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A quilt is an extraordinarily familiar and surprisingly profound item. Owned by many, quilts are remarkable cultural artifacts—a factor not lost on many of our students, who are from a region with a rich history of quilting. In the Fall of 2019, I asked my students to create a community quilt as a class project. The quilt was intended to be an accompaniment to a course that combined philosophy of religion and theology with a focus on human identity within the Christian tradition. Without any prior experience, the students in this course designed, sewed, and assembled a quilt in the space of three months. As a result, the abstract notions of the course took on the texture of rough fabric in their hands. While threading needles proved an enduring challenge, notions of fellowship and of relational identity came together like stitches on quilt-blocks, something readily accessible and extraordinarily familiar. In exploring Christian notions of identity, the course takes Genesis 1 as its point of departure. This text is foundational for Christianity in terms of understanding the human condition and the connection between humanity and divinity. But what does “being created in God’s image” mean to the average twenty-year-old? In a secular university context, I have always found it challenging to connect students to what seem like lofty intellectual and devotional traditions. In the past, I have explored examples of Orthodox iconography as a way of providing a window into these traditions. Yet even an icon-making workshop with opportunities for hands-on experience was not as successful in bridging that gap as I had hoped. It appeared that it is not just doing or making that was important, but the accessibility of the object being constructed as well. A quilt, by contrast, is extraordinarily accessible. While it provides warmth and comfort, its significance is much more than simple utility. Quilts are created according to long-standing traditions, embellished with artistic flourishes, and often given as gifts. Dignity quilts are used to clothe the sick and dying, while memory quilts might incorporate the clothing of those who have passed on. Most importantly, most students from this region own a quilt, which carries with it the memories of their childhood, connections with its maker, and for many, a sense of comfort and home. I encouraged the students to choose a theme for their blocks that included something personal both figuratively—like a story or memory—and literally—like fabric or another material element from their lives. The results were startling. One student focused on the joys of the “local,” using fabrics dyed with local berries and bark from a native birch tree, printed with words from a resident poet. Another student created a more abstract block representing something of the depths opened by grief over a recent family loss. A member of the university football team cut small squares from a range of jerseys to create a mosaic of his player number and, in so doing, indicated the way in which his identity as an athlete brought together so many facets of his experience. A student who came from far away used fabric from clothing that connected her to her life back home. The quilt blocks demonstrated most effectively how history, community, context, and craft are enfolded within identity Where in the past it had been challenging to prompt class discussions, this time students worked with their hands and conversation flowed freely and casually about the dense readings and complex ideas we covered. What is more, as the quilt came together, so did the class community. Sitting around the quilt sandwich became an opportunity for sharing, for connection, and for new understanding. The intricacies of the course materials became accessible because the students were exploring these materials via the metaphor and labour of quilting. This meant they explored their own identity and their connections to each other in parallel to the insights traditionally drawn from Genesis 1. Ironically, in arranging the quilt squares, the students chose sashing that evoked the gold and brown colours of Orthodox icons. In effect, the quilt became a contemporary, lived expression of iconography, one that drew together the identity of the class community into an image that reflected something greater. The completed quilt will not win any state fair competitions, and yet its crooked lines and rough finish speak of how intellectual complexities of identity are made plain in the place where one lives and by the work of one’s hands. This quilt project demonstrated the astonishing layers of connection possible when incorporating local cultural traditions and material practices into the abstract discourses of a third-level philosophy of religion course. It also created an analogue, where students could attempt new skills alongside new theoretical concepts and have the freedom to try and fail at both. As a student remarked, “The freedom to take risks and support one another in our physical explorations was mirrored in the discussions as well; students felt more free to take intellectual risks when discussing the texts because we had each already grown by failing in some way: sewing a quilt square upside down, or making wonky stitching, or struggling with the basics of threading a needle.”

