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The shift in the pattern is subtle, and I might be hypersensitive given the national spectacle of alternative facts and fake news, but I think conversations riddled with non-sequitur speech are on the Lynn Westfieldrise. Here is an example: Recently, as a consultant for a weekend gig, I was checking into a hotel in Chicago. The desk clerk, a young woman, asked me for identification and my credit card. Reaching into my purse, I handed her my documents. When I noticed that she was swiping my credit card, I told her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party, and she need not swipe my credit card. She said she had to swipe everybody’s card. Again, I informed her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party and that their card was on file for all my expenses. The manager, overhearing our conversation, came to the desk. He told the clerk that I was correct and that my card need not be swiped. Two days later at checkout, mindful that my card had been swiped, I wanted to be sure no costs had been charged to my card. I handed the young woman at the hotel desk (different woman than at check-in) my room keys and asked to which card the expenses were charged. She told me, without looking at the paperwork, that the charges would go to the card I gave at check-in. I told her my expenses were being paid by a third party and asked which card was being charged. She looked irritated and called for the manager to help her (or me). When the manager appeared at the desk (same manager from check-in), I asked to which credit card the expenses were being charged. He replied that the charges were going to the card given by my client, but he did not tell me the number on the paperwork. I reminded him that my personal credit card had been swiped at check-in. Shaking his head no, he said that my card had not been swiped. I frowned at him. The manager responded begrudgingly, “Yes, but she made a mistake.” His response was confusing to me. His statement inferred that if a mistake had been made and subsequently rectified, then no mistake was ever made. Therefore, I should not be questioning the process. I asked again, “To which credit card will my expenses be charged?” Finally, looking at the paperwork, he read aloud the number on the bill, and indeed, it was the card of the client. I thanked them both. As I walked out of the hotel, I made a mental note to check my monthly credit card bill because it is likely my card will be charged. The feeling of suspicion and fuzziness I felt while walking out of the hotel is similar to how I feel while watching TV political interviews. Non-sequitur speech is seeping into public discourse at an alarming rate. Political pundits on news shows routinely, regardless of the posed question, give a scripted reply that ignores the question at-hand but instead polishes the political brand or repeats a generic political message. The confusing response to the question is often such a non-sequitur that the interviewer, even when poker-faced, looks confused and gropes for ways to bring some semblance of cohesion to the TV viewer. Regrettably, my hunch is that this strange and strained conversation pattern (which is not dialogue) is creeping into the classroom. It is as problematic in classrooms as it is in politics. The up-tick of non-sequitur speech by my students in the classroom is troubling. I do not want the deliberations in my classrooms to devolve into pseudo-conversations that have little to do with reality or where bold-faced lies are touted as truth. I do not want my students to mimic the patterns of communication from politics believing that specious comments make for genuine dialogue. If teachers are not vigilant in our classrooms to create space for healthy, open dialogue and the free exchange of ideas, then conversation patterns of alternative facts and non-sequitur speech will quickly seize our classroom discourse, rendering us a less able, more oppressed people. It seems, given the state of authoritarian governmental leadership and the shrinking respect for a voiced constituency, that it is imperative that practices of dialogue are reinforced and extensively utilized in our courses. We who teach must provide antidotes for the poisons of alternative facts and mean-spirited clamor that masquerades as dialogue. The truth, as well as the ability to speak it, in empirical facts or in the nuances of multi-faceted poetry, is to be guarded and nourished in our classrooms. Teaching students the power of dialogue, at this moment, is an act of resistance that will reach far beyond the classroom. Nurturing moral imagination, honing skills of courage and thoughtful activism, analyzing and reinforcing our bedrock values of equity, justice, and human dignity are pedagogical imperatives for all topics and all classrooms. Our classroom spaces must become cauldrons of resistance by the dialogues we share. As I plan my fall courses, I will increase the time for student dialogue in learning activities and assignments. I will intentionally discourage non-sequitur speech and encourage their critical wisdom. For the sake of our constitutional values we must equip our students with dialogue as a tool of resistance.

