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The following axiom is often met with solemn nods, sad sighs, and knowing looks of empathy and understanding: “Church hurt is the worst hurt.” At every seminary, there are students with deep wounds from the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual abuse they experienced in congregational contexts. Seminary communities understand that a church can be the site of terrible harm and heartbreaking pain. There are also powerful testimonies of resolve and resilience. Our students are not satisfied with the status quo and are seeking the kinds of theological education that will equip them to lead ministries of healing, hope, redemption, and transformation. Some are called to work within existing congregational and denominational structures. Others are participating in new church developments and enacting their convictions to form religious communities in places and among persons that have been ignored and forgotten. But what happens to teaching when seminary hurt is the worst hurt? I find that the seminary classroom is more responsive to church hurt than seminary hurt. Faculty in theological schools are generally open to acknowledging the trauma and affliction that people encounter in congregations. Some of us share our own scars and wounds. Many of us are theological educators because we too have not given up on all the good that is possible in churches. We are quick to assign readings that address pastoral leadership. We encourage our students to make connections between the theologians in our respective syllabi and congregational praxis in the “real world.” However, the seminary classroom is sometimes slower to respond to the harm and pain inflicted upon students within our own learning communities. The remainder of this reflection focuses on three specific forms of seminary hurt that I have encountered in my classroom. The first results from a student harming another student with deleterious commentary that assails the dignity of persons within our learning community. My seminary is committed to the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ persons in Christian leadership and society, but we also welcome students from religious communities that do not share our conviction. A few of these students have been outspoken in their opposition to our position and have utilized classroom discussions to express their disagreement. Other students are unfamiliar with queer theology and grapple with the practical implications of our commitment to LGBTQIA+ justice. My approach to these instances of harm is to respond promptly and firmly with direct intervention. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to maintain a respectful learning environment. It is my role to hold my students accountable when public professions of their personal beliefs are hurtful. Even if the bulk of these interactions with students occur outside of the classroom in private conversations, there must also be a public acknowledgment of the harm done inside of the classroom. The second form of seminary hurt is more difficult when I encounter it in my classroom. How do I respond when my colleagues harm students? There are few secrets at a freestanding seminary like mine. With a smaller student population than the nearby high school and an entire faculty collegium that is the same size as a computer science department at some universities, my seminary inhabits an intimate and fraught ecosystem. When I teach about racism within the history of Christianity in the United States, there are occasions when my students discuss the racism they have experienced in other classrooms at the seminary. In doing so, they are rightly underscoring the pervasive realities of racism within Christian institutions today. Studying history is not just about the past, it is also about helping us better understand how the past reverberates in our present. But what is my responsibility to my students? When matters move beyond my classroom, I must navigate multiple layers of collegiality, mutuality, hierarchy, and power. The third form of seminary hurt revolves around institutional decisions that harm students. My teaching often pivots to engage current events because I seek to be responsive to what is happening in the actual lives of my students. Sometimes, the events at hand deal with controversial matters in our seminary community. There has been confusion and anger when beloved colleagues are dismissed or depart because of arduous conditions. There has also been dismay and frustration regarding policies, procedures, and the pace of institutional change. In my classroom, I have engaged the following challenge from my students: “What I have dealt with at this seminary is worse than what I have experienced in the church. Shouldn’t the seminary be better than the church, or at least as good as the church?” In these moments, I wrestle with ambivalence. On the one hand, I am further motivated to grow as a teacher and determined to do better in my classroom. On the other hand, I know that participating in pathways toward institutional change requires that I venture outside of my classroom. And some of those places are where seminary hurt awaits and abounds.

