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My grandmother used to speak in adages, parables, metaphors, similes and symbols. Now I call her proclivity for language, literature, and meaning-making “wisdom-speak.” Then, I thought she was being corny. She knew her wisdom-speak was meant to teach me enough until I am ready to know more. Her adages came from bible verses, poetry lines, and quotes from novels, cultural remembrances and living life as an African American woman in the USA, born in 1887. Folks like Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, Pearl Bailey, Jesus, and Sarah Vaughn were regularly invoked. Wisdom-speak is colorful, witty language - easy to recall and recite, with a depth of multiple meanings. Wisdom-speak is part of everyday conversation. It is a pithy quote or well-placed refrain woven into a conversation like salt on fried fish. It is accompanied by a hmmm or tongue click, a foot pat, a shoulder shrug or an eye roll. Wisdom-speak is a body, mind and spirit lesson. Grandmother Vyola would say, “All that is is not visible.” As a child, I thought she meant that there is more to creation than what can be witnessed with the naked eye. If knowing is only about what is directly in front of us – then we miss so very much of all that is. Learning to see the invisible is the task of knowing. Learning the ways of the wind and the saints, angels, ancestors, cherubim and seraphim; the dream world and the day dreaming world; the ways of prayer and meditation are the learning of the invisible. Then as a young adult, I decided she was talking about identity politics and the politics of domination. The genderless politics of patriarchy, with its racist undertones and dictates, considers much of “all that is” to be too much for women, many children, and most men. The truncation of imagination engineered by systems of domination and control renders the capacity of many people as inferior thus negating all that is. Poverty drastically limits opportunities for in-depth exploration – so when we meet persons who have carved out an education in the wake of social depravity we should be in awe.   As a young adult, I came to understand good teaching meant finding ways of seeing the manifestations of oppression in my own classrooms, church, society, and world. And I encountered Alice Walker and figured Grandmother Vyloa was talking about what Dr. Walker was talking about. Grandmother Vyola is resonant with novelist, poet Alice Walker’s four-part definition of a “Womanist” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1983. The first part of the definition reads in part: “….Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one.” It seems as though Vyola and Alice were cut from the same cloth. In the last few days, I have turned my attention exclusively toward preparation for school. I have my head down as I put finishing touches on my syllabi, design learning activities, schedule guest colleagues, locate films, and order art supplies. My mode is one of efficiency and my mood is closed off. I am, in my planning, working from an attitude of indubitability. I have a clarity about what I will teach, how I will teach and what my students will learn. While immersed in my preparations, grandmother whispered in my ear. Grandmother Vyola says that patent planning is not good for me or my students. She advises that the better way is to be more opened ended – like Jesus’ parables. Allow the students’ voice to affect most aspects of the course design, not just the convenient parts. Consider that you cannot see all there is to see so leave room for your own learning while you teach. Most of all, the plan that that which is revealed will be marvelous and know it is unplannable, but can be readied for – Get Ready! I have learned to pause when grandmother speaks. I take a second look at my plans and see that I have relied, a bit, on stale redundancy and a few too many current conventions. I recognize that when I start telling myself I know what will happen, what can happen in my own classroom – I am in danger of not allowing for surprise, the unexpected, or the un-expectable activity of Spirit. My grandmothers Vyola and Alice remind me that my certainty is likely a trap. If I plan for only what I know, only what I can see, only for what I can do – then I am not being womanish, not acknowledging all that is in the world. With this wisdom, I have begun to incorporate more ways of acknowledging the hegemonic forces which hide in our midst. I have adjusted and added ways which invoke the freedoms of learning for my students – freedoms like their own questioning, curiosity, and concerns being integrated into the full length of the course.   School starts the week before Labor Day --- I am less certain of my plans and better for it.

