in garnering the trust you’ll need for the day. Teach the moment. Present what you understand about the situation and contextualize it in light of what you know as teacher-scholar. Then take a few moments to show how you’re learning. In so doing, you’ll remind students that they are not the sum of their emotions. They are also learners with skills and proficiencies to help them grapple with the day beyond what they could have done prior to class. It also solidifies a basis for community-building amidst the new state of affairs. From here, you have a “we” with which to work. Come together around a whiteboard and make a list of questions that you all want to pursue as a class. Name the resources you might consult in the coming days in your search for more information. Excavate your syllabus to see not whether there’s anything of use, but what can be used in the moments ahead. Better questions lead to better possibilities. The work you have put in—together— will bear fruit in the days to come. I know now what else to ask for in the midst of trauma. But until then, use the learning process as a vehicle to position yourselves in renewed strength and community.

Several years ago, I was expecting a guest speaker in one of my courses. To prepare for the colleague’s visit, I asked my students what questions they had for the person.  Silence. And not a quizzical silence, just a dead silence. I tried to prime the pump by repeating the guest’s research agenda as well as the topics of our course’s conversation. The response by students was underwhelming – the not so faint sound of crickets could be heard. I signaled my dismay by using a displeased tone of voice and reminded the students that they must have questions. In distress, a woman blurted out, “I don’t have any questions!” I realized she meant that she did not have any deficits.  She thought questions only signaled what she was supposed to know, but did not.  Questions, for her, were a confession of inadequacy, unpreparedness, and ignorance. I had failed to teach that questions were tools of curiosity and a method of inquiry to interact with the guest lecturer. Since that moment, I have been trying to cultivate and nurture student curiosity.  In this journey, I have learned that what I am curious about is not necessarily what my students are curious about. I have learned that some students have no curiosity for classroom learning because their energies are tied up in modes of survival, credential earning, and the distractions of family and wage earning. These students are difficult to gather-in. I have learned that students have been told that their genuine curiosity is without merit, so they have learned not to voice their real questions or pursue their authentic passions. I have learned that some deep, marvelous curiosity is voiced in a language/vocabulary that is academically unsophisticated and I have worked to train my ear to hear these curiosities. I have challenged myself to “think like my students” and try to anticipate the kinds of questions and inquiry they will levy toward a reading or learning activity. I want to align with them and use their inquiries as starting points.  I’ve had some success with this tactic – but it’s not easy.  Mostly I’ve learned that students are so eager-to-please that when I tell them they are to formulate their own genuine curiosity about a topic – they do.  Last semester I had two kinds of assignments in my seminar. First, the students were to consider the assigned readings, then like jazz musicians, riff off of the author’s argument. I called them Riff Reports. The instructions were to bring to the class a report about what the reading sparked in their thinking and imagination. I challenged them, “Bring your own insights, curiosity – do not repeat the reading, do not report the reading.  Consider your own passion, interests, situations, then build, expand, add your voice, perspective, and idiosyncrasies to the conversation.” At the beginning of the semester, I modeled in class sessions what I meant by Riff Reports by doing my own version of riffing off of the readings. In my three-hour session, I would do a one-hour riff, then two students, each taking 30 minutes, would riff off of the same reading. This would give the class three riffs from one reading – a cornucopia of meaning and wonder! Second, by the end of the semester, the students completed a Curiosity Report, building off of the reading, their Riff-Reports, my Riff-Reports, and the conversations we had in class sessions. The Curiosity Report could culminate in a critical reflection essay or it could be a creative portrayal. Regardless of its final embodiment (the student’s choice), the report had to include a method of inquiry which addressed the student’s own curiosity. Students were invited to explain why this curiosity was important to them and their people. They had to sit with the librarian to create a bibliography, interview experts, and go on field trips to visit the locales needed to satisfy their inquiries. By mid-semester, students gave oral reports about their topics, questions, and inquiry methodology. By the end of the semester, students gave an expanded presentation and then handed in a written form.  Watching and helping students formulate their own curiosity was a very different way to teach than telling them what was important, critical, or required in the disciplinary canon.  Helping them develop, unearth, and investigate their own agendas was not the same as performing my passions, thoughts, and ideas for them at the front of the class.  Witnessing their process of being inspired by our reading, then taking a kernel of their own idea and working it up into a full project, was very meaningful to me. This witnessing gave me a real sense of reverence for their ability to think, create, and hope – I felt as if I was witnessing beauty.  