It is no secret that the arts are powerful tools that can be used in any classroom to challenge, liberate, expand, complicate, and even heal aspects of our educational practices. The visual arts, in particular, not only allow us to connect in deeper ways with the content and context of our studies but can also function as a portal to what is hidden in our deepest recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. From rage to grief to wonder and joy, the arts help us access emotions and educate our affections while inspiring us to resist, denounce, agitate, connect, conjure, and generate tools for speculative imagination, for integration of embodied and intellectual knowledge for the healing of all our relations. As a site for world-making, art lends itself to dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and acting in the world. Artists and works are poised with the capacity to enhance our understanding of how historical and cultural amalgamations circulate our bodies, shape our culture, and inform our experiences, while also offering opportunities to assess and integrate multimodal processes of learning. What follows is a series of suggestions on how to bring the arts into the classroom to activate and enrich multimodal learning. When I am presenting an artwork within the context of classes in art and religion, I like to begin by providing historical information based on my previous research of the work. I find the work’s curatorial files which, depending on the artist, are broadly available online. Many contemporary artists use their own websites as archives of works, exhibitions, ephemera, press clippings, etc., so be sure to check those as well. Then I consult chapters, articles, catalogues, and reference works which provide context for the creation and reception of that particular artwork.[i] I also provide the artist’s full name, the work’s title and date, the collection to which it now belongs, how it was acquired, and how the museum or gallery’s curatorial practices participate (or don’t) in “unlearning and changing the base of colonialism in the concepts of private property, Manifest Destiny,… Eurocentrism, Cartesian dualism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, positivism, sexism, racism, individualism, extraction, classism, violence, and control,” as Wanda Nanibush, the assistant curator of Canadian and Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, puts it. The goal is to deepen and expand the experience of engagement with the works—not so much to define, constrain, or limit the contours of interpretation. In other words, the contextual information we offer on any creative work should not limit the personal connections, emotional reverberations, and embodied experiences that teacher-learners may develop with the work. Beyond the artist’s and work’s contexts, I ask teacher-learners to describe in detail what they see and what they understand. For example, if I share a painting, I ask them to describe the color, contours, textures, contrast, movement, proportion, composition, medium, size, dimensions, and how the lines appear in relationship to one another. This step reveals to us how we have been conditioned to take in a lot of images hastily, spending a very short amount of time looking, identifying, and savoring what the works are doing, and how the textures, colors, and rhythms of the composition have been carefully arranged by artists to elicit responses in us. Only after exhausting our capacities for naming what is in front of us, do I ask teacher-learners to progress in the interpretation of “what is” to “what it might mean.” We often claim that artworks mean something without carefully tracing for our class participants where these meanings are visually located or where they originated within the work. The last question I engage with is the “so what?” that Gilda Williams proposes in How to Write About Contemporary Art.[ii] What are the echoes for the context of our class? How does it invite us to look at our subject and discussions differently? How does it open up a space for the poetic to guide and allow us to access our deepest, sometimes hidden, recesses? Works of art are powerful in connecting us to our emotions, in helping us understand what it means to be human, to be whole, to be here. As theological educators who are laying out the blueprints for sacred, embodied, planetary change, we must remember to have the arts in our toolboxes. The arts are never far away from what matters most in life. Artistic productions participate in decolonial efforts—are capable of doing what Macarena Gómez-Barris names as “the erosion of the extractive gaze” while “affirming the diversity that resides within the matrix of coloniality.”[iii] As antidotes to Empire, visual arts are sites of subversion that promote imagining and shaping into being other emergent worlds. They also require from us, as Indigenous Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak puts it, an acknowledgement that we are co-responsible for maintaining our capacity and responsibility to keep the dreams of our ancestors alive.[iv] As apertures into worlds of the not yet, artworks also welcome wonder, openness, diversity, reciprocity. Allowing a careful looking, engaging, and sensing what the works are activating emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually in us is generative way to amplify learning in our classrooms. Part II of this series will provide practical examples of engagement with artworks. Available April 27, 2022.   [i] A helpful resource for helping in the design of the experience with works of art is Teaching at the Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rikak Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2014. [ii] Gilda Williams, How to Write About Contemporary Art (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2014). [iii] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 133. [iv]Ailton Krenak, Ideias pra Adiar o fim do Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019), 47.