As anyone who takes on the task will appreciate, teaching the Qur’an is an incredibly challenging undertaking. The scripture bears out multiple layers of meaning and finds expression across a range of literary devices: parables, similitudes, hyperbole, sacred narratives, direct exhortations, and so on. Moreover, my students – like most that we encounter – rarely have the ability to access the Qur’an in its original Arabic, through which much of the scripture’s polysemy is most evident. Adding to the difficulty of teaching the Qur’an is that there is a pedagogically valuable array of exegetical traditions that have emerged from the innumerable engagements Muslims have had with the scripture across history. While it is certainly possible to teach the Qur’an on its own in English, I have always felt compelled to draw my students’ attention to these many interpretative communities and to expose them, at the very least, to some of the hermeneutic concerns held therein. In short, I want to teach my students something about Qur’anic exegesis alongside the Qur’an itself. How, then, have I done this for my largely English-speaking undergraduates? I have expanded upon and adapted a set of “exegetical exercises” that Farid Esack used when I served as his teaching fellow over a decade ago. The point of these assignments was to expose students to different interpretative resources and techniques in graduated stages so that by the end of a semester they were prepared to undertake a focused interpretative analysis of their own. What I’d like to do here is share some of those pedagogical techniques that I’ve used in different iterations of my Qur’an course. Translation Comparison One of the first tasks I assign is the reading of a short Qur’anic passage, usually Q. 96 or Q. 97, across multiple English translations. While I allow students to go out and find credible translations of their own, I also state that they must all reference specific translations in order to ensure a common starting point for everyone. At present I require the translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem published by Oxford, Michael Sell’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, and the Study Quran from HarperCollins. Narrowing their attention to a small set of verses has proven ideal because it compels them to comb through a translation word-by-word. The assignment is essentially about attention to detail. In the short essay, I ask them to write on these verses, they identify noteworthy differences, comment upon how these small changes affect their understanding and then opine on why some choices are made over others. Why translate it this way over that? For example, students often spend much of their time thinking through the interpretative implications of a keyword in Q. 96:2 that is variously translated as “clinging form,” “blood clot,” “embryo,” and “congealed blood.” When we discuss our findings in class, I make it a point to turn also to the translators themselves and situate each translation project by referencing the introductions of their respective translations to better understand their objectives and methods. While most of my students may lack familiarity with Arabic, this exercise impresses on them the nuances of language and word choice and introduces them to an important method of interpretative investigation. Qur’an Commentaries in Translation Another step that students take is to look at Muslim Qur’an commentaries or tafsīr in English translation. While the overwhelming majority of the extant corpus of Qur’an commentaries remains unavailable for my students, there are several works that offer students a window into this scholarly world. Two helpful compilations are The Quran and Its Exegesis: Selected Texts with Classical and Modern Muslim Interpretations (Oneworld, 1996) by Helmut Gätje and An Anthology of Qur’an Commentaries: Volume I – On the Nature of the Divine (Oxford University Press, 2010) edited by Feras Hamza, Sajjad Rizvi, and Farhana Mayer. Both works allow students to see different commentators weigh in on the same topic or passage. A harder to find book, but one worth excerpting is J. Cooper’s abridged translation of the beginning of the tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) (The Commentary on the Qurʾān, Oxford University Press, 1987). This translation provides students with a sense of how a classical work of exegesis was structured and approached. There are, of course, many more translations of Qur’an commentaries emerging and the site http://www.altafsir.com furnishes online access to some of these. Exegetical Reference Works The end goal is to provide students with the resources and tools to undertake some preliminary exegesis for themselves. With that in mind, I find it worthwhile to introduce my students to the research and literature being produced by scholars of Islam in the Euro-American academy. Typically I arrange a library research session when – working with a librarian – we expose students to important reference works like English-language Qur’an concordances and Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an and Encyclopaedia of Islam. These reference works are often a good starting point for further research into topics and persons appearing in the Qur’an. Given the idiosyncrasies of all these works, students find the guided hands-on experience in the library invaluable. We also spend time familiarizing students with Arabic transliteration conventions (and variations) as well as how to successful navigate the journal databases. While the secondary scholarship on the Qur’an is substantial and growing, it is often difficult for undergraduates to successful find and identify the best that is out there. These library sessions are aimed at providing them with some grounding and guidance for their work. While this is not an exhaustive look at the exegetical exercises I use, the above points represent what I believe to be some of the most helpful activities for preparing new students to do some preliminary exegesis of their own. I offer them models and tools so that they can explore their own lines of inquiry and raise their own questions in response to this incredibly dynamic and multi-layered text.