In every case, students selected topics that were personally relevant, intimately related to their life circumstances, and in some cases, life-giving. Our librarian called me to comment on the breadth and uniqueness of their topics and how interested he was to help students who were interested in inquiry. In two instances, I sent students to talk with faculty colleagues whose research interest matched the students. In both instances, the conversations were generative for both student and colleague. Finding like-minded thinkers feels like water in the desert.  At the risk of romanticizing the experience, I did have one student who, in my opinion, got lost in the process. The student preferred being told what to do and how to do it.  When that was not the task, the effort needed for discovery and self-motivation was too much. The student was able to articulate a fascinating question of inquiry, but could not follow through on investigation and creative research methodology. Pursuing curiosity requires time for introspection, consideration of on-going context and conversation, and the where-with-all to investigate.  Structuring classrooms for student curiosity seems like a no-brainer, but it has taken me many years to get here.

In graduate school, I spent a year teaching at San Quentin State Prison while writing my dissertation. I loved my Religion and English classes at the prison and frequently remarked to friends that teaching incarcerated men, many of them in their mid-thirties or beyond, was strikingly similar to teaching 18-22-year-old undergraduates at UC Berkeley. “They make the same excuses about why they couldn’t do the reading,” I loved to tell fellow graduate student instructors. The students, those on the inside and on the outside, also often struggled over the same points – how to write a persuasive thesis, how to conduct research, how to understand unfamiliar religious practices. Eventually, I found a job at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, and left both Berkeley and San Quentin behind. After several years at Rhodes, a colleague invited me to teach in another prison education program, this time a “great books” program at the West Tennessee Women’s Prison. I jumped at the chance and offered to cover the Hebrew Bible. Strategically, I decided to teach the two books I was already teaching to Rhodes undergraduates in my Feminist Biblical Interpretation class: Ruth and Esther. This suggested several advantages: I would already be prepared for what the students would have to say about the texts, what directions the conversation might take, and I thought women might be interested in reading texts where female relationships, like that between Ruth and Naomi, are foregrounded.   I entered the first class at WTWP confident in what would happen. I had just taught Ruth to my traditional undergraduates a week before and the Rhodes students had had excellent discussion, especially about Ruth and Naomi and their relationship (Ruth, you’ll recall, is urged by her mother-in-law Naomi to leave after her husband dies; Ruth replies with the famous words, “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried” [Ruth 1:16, NRSV]). My Rhodes students were open to the possibility of queer readings of Ruth and Naomi – generally, they were interested in finding and ferreting out pockets of homoeroticism in the text – though also critical of Naomi as “a whiner.” Ruth, meanwhile, seemed less a loyal friend or lover than a burden – “like someone else’s pet you have to take care of,” as one student put it. The women at WTWP were also very enthusiastic to talk about Ruth, but they had different understandings of the relationships in the text. They were, on the whole, far more sympathetic to Naomi and “what she’s been through.” They were mostly (though not entirely) reluctant to see the relationship between the two women as homoerotic, but they placed great value on reading it as a strong friendship. Ruth and Naomi had each been through a great deal. They needed each other. This experience of teaching the same text in two very different groups was a valuable pedagogical reminder to me about the dangers of making assumptions about students and how they will respond to the text. It was also useful in thinking about trauma. Many incarcerated women are survivors of trauma, especially violence and sexual violence. Incarceration challenges family bonds and strains relationships. All of this is well known. What I did not realize until teaching Ruth in prison, however,  was the unique hermeneutic perspective it gives students into the text. These women read the book with greater empathy, and with greater attention to the dynamics of its relationships. They understood why Ruth and Naomi needed each other. (Relatedly, when we read Esther the following week, they took a dim view of the men in the text, especially Ahasuerus for his sexual exploitation of women and Mordecai for his strategic exploitation of his niece Esther. These readers intuited what scholars such as Nicole Duran and Randall Bailey have argued, that the book of Esther is a work of male exploitation). The traditional undergraduates at Rhodes have their own traumas, and these too influenced their reading. College students are especially attuned to the fraught relationships between children and parents -- this came across in their reading of the book. Sexual exploration is also a cause of interest, as well as anxiety, in college -- these readers were more open to the possibility of queer romance in the text.  The traumas that shape our lives shape, as well, how we read texts. This is a simple lesson, but one that the students in my two Ruth classes helped me understand better.