Just the thought of failure, either in anticipation or in loathsome memory, causes many to recoil, wrench in pain, or feel ashamed. The big red-inked “F” on the exam, either literal or metaphorical, sends chills down spines and contracts sphincters. Fiasco, disaster, confirmed lack, or found-out mediocrity, humiliates and destroys. Failure is unavoidable. As they say, “we learn more from our failures than from our successes.” Rather than stigmatizing those who fail, it behooves us to embrace those who are brave enough to make attempts and normalize the help needed to strengthen efforts. Still, normalized help is not easy to come by. For many students, for many reasons, one of the first things they do in undergraduate or graduate school is fail. A student who exceled in high school courses will not necessarily ace the first exams in college. Comparable to students, teacher failures are as varied as teachers. Early career fiascos, mid-career blunders, late career mistakes and poor judgements – confirm that we are persons who are fallible. Humanness is messy. Our teaching failures remind us that an expert in any field does not necessarily make for a good teacher of that field. Learning to teach the methods, approaches, practices and literature of any discipline requires as much attention as learning the content of that field. Any seasoned teacher will tell you that there were (many) failures along the way to becoming a competent teacher. The ways schools respond to failure is a key element in the formation or deformation offered in our educational enterprise. Students and faculty are more formed by the ways they are accepted or rejected during failure as they are by any course in the curriculum. A climate of help, support, applauding of persistence, and reward for courage, tells students if they are worthy of the degree they are attempting to earn. It tells teachers that the community where they teach has their backs. Higher education colleagues report that they survived an educational process which told them that failures were to be rare/never and were intolerable. Out of self-protection, many of us learned to pretend we do not fail. Or we have been taught to hide the failure. We masquerade or just never quite own up to any failure. School ecologies which are intolerant of failure are climates which are deforming of spirit and shallowing of imagination. Without healthy spirit and deep imagination education becomes rote, wooden and hollow. Our students, then, are ill-equipped to leave our classrooms. Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful (wo)men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” In classrooms, it behooves us not to lower standards, inflate grades, or dumb down curriculum so there is little to no failure, but instead create ecologies of learning where moving past failure is integral to learning, encounter, discovery, boundary expansion and new experiences. Asking for help is not cheating; it is not a show of weakness; it is not a declaration of permanent inadequacy or insufficiency. Failure does not foster mediocracy or create indelible flaws. Asking for help is difficult. Asking for help has to be re-learned. I first met Ariel as a student enrolled in my introductory class. His habit was to sit quietly, listen attentively and participate actively in small group activities. I noticed that he was smart when I read his first submitted essay. His writing was strong, his grasp of the course material was solid and his conjectures concerning implications and applications was superb. By mid-term of the semester, Ariel’s engagement in the class showed that he was, consistently, a capable and talented student. During a break in a class session Ariel came up to me to talk. He said he had a proposal. I was intrigued and listened attentively. His proposal was that since he had done so well on the first three writing assignments, that I would allow him to forego the remaining three assignments. I told him to let me think about it. At the end of class I pulled him aside to talk. I told him that in order for me to forego the three pending writing assignments, he would have to agree to help students in the course who were struggling. I told him he would not have to do the remaining assignments in the syllabus, but instead he would use his time to lead a study group to help failing students. He said he would think about it. During the following week he emailed me and said he would take my offer. I emailed back and told him to meet me in my office an hour before our next class. Before the next class and my meeting with Ariel, I emailed three other students who were also doing quite well in the course and offered them the same deal. If they were willing to keep up with the reading of the course, in lieu of writing the remaining three essays, the four of them would help other students who were struggling with the materials. When we met I told them that their help with other students was not mandatory and they could complete the course as outlined in the syllabus. Each chose to create a study group with other students. The study groups worked well; help was given and grades came up. After the last class session Ariel came to my office. He thanked me for the class then said, jokingly, that the deal I struck was unfair. I smiled at him and waited to hear his rationale. He said that the task of creating the study group, and helping other students, was much more work than had he simply written the remaining essays. I smiled wryly and reminded him that it had been his choice. I asked him if he had learned from helping. He said yes. I told him that there were students who he helped who would not have taken help from anyone else. And I thanked him for his good help. Ariel told me I owed him lunch. Gladly, I obliged. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ― Winston S. Churchill So, we ask these reflection and invitational questions. To whom do you turn for help with your teaching failures? What systems of help do you build into your courses for your students? In your school, is there an ecology that normalizes failure and regularizes help, support and resilience and if not, what would it take to create one? Who are your collaborators and conversation partners when you fail and when you need help? What failures in teaching are weighing you down and need to be forgiven and healed?