During the past year and a half of the pandemic, the uprisings for racial justice, the continued fight for LGBTQIATS justice, the struggle for the rights of immigrants, and the global impact of climate change, I discovered an urgency in myself to create and to grow things as a way to resist and refuse the death dealing all around us. The realization of so many lives lost, generations cut off, and futures extinguished weighed heavier each day. As a coping mechanism, I feverishly planted things in my garden, from herbs to vegetables, and grew green things in my home. I willed each and every plant to thrive and flourish, even as I felt rage and, at times, despair about the state of the world. I wondered if others felt the same. If colleagues and students felt weary, depleted by the constant weight of white supremacy pressing down on every inch of our lives. I started asking myself if what I was teaching even mattered anymore. Did what I was assigning students to read and write speak back to the now? Did the topics we were discussing speak truth and do the work of witnessing the rage and anguish of the past and present? Did my lectures also speak into the creation and necessary intentionality of embodied joy as an act of refusing oppression in our lives? Did the classes I designed speak into the flourishing futures we were trying to co-create? Here’s the pivot. Once our institution was entirely online and I realized that as educators, we had collectively reached a level of exhaustion and depletion that would continue into the future, I craved bringing the practice of creation and spirituality back into the classroom in a tangible way. I wanted to bring back the spiritual practice that art had been in my life. In sum, not only the act of creating a piece of art, but the process that undergirds that creation. The work and discipline of noticing the big and small things in daily life and in the world as a response to so much death—death meted out by white supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian violence, heteronormativity, bigotry, and ableism, to name just some of what we were are living through. I was also sick of words. Words can be full, but they can also be rather empty. People asking, “Hi, how are you?” without actually wanting to know. Sometimes there are things you feel, things you know, things that are ancestrally grounded in you that are unspeakable because they are so real and so incredibly meaningful. Sorrows and joys too deep to speak about in any coherent or fulsome way that an outsider could understand. There are things we experience that can’t and won’t be spoken about on demand. The days that we were living in felt heavy in this way: there weren’t enough words to carry the weight of it all. I began to wonder if there was a different way to teach and participate in the expression of community and lived experiences without centering words, to instead allow the unspeakable things within to guide us in a semester-long online class. I invited Rev. Darci Jaret, a local artist and theologian in Atlanta, to teach with me and we started working on creating our dream classroom. A space where students might use visual art to think theologically about art as a spiritual practice and a necessity for doing ministry and pastoral care in today’s world. As part of planning for this course, now dubbed, Spirituality and the Arts, we decided there would be no graded written work and instead we would focus our time on accountability through shared process and artwork. Students would create six pieces of visual art which moved from their personal journey to their theological understanding of the Divine presence, to pieces inspired by artists like Gabriel Garcia Roman’s Queer Icon series and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. We would paint, sketch, and sculpt. The pieces were connected to one another, spiraling out from self, back to community and the world, and back to the self. The final project would be a gift and blessing for another student in the class, a sending back into the world equipped to mend through a deeper appreciation of how the practice of making and praying through making changes our thinking, our theologies, and how we embody ourselves in the world. A major shift we made for this class was to let go of weekly assignments. We would take space and time for each piece of art. Instead of having pieces due each week, we gave students two full weeks to complete each piece. They were asked to manage the time as they saw fit but to remain accountable to sharing their process with the group. Each week, students were given relevant material to read and watch, ranging from scholarship on spirituality and pastoral care through art to watching documentaries about the decolonization of societies and neighborhoods through art making. We thought of the scholarly material for each week as a place for grounding and growing inspiration, raising significant questions, and challenging bias. Art and creativity do not occur or appear on demand but like any living thing, are nurtured into being through acknowledgement, trying this or that, and deep contemplation of what we encounter in the world, in ourselves, and in others. We encouraged our artists to think about and wrestle with the course material and provide video updates on their process at the end of the first week of each project. We asked them to cheer one another on as some projects were easier or more difficult for people depending on what was being worked out through each piece. We often repeated that is ok to just read and think, and to start and start over. The only thing to submit for a grade was the piece of art at the end of each two-week period. Everything that occurred up to that point was part of the practice of learning to be in community through accountable process.