Time and time again, I find that successful online students are those with skills of self-direction, self-regulation, and time-management. Self-directed learners determine their learning needs, set learning goals, locate and access suitable resources for learning, manage their learning activities, monitor and evaluate their performance, and reflect on and reassess their learning strategies. Self-directed learners have skills of self-regulation—this encompasses concentration, self-awareness, self-discipline, time-management, delaying gratification, and self-assessment. However, as Sandie Gravett notes in her blog post, students often feel ill equipped for self-directed learning (https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2018/09/becoming-a-better-teacher/). How do we encourage students to assume responsibility for their learning and become self-directed learners? It takes more than signposts and reminders. For many years, I signaled the importance of these skills by linking to websites such as "What Makes a Successful Online Student" which states: “With the freedom and flexibility of the online environment comes responsibility. The online process takes a real commitment and discipline to keep up with the flow of the process.” I also encouraged them at the beginning of the semester to write down all of their deadlines in a scheduler. I would even email them reminders each week. And still, I found some students fail simply because they fell behind: they prioritized other courses and responsibilities, or they procrastinated and left it until a later time that never came. Online environments can exacerbate tendencies towards procrastination and distraction. We can find endless rabbit holes online that fuel procrastination and undermine our efforts at self-discipline (as Tim Urban humorously depicts in his popular blog post on procrastinators, https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html). We are also prone towards continuous partial attention–the process of paying simultaneous attention to numerous sources of information, but at a superficial level. Unlike multitasking, which is driven by a desire to be productive and efficient, continuous partial attention is motivated by the desire to continuously connect and be connected in an effort not to miss anything. As Linda Stone remarks, “It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior, and it involves an artificial sense of constant crisis” (https://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/). Our students have a fear of missing out (“FOMO”), and their attention is often interrupted by notifications and alerts on their cell phones. Although we have no control over our students’ behavior and whether they will ultimately succumb to the pull of distraction and procrastination, we can incorporate various activities in our online courses to encourage them to develop skills of self-directed learning. For example, you can facilitate greater self-awareness of their study habits and learning strategies by assigning introspective writing exercises where they answer questions such as: What tasks am I currently procrastinating? Is it because I’m unsure of how to do them, or afraid of doing them poorly? What activities do I gravitate to when I procrastinate? (Nilson 2013, 83) Here I share a few strategies drawn primarily from Linda Nilson’s Creating Self-Regulated Learners: Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills (Stylus, 2013). Again, self-regulation refers to a sub-skill of self-directed learning: how students approach learning tasks in our online courses. You can introduce them to self-regulated learning from the outset by assigning a reading such as Robert Leamnson’s (2002) article, “Learning (Your First Job)” available through the University of Georgia Center for Teaching and Learning: http://www.ctl.uga.edu/uploads/main/mainLearningYourFirstJob.pdf. It begins by emphasizing that learning is “not something that just happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself,” and then shares strategies for focusing attention, managing one’s time, studying, and preparing for exams. You can encourage students to set goals for their learning by having them write a paper at the beginning of the course entitled “How I Earned an A in This Course” (Zander and Zander 2000). This exercise encourages students to envision concrete and attainable goals for their learning, and it also gives you a sense of their hopes for the course. You can have students revisit them at the end of the semester, reflecting on the extent to which they followed their strategic plan, when, how, and why they might have strayed, and how this impacted their actual performance in the course. You can help them self-test their understanding of the course materials through reflective writing and visual mapping tools. You can do “learning logs” where they identify the main points of each reading, what they found most surprising, what they found most confusing, and why they found it confusing (Bean 2011). Or you could have them write double-column notes on the readings: one column with substantive notes similar to those of “learning logs” but another