Since Trump became a candidate in the 2016 US presidential race, educators have continued to reflect on how his political presence might influence pedagogy. Personally, I find myself in a familiar quagmire: to what extent do I focus on current events in my Islamic studies courses? If I wanted to, each class session could devote itself exclusively to political developments, domestic and international; this has been the case for years. Trump’s incendiary comments, policy moves, and cabinet picks who malign Muslims, exacerbate this quagmire. Trump, for example, said that “Islam hates us” in a March 2016 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. His cabinet picks and advisors have endorsed similarly disturbing, perhaps willfully ignorant, positions and rhetoric. In this blog post, I will discuss some strategies, as well challenges, for how Islamic studies teachers might react to a Trump administration in a classroom context, with special attention to building positive narratives in addition to challenging existing ones. A recent Executive Order bans travel to the US from nationals of several Muslim-majority countries. In the language of The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani, “If we bombed you, we ban you.” As students, professors, and researchers—even those with green cards—find themselves in limbo, the EO has already sent reverberations across the lives of Muslims in the US and abroad. Fortunately, many scholars of Islam remain positively engaged in public discourse and efforts toward bridge-building and political problem-solving on an ongoing basis. Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst wrote a blog post for the University of Vermont, “Trump 2016: The View from Islamic Studies,” in which she details the connections between Trump’s rhetoric, cabinet choices, and their consequences. Caleb Elfenbein, an author for this “Teaching Islam” blog, has contributed to an important project that maps anti-Muslim crimes in the US. Also chilling is Mohammad Fadel’s article for The Islamic Monthly that details worst-case scenarios for Muslims under a Trump administration, including comparisons with Japanese internment camps. This is all to say that there are simply too many, individual as well as cumulative, momentous and worrisome news headlines to introduce to an undergraduate Islamic studies course while still covering other material in the course. Are the Challenges (that) Different than Before? Effective pedagogy includes understanding one’s context, including institutional goals, student demographics, and the current political landscape. An effective way, I find, to invite students to draw personally meaningful connections to course material is to always keep in mind popular symbols and ideas that bear, even indirectly, on what we study. The absurdity of mainstream media coverage of Islam can also offer some cathartic moments of laughter, which also helps ease students into challenging discourses. In terms of noteworthy contributions that Muslims make to American public life, we saw Linda Sarsour—a Palestinian American activist—lead organizing efforts for the Women’s March on Washington. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress (now in his sixth term), received the endorsement of Bernie Sanders for chair of the DNC, and the funeral of Muhammad Ali in June 2016 attracted international media attention, including its full broadcast on Fox News. In a beautifully narrated but also depressing account, NPR’s Asma Khaled details what it was like, as a Muslim woman, to cover Trump’s campaign during the election. As Amir Hussain adroitly argues in his recent book, Muslims and the Making of America (Baylor, 2016), we have much to learn about American cultural fabric by studying the role of Islam and Muslims in our history, even as it continues to unfold. In my capacity as host for New Books in Islamic Studies podcasts, I have interviewed a number of scholars—including Amir Hussain, Sophia Arjana, and Todd Green—about how current political affairs impact the lives of Muslims in the US. I keep my students in mind as one audience for these interviews, and I have repeatedly assigned my students the interview I conducted with Todd Green, on Islamophobia (which prospered in the American mainstream long before Trump reached the national spotlight). The Good, the Bad, and the Mystical Despite the many humanizing accounts about Muslims that my students study, these same students also tell me that they aren’t surprised to learn about the pervasive Islamophobia in the news cycle. But don’t some details shock them, even a little bit? In a 2015 Public Policy Poll, for example, about 30% of Republicans and 19% of Americans supported bombing Agrabah—the fictional city from Disney’s Aladdin. Among Trump supporters: 41%. As I wrote in a previous “Teaching Islam” blog post, students can use current political tensions, and how they respond to them, as a way to make sense of Sufi conceptions of spiritual growth. “Do I,” students might ask themselves, “harbor anything related to these views that I find so toxic and ignorant?” I’m currently teaching Islamic Mysticism for the third time, and I’ve implicitly chosen in past iterations to focus less on current events than I do in my introductory courses on Islam, or even in my courses on the Qur’an in which we explicitly explore contentious political topics. This time, however, I find myself taking closer stock during class time of political context, and not only because of the most recent presidential election. I think students likewise crave a balance between attention to (depressing) current events and engaging with aesthetics and intellectual discourse that don’t immediately relate to the latest fake news (or “alternative facts”?) on their social media feeds. In conclusion, I would like to include a brief reflection on student activism and its connection to teaching. As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I witnessed some student groups host anti-Muslim ideologues including Dennis Praeger, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes. Frequently, I would watch many other student groups respond with formal protests, which I found both heartening and problematic. Indeed, protest is perhaps part of the human spirit; it encapsulates much of what it means to thrive in a democratic society. It’s also an effective catalyst for change as numerous examples from history attest. At the same time, however, I regularly remind myself that part of the difficult intellectual work of teaching and learning involves building narratives, not only challenging visible narratives. Both are necessary, and my course on Sufism helps me, and I hope my students as well, appreciate the significance of this balance, the complementarity between jamal (beauty) and jalal (majesty)—two sides of the same human condition. Where do you strike your balance in terms of navigating planned course material with course-related current events as they arise throughout the term? Please share in the comments section.