One of my social media names is “salsasanchez,” a not-so-subtle hint that I love everything about salsa music! Its history, genres, sounds, musicians, and, of course, the dancing! As a bass player, the only thing I love more than dancing salsa is playing the salsa groove on my instrument—or better yet, playing it while dancing! My picture of the new creation includes playing an upright baby bass in a Rubén Blades’ salsa band. But what does salsa have to do with cultural health? Could salsa music foster healthy forms of engagement with neighbors from cultures other than our own? In our seminary’s latest round of curriculum review, cultural health became one of seven desirable health outcomes in the formation of our students for pastoral ministry. I was assigned to assist first-year incoming students with an initial way to assess their levels of cultural engagement. As a theoretical framework for this initial self-assessment, I suggested thinking in terms of three levels of interaction with the cultural other, namely, multicultural, cross-cultural, and intercultural engagements—the third option being the more involved or deeper (and yes, healthier) form of interaction to work towards. The multicultural level merely signals an awareness of the presence of people from multiple cultures in our midst. Such an awareness is a first step in cultural engagement and may lead to knowledge of the other at a theoretical level. The image that comes to mind is that of parallel planets (worlds) that are aware of each other from afar but do not have meaningful contact with one another. It is the least demanding form of cultural health. The cross-cultural level moves beyond awareness of the cultural other toward movement into the other’s cultural world. An apt image for this level is a bridge, which provides a path from one world into the next. Although cross-cultural language can promote more involvement with the cultural other, it can also fall prey to unilateral forms of engagement where the “higher” culture crosses into the “lower” culture to change it—a one-sided crossing that gives rise to unhealthy paternalism and dependency. Which leads us to the intercultural level, the most demanding engagement. The image of a team working together toward a common goal, with each member contributing something unique to the community, best gets at the goal of intercultural collaboration. Hopefully, such collaboration leads to deeper relationships of mutual interdependence in which cultural others move from being strangers toward living as neighbors and friends. To move from my three-level theoretical paradigm into a simple pedagogical tool for self-assessment, I imagined how the use of salsa music could creatively assist students to get an embodied sense of these levels of cultural health in a classroom setting. Enter Rubén Blades! I played one of his songs and asked students to listen for the “clave” rhythm (the groove that makes salsa work) in the piece, which I demonstrated for them by clapping my hands to the tune La canción del final del mundo. The students’ first task was simply to listen to and find the clave in the salsa—an exercise in basic multicultural awareness. But then, I asked students to perform a cross-cultural exercise, to go a little deeper in their engagement with the cultural other by clapping the clave themselves. Some struggled, some succeeded, but all had crossed into the world of the clave! They were not only aware of the sounds of salsa, but participated in music-making in a different (although to some extent, artificial) cultural environment. Finally, I demonstrated for students what a salsa clave looked like in dancing, showing them the basic steps involved. Then, I asked if any of them would be willing to try out the dance. Volunteers agreed to dance next to each other, replicating my footwork to the best of their abilities. Soon enough, we were engaging in an intercultural exercise, one in which we were collaborating in practicing and performing a salsa piece together. Others in the classroom did not dare to dance, but were happy to keep clapping the clave. Some simply listened in awe. Which shows how students at our institutions are always operating at different levels of cultural health with some cultural other. The creative use of salsa music to challenge cultural comfort and instill a vision for a more generous engagement gives me hope in a healthier world—indeed, in a new creation—where we dare to work and play together in clave time. Let’s salsa!