for their personal reactions (feelings, attitudes, values, beliefs, perspectives, prior knowledge, changes in their way of thinking). (Nilson 2013, 27) You can have them test their understanding through “mind dumps,” where they write down all they can remember about the readings, videos or podcasts, or have them create visual study tools that map out, integrate, and structure what they’ve learned (Nilson 2013, 33). After you give students feedback on their work, you can have them complete meta-assignments that ask them to explain what they think our feedback means (Nilson 2013, 56), or write a letter to the next class about the paper or project: how to prepare for tackling the assignment, what strategies to take, what missteps to avoid, and the value of the assignment (Nilson 2013, 56). Finally, you can have students reflect on their learning through course “wrappers”: at the beginning of the course, students write what they think the subject matter or discipline is about, how it’s done, and why it’s important, and then at the end of the course they revisit those questions and compare their answers (Nilson 2013, 87). Another closing activity might be short “Future Uses” papers where they identify the three most important concepts or skills they learned in the course, why they consider them important, and how they might use them in the future (Nilson 2013, 88; Svinicki 2004). These are just some ways that we might help students develop skills of self-direction, self-regulation, and time-management so that they can be successful in our online courses. Works Cited Bean, John C. 2011. Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom (Second Edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nilson, Linda. 2013. Creating Self-Regulated Learners: Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills. Sterling, V.A.: Stylus. Svinicki, Marilla D. 2004. Learning and motivation in postsecondary classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Zander, Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander. 2000. The Art of Possibility. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. min Zander. 2000. The Art of Possibility. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

The questions that inform my teaching and scholarship focus on representations of violence. This means I spend a good deal of time studying such representations. I learned several years ago that my capacity to answer relatively straight-forward questions like “But is that film really gory?” or “Will I find that book really disturbing?” has dwindled into non-existence. Turns out that when a significant portion of your media consumption is comprised of images of war, torture, sexualized degradation, and racialized brutality, your attunement to the average consumer’s tastes atrophies. From the outset, then, I acknowledge that I might not be the most reliable guide to help sort out how to teach traumatic materials. By the same token, I have taught, written about, and meditated on an array of traumatic materials—and my students, in the main, after initial phases of feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by the questions and contents that organize my courses, have reported finding something valuable in them. So, to open this blog series, I want to suggest that teaching traumatic materials may not be so different from teaching per se. First, I think we are sometimes overinvested in thinking about traumatic materials as a special case. When considering the events, texts, and ideas that comprise the religious studies curriculum, it’s tough to think about what remains after subtracting potentially traumatizing content. War, violence in various forms, imperialism and colonialism, degradation and humiliation, ethnocentricism and racism, sexism and heterosexism—examples of each abound in the language, imaginaries, and practices that we take as our object of study. Do we need additional pedagogical tools beyond the transparency, openness, and attentiveness that we should be using all the time to make sure that we are noticing, and making space for, our students’ varying levels of discomfort, resistance, confusion, and hostility? Given that traumatic materials constitute so much of what we teach when we teach religion, I would suggest that—insofar as we are teaching well—we already know how to teach such materials. Second, I think we overestimate our ability to predict which materials will traumatize. In a former life, when I was an adjunct teaching Constitutional Law, I made a remark about the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution’s solution to the practical problems presented by the Articles of Confederation. A young African-American woman, who had been quiet for the first few weeks of class, spoke up and eloquently explained that she found nothing to admire in a document that still countenanced the ownership of human beings. I carry her intervention with me every time I enter the classroom. My experience of the world shapes what I experience as injurious, as ugly, as painful, as disturbing. In the same vein, I remember distinctly how terrified and paralyzed I felt sitting amongst the enthusiastic cheers that greeted the final scene of Brett Ratner’s blockbuster film, X-Men: The Last Stand, as “good” mutants fought to destroy the “bad” mutants who refused to be “cured” of their otherness. Given that history and mainstream culture are made by and for those who hold power, even the most seemingly anodyne examples can be traumatizing for those who were never meant to survive.    