In a poem entitled The World’s Feeling,[1] the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade has a line that says: “I have only two hands and all the feelings of the world.” I love this metaphor and I feel that this is how I have been living lately. The political arena seems to be depleting us day by day with news of atrocities, shocking moves that place the world at a tipsy point, and new national laws that put people in danger and potential situations of disaster. And we have just started! Too many feelings, too much disastrous news, and too few defused responses and ideas without anything that seems to be truly articulating the moment in any clarifying direction.  Every movement is divided. The so-called leftists, living in a time of potentialities to create a new left, is bitterly divided over issues either defending one candidate or accusing another. However, there have been positive moments. The Women’s March was a balm to many of us. As were the responses from Boston and NYC about Trump’s threat to immigrants and registering Muslims. As a citizen and as a teacher, I feel the weight of the feelings of the world and yet I only have two hands to deal with it all. The task of living our days in resistance to power seems insurmountable and that also seems to be the hope of the leaders of this country. The battle at hand is not only on the front of new laws and administrative resolutions but also on the controlling of feelings and emotions. The attack on media as the new enemy, the creation of “alternative facts,” and actions such as “President Donald Trump to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants,”[2] are all tactics used by the government to disturb our feelings and confuse our ideas. This is not removed from the classroom. Students carry their emotions into every class. Teaching engages the world of ideas and contemporary movements. Teachers must engage ideas and human feelings at the same time. Ideas are dependent on feelings and feelings are affected by ideas and it is in this chiaroscuro time and place where teachers work. Antonio Gramsci defines our time in precise ways: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” An empire is eroding, a collapsing new world order is emerging and in the midst of it all, there are monsters of all kinds! We can surely name them! It is in this chiaroscuro time that faculty are called, even demanded, to attend to teaching in ways that take seriously the complicated interplay between ideas and feelings in their subject matters and within the student’s lives. Our classrooms are containers of the world’s feelings with only few hands. However, if education is for life and not for a program of profit and if outcomes are hoped for the decolonization of the minds and bodies and not to fulfill a neoliberal project of processual measurement, then we can meet each other now; but also, beyond the surroundings of the classroom: in soup kitchens, in marches for rights of people, in strikes against economic austerity deals of destitution. We can continue to organize something that will be plural, filled with ambiguities and paradoxes, but that can somewhat, produce sustainable forms of resistance to be engaged. In order to do that, teachers must teach with their heart and mind filled with feelings of strength and possibilities. Classrooms must be places for thinking and feeling, where emotions embolden ideas and where ideas help organize emotions. Our classes should fuse Descartes with Antonio Damasio: we think and we feel, therefore we are! We need idea-feelings, that is, thinking that feels and feelings that think. In this way, classrooms will be spaces with deep liberating thinking and expansive feelings. The song Volver a Los 17[3] (Returning to seventeen) calls us to engage our feelings: What feelings can grasp knowledge cannot understand, not even the clearest move not even the widest thought, the moment changes everything We need poetry and songs to continue moving! Art, poetry, and songs to expand us, to help us be better teachers. The same song says something akin to our endless task of teaching: Entangling, entangling it moves, like the ivy on the wall, and so it flowers, and it grows, like tiny moss on the stone. Oh yes oh yes We are ivy on the wall of empire! Entangling in everything there is. We are flowers inside of guns, we are tiny mosses on the stones of our reality. Oh yes oh yes! When our minds cannot grasp the intensity of this moment, we can recur to our hearts. For there, in our hearts, if well cared, we can find solace, peace, and sustenance. For the hearts of teachers are bigger than anything. The hearts of teachers embrace all kinds of students and realities, wrestle with all kinds of theories, and engage all forms of thinking-feeling. So we don’t fear the world! If the world looks frightening, our heart knows better. As the same poet Drummond says… World, world, wide world, wider is my heart.[4] [1] Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sentimento do Mundo. [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-publish-weekly-list-crimes-immigrants-commit-refugees-aliens-executive-order-us-a7546826.html?cmpid=facebook-post [3] Song by Violeta Parra. Hear the song here by Mercedes Sosa and Milton Nascimento: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB37oAxOkzA [4] Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Poema de Sete Faces.

