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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.

In the last several years, I have been pondering the purpose of our work as theological educators. This seems especially pertinent because many mainline churches which both send and receive our students are dying, theological education institutions have found it difficult to attract new students, most of these institutions are in budgetary crisis, and more schools are closing every year. I have wondered what is important about theological education, what value it adds, and what about it lasts. In the process, I have considered my own experience in seminary and graduate school. It has been 29 and 26 years, respectively, since I entered those programs and I have been reflecting on what has stuck, and what made the time, money, and effort worth it. I admit that I don’t remember many specifics unless I scan my shelves for the books that I read in those programs; they are old friends and evoke a difficult season when I was undergoing a major gestalt shift—a time when old paradigms were losing their power for me. These books remind me of a time when I began to understand more deeply something I had been struggling to clarify. They are old friends who introduced me to new horizons and opened new possibilities in my thinking and doing and being. I have kept these books not because I ever imagine using them in a classroom myself or because I need them for a writing project (they are too outdated for either of those): I keep them because they represent significant—even lifechanging—moments of my life. I remember my professors, my classmates, our discussions, the papers I wrote, the meetings in faculty offices where I engaged the ideas in these books. I think about the arguments I wrestled with, developed, let go of. I remember wrestling with my own understandings, and with teachers and peers, as I felt myself changing, growing, emerging. I don’t value these books and the memories of my time in seminary and a doctoral program so much because of the career they have afforded me; I value them for who they helped me become. I have been playing with the idea that perhaps the benefit of theological education is less in the information we educators impart or the professional training we provide, and more about the kind of learning and experiential communities we build together. Perhaps our value in the world as theological educators is less about the preparation for a particular ministry, the ordination process, or further schooling, and more about the kinds of opportunities we afford students to be formed, to be changed, to grow as people, no matter where they end up or what they do in their professional lives. Students will be formed by all the new information they are exposed to, of course, but also—and maybe more importantly—students are formed by the relationships with people and ideas they develop while in our programs, by the ethos of curiosity and the room to ask gnarly existential questions, by the freedom to interrogate life and the world and themselves and God. The goal of formation emphasizes who people are becoming: how they think, how they behave, how they treat others, what they value, their level of emotional intelligence, the ways they respond to God in and for the world. What if theological education institutions had as their mission to be sites of exploration toward the formation of people so that they—and those they engage—can flourish? Willie Jennings’ book After Whiteness (Eerdmans, 2020) is one of the most important books on teaching, learning, and organizational leadership I have read in recent years, and I want to be a part of what he is imagining. I want to see what could happen if theological education institutions come to be seen as places to belong, to grow, to change, to be creative, to think hard, to come alive in one’s own faith, hope, and love. What would it take for them to become places that explore formation as good people rather than primarily to impart knowledge or deconstruct embedded theologies? Jennings assumes—and I agree—that all human beings yearn for a place to belong and a place to learn how to flourish, and to have that modeled for them. What if theological education institutions became those places? What if they were places people came to first to explore rather than pursue? In the process of this work, of course, we must name what is going on in the world, what is wrong, what impedes flourishing. As Jennings notes, this requires the difficult and painful work of understanding our current condition(s), exposing and decentering and deconstructing the dominant (white, often male) view. This is something divinity schools like mine excel in. But people yearning for flourishing need to understand something else, too. We need to lean into hope, love, faith, grace; to understand all people as beloved, as having the imprimatur of God, as having voices that need to be heard, that deserve to be heard; to have the tools to enact justice. Theological educators in this model would need to have an explicit vision of flourishing, a sense of what could be, of what surely the Divine Urging is calling all of us toward. Those of us teaching theology and religion have an opportunity and, I think, an invitation to hold out such a vision, a creative imagining of who and what God is, and for what that God longs, for her creation. So many of our students live fragmented, trauma-filled lives. They come to our programs from homes, schools, communities, and jobs that are toxic, stressed, and struggling and, often, oppressive. What if we invited them to join us in seeking something more grounded, more life-giving, more whole, and helped them, for example, resist the neoliberal impulse for mastery, control, organization, ownership, separation, and possession (even of ideas)? What if we not only taught such a way but modeled it ourselves as well? Would that change our focus and our practices in the classroom? Would that shift our criteria of “success”? In this playful imaginary, theological educators and the administrators of our institutions would be normative, prescriptive, and committed to their own formation and growth as well as that of students, and of the communities of which we are a part. We could do this while also being critically analytical of the ideas we promote. We might ask explicitly, for example, what the sacred texts tell us about flourishing. We might examine what various religious/faith/philosophical traditions have to say about the good life. We might wonder aloud what is the story of the Good as witnessed in the sacred texts. We might inquire how to sift through all the broken humanness in the sacred texts to get to a message of hope, love, grace, redemption, care. If a deep understanding of flourishing and formation toward such a life and world became the goal, I wonder how that would change how we teach our students to read sacred texts, and whether it would influence how we teach the histories of Christianity. Would such a goal change how we teach pastoral care in our complex world? Would the flourishing of ourselves and our students as the goal influence how we teach ritual and religious practice? Would it change how we teach theology? Would it change how presidents and deans lead the institutions of which we are a part? Would it change whether and how we create community together? I am not suggesting we become proselytizers: I want to retain and exercise my critical thinking, even in relation to the commitments I hold dear, but I sense that a shift in our mission and focus might change some of the ways we do things, moving the emphasis from production to exploration. I yearn for more conversations among ourselves as theological educators and with our students about what we might do differently that might help heal ourselves, each other, our institutions, and maybe even our particular corners of the world. These kinds of conversations take work and intentionality, to be sure, and it would take effort to alter our emphasis from education as information to education as formation toward flourishing. For starters, we would want to develop some shared understandings of what flourishing looks like, what it requires, and how theological education could contribute to it. And, of course, formation and information are not so distinct; it is more a matter of alterations to emphases and processes and outcomes I am pondering. How/would an emphasis on formation to enable flourishing reconfigure our curricula, our faculty, our teaching practices, and the students who might be interested in joining us in that exploration? We might continue to attract fewer and fewer students seeking ordination credentials, it is true, but it is also true that we may spark the desire to join us in people who don’t know exactly what they will do with their time with us, people with tangled existential questions who are looking for a place to belong and explore and grow. And if they joined us in these efforts, who knows what old friends they might take with them?