Related to the question of predicting which materials might traumatize, I also wonder about our ability to read students’ reactions. When does silence evince reflection and when paralysis? When is speaking up fueled by enthusiasm and when by rage? Although my course evaluations tell me that my ability to read the energy of the room is far from perfect, I remain convinced that when we strive to remain present with our students in the unfolding of the event that is the class session, then the surprises that inevitably come will be much less likely to catch us off guard in destructive ways. Finally, I think we sometimes overvalue teaching traumatic materials—either by assuming that certain topics are beyond our pedagogical capacity—because they are too upsetting, too sensitive, too difficult—or by valorizing those who have the “courage” and the “finesse” to teach such challenging content. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because I find something important, something tantalizing, something worthwhile in the material. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because it opens a particular perspective on the world for my students. And, like most teachers, I have good days and bad, days my students get it and days they don’t, days I’m fully engaged and days I’m distracted, days they resist what I’m trying to do and days they trust me enough to willingly come with me. The more we normalize the traumatic in our pedagogical imaginations, the more we’ll be able to help our students encounter the ubiquity of trauma that constitutes their world and their lives.

If I get shot in my classroom – I’m gonna be mad! Yesterday, a friend told me her church and nursery school were having shooter-on-campus drills for the staff and children. I wondered when our school was going to do the same.  Sometimes my colleagues and I joke about what we would do if an active shooter came into our building. We joke about ways to protect ourselves by fighting back or by fleeing. One colleague said not to plan to assist her in the event of an intruder because, given the opportunity, she would be the first one out of her office window. I made a mental note to see if I could climb out of my window. Thinking about myself climbing out of my basement window tickled me until I remembered it was a strategy to avoid getting shot. The list of schools, churches, and public events that have become killing fields is growing. News reporters occasionally entreat viewers to stay sensitive to the victims of these tragic events.  Interviewers of distraught family members work hard not to appear prosaic. While we do not want to mute our reactions to reports of gun violence, the numbness is difficult to prevent. One of the nine people shot by the 21-year-old white supremacist in the 2015 Charleston church massacre was the grandmother of an alumna. Grandma was at Bible Study when she was savagely murdered. When my student and I get together for lunch, we still talk about the aftermath of the killing and I help her grieve. The amount of effort I have given to the teaching craft has not included ways of staying alive in the face of a gunman in my own classroom (most of the assailants are men). Heretofore, the challenge and un-safety has been in ideas. The danger of classrooms has been in coaxing fearful or belligerent students into new meaning making strategies, or different ways of understanding old traditions. Now, the real danger of potential gun violence feels like domestic terrorism. I am afraid, I am unprepared, and I feel edgy in the familiar safety of my own classroom. The possibility of gunplay in my school looms thick yet wispy in the ethers. I struggle to make sense of this faint paranoia because I know it affects my teaching. In my Teaching Teachers to Teach course, should I teach self-defense and strategies for emergency evacuations? Should I review with students the open-carry laws of the state and nation? Should course preparation include time at the gun range? Suppose classroom attire included Kevlar vests and running shoes? Could I shoot back at a student who was shooting at me? The first time I saw someone shot, I was 9-years old. One school night, my dad and uncle were going to the post office to mail household bills. I gladly tagged along because I enjoyed being with them. Our routine was that once we arrived at the post office, I would be handed the bundle of envelopes, then I would leap out of the back seat of the green Pontiac, dash up the stairs and deposit the letters into the outside mailbox for quick delivery to their addressed destinations. With my uncle driving, we rode with ease - the radio playing, my dad and uncle chatting and me enjoying the view from the back seat. My uncle turned the corner onto a one-way street – we were about a