Every once in a while, integration becomes the golden fleece in curriculum design, teaching, and assessment. Deans can feel pressured to identify the way the curriculum, and the Faculty, integrates subjects and learning in the curriculum and its course of study. They may feel frustrated when called upon to find ways to demonstrate, through assessment, that integration is taking place: what it looks like, to what degree, for what outcome. This points to a fundamental challenge: in what ways and to what extent are the things learned in seminary transferable (applicable) to ministry contexts? Novice deans often wrestle with some basic questions. What are we trying to integrate--subjects, fields of study, concepts, skills----all of them? Who is supposed to do the integration--faculty? Students? How do we assess integration? What evidence do we look for? How do you grade it? What does it look like, anyway?! Attempts to engage the faculty in how to integrate the curriculum become frustrating and ultimately futile. If you are frustrated trying to integrate, maybe you're focusing on the wrong thing. Transference of learning. A more helpful framework to focus on may be transference of learning. Transference of learning is a powerful indicator of higher order learning. It denotes the ability of a student to take something learned in one context or a particular field of study, and apply it in a different context or field of study. Transference of learning provides evidence of higher order learning: synthesis, imagination, application, innovation, and creativity. Focusing on transference of learning keeps the focus where it belongs: the student's attainment and mastery of learning. One common attempt among faculty is to focus on integrating content learning---concepts from distinct and diverse fields of study. While that is possible, in reality, it rarely happens by intent or design, and more often than not by serendipity, if at all. Busy faculty members rarely spend enough time in conversation among themselves about their own scholarship, fields of expertise or even discuss their own teaching and courses to creatively design integration in a course of study. Focusing on transference of learning can be a more effective framework for faculty discussion about teaching and learning and its outcomes. Ask a professor "How do you strive to integrate what you teach in your course with what students are learning in a course in a different field of study?" and you'll likely succeed in merely stumping the teacher. Ask, however, "What are those things in your course you want to see your students use or apply in other courses as they continue their courses of study?" and you'll likely get a clear and confident response---and a hint about what to look for. While the concept of transfer of learning is easier to grasp than the vague "integration," it must nevertheless be applied with informed rigor in order to be effective as a framework for teaching and learning in the curriculum. Dale H. Schunk provides a list of types and characteristics of transfers of learning from the literature of educational research. The summary below can serve as a guide to develop program level goals, craft course learning outcomes to align with those goals, and point to evidence for assessment. Types and Characteristics of Transfer of Learning Overlap of learning between situations and contexts: the original and transfer contexts are similar ("near") What is learned in one context enhances learning in a different setting ("positive") Knowledge of a previous topic is essential to acquire new knowledge ("vertical") Knowledge of a previous concept is not essential but helpful to learn a new concept ("horizontal") Explicit new knowledge transfers to new task ("literal") Use some aspect of general knowledge to think or learn about a novel problem ("figural") Transfer of learning involves abstraction requiring conscious formulations of connections between contexts ("high road") Abstracting situations from one learning context to a potential transfer context ("forward reaching") Abstracting in the transfer context features of a previous situation where new skills and knowledge were learned ("backward reaching"). Engaging the Teaching Faculty in conversation about transfer of learning can re-shape its thinking about course methodology and learning outcomes. Using transfer of learning as a framework for assessment may make evaluation of "integration" a less stressful and more effective way to measure student learning. Starting Questions What evidence do you have that students use what they learn in one cognate field of study as applied in another? What evidence do you have that students are able to apply what they learn in academic courses in their ministry contexts? What evidence do you have that students are able to apply what they learn in core courses in their field-based studies and supervised ministry experiences? What transference of learning do you wish to see in what students are learning in basic Bible courses to homiletic courses? What transference of learning do you wish to see between acquired academic skills and ministry context competencies? SOURCE: Schunk, D. (2004). Learning theories: An educational perspective (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Pearson, p. 220.  

Perhaps one of the most painful memories I have of my early years in teaching was election night 2004. The pain comes from my too late realization that in my advocacy for a progressive outcome for the election I had semi-wittingly politicized my classroom in a way that still haunts me. I’d like to reflect for a bit on what happened and what I learned. What happened was quite simple. I was a progressive who was against the war in Iraq and the convulsions caused to our common life by extraction of our common wealth to finance massive tax cuts. Put simply, I was ardently against Bush and made no secret of it. In the weeks leading up to the election and the evening of the it, on which I had a class meeting, my advocacy had had the effect of drawing a political line along which members of the class sorted themselves. A consequence was that for the few weeks remaining after the election my pedagogical space consisted of political partisans and not a community of learners. What I learned from that was three-fold with the full effect being felt in the recent election. The first thing I learned was that I had spent insufficient time or energy teaching about my values, what they meant for how I understood the faith, and thus, how I constructed the task of teaching theology. Here I don’t mean to imply that I understand my role as being teaching my theology. Rather I want to suggest that it is good to realize that our values are being taught whether we are explicit about it or not. Being explicit means that I can reflectively engage students and materials in ways that shape our common experience. By focusing on values I can invite more people into our space than if it is a matter of politics. I did not do this work. The second learning was that I had spent insufficient time clarifying how I integrated scripture, faith, values in the work of theology for myself. So, while I am sure that I demonstrated a sort of integrity for my students it was not sufficiently reflective to build my teaching around. Certainly, the project to which I am dedicated as a theologian was/is clear and finds expression through my teaching but, at least at that point, the integrity at the center of teaching and that project were not clear. From this learning I changed my pedagogy radically. Teaching theology and not about it became my guiding pedagogical principle. The upshot of this change was that questions of the integration of scripture, faith, and values as the work of theology were at the center of every course from its beginnings. In the two classes I taught following the recent election I began with an observation that we as Christian theologians were being called into the public square at this moment for several very specific reasons. First, the candidate who won had made very specific promises about bringing harm to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, our neighbors. By placing promises to register our Muslim neighbors, round up and deport the stranger among us (immigrants), and the imposition of what amounts to martial law (a national stop and frisk policy), at its center the Trump campaign made the political theological. It is just here that my learnings of the past few years made it possible for our class(es) to grapple with our responsibility in this moment in ways that did not immediately devolve into partisan positions. We were able to draw on scripture, the various theologians we read, and our experiences of faith to imagine how to move forward. This was quite a bit different than in 2004. This then was my third lesson. By making the ongoing thread running throughout each class the explicit integration of our faith and values, it was then possible to interpret the political moment as a matter of faith and not partisan politics. A student summed up well what we had discovered on our journey: “loving and protecting our neighbor is a type of politics.”

