Resources

At the heart of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is the dictum of “reading the word and reading the world.” As a literacy specialist who worked with Brazilian peasants, Freire learned from these students the necessity of making the connection with their lived experience. Teaching for social change takes participants beyond the “I am the teacher/you are the student” hierarchical model. I have learned that the democratic sharing of knowledges is more possible when a class connects the social justice issues, we are studying with the community just beyond our campus. Learning becomes a series of dialogues with texts and issues and the organizations who are working for immediate and systemic change. The social justice organization nearest to my campus is an emergency shelter for families less than a block from campus, Decatur Cooperative Ministry (founded in 1969). Their motto is: “Short-term shelter. Long term self-reliance.” DCM began as an interfaith response to poverty and homelessness in Decatur, GA. Their ministries grew with the gaps caused by economic inequality over the years to address needs of transitional housing, financial literacy, and food insecurity. They work toward the goal of permanent housing and family success. DCM is part of a local network of organizations addressing economic injustices in the Atlanta area. DCM’s emergency housing is aptly called “Hagar’s House.” For over twenty-five years, my introductory-level Bible class has worked in partnership with this shelter as a “practicum” or small internship that is supervised by DCM staff. Students provide various assistance: tutoring with children after school, serving as lead volunteers at weekly dinners or as overnight hosts, working the main desk, providing web and social media ideas and support, assisting in financial literacy classes, or collecting food from the local food bank. Students study poverty and housing inequities locally (through the Decatur Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights) and nationally (with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival). My classes are diverse, with South Asian refugees, first generation college students, and a few who have experienced homelessness at some point during their lives. We take risks as we engage the social issues in the world, and we prepare for our onsite work by engaging issues of race and class, along with our stereotypes and questions. This semester we are writing blogs for the DCM newsletter on the biblical Hagar from Genesis 16 and 21 (and beyond). Blog writing emerged during the pandemic as a need identified by DCM when we had to pivot to a virtual classroom, and working with young children onsite was not an option. Our partner organization identified their needs, and they wanted to highlight our blogging as a way to give something concrete back to the staff that is useful for their member congregations, staff, board, and clients. Students are writing these blogs on Hagar along with a reduced onsite practicum. We are first engaging the scholarship on Hagar from womanist and feminist perspectives. And we are reading poetry (Mohja Kahf) and a dramatic piece (Kathryn Blanchard). Hagar as Black, Egyptian, slave, surrogate, mother, aunt, homeless, bold namer of the deity (as El Roi, the One Who Sees), and matriarch of Islam are main areas of investigation. Our community partner would like its supporters to know more about their shelter’s namesake. Students will encounter Hagar in the biblical text, in scholarship and literary imaginations, and in their work in the second half of the semester with those who live at Hagar’s House. Students will serve and share meals, open doors and supply cabinets, play with children in the community room and design programs, and begin conversations. They will explore the root and systemic causes of poverty and housing and food insecurity in the US through one nonprofit organization’s commitment to meeting emergency needs and working toward systemic social justice. We are mapping the past—the biblical stories of poverty and displacement—as well as the current ones on our campus and in our neighborhood. What I have discovered over these years of partnership is that discoveries also happen beyond the classroom walls. Engaging the complex issues of systemic poverty and homelessness takes concrete form in the faces and lives of the staff and clients at DCM. The Hagar of the Bible and Qur’an continues her story—this time in her own words.

Mystagogy, as a practice of leading an initiate into the deeper mysteries of Christian life and faith, occupies a central place in learning about Christianity. But in a secular religious studies classroom, to what degree is this exploration possible or even permissible? And more practically, how does one go about communicating, or indeed “translating,” elements of praxis, devotion, and commitment for students who do not necessarily share in the faith tradition being examined? This past fall, as part of my course on Christianity, I arranged for a Russian-trained iconographer to run a five-day workshop showcasing the process of “writing” an Orthodox icon. Under his guidance, my students followed the traditional process, used authentic materials, and implemented time-worn techniques to create their own icon. My hope was that the path through this workshop would in some small way illumine the path of mystagogy and as such, connect these students to core elements of the tradition in multifaced and embodied ways while still preserving the secular context of their learning. The image of an icon can be puzzling enough for those not familiar with the tradition. To many students, the stylized appearance of the saint or holy figure can seem alien and inaccessible. Every detail is replete with meaning and mystery and every gesture is deliberately and precisely positioned to communicate that meaning. And yet, despite the shrouding layers of tradition, a face has a remarkable ability to drawn one in. Similarly, while the ancient process of creating an icon, with its numerous steps and specialized techniques, seems even more mystifying, there are many elements that are surprisingly familiar. Creating the tempera paints involves getting one’s hands dirty separating eggs, removing yolk membranes, adding wine, and grinding in pigments on a sheet of glass. Applying gold leaf and the divine light it represents involves the use of squirrel hair, grease, beer, and bread. It seems that reinscribing the mysteries of incarnation involves everyday tools and common resources from the kitchen and garden. Working eight hours a day for six days, students spoke of the process as being unlike any other project they had done, a process that was all-consuming and meditative in character. Indeed, the very experience of time took on a markedly different quality. Students spoke of how the investment of this kind of time and energy created a deep sense of value. This was value that didn’t fit within a typical financial or economic sense of things. It was not monetary. For example, they could imagine gifting their icons but not of selling them. “After spending so much time working on this project, I value it in a way that I do not value many other objects… After experiencing first-hand the patience and diligence required to write an icon, I understand the value of those gifts and how significant they must be to the recipients.” In this example, value was not bestowed by a sacred authority but rather from the immediacy of the creative experience. The icon was valuable to these students not because it was deemed sacred but because it was part of a process of investment where its value and beauty steadily increased through the various stages of its creation. Within the secular learning context, this experience resonated with the students far more than an intellectual or theological account. For the students, the icon became a thing of value but also a thing of beauty. Interestingly, this beauty was not something they claimed credit for, a product of their individual creativity, but rather it emerged from a prescribed process into which they had little if any input. Students spoke of setting aside their role as author and creator, of moving into the background and being at the service of a tradition that surpassed their own interests and ownership. They wouldn’t be signing their icons as the artist signs their painting. From this altered vantage point, students were able to appreciate details of the tradition in different ways: the play of light and shadow, the cast of the gaze, the creases in the robes, the vividness of the pigments, and the many stages of illumination. The experience of beauty included the aesthetic features and the meaning communicated but also a certain sense of investment, of labour, and the time taken to carefully move from one stage to the next. In all, the experience of creating the icon communicated values and perspectives that are key elements of the theological and spiritual landscape, but in ways that were more immediately accessible. In the end, the process of creating the icon provided a rich and evocative path through some of the central mysteries of the Christian tradition in ways that went well beyond the repertoire of traditional instruction. An icon involves transforming a piece of wood into something sacred and in this journey, this process, we see the path of mystagogy unfold. Students followed this path towards the mystery of the image where the icon is a combination of simplicity and complexity, of the abstract and the everyday, of something small to look at and at the same time something enormously meaningful to behold. It took time to create and the layering of process and meaning resulted in an object that speaks much louder and with many more voices than its compact appearance might suggest. Despite the secular context, this workshop was a moment of connection with a vast sacred tradition, translating notions of incarnation and revelation in ways that were deeply felt, transformative, and very much at the heart of Christian identity. “The paint physically went on very thin, meaning that to get a solid colour required upwards of 20 layers of paint. This is where the reflective nature of the creation process really began for me. As the layers go on, you lose count of how many you’ve done, and time begins to bend. I found myself becoming so engrossed in the process and wanting to see that opaque colour that hours would pass without me realizing it. It is in this time that I understand there was space for a divine connection.”