block from the post office. Without warning, shots rang out! --- “POP! POPPOP!” – I struggled to see out of the window because my uncle, with cat-like reflexes, had slammed on the brakes, shifted the car into reverse and, with foot flooring the accelerator, began backing out of the street - all in one gesture. Since this was before the days of seat belts, my child-body shifted wildly with the momentum of the car. Even so, I saw a group of teenage boys chasing a lone boy who was limping as he ran. The limping boy ran across the street, up on the sidewalk, and then collapsed. A boy who was chasing him had a gun at the end of his outstretched arm. That boy ran over to the collapsed boy and pistol-whipped him as he lay on the sidewalk. As if the scene had been choreographed by Alvin Alley, they all ran off down the dark street, into the night, as if on cue - all but the collapsed boy who lay bleeding and dead on the sidewalk. My uncle’s skillful driving sped our car backward around the corner and away from the mayhem. Uncle commanded the car out into the intersection, then gunned the gas, propelling us forward into streets with no shooting teens. I stared from the back seat in horror.  My beloved friend Zenobia is a retired warden from New York City corrections department. She spent twenty plus years on Rikers Island and other prisons. Years ago she used to talk with me about the ways of assessing a room for my best escape in the event of unexpected emergency like a gun being fired in the room. When we would sit in restaurants, she would casually ask me over her menu to tell her where the exits in the room were. I was to have noticed them and made mental notes as we walked into the space. Most days I could not answer the question because I had failed to take notice. I did not like this game. I resisted her teaching because I deemed those skills as needed only in places like prison. The applicability of Zenobia’s lessons for my classroom setting is soul withering. Tomorrow, I’m gonna call her and ask for a refresher lesson.  I do not own a gun because if I did I would undoubtedly use it.  I would use it when I felt fearful or angry.  I do not think clearly when I am fearful or angry. 

It has now been over a full year since the 2016 presidential election. Yet, I still remember vividly the dark and raw thoughts I had the morning of November 9, 2016. When I woke up and learned of the election results, I was horrified that so many people had made a conscious decision to elect a person who embodied and condoned the evils of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to be the world’s most powerful leader. Most of the discussions I had that day with my family, friends, and colleagues centered around our inability to understand the political stances and ideologies that were reflected in so much (but not the majority!) of the popular vote. In that grim day after the election, I remember thinking that educators, like myself, must have completely missed the mark. As a professor of theology, I was particularly troubled. The election had touched one of my core beliefs deeply—that is, the purpose of theological education is to form persons to think and act responsibly in the church and society. I remember thinking that my field had failed, and that we needed to rethink everything we had been doing in the classroom up to then. As I read the analyses that were pouring in that day, one particular headline caught my eye: “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch. Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren't.” The article was written by Charles Camosy, a professor at Fordham University, who was proposing that the election reflected a divide in our country between those who have a college degree and those who do not. “The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump,” he declared. I had been thinking more about age-old racism and the divide between whites and non-whites as the reason for the election results. But, Professor Camosy presented a different analysis, one that has been troubling me and my role as a theological educator ever since I read it that day. He said: “College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump.” What really stopped me in my tracks was his remark about how college-educated persons, “have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses . . . . [M]any professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.”