Dear Wabash Blog Readers~ Welcome to our blogosphere innovation for the beginning of this new school year.  For the month of September, we will offer Dr. Hong’s masterful reflection on powerful, creative pedagogical pivots that she made in a course in the Spring Semester.  Log on every Wednesday of September to for the next compelling installment. (Part One of a Five Part Serialized Blog) I’ve always loved art. Some of my earliest memories are of coloring on the walls, much to my mother’s dismay. Today, I enjoy sketching and painting, but as a disclaimer, I’m not a skilled artist by any means. I am someone who enjoys creating art and has grown to appreciate the way the arts have shaped my life and personhood. In my adolescence, I was hungry for art. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the best at it, just that somehow it filled me up in a way nothing else did. In my search for art, I took every available fine arts class offered at school. I took lessons on Korean calligraphy and painting at my Korean immigrant church on the weekends, joined all the choirs, and tried out for school and community theater. I fell in love with the synergy between the physicality and spirituality of what art did in and through me. The more I learned and engaged in the practice of art, the more art became a necessary spiritual practice. As a young person who was still trying to understand religion, I somehow sensed that the divine met me in those nebulous and vibrant spaces where art was made. There was nothing as exciting as a blank sheet of paper and that first mark of graphite pencil on its surface. What came after—whatever image or pattern appeared on the page—took on a life of its own, almost of its own accord--sacred about making, giving something shape and meaning. All of us did this so naturally as children. Do you remember? When was the last time you picked up a pencil, crayon, paint, or markers, for fun? When was the last time you built something just to try it? As I grew into adulthood, I continued to love art, but I had a narrower view of it. I thought there was a place and time for art, that I had to carve out intentional space for art to happen. After I had children, I lost that sense of order and time. Day and night blurred as did my sleeping and waking hours. There was no such thing as carving out space for anything on my to-do list, let alone art.  The way I understood and recognized art began to expand to include the practice of noticing. I began to notice the artistic quality of things created and growing around me. It started when I began to see the world through my children’s eyes. As their grownup, I had a lot to relearn from them. Do you also find it sad that we so easily forget the perspective of noticing and marveling as we grow into adulthood? As adults, we need to work hard to relearn and regain the perspective that came so naturally in childhood. For instance, my children gasp when they see insects, not out of fear, but out of interest and wonder. I still only scream. During my journey to adulthood, I had learned appreciation for the fine arts, but I had forgotten to stop and notice the beauty and artistry of everything around me. Art didn’t have a designated place and time. Life is art. Art is life. During the first year of the pandemic, when both my children were learning virtually at home, so was I. My children shared with me their love of dandelions, ant hills, finding cicada exoskeletons in the summer, and marveling at the chaos of a thunderstorm from the safety of our porch. For them, there was no mundane. There was no simple. It was all gloriously complex and wonderous. How marvelous that those branches were just right for climbing! How curious that there are so many shades of red, orange, and yellow in tomatoes. How weird that cats have whiskers on the backs of their legs. (They do! Check it out.) I keep learning from them that the artistic exists in everything, in both the order and the mess. I keep learning that it is a spiritual practice to relearn appreciation for the miracle of the everyday. It connects me to the divine and back to myself, back to the earth, and back to the people with whom I am in community.

In the late 1970s, the summer day camp hosted by my church was filled with children grades 1 to 6. The counselors, including me and my best friend Michele, were high school aged people. I taught Nature Studies and Michele taught Spanish. Along with these two subjects, the campers also took classes in recreation, and crafts. We swam at the neighborhood pool in the afternoons and on Thursdays we went on excursions to Philadelphia sites like the Fairmount Park summer theatre, Music at the Del, the Philadelphia Zoo, the Franklin Institute of Science, and boat rides down the Delaware River. I had fun teaching, learning to teach, playing with the kids, and having a summer job with a pay check. Snack time was a highlight of most days. Served immediately after swimming, the thirty-minute afternoon break typically provided a choice between cookies or fruit. At each snack time, baskets of treats were placed on the table for campers and counselors to take what they wanted. By Fridays, the cookies, having been the choice for most of the children, were depleted. Friday snack choices were limited to fresh fruit, apples or oranges. Much to my surprise, only a few children would eat the fruit – choosing instead to have no snack. Children who took a piece of fruit would only take a bite or two, then discard the rest. Jamal was a bright, intelligent camper – age 10. He had beautiful cinnamon colored skin, stood about four foot/ten inches tall - he looked like a baby Denzel. He was mostly lanky arms and giant feet in high-top sneakers. When he played half-ball, red light/green light or tag, he had an awkward grace as he galloped in play - never tripping over his giant feet. Jamal could also be described as being “smart-alecky” as he often was sarcastic to adults. I liked Jamal for all of these reasons. He was confident, thought-filled, interesting to talk to. He was funny and he liked the attention I gave him. Jamal and I developed a quick rapport during sessions in my classes on urban trees, flowers, and pet care. He enjoyed caring for the classroom rabbit (named TR i.e. The Rabbit), hamsters (Sid and Natalie), snakes (Adam and Eve), and voles (no names given). I soon learned that it only took a stern look from me for Jamal to temper his audacious behavior and curb his insolent tongue. This also endeared him to me. At snack time, rather than sitting with the other counselors or campers, Jamal and I would sit together to talk. We talked about current events. I would pepper him with questions about his aspirations – “Why do you want to be a truck driver?”. Jamal was one of the kids who looked disappointed when the snack baskets only offered apples or oranges.  On a particular Friday, Jamal placed an orange on the table, then climbed onto the picnic bench and seated himself across from me.  