As we go back to the classroom (and shake off the dust of summer), we all have mixed feelings and expectations. While some of us will just go back to the normal, others will be anxious and perhaps fearful about a new semester. The beginning of a semester can carry a feeling of being displaced, a sense that we don’t know what is coming our way and what is next. In one word: the lack of control. That is why we occupied so much of our syllabi in order to gain immediate control of that space we actually cannot control, and in fact never have controlled. What will my class be made of? How many students and who are they? Will we be able to control everything? Be fair with everybody? Be attentive to our own tasks, juggling the school’s demands and all that the teacher hopes for? The specific details of the practical aspects of our syllabus, the division of tasks, the proper tools to be used, the connections to be made, the boundaries to be established. In truth these are questions that only end when classes are over after a whole semester. Besides, after being away from the classroom for a while we may feel a little out of joint, as if the classroom is again a foreign/home space, until the map we draw (our syllabus) will help us travel through this newly foreign terrain. In our classrooms we are both professors and educators. Rubem Alves makes a distinction of these two roles. He says: “A professor is an employee of institutions that manage lagoons and puddles, specialist in reproduction, an instrument of the social apparel of the state. As the educator, on the contrary, [the professor] is a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.” [1] As we go back I wonder how our duties as professors will cast a shadow over the role of the educator. Will our pedagogies be more faithful to the management of forms of reproductions or attentive to the ways our students can become more expanded, more fully human beings? Will we dare to be a “mediator of hopes,” or a “pastor of projects?” If we only trust the readings of our classes we are more professors than educators. If we believe that the evaluation can only take a form of a formal final paper we will not tap into the rich resources of our students. If we make classrooms be a “one fit for all” place, we will make our educator side slip into the perfectly devilish/delightful combination of institutional bureaucracy and personal fears. A combination where students pay the price of teachers whose hope is confounded by fear. In classrooms we are educators! That is why we gather together: to share knowledge as we share tastes, to share complexities and differences as we share life together. But in order to get there, we must be awakened! That is what Alves says of how to prepare the educator: “is necessary to wake her/him up… its enough that we call them from their sleep, by an act of love and courage. And when awakened, they will repeat the miracle of the instauration of new worlds.”[2] I think we are very good at managing lagoons and puddles. However, our task as we begin our semester is to be awakened into the educators that live inside of us and be(come) a co-founder of worlds in our students, a stretcher of horizons, jokers of our common worlds and satirists of our own stupidity, doing what we do with a sense of praxis that will be able to transform actions, gestures, movements, feelings and create possibilities. In a word: dreamers of new realities! Paulo Freire talks about this dreamer in a more academic language. Forgive the sexist language: “Because he admires the world and therefore objectifies it, because he grasps and comprehends reality and transforms it in his action-reflection, man is a being of praxis. Even more so, man in praxis… His ontological vocation, which he ought to existentiate, is that of a subject who operates on and transforms the world. Subjugated to concrete conditions that transform him into an object, man will be sacrificing his fundamental vocation… Nobody is if he prevents others from being.”[3] Every dreamer must start in reality, it the midst of contrasts, racial divides, economic disparities, political dualisms, violent neighborhoods, dialectical complexities and all kinds of conflicts. We must make unhidden the social processes of reality that prevent change and transformation especially for minorities and oppressed people. Educators can (be)come the very material they use in the classroom, the texts they read, the dialogues they have, the educational tools they use, the theories they choose and the very awareness of what kind of pedagogy that they foster. We are caught into this action-reflection that stirs up, criticizes and amplifies theories and praxis. We are not detached from the world, but rather we are the result and consequence of the world we create. Our pedagogies are not meant to keep the status quo but to transform things and people, even if we know that what we do will not transform anything or anybody. More than anything we must keep our fundamental vocation as teachers, whatever that might be, so we will not prevent students from being the fullest they can be, in the owning of their bodies, their feelings, their thoughts and their capacity to reach out, to expand, and to listen to their own selves. As we go back to the classroom, let us awaken ourselves into the praxis of being educators! Dreaming dreams of new worlds and human beings fully stretched, while hoping for a good semester with all the rights and wrongs we will certainly make if we dare to be “a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.”   [1] Rubem Alves, Conversas com quem gosta de ensinar. (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 1980), 27. [2] Ibid. [3] Paulo Freire, La Concepción problematizadora de la educación y la homanización.” Cristianismo y Sociedad. Montevideo, 1968, 18. Freire... quoted by Carlos Alberto Torres, "Dialetics, Conflict, and Dialogue," in Moacir Gadotti,  Pedagogy of Praxis: A Dialectical Philosophy of Education (New York: Suny Press, 1996).