[1] This statement made me pause, because it resonated deeply with my own experience, and, therefore, called me to task. I began thinking: Are the ideologies expressed in my assigned readings and classroom assignments monolithic? In my efforts to form persons to think and act responsibly, have I promoted an insular way of thinking? As educators, we have a great opportunity (and perhaps even a responsibility) to present certain sets of values persuasively. I even state some of these values explicitly in my course syllabi. For example, I want my students to know that I value the theological voices of those on the margins, both in history and contemporary society. I am edified when students come to adopt this value of mine as their own. In addition, if certain values, like racism, ignorance, and bigotry, are displayed in my classroom, I clearly denounce them and explain why. But, in my effort to rethink everything I have been doing in the classroom, Professor Camosy’s article has led me to consider a different approach: that I should be giving some attention to racism, ignorance, and bigotry, before simply denouncing it. In the classroom, this would entail assigning readings from the alt-right, for example. The goal would be to better understand the political and theological stances that undergird these values, which are often underrepresented in higher education, so that we and our students would understand them better. If I want my students to think and act in the world responsibly, shouldn’t they be able to understand the values they will be encountering and engaging outside of the classroom? In the required texts and readings assignments on my course syllabi, I strive to include diverse authors. I understand “diversity” in this sense to mean the inclusion of writings by people traditionally marginalized because of their race/ethnicity, gender, class, etc. But, lately I have been thinking that I might do better to reconsider my definition of “diversity.” Perhaps it should include those marginalized by educational levels, age groups, geographic regions, values, and political standpoints? To be honest, what has held me back thus far in assigning texts from certain political standpoints, such as those that are entangled with white supremacy, is my own aversion to them. I also do not want to be misunderstood as promoting the values espoused by such writings--or worse yet, risk students being convinced by their rhetoric. So, I’m curious: What do you educators, who might be reading this, think is at risk in extending this definition of “diversity” or not extending it? On the most practical level, have any of you begun to include diverse political standpoints in your reading assignments? If so, how do you present the material to your students? Do you follow any rules or guidelines? Perhaps most importantly: Is your working definition of “diversity” effective, do you think, in preparing students to intellectually and socially engage with the world outside of the classroom more effectively?  [1] Carles Camosy, “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch,” Washington Post, November 9, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-college-educated-americans-are-out-of-touch/?utm_term=.3634cedb1e19 (accessed December 13, 2017).

A few years ago, during a search for a New Testament professor, I asked two questions during the interview – two questions I ask of every candidate for a position with our institution regardless of rank or discipline. The first is innocent enough: “How important is racial/ethnic diversity to you when teaching?” All candidates, to a fault, enthusiastically answer in the affirmative. Then I ask my second question: “Which scholars and/or books from racial and ethnic minorities do you include in your syllabus and why?” Here is when the squirming usually begins, revealing the lack of academic rigor of the candidate under consideration. During this particular New Testament search, two separate candidates from different Ivy League schools provided problematic responses. The first responded that as much as s/he was committed to diversity, s/he could not think of any scholar of color off the top of their head who has written a credible text concerning the biblical text. Let the response of this biblical scholar sink in for a moment. The second scholar, grasping for straws, offered the name Paul Ricœur, and then proceeded to convince me why I should accept his answer. I didn’t. While these two particular individuals best illustrate the depths of the ignorance of many white scholars concerning the scholarship emanating from what will soon be – combined – the largest U.S. demographic group, others have provided slightly better answers, but no less ignorant. For example, often the names offered are of scholars whose works were well known in the last century. Although they name foundational thinkers, they lack knowledge of current contributors to the discipline. Other times Latin American liberationist scholars are mentioned as if they are representatives of the U.S. Latinx context. Or white women use the term mujerista as the Latinx equivalent to womanist revealing their total lack of knowledge concerning the rich feminist discourse occurring among Latinxs. One’s pedagogy, or scholarship for that matter, can never be cutting-edge if one is ignorant of all aspects of their discipline. As a Latino man, my teaching must not just include the thoughts and writings of eurocentric and Latinx scholars; but also those of Indigenous, Black, and Asian-American scholars, as well as Queer and Feminist voices. Not to be familiar with the contributions of all marginalized communities does a disservice to my scholarship, and more importantly, to the students in my classroom. Many white scholars fall short of academic rigor because they can succeed, be published, and thus paraded as the fattened calf due to the prevalent institutional racism which