Jamal stared at the orange. I asked him, “Why don’t you eat the fruit?” Without hesitation and still staring at the orange with suspicious eyes, Jamal answered, “You can’t trust it.” I repeated his comment, but made it into a question, “You can’t trust it?” I continued, “Little boy, what does that mean?” Jamal, still looking at the orange, answered, “You can’t trust what it’s gonna taste like.” Jamal then looked at me with an expression that conveyed I had little common sense. “Boy, what are you saying?” – I asked with impatience. Peering at me over his wire framed glasses, Jamal said, “It’s like this. When you bite into an Oreo cookie or a potato chip – you know what it’s gonna taste like. It tastes the same every time. But! (Jamal put his finger up and pointed at the orange for emphasis as if he was accusing the orange of wrong doing) If you eat a piece of fruit - you don’t know what its gonna taste like. It might be sweet(?) (dramatic pause) It might be sour(?).” While speaking, Jamal pulled his shoulders up to his ears and turned his palms up to communicate the uncertainty – “You just don’t know what you gonna get.”  Now forty-years later, I have not seen Jamal since summer day camp days, but his insight and perspective continue to teach me. The finicky eating habits of Jamal, and the other campers, might be what I witness in some college and graduate school students. The dietary preference for processed foods over nutritious organic offerings might be the same sensibility expressed by students who resist creative assignments in our courses. At the risk of overworking this day camp story – what if our students prefer that which is predictable, formulaic, and expectable in our courses? What if our students reward our predictability with their affirming behaviors and chastise us when our assignments pull them out of their comfort zones? More to the point, what if the lack of variety in our assignments is a detriment to our students’ formation? What if our narrow offerings keep students from learning needed lessons for expansive formation in the digital age? In other words, risk averse students are difficult to teach and risk-averse teachers might be harming the learning.   Like apples and oranges, teaching is organic, alive, unpredictable – often conflictual. Even with the best preparation, in the words of Jamal about the fresh fruit snack, “You don’t know what you gonna get.” Teaching is more art, finesse, delicacy than science, recipe, or formula. Predicting how a class will go with ironclad certainty is for people who do not understand the nature of teaching. Students’ sensibilities to newness, risk, and exploring the unknown impact the dynamics of the course. I remember summers of designing course assignments and learning activities which were tailored for my upcoming fall courses. I would consider the climate of the school, the events of the larger society, the students enrolled that particular semester.  I would design assignments which would connect our classroom learning to congregations as well as the wider society. I would dream up writing assignments which asked for creative non-fiction genres – letters, personal reflection, op-ed/opinion pieces, and project proposals. I would assign mapping, charting, poster-making for hallway exhibits and public displays of learning. Some assignments required group presentations, creation of scavenger hunts, bibles study lessons (written and demonstrated) or creation of playlists, reports of excursions taken beyond our class time. I developed an entire repertoire of assignments complete with detailed instructions, assessment rubrics, and foolproof encouragement!  I made these course design efforts because I believe students need to develop problem solving skills, hone their own creativity, and get acquainted with the makings of innovation and newness. As is typical, on the first day of class I would review the syllabus with the students. Oftentimes my creative assignments were met with grimacing faces, untrusting eyes, hesitate students who preferred the predictable critical essay and term paper over the creative. So many of my students were like Jamal who wanted to know the taste of everything before risking the bite. Many students preferred an intellectual encounter more like processed foods than risking learning activities for which they were uncertain, unrehearsed, and unfamiliar. Adult learners prefer to be affirmed for what they already know than meeting the challenge to learn the new. Much to my joy, each class had four or five students who delighted in the creative, in the unpredictable and the innovative. I depended upon them to coax, model, and bring-along those students for which my unorthodox assignments were too scary. For those of us who are interested in preparing students for the complexities of the 21st century, forming students into societal change agents, or simply teaching creatively for our own artistry and sanity – we must ask ourselves about our student’s palate for the uncertain, the unpredictable and the unfamiliar. In my early years of teaching several students found their way to the Dean’s office to complain about my assignments. Thankfully, I had a supportive Dean. My hunch is that teaching predictably fosters students less prepared to handle surprise, adversity, or the chancy sour notes of life. Worse yet, predictable teaching rarely challenges the status quo or shows students ideas beyond their established norms and previously uninterrogated values. Adeptness with diversity is a key to student formation. Better formation of students requires we teach to invite them to be more aware of and able to traverse all kinds of diversity. Our classrooms are rife with the possibility of exposing students to the complexity of many: races, nationalities, genders, cultures, religions, theologies, ideologies, perspectives, preferences, values, learnings, etc. In so doing, we debunk the notions of supremacy - in all of its forms. I am not suggesting class assignments should be like amusement park fun houses with trap doors in the floors, wavy mirrors and scary things jumping out of dark shadows in vulnerable moments. I have never been a proponent of pop-quizzes, adding assignments onto a syllabus as punishment, or attempting to control poor student habits with unexpected tests. We are not trying to induce fear or panic in our students. But neither do we want to lull students into complacency and complicity with redundancy, staleness, and musty, formulaic teaching. Embracing a wider palette of assignments models for our students the expectation of grappling with diversity as learning. While Jamal and I sat together at the picnic table - I peeled the orange. I handed him the peeling to take to the trash. By the time he returned, I had placed half the orange on a napkin on his side of the table – the other half I held in my hand. Jamal looked at his orange half. I looked at Jamal. Jamal looked at me. I pulled two segments from my half and popped them into my mouth and chewed. The orange was slightly tart, but not offensive to my pallet. I gestured to Jamal to try his half.