I recently finished my fourth year of full-time teaching and I have noticed two consistent reactions that students have to course material in my Islam-focused courses (i.e., Islam, Islamic Mysticism, and The Qur’an): 1) Ability and willingness to readily acknowledge Islamophobia in American popular culture and 2) Appreciation for Sufi themes and literature. Although I may not have surmised how these two themes relate to one another pedagogically a few years back, I have come to see several connections and will use this blog post to explore some ways to take advantage of these student experiences in the classroom. Conscious and Unconscious Islamophobia Usually, on the first day of class, I write “Islam” on the board and solicit from students the first words that come to mind. Some hesitate to shout out “terrorism,” “anti-democratic” and the like, but I find that there are usually enough brave voices in the class to surface these collective social portrayals of the Muslim Bogeyman, and even evoke some cathartic laughter in the process. I find that this exercise, although rather straightforward, helps set a tone; it signifies to students that suppressing the obvious will hinder class discussion and probably their learning process as well. Much later in the semester, often in written assignments but sometimes in class discussions as well, I find a regular cadre of students admit—at times with a combination of shame and gratitude—how troubled they are to realize the Islamophobic views they have known, or found, in their own minds for who knows how long. This proves unsurprising, however, as many college students today were in diapers on 9/11 and therefore know nothing of a world without the “War on Terror.” It’s significant that these timid disclosures tend to occur toward the end of the semester, because no matter how easy it is for students to identify and caricaturize broad social concerns early on, it takes time to reflect on how stereotypes affect them on an individual level. Sufism and “Spiritual Jihad” When we explore various Sufi themes it’s easy enough, usually unprompted by their instructor, for students to draw some sort of personal meaning from the course material. When we read Ghazali’s (d. 1111) Deliverer from Error, for example, many students find it compelling as it reflects a perennial quest for spiritual truth. I’ll often screen episodes, as well, from the BBC production “The Retreat”—a three-part documentary that observes participants at a Sufi retreat in southern Spain; the cast includes multiple archetypal characters such as spiritual-but-not-religious, rigid dogmatist, addict of technology, and an atheist. Thus students can thus usually find themselves in one or more of the characters. In particular, a text I regularly teach is the 15th-century Sufi allegory, Yusuf and Zulaykha by ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492). Many of its central themes relate to challenges of confronting one’s inner demons, and it, therefore, offers some helpful models for students to consider as they confront their own latent or blatant preconceptions about Islam and Muslims. Yusuf and Zulaykha adapts the story of Yusuf (Joseph) from the 12th chapter of the Qur’an, except Jami’s version is much longer, has more details, and focuses on a love-struck female protagonist. Students often think she’s kind of crazy (or just crazy) because of her singular obsession with Yusuf. This obsession ultimately leads her to age physically and persist in a state of inconsolable grief. Eventually, however, once she realizes that it is not Yusuf per se whom she loves, but the divine reflection within Yusuf, her youthful beauty returns, she marries Yusuf, and they live happily ever after. The catalyst for her transformation takes place when she smashes the physical idols she had worshiped, which could symbolize the idols in her heart that had blocked her from True Love. Thus the story conveys useful pedagogical lessons on many levels: truth lies within us, it is we who block truth from becoming apparent, concealing the truth makes us sick and bitter, but also, our obsession with apparent manifestations of truth is highly seductive and difficult to ignore. Struggling Against the Machine One student in my Islamic Mysticism course wrote the following in a response paper late in the semester: “For those who approach this subject with any form of bias, I think must prepare for a clash of what we once viewed as fact with what we can now see as fact. This clash, for me at least, set forth a type of grief and shame.” I suspect that this student—like the protagonist in Yusuf and Zulaykha—arrived at his new perspective only after struggling deeply with his own shadows. Many Islamicists, including myself, find that teaching about Islam and Muslims requires students to go through a process of unlearning or de-programming—however you want to put it—the layers of fear and stereotypes that 21st-century media and society has drilled into their minds, often unconsciously. I think experiences like these are common—although in my own observations few students are willing to admit their feelings in this regard so candidly, even if they undergo similar transformations. What, then, is the best way to guide students through the sometimes-painful process of navigating those parts of themselves that aren’t so pretty? The more I teach, the more I find myself letting students gradually and gently acknowledge their own struggles, rather than relying on the megaphone of my teaching platform. My shift, in this regard—as I intimated the beginning of this post—has resulted from consistently observing students, out of their own volition, desiring to put forth the difficult effort it takes to look inward with honesty and circumspection. Thus the concept ofjihad al-nafs (spiritual struggle) in Sufi traditions—as illustrated in Yusuf and Zulaykha or any number of other scenarios—can allow students not only to draw personal connections to centuries-old texts but also appreciate the difficulties and rewards of challenging oneself to learn and grow amidst a cultural machine that discourages such an endeavor.