continues to support a white affirmative action which protects their job opportunities and current positions from better qualified and more knowledgeable scholars of color. As a Latino going through my Ph.D. program, not only did I have to master Eurocentric thinkers, methodologies, and theories (as I should have), but I was expected to also be fluent with the thinkers, methodologies, and theories arising from my Latinx context. And yet, it was my white colleagues who were considered among the “brightest and the best” who lacked any requirement or need to read or know anything about my context - or any other marginalized context. How can anyone ever be considered knowledgeable with such a limited understanding of a sliver of their discipline? Part of the problem is that so many of the so-called top schools promote ignorance because they lack scholars of color, especially Latinx scholars. All you need to do is count how many core Latinx faculty are present on the faculty of the so-called Ivies to prove my point. You can count them on one hand, and maybe have a free finger leftover to give. Simply stated: If the faculty fails to represent the diversity of the population, then that school – even if it claims to be among the Ivies – lacks academic excellence and rigor – regardless of how large their endowments may be. Of course, this institutionalized racism is not limited to the Ivies. Gaze upon your own religion department. How many Latinxs are among your core faculty? Our presence may be requested to demonstrate a politically correct diversity; nevertheless, our scholarship remains confined to our barrios. Latinx, who comprise the largest ethnic group in the United States, remain the least represented group of all full professors in the academy, usually relegated to the “instructor” or “lecturer” rank where we possess little if no voice on how the academic institution structures itself, or in influencing doctoral students. The voices of marginalized scholars must be prevented from fully participating in shaping the academic discipline. For if they were truly given a seat at the table, they might reveal that the discipline which has been upheld for the past centuries as universal is simply a privileged eurocentric method of theological contemplation which in reality is but a very limited form of the particular.  Students sitting in classrooms of white professors are often prevented from obtaining a cutting-edge education because of the strategies employed by so-called top schools, either consciously or unconsciously, in maintaining and sustaining eurocentric academic supremacy. Speaking only from the Latinx experience (although I suspect it may resonate with other marginalized groups), when some schools seek to hire Latinxs they often search for the brownest face with whitest voice. Quotas are thus met without having to deal with the scholarship being generated by nuestra comunidad; or worse, fuse and confuse Latin American theological scholarship with Latinx scholarship. Better yet is to find an actual white professor who can teach the Latinx context. A second strategy is to hire junior scholars (or in one case I know, a senior scholar), without tenure, to teach courses about the Latinx context while continuing the historical trend of seldom granting tenure. In this way, after seven years, the school can find a new Latinx to use, misuse, and abuse ensuring they will never amass the power to challenge, influence, or change the discourse at the institution. And finally, the school can invite well-known Latinx scholars to serve as visiting professors. Again, while the Latinx context is momentarily explored, the institution protects itself from structural change, because, after all, once the year appointment comes to an end – the scholar returns to their institution violence. As radical as they may have been, their absence quickly helps the institution forget whatever challenges may have been raised, and of course, if the challenges hit too close to home, they can always dismiss the Latinx as angry. A pedagogical problem exists with white professors because of the continuous racism and ethnic discrimination prevalent in our schools that still relegates our voices, our thoughts, and our bodies to the margins. I leave it for you to ponder how racist your school might be. I, on the other hand, wish to close praising those white students and scholars who refuse the temptation of scholastic laziness and spend a good portion of their academic training learning about the context of their racial/ethnic Other. Although they can succeed in the academy without having to do this extra work, nevertheless, they have come to realize they can never truly possess scholastic rigor if they lack the breadth of their discipline. These are the white scholars I crave to call colleagues! Their integrity prevents them from speaking for us, or in place of us; rather, they master the contributions made on their margins so as to better inform their own thinking and become more effective in sharing our contributions in the classroom. They have come to realize they can never be good teachers if they are ignorant of the full scope of their discipline.