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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.

Developing a more learner-centered course design does not have to mean pulling everything up by the roots. A good start is to examine the activities already happening in your courses, finding where good learner-centered design principles already exist. Here, I look at two versions of an activity that is common in my own course designs: Peer Review. The first example is simple; the second example is more complex. Both are fully asynchronous, allowing learners to manage their time as their lives require. (Honoring learner time and agency is a learner-centered principle.) Along the way, as in the last sentence, I keep an eye out for learner-centered design principles that I can identify and name. Example One: Peer Review and the Short Writing Prompt: In small groups on an online discussion forum, learners write a short weekly post in response to a writing prompt asking them to integrate course readings with their own contexts and insights. (Constructivism is a learner-centered theory.) During the week following a due date, small-group classmates offer each other 2-3 sentences of substantive informal engagement, followed by a peer review embracing three yes-or-no elements: Balance (every element of the prompt receives attention); Engagement (the whole work is engaged substantively with the course and its materials); Mechanics (spelling, grammar, organization, citation). For the first 1/3 of the term, peer reviews are purely diagnostic: no revisions are needed, but learners MAY reach out to the instructor for guidance in response to feedback. (Learners taking responsibility for learning is a learner-centered principle.) For the middle 1/3 of the term, learners getting two or more "No's" from peers must reach out to the instructor. For the final 1/3 of the term, learners getting any "No's" must reach out to the instructor. In practice, my role as instructor is mostly to provide guidance in the early weeks, rewarding (via recognition) social goods like risk-taking and commitment. (Guide-on-the-side-style facilitation is a learner-centered practice.) Example Two: Peer Review and the Final Paper: Bear with me on this one. There's this final research/thesis paper, see? (My course is "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible," and this is the notorious exegesis paper.) But a complete draft is due at the midterm...and by "complete draft" I mean Complete Draft: it's at the full word count and includes all of the expected elements of the final paper. Why? For many reasons, but relevant here: your small-group classmates need something complete to be able to peer-review it! So that's the "bad news" on the draft: it must be complete. What's the "good news"? The draft does not have to be particularly good! Because the Complete Draft does not count toward the student's grade in the class: this peer review is a formative evaluation, not a summative evaluation. (Formative evaluation is a learner-centered practice.) So, learner: in your draft, take risks! Try things! Get out on a limb! Pull out all the stops to try to articulate the things you are trying to say. (Creating conditions for student voice is a learner-centered principle.) In order to promote informed, substantive peer review--something more illuminating than "I liked it; it was good"--students are armed with two (2) rubrics. First, there is the rubric for the final paper itself, made available to learners at the start of the term. (Instructor transparency and accountability in assessment is a learner-centered principle.) If reviewers have so far neglected this document or struggled with it, now they are put in a position to have to get to know it better and work with it constructively and ask for help if needed. The second rubric is the rubric for the peer reviews themselves. (Are the reviews engaged with the draft being reviewed? Are they engaged with the final-paper rubrics? Are they constructive as well as affirming?) Here I include one coercive element: 20% of a student's peer-review grade requires that *their own draft* be complete and on time, and this element is a binary: you get 20 points, or you get zero points. And here's the thing: the evaluation for peer reviews is not formative, but summative. This thing must go smoothly and tightly, or the wheels fall off. (Don't ask of learners more self-motivation than reasonable for their level: scaffolding is a learner-centered principle.) Closing notes: Learner-centered course design principles didn't descend from the sky on stone tablets. Rather, they arose from the reflected-upon experiences of educators like yourself. By joining in this process of reflection and discovery, you join in the construction of applied learner-centered pedagogy. Where can you discover some more of the learner-centered principles that you're ransacking your course designs for? Do a web search for "student centered learning"; "learner centered instruction"; "learner-centered assessment" (or "student-centered assessment"); "learner centered teaching"; and so on. Good luck and have fun.