Those of us who spend our leisure time watching the Tennis Channel are guaranteed to have seen numerous episodes of the marketing promotion called, “Bag Check,” where the top players reveal, one item at a time, what they carry in their huge “clearly labeled” tennis bags. Even though we realize that we are marketing targets, there is something very compelling about analyzing the contents of the bags of these remarkable athletes, and seeing and hearing about what they have decided they wanted access to when they are out on the court during these high-stakes matches toward which they have invested so much of their time and energy. Anybody who has seen me on the court is likely to have very little interest in the contents of my tennis bag, but, as a teacher, this image came back to me as I read several essays written about education and pedagogy in the 1980s and the 1990s, by noted scholar of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith, in which he talked about his practice of spending time in all of his introductory courses to “unpack” his syllabi. Before getting into each major part or section of a course, Smith would explain to his students what, among various options, he chose to focus on, as well as why he made those choices. According to Smith, he did so to show students that a syllabus is always already a constructed argument; talking about how and why he constructed his course in class offered students an (additional) occasion to reflect on how certain judgments were made and how those very judgments might lead to particular implications or consequences. There was, for Smith, also a larger context for this practice. The introductory courses he was describing were all taught to undergraduates. Smith was transparent in explaining that these introductory courses of his were so-called “service” courses. That is to say, students who took these courses usually took them to satisfy their general distribution requirements; they were not taking them as majors in the study of religion. (Even in the early 1990s and at the University of Chicago, the number of religious studies majors was already rather small.) As a result, Smith came to the realization that teaching students disciplinary content and disciplinary methods of religious studies should not be his primary goal. Instead, he aimed to use these introductory “service courses” to help students think and talk about interpretation and argumentation. In other words, whatever content he chose to address in his introductory courses, including his explanation of his syllabus, functioned primarily as case studies to illustrate the reality of multiple interpretations and hence the inevitability of argumentation and adjudication. Why? Because as a literary scholar, Gerald Graff, has argued in his 2003 book, Clueless in Academe, learning to perform, engage, and analyze argumentation is what the academy and education should be all about. Smith went on to suggest that as a teacher, he would not mind if his students did not remember much about the content of his “service courses”; what Smith wanted from his students in these courses was for them to learn and develop the capacity to interpret and argue, as well as the ability to evaluate different interpretations and argumentations. In fact, since most doctoral students in the study of religion end up teaching introductory courses to undergraduates, Smith proposed that doctoral programs in religion should require every student to submit a syllabus with a written rationale for every element that had been included in the course design. (For the same reason, Smith would also like to see more faculty members who supervise doctoral students in religion participate in, rather than being “protected” or “relieved” from, teaching undergraduate introductory courses.) Since moving three years ago to join the Religious Studies Department of a Jesuit liberal arts college, I have found a new and deepened appreciation for many of Smith’s insights. Like most religious studies departments in colleges and universities, mine is mainly a so-called service department, so my courses, especially my introductory New Testament course, are seldom filled with religious studies majors. While a number of them may have chosen to take a New Testament course because of their Christian upbringing, some are also enrolling simply because they have to do a class on religion and mine happens to fit their schedule. For the reasons Smith articulated, I have also changed my introductory New Testament course to focus less on disciplinary content and more on honing students’ interpreting and argument-making skills. My “unpacking” of the syllabus, however, has so far been limited to the first class session of a semester and involves a quick rundown of what we will do and what I will require, but I have never taken the time to acknowledge and to explain—that is, to argue—why we should do what we do and why I should require what I require. Looking back, this is rather lamentable, as I know, even when I was teaching graduate students in a seminary, that scrambling to cover every New Testament book or letter in a semester-long “introduction” (i.e., in approximately 40 hours) would be pedagogically helpful neither to me nor my students.  I like the idea of disclosing my deliberations about the materials we will engage, and the approaches we will take with that material right at the outset of the class, not just as a matter of routine housekeeping, but as an example and exercise of the kind of thinking and learning that will follow throughout the semester. Doing so can display the complexity, the difficulty, and the responsibility of making informed but interpretive decisions of what to include and exclude, what to adopt and what to abandon in a world that seldom has neat and clean “answers.” Perhaps it is time also for you to do a bag check: What’s in your bag?