On March 30, 2020, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man, died a week after being pinned to the ground by police officers in Rochester, New York, where our school is located. This incident sparked protests, with some former and current students serving as public street chaplains, providing prayers and spiritual support and calling for police reform. When students expand and act out what they have learned in the classroom, should I pretend nothing happened in the community and the world? Although the professor tries to take an apolitical position, students do not separate their learning from reading the world and living in the world. In a group addressing “Things they didn’t teach in Seminary,” a few former students asked practical questions such as how to respond to parishioners who resist sermons explicitly addressing or supporting social movements like #BLM. While types of activism vary—from hashtag activism to solidarity activism on the ground—and even if we do not use the term “activism,” our teaching necessarily involves our perspectives on social justice and our political positions and actions. Paulo Freire argues that because education functions to reproduce dominant ideologies, it can never be politically neutral.[1] Teaching involves “reading the world” beyond the boundary of the classroom. Teaching the biblical text and its cultural and geographical world is not limited to the historical past but addresses highly politicized territory where people still suffer from wars and occupation. Some may be concerned when teachers impose their political perspective or ideology upon students because teachers have power, but when we find our former, current, and future students acting as civic agents for change and religious leaders in social movements, our activism as teachers does not force them to believe or act according to our convictions. Instead, as Freire teaches, students have the right to challenge or reject the teacher’s perspective and the ability to form their own views and speak and act out their opinions. Many activists in the present time understand that what is critical in social movements is not charismatic leaders but the community. The student community has had to grieve and reflect on what they have learned, engaging the world. The pedagogical potential of performative grieving in times of state violence, argued for by scholars in education, came to the fore in my online teaching during the pandemic. I often had students who broke down because of losses—losses of persons, jobs, health—and because of the confusion that systemic racism brought during the pandemic. I was able to say to them, “It’s okay to say it’s not okay” or “It’s okay to cry,” not because I was stronger than my students, but because we needed such collective grieving. For me, building a community of mourning in the classroom was a gesture of activism.  However, as Angela Davis said, if “freedom is a constant struggle,”[2] how long should we perform grief in our teaching? Teacher-activists have become exhausted, particularly in the past years. Critically-minded professors are wrung out by bringing social justice issues into our teaching, one after another (racism, gender inequality, heterosexism, economic injustice, colonialism, climate change, etc.). I create and teach courses like Global Read of the Bible, Feminist and Womanist Interpretation of the Bible, and Migration, Immigration, and Diaspora. Teaching such courses requires continuous engagement with and activism for social justice, as well as a breadth of knowledge. Such continued social challenges and grief causes emotional exhaustion. This is why we need to find communities of mourning and moments of contemplation. As I offered space for students in my classes to mourn, the Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry community (PANAAWTM) offered me a space for mourning when anti-Asian racism was climactic in the Atlanta mass shootings on March 17, 2021. Wo/men professors, students, and activists of Asian heritage gathered online to grieve, reflect, and pray together. A few sang Asian traditional songs and offered prayers of our ancestors. Through these practices, I gained spiritual strength, intellectual courage, and a clearer sense of commitment to teaching for social justice.  I am grateful for another opportunity that the Wabash Center is giving four Asian and Asian American female professors in New Testament through a Peer Mentoring Clusters grant next year. I am sure that reflecting on teaching—even such seemingly objective courses as Hebrew and Introduction to New Testament, which two of my colleagues are teaching this summer—will lead us to grieve and be “contemplative in action,” because our teaching is not an individual act, but is always situated in the particular contexts where we struggle against oppressions and injustices on the institutional and social level.  [1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998). [2] Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). Photo: Justine Murphy (@CitizenMurphy), "Brown," Twitter, September 16, 2020