Since the start of the twentieth century, Christian religion scholars from the dominant culture - specifically ethicists – shifted their focus on how to live the Christian life via praxis toward the nature of ethics, wrestling more with abstract questions concerned with what is the common good and/or which virtues to cultivate. An attempt is made to understand the world, but lacking the ability to differentiate within disenfranchised communities between a “blink and a wink,” à la Geertz, their final analysis lacks gravitas. Teaching religion has become a process which [de]liberates not liberates. While abstract deliberations at times might prove sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed, the first casualty of abstract thought is rigorous academic discussions concerned with how to construct a more just social structure based on faith claims.  A move to the abstract has, as my dissertation chair John Raines constantly reminded me, made the [class]room an appropriate name which signifies what occurs. This “room of class” becomes a space where students learn the class to which they belong, and how to assume the responsibilities associated with that class. During a visit to Yale, a student reminded me that while most seminaries train ministers for churches, Yale trains future bishops and superintendents. I doubt if such an attitude is limited to just one of the Ivies. Those with sufficient capital or connections to attend certain “rooms of class” on prestigious campuses are afforded opportunities normally denied to others (predominately students of color) who attend rooms at less prestigious locations. To occupy [class]rooms attached to power and privilege means that what is taught focuses more on the abstract as opposed to praxis designed to subvert power and privilege. To some degree, most eurocentric approaches to pedagogy at prestigious [class]rooms, more often than not, focus on explaining what is religious. But for those rooted in (or in solidarity with) disenfranchised communities relegated to the underside of prestigious [class]rooms, the question is not so much to determine some abstract understanding of religion, but rather, in the face of dehumanizing oppressive structures, to determine how people of faith adapt their actions to serve the least among us.  Some professors who embrace a more liberative approach to pedagogy recognize there is no such thing as a neutral education system. Rather, students, depending on the [class]room they attend, are either conditioned to domesticate or be domesticated. A theological education serves to normalize and legitimize existing power structures within the faith community and society. A liberative pedagogy instead seeks to cultivate the student’s ability to find their own voice by creating an environment where collective and individual consciousness can be raised. The starting point is not some truth based on church doctrine or rational deliberation. Instead, the starting point is analyzing the situation faced by the dispossessed of our world and then reflecting with them theoretically, theologically, and hermeneutically to draw pastoral conclusion for actions to be taken. To function in the [class]room as a scholar-activist is usually to be dismissed, especially if one chooses not to engage in the methodologies acceptable to eurocentric thought. A division, unfortunately, exists where those concerned with the importance of maintaining their privileged space in [class]rooms oozing with power insist on lessons revolving around the thoughts and ideas of mainly dead white scholars (and those soon to join them) dismissing scholar-activist and the scholars from marginalized communities who inform their own thoughts. Simply peruse the reading lists on syllabi at prestigious [class]rooms to notice how scholars from disenfranchised communities are ignored – except, of course for that one elective class offered to check off the political correctness box. The [class]room space is protected with a call not to engage in the politics of our society, but instead to limit our thoughts to the polity that is the church, usually a homogenous church which more often than not misses the mark. The calling to be a scholar-activist is a recognition that by seeking solidarity with the stone rejected by stale builders regurgitating dead thoughts incapable of saving anyone, one finds themselves among the cornerstone of relevant, cutting-edge scholarship capable of revolutionizing society, literally turning the world upside-down.   