When the pandemic hit, everything changed overnight. We were in a state of crisis. Crisis has a way of exposing our frailty. Our vulnerability rises to the surface without our permission. Lack of control, uncertainty about the future, and anxiety about the unknown work together like a torrent, forcing us to let go of certitude. We know in part. That’s how it’s always been. But crisis beckons our confession of not knowing. Crisis humbles us, allowing us to see life from the vantage point of the powerless. Crisis reveals what busyness can hide. Crisis can be a pedagogical tool. What lessons have I gained from the pandemic crisis that will stay with me when vaccines and face masks are no longer a point of division? This vignette helps me explore this lesson. [text_only_widget] Vignette I opened an email from one of my students who said she needed to speak with me in person. Despite the growing number of safety protocols on campus, I agreed to meet with her. When she arrived, she sat in my office chair. Her shaky leg indicated her restlessness. “How can I help you?” I asked. She could no longer remain on campus. Despair had stolen her will to complete work, hang with friends, and ultimately to continue. Being home with family, she shared, seemed to be her best option. At home, she would be surrounded by those who knew how to love her well as she navigated depression. After sharing her concerns, she looked me in my eyes, and invited me to be honest with her about what I thought. Now, it was my chance to love her well as her professor. I wrestled with my thoughts: “Couldn’t she just figure it out?” “Is it really that bad?” “Is this just an excuse to go home?” At the core was my own selfishness—I wasn’t ready to lose one of my top students. Despite my inner wrestling, loving her well meant letting her get the help she needed. She didn’t really need my blessing, although she wanted it. “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole,” I told her. My insistence that self-care was nonnegotiable offered some sort of release. That was my last time speaking with her in person. She disenrolled from my university. Her sense of urgency to preserve herself was quite admirable and brave. [/text_only_widget] As we continue to remain in the pandemic crisis, these narratives show up in my office, emails, and coffee conversations repeatedly with many students who are navigating similar concerns. Depression, stress, anxiety, insomnia, and fear of returning home describe a large number of students. Counseling services are so full that they find it a challenge to adequately accommodate our students. “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole,” I told her. That brief response embodies a lesson I’ve been trying to learn ever since the pandemic started. That lesson is on self-care. The crisis of self -care did not start because of the pandemic; rather, the pandemic simply exposed what has always been burgeoning beneath the surface, exacerbating it so it can no longer be hidden. Lesson 1: We are not fragmented. All of me in one space. That’s what the pandemic did. Fragmentation is only an illusion. I am guilty of trying to live under that illusion. During COVID-19, I could no longer live a fragmented life. I could not put motherhood on a shelf until I finished teaching; my children were with me. The bedroom became a makeshift office as I tried to supervise my children’s e-learning while also teaching a Zoom class. My children offered no apology for competing for my care. Lesson 2: Wholeness is the new cool. I don’t want to only pursue wholeness for the sake of my own sanity and peace. But, I must do it because my students need to know that wholeness is a worthy pursuit. Lesson 3: Self-care is the new norm. Self-care recognizes that we are not fragmented. I’m learning how to create space for myself. Self-care requires intentionality. It requires permission-giving. It requires discarding the guilt. Self-care does not equal selfishness. It requires exorcising the lie that I should have superhuman strength. Our students do not possess super strength; nor do we.   “Give yourself permission to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to be whole.” My own hypocrisy is appalling. If actions speak louder than words, what would it look like for my assignments and classroom space to reflect self-care as a priority for my students beyond COVID? How do we model self-care without crossing boundaries? Possibilities include: Normalizing a mental health day as an excused absence. A Prioritize Yourself Day, where I invite students to engage intentional practices of self-care during class time. Stretching before or after a heavy topic or exam. Inviting gratitude into the classroom. Encouraging students to reach out to other students when they notice someone is missing. Celebrating hard work, even if it is not an A. Creating a culture where students know that failure and disappointment is expected as part of the learning process. How do we make self-care the norm for both teachers and students post-pandemic?