Trust forms the basis for human growth, as many learned from Erik Erikson’s psychological stage theory. Infants need consistent, predictable, and reliable connection and responses from caregivers for healthy development. These qualities facilitate an environment that allows for the emergence of inner confidence and strong emotional bonds with others. While we are born with the capacity for trust, we learn to trust through lived experience over time. A piece of theory from D.W. Winnicott, British child psychiatrist, liberates caregivers and teachers alike from the burden of getting everything just right. Winnicott offers a supportive message to the tired and weary: you don’t need to be perfect. “Good-enough” is just fine. Reliable caregivers put supportive provisions in place, and they create space for others to discover and learn on their own. Caregivers and teachers stand close by and ready to respond. During the COVID pandemic, I have taught primarily in two modes: completely asynchronous courses using Blackboard learning modules, and blended courses using synchronous Zoom sessions and Blackboard modules. It has taken time to develop the skills to teach online. Thankfully the learning curve began well before the urgency of this time. When I think about “good enough” teaching, I need to check my own inclinations toward perfection, the need to: formulate precise learning objectives, create crisp podcasts and videos, and develop clear PowerPoint slides, among others. Certainly, these aspects of teaching matter. Participants need to be introduced to theory and practices and have their competence assessed. Yet, trust as an embodied capacity of being tuned in and responsive to course participants has always been an aspect of effective teaching and learning in some fields and for some faculty. Since the onset of the pandemic, such practice has taken on new significance. Course material opens participants to others’ pain as well as their own. I have observed body language and read reflections that reveal genuine struggle, trauma, and wrestling. I empathically respond to participants. I exercise caution not to coerce sharing of information or details that would leave the participant feeling exposed or overly vulnerable. Noticing the gesture or the comment is often sufficient. Embodying trust in the online/virtual environment is not about catching every nuance. But it is about practicing good enough teaching that tunes in and follows through on body language and verbal and written comments. Teaching online during the pandemic requires instructors to model trust for course participants. In a therapeutic relationship, a counselor creates an emotional and physical environment for care seekers to express themselves without fear of judgment. We certainly expect such trust to be demonstrated by a trained clinician. Instructors foster trust by taking seriously participants’ experience as they encounter course material. Fortunately, course instructors in their modeling of trust give permission for others in the class to offer their own supportive comments. Trustworthy instructors do not gloss over glaring statements that beckon for attention. In a class I taught recently, a student introduced herself by saying that she was a bit apprehensive about how the class would unfold: “I am afraid of what it may break open in me.” I acknowledged the comment made in a video post and encouraged the participant to offer herself compassion. In the relative privacy of a course paper, the student referenced ongoing challenges in an intimate relationship. I responded to the statement with a brief, nonjudgmental, and supportive comment of my own. In so doing, I offered care for the student as a person even though it is not my role to elicit the further sharing of details. Paying attention and responding builds relationship and helps foster inner strength for participants in these trying times. Both online Blackboard discussions and Zoom seminar sessions have created the space for a level of intimacy that I would rarely expect in the physical classroom. Intimacy has to do with the quality of participants’ sharing: an authentic encounter with course material and their own experience that reflects deep rather than superficial connections. Such deep dives occur through discussion board posts, journal reflections, presentations, course papers, summary exercises, and academic advising appointments. Holistic and trust-filled teaching and learning requires attentive instructors who listen, observe, and respond. Academic deans and other personnel can also exercise administrative leadership by recognizing the importance and value of such formative practices in theological education. Limiting the number of participants in online classes allows for tailored instructor engagement with participants, arguably the heart of trust-filled teaching and learning.