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with my first-year students’ reluctance to argue with each other. Several years ago, I started asking my classes where these sentences change from being OK to not OK: I agree with Peter. I want to add to what Peter said. I disagree with Peter about this. Peter’s view has some serious problems. Peter is wrong about this. Peter’s view is silly and naïve. Peter is an idiot. Years ago, first-year students here at my small Catholic college in the Northeast usually said it was around 4 or 5. But these days, they generally draw a line between 2 and 3. Expressing disagreement is no longer okay. It’s a significant loss. As an academic, I know that defending our position from challenges helps us hone our own position. It sharpens our wits, and it makes us revise and improve our arguments. My students are no longer getting this practice, and it shows in their papers. They don’t anticipate basic objections and their arguments are weaker. For years, I tried to reverse the trend. I explained the value of academic arguments, and I pushed my students to express disagreement with each other. They resisted. I pushed harder. One day, a student looked at me and said, “We know you want us to fight but we don’t want to!” Of course I didn’t want them to fight. Did I? The comment shook me, and I started thinking. Why did they think that I wanted them to fight? Were there downsides to classroom arguments that I wasn’t seeing? Could I reach my pedagogical goals without having students argue with each other? What might that look like? I kept thinking. I studied Buddhism and thought about the downsides of an adversarial approach: It makes us focus on winning, so we listen for flaws and weaknesses, ignoring the strengths of positions. We risk becoming less open to alternative views and less able to see the flaws in our own thinking. I studied feminism and considered reasons why some won’t enter a combative discussion. Not everybody has the confidence and inclination to speak up if they believe that they’ll be attacked—and they might see what I consider rather mild disagreements as attacks. I wondered how many had not dared enter those lively discussions that I so fondly remembered from my past classes, and I squirmed. I have increasingly come to see my students’ distaste for disagreement and argument as healthy reactions to an overly angry and combative culture. My students years ago could playfight in class and trust that things would be fine. My students today have seen too many discussions turn nasty. Too much is at stake for them socially. They don’t have that luxury. I rethought my approach. I want them to “fight” because I want them to get better at building and examining arguments. Could I treat “fighting” as the means, not the goal, and then reach that goal in a different way? I started shifting the focus away from students arguing with each other towards us together examining and arguing with the text and its author. I let them work together to identify flaws and to devise ways to improve arguments, and we discuss better and worse ways to communicate what we discover to an author. It’s not as effective as arguments with each other for teaching students how to improve their arguments and respond to objections. But they like having a class in which they talk and figure things out together. And I like the care and sensitivity with which they investigate the views of others, finding things to appreciate and ideas to consider—even in arguments that I thought were rather bad. I worry that by letting them avoid “fighting,” I am ignoring something crucial. Students need to learn how to disagree civilly—heck, most of us could use some work in this area! I worry that they only have two modes: polite avoidance of conflicts in person, and then fights, name-calling, and cancel culture online. I’m still figuring out how to get students out of those two modes. I’ve had some success with role-playing, assigning them a position to argue for and sometimes even assigning them a confrontational personality. That makes it safe. If disagreeing and being disagreeable is their assigned job, it’s my fault, not theirs, so their performance in the role won’t harm their relationships. They tend to go at it with some enthusiasm. It still doesn’t have the energy and fire of real arguments where students defend their own position to people who disagree. I worry that I’m babying them, but it seems that they need that safe space. And sometimes, the dissonance between what they are saying in their assigned role and what they believe becomes too much for them. They fess up, stating out loud that they disagree with the position I’m making them argue for and explaining why. It’s a roundabout approach, but it may get the job started.