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“Write your name, for me, please,” she asked, a sturdy index finger tapping on a piece of paper, on the table at my aunt’s house. She was my paternal grandmother, Johanna, or Teacher Kate, as many people called her, and she was visiting her family in Toronto from Guyana. She would have been in her sixties then, a compact Black woman with flawless skin, a kind, steady gaze, and a resonant alto speaking voice. You could hear the mixture of crisp and precise British-influenced English that would have been expected of schoolteachers of Teacher Kate’s generation, born before World War I, in a corner of Amazonia and at the edge of the British Empire. You could also hear the rhythms of Caribbean creole speech, reflecting Guyana’s cultural legacy of majority populations descended from enslaved Africans and indentured folk from the Indian subcontinent and China, among others. Teacher Kate’s work in classrooms with children began before 1930 as a pupil-teacher, a form of teaching apprenticeship of young teenagers that was regularly practiced in the English-speaking Caribbean, in the early decades of the twentieth century. “Write your name, for me, please.” It was a directive, an invitation, and a question all rolled into one as we gathered around my aunt’s dining table. This was the late 1970s, pre-Internet, and I was in my early teens and already in high school. At that point, I had attended school for almost a decade split between Antigua and Canada, having spent my infancy in England, the country of my birth, as a child of the Windrush migration. The late 1970s was a magical transitional time in Black musical cultures as it was the era of the earliest commercial hip hop recordings, disco, funk, and R n’ B. We also listened to reggae, dancehall, calypso, and soca, Caribbean popular musical genres as well, new wave, punk and pop and rock n’ roll on AM and FM radio—our musical choices reflecting our transnational existence between recent Caribbean memories, the larger social context of a rapidly changing Canadian cultural landscape, contemporary Black Toronto realities in the Caribbean diaspora with close sonic and familial ties to major urban centres in the US and England to which Caribbean people had migrated. My friends and I emulated the look of the Pointer Sisters, The Emotions, or women lead vocalists in Chic. In our stylistic ambitions, we existed on a continuum of retro 1940s, church, and our imagined Studio 54. Our looks were achieved through making our own clothes with Simplicity and Butterick patterns, and reworking and mending heavily discounted seconds (discarded mass-produced clothing with what we considered minor and correctible mistakes like crooked seams and missing buttons) purchased cheaply in the garment district in downtown Toronto. That day I wore a belted, light beige, cap-sleeved dress in a shimmery fabric. My hair was still natural, a few years away from its 1980s curly perm, and picked out into a ‘fro. This was the late 1970s and in Black diasporic girl stylistic cultures in my corner of Toronto afros, cornrows, and other natural styles still reigned supreme with the occasional hot comb pressed straight styles for special occasions. I wondered why Teacher Kate would want me to write my name as an introduction to who I was as a student and her granddaughter. Why not ask me to read out loud or to recite memorized passages of poetry, bible verses, or dramatic plays? I had already had lots of practice in public speaking at school and in church, in Canada, where my first recitation was Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom.” I remembered the church assembly in the Jamaican Pentecostal congregation that met in the basement of a mainstream Protestant church in our Toronto neighbourhood, now called Little Jamaica. We were Anglicans but my mother insisted that we go to the church down the road and around the corner from our house that we could reach without crossing a major intersection, and where our friends from school, recently arrived kids from the Caribbean, also went to church. “Write your name for me, please.” So, I picked up the pen and I wrote my first name in cursive and print. “Write your whole name.” I wrote my first and last name. My grandmother inspected my writing and complimented it while also giving some pointers to improve the cursive. “Write it larger,” she said. I wrote my name several times and each time I did so with more confidence than earlier versions. Now, I wrote my name every day in school on assignments and had done so for years. My friends and I even practiced our autographs. I had written my name years ago in my British passport as an elementary school student. This occasion, however, felt different. In the analog world of the late 1970s, just a few years before the launch of the digital age, my grandmother was inviting me to come to the table of knowledge, to take up space, and to write myself into the narrative in my own hand, boldly and confidently and with style. Words mattered. I got it. I created my signature in that moment with its large cursive letters. Teacher Kate lived for over three decades after that night, in total just over a hundred years. By the late 1970s she had already taught several generations doing the hard work in the post-slavery and British colonial era of the first half of the twentieth century of teaching literacy. Many had entered Guyana and other Caribbean territories as transports of empire through the forced migrations of the slave trade and indentureship, without signature—perhaps an “x,” or even a thumbprint for the latter. I was only Teacher Kate’s student for that one evening but I learned a crucial lesson of accepting the invitation to take my place and to write my name and write myself into being. Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

Like higher education in general, religious or theological education also pursues forming and informing not only religious leaders but also responsible citizens. The concept of citizenship here is not necessarily understood in legal terms. In this time of globalization, we need to consider what global citizenship means. While globalization brought interconnectedness and benefits through economic and technological developments to our world and into our homes, it also heightened inequality—especially in the Global South—since the 1980s. The classroom concerned with social justice and civic engagement should stretch beyond the classroom to the global dimension. When I came to the U.S., I realized my theological training in South Korea had been thoroughly “Western.” I did not arrive in a “new” world. Instead, what was new was my arrival, signifying otherness. Such dissonance began to reveal how distant I am from such West-centered knowledge. As a person from a geographically non-Western world and a non- English speaker, I often feel that Western knowledge is limited and tells only one side of the story or one of many truths. I was fortunate to have a doctoral advisor who helped me seek not only alternatives, but also an “alternative thinking of alternatives.”[1] I count myself lucky for having taught at a theological school that welcomes such thinking, as well as a global perspective in my teaching. The first course I created was the Global Read of the Bible. The main purpose of this class was ambitious—it explored how the Bible has been received and read not only in the West but also in the Rest. I wanted to introduce students to other ways of reading in global Christian