I help people have difficult conversations for a living. I facilitate dialogues–usually in communities deeply divided over issues that touch on people’s values and worldviews. I have spent much of the last three years working with professors as their classrooms increasingly fit that description. In Jill's terms, I help people wobble, but not fall down. Jill talks about wobble in terms of letting something happen and getting out of the way. That is a piece of it for sure, but there is a choreography to wobble, a delicate but purposeful crafting of space, time, language, movement, and furniture that makes wobble possible. The purpose is to break people out of the conversations that hold us back from seeing complexity in ourselves and others. It is meant to crack the surface conversation to reveal new possibilities, to deepen understandings of values and lived experience, and to unmask our own assumptions. I call it “choreography” because every choice we make while facilitating a conversation invites some responses and discourages others. And every choice we make leads people to focus either on us or on each other. If we call on people, it invites people to raise their hands and wait for us to conduct. If we don’t, it invites people to give and yield focus as they move in and out of the conversational space. It is choreography at its most subtle. If we ask people to sit quietly and reflect for two minutes before answering, we invite the second and third thought that someone has, not just the first. The work of dialogue is disruptive of old patterns. It disrupts dynamics of dominant voices monopolizing the space–including ours. It weakens the power of the first speaker. It breaks the pattern of asking questions we already know the answer to while our students try to read our minds. It invites silence as a space of intention and reflection rather than of fear and disengagement. It invites empathy rather than judgement. It prompts uncertainty rather than certainty and curiosity rather than declamation. It allows for wobble rather than steady motion along the straight and narrow. When I visited Jill’s class, I stood up and talked about dialogue in front of rows of chairs, with people raising their hands and I called on them–ironic. It was a fine conversation. But when I sat down to watch the rest of the class, Jill didn’t just allow or encourage wobble, she choreographed it. Jill asked the students to move the chairs into pairs of arcs facing each other. A wobble happened. Then Jill sat outside the circle. Another wobble. Outside the circle is one of those places that disrupts the old pattern, a place of intellectual humility. It disrupts the pattern of students relying on us for the prompt, the answer, the nod of approval. Then she asked a question she didn’t know the answer to. Wobble. She gave people a chance to reflect before speaking. Wobble. This is not just allowing something to happen; these are a set of choices we make–a choreography that when done right makes possible a new kind of conversation that breaks the dominant polarized and divisive rhetoric or silencing that we see so often in our discourse. What happens when we choreograph wobble is that students rise to their own power and possibility, and move through their own wobbling moments to muster the momentum to move together. In Jill’s class, the conversation had to be interrupted after 40 minutes to announce something about papers, but it would have gone on. Even if Jill and I had quietly snuck out of the room, it would have gone on because the students had turned toward each other and engaged.  Whether we recognize it or not, much of our public discourse is designed for simple, polarizing, escalating episodes of attacking and defending well-worn positions. We have opportunities to design and incubate a new discourse, one designed for the generation of ideas, the exploration of new ground, the contemplation of complexity. The patterns we have to break are strong and so our choices must reflect that. Our choreography must reflect the need of this moment; the need to turn to one another with curiosity, complexity, and care.

Daniel Madigan, my mentor when I first began teaching Islamic studies, considers his introductory course an opportunity to help students understand Islam as a religious choice and vision. This, in contrast to a politicized framework wherein Islam, is a problem to be solved. Marshall Hodgson also refers to the vision of Islam early in volume one of his series, The Venture of Islam. He writes, “Islamicate society represents, in part, one of the most thoroughgoing attempts in history to build a world-wide human community as if from scratch on the basis of an explicitly worked out ideal.” In an earlier blog post, I recommended the use of graphic novels and comics in teaching Islam because they are substantive and because students benefit from the engagement with visually rich, multimodal texts. Courses in religious studies have an unfortunate tendency toward abstraction. Separating ideas from their cultural expression is a disservice to our students and Islamic or Islamicate culture itself, which represents the “highest creative aspirations and achievements of millions of people;” Hodgson again. If we are to help students appreciate a vision, we must show them how that vision is lived, and the cultural heritage it has built over the centuries. In this post, I want to highlight some of the online resources available through museum websites, particularly the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and provide ideas for how these tools could be used in the classroom. In conjunction with a virtual exploration, it would be ideal to send or accompany students on a museum visit but this is not always practicable. Fortunately, museums are committed to education and the advancement of knowledge in their mission statements and their online resources are often exemplary for that purpose. Teaching is sometimes isolating because it can be accomplished in isolation. A busy professor can close off the classroom and get through the term without doing the work of engaging outside institutions. But to do this job right, we need partners whose missions intersect with our own. In my experience, museum professionals are eager to help and they have created a wealth of resources to draw from. A small investment of time spent researching museum offerings or reaching out to a museum education office can pay huge dividends in terms of student learning and engagement. In fact, a more student-driven classroom can save time in the long run. Letting students take charge of their own learning means they are doing more of the work. Anyone who has visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows it is an overwhelming experience. Thanks to a sense of direction that allows me to get lost in my own neighborhood, I have spent the better part of an hour just trying to find my way to the right wing in the Met. Their website can provoke a similar experience. It requires a