Podcasts

Decolonizing teaching is an experiment in synergism. In developing new pedagogies, we can only guarantee crisis – crisis to reconstruct identities of the teacher and the learner, alike. What would it be to teach in a way that taboos, barriers and boundaries become meeting places? How will we learn to collaborate, build coalitions, and create partnerships for new epistemologies? 

During the extended pandemic students are voicing discontent with courses which inadequately relate to minoritized views. Students are impatient when classrooms, yet and still, do not take seriously the complexity of all students’ experience. This is a moment, if we can seize it, to learn to open classrooms  to practices of collaboration, partnership and coalition building to teach with our students rather than at our students.

Academic fields change when the teachers are people who have not previously taught in that field and when we resist the colonial presumptions built into the field. What does it mean to re-train, re-learn, re-educate ourselves to teach toward a decolonized mindset? In what ways might intersectionality be embodied in our teaching? What are pedagogies by emerging scholars and how are they grappling with the identity politics of the academy?  

Too often the work of those who create, compose, build, or choreograph are not supported by our academic institutions. Many scholars pursuit their artistic passions in their “spare time” leaving their teaching and institutional life unfulfilled. Burn out is common. Narrowly defined, legitimacy of scholarship is strangling possibility and new vision.  What would it mean to incorporate the tools of imagination, creativity and innovation into the life of scholarly teaching? What would it take to redefine academic rigor so as to regularize, require, and necessitate the innovative, the new, the creative?

At a time when theological educational institutions are struggling, the mainline church is floundering, and we are still disoriented by the racial pandemic, the viral pandemic, and afraid of the near future, what is flourishing? How would we teach differently if theological education was seen as a critical enterprise for creating a better world during this time of crisis?

Writing is part of the scholarly teaching life yet few of us have been trained to write well. Many of us have published articles and books without benefit of reflection upon our writing identities and our writing voices. It takes time to embrace the genuine writing voices and courage to write for resistance, liberation, and incarnation. What does it take to write as if your voice matters? What does it mean to express your thoughts, ideas, and know-hows in the artistic medium of writing?  

Who do we want our students to become, what do we want them to build, and how do our classrooms form them for these tasks? Are we willing to relate to our students as co-knowers, co-producers of knowledge, equal partners in the quest of learning? What kind of trust is needed for students to bring the wisdom and knowledges of their communities to bear in the classroom?   How do the commitments, obligations, and values of the teacher effect the wellbeing of the students and the role of the university in a democratic society?  

We are tasked with teaching while being under siege. We are teaching persons who are living under siege. This inspirational conversation frames the need for teachers to learn communal strategies of survival which may have been previously abandoned or never learned. Learning to leap away from conformity might require teaching as the act of dreamers, conjurers, time travelers, and pilgrims. What if the vision for a new paradigm of education espoused education for everyone? What does it mean to teach what we do not know but what we have glimpsed? How do we keep job obligations from dampening our teaching and truncating our imaginations? How do we push through the fear to risk new paradigms for communal teaching?  

This conversation, dappled with Dr. Jennings’ readings of original poetry and prose, examines the destitution of faculty when the only legitimate expression of scholarship is to perform the values of being a white, self-sufficient, and male. Individualism, competition, and arcane merit standards have fundamentally distorted theological education. Jennings asserts that the generative aim of education ought to be belonging. He challenges us to muster the courage and creativity for the discovery of our genuine contributions to the production of knowledge. Without this risk we fail our students and one another. What is the collective sound of your faculty? When the faculty plays together - what is original tune? In what kinds of improvisation does your faculty revel? How does the music of the faculty inspire students to join in?  

Learning to listen to, attend to, and care for your body strengthens our ability to cope with stress, anxiety, and trauma. In this moment of pandemics when something has happened to every-body, regularly checking-in with your body can inform if professional help is needed.