certain amount of detective work to identify the right online resource for your students and a significant amount of scaffolding to guide them to its best use. But there are unique opportunities to be found! Five decades of Met publications are available to search and download, sometimes in their entirety, for free. This collection includes a full online copy of Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators that pairs well with an online lesson plan on “Arabic Script and the Art of Calligraphy” suitable for modified use in the college classroom. The Met website is also home to 82nd & Fifth, a series of two-minute videos in which curators discuss works of art that changed the way they see the world. These videos, including an engaging presentation on the official signature of Süleiman the Magnificent, are also available as part of a YouTube playlist. Projects like this provide useful modeling for classroom activities. A student can be tasked with exploring Islamic art and creating their own short video on how it has changed the way they view the world. The most powerful resource on the Met website is the ability to search its collection as a whole. Students searching for “Islam” will bring up thousands of entries, including photographs, historical information, and links to related objects and textbooks as available. This is a fantastic opportunity but it must be used wisely. Casting students into this sea of information without a clear purpose is not likely to be successful. As a colleague once instructed me, “Throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks is not a sound pedagogical strategy.” Certainly, the Met collection can inform garden-variety research papers and projects begun in the classroom but it can also provide an initial inspiration for detective work. Students might start with an item from the collection and generate questions based on its features and provenance. Finding an elaborate illustration of a drunken party from the Diwan of Hafiz, students may wonder about the relationship between intoxication and mysticism. Confronted with a folio from the Blue Qur’an, they might want to know more about the aesthetic and practical features of other Qur’anic manuscripts. The key is that students are puzzling over museum objects and formulating their own paths of inquiry leading to a more holistic understanding of Islam. Advancing toward the highest, creative and comprehensive level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, you could ask students to curate their own virtual exhibition using an online collection. Seeking out meaningful threads of continuity between temporally and geographically disparate objects is an enormously challenging task but the rewards for a job well done are great as well. Such an assignment, carefully wrought, has the potential to help students consider the vision of Islam as it was realized in material culture; not in abstraction, but as a source of creative renewal and inspiration across time and space.

I am a cyclist.  I ride a hybrid commuter bike to work most days and have a road bike that has taken me up mountain passes and on to country roads outside of Dallas where views of fields and livestock replace the asphalt jungles of the Metroplex.  I picked up cycling almost a decade ago when it became clear that I needed some kind of response to the combined stresses of pre-tenure professional life and young children at home.   I got on the bike for outside time, physical challenge, and personal space.  I’ve stayed on the bike for all of these reasons, and also for what time on the bike has taught me about attentiveness, mindfulness, thinking spaces, and more recently, about wobble:  those moments when things slow down, or haven’t quite started up; when direction, volition, and commitment are in play. In cycling, wobble happens when mounting, dismounting or moving slower than 2 miles per hour, often during a turn.  As things go, this is also when it happens in classrooms.  When conversations aren’t strictly guided, when listening replaces lecture, when a set authority structure is open to flux, intellectual patterns can come a little out of balance and preconceived ideas can change.  Put another way, transformative learning can occur.  Without the wobble, feet firmly on the ground, we can never get on the bike and ride. My interest in wobble stems from some conversations about diversity and intellectual humility I’ve been having with colleagues from various places and disciplines,  and also from a recent workshop for faculty and graduate students here at Southern Methodist University on conflict and conversation in religious studies classroom spaces (thanks to Wabash for funding this with a small grant).  The workshop focused on understanding why contentious issues can be difficult to talk about, and also offered concrete methods for facilitating useful conversations across difference.  John Sarrouf, an experienced facilitator and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Essential Partners, led that workshop for us.  John was also kind enough to come and speak to my undergraduate class about the work he does.  It was in that encounter that I saw wobble in action. John greeted the class and then asked if they were talking about the upcoming presidential election.  My otherwise talkative, engaged, and engaging students shrunk at the very suggestion.  Shoulders hunched, faces turned to their desks, they shook their heads.  They were thrown off balance, visibly uncomfortable, almost at a standstill.  Then, John asked what it would take to be able to have those conversations.  Under what conditions could they speak?  Their heads came up, they made thoughtful suggestions, and by the end of John’s 10 minute time, they had recalled productive discussions around Black Lives Matter, religious differences, and their experiences in our class.  They had turned an intellectual corner and were up and riding (thinking) again.  In an online discussion post that followed, one student mentioned a change in his thinking in response to a suggestion John made about talking to understand rather than to persuade.  Something in the wobble allowed him to hear, consider, and embrace a suggestion.  He learned something. As in mounting and dismounting a bicycle, the wobble needs to be controlled.  Too much and forward momentum turns into a crash, too little and we never get that second foot off the ground.  Now that I am attentive to wobble, though, and have learned to use it by letting silence happen in discussions — by getting mindfully out of the way, or by not shying away from controversy when it arises — I have come to recognize its real potential.  Or more accurately, I can see it for what it is.  Before I saw discomfort or disengagement, things I wanted to minimize.   Now I am more likely to see the beginning of forward momentum.  I see the beginning of transformative, interesting thought, even around topics as challenging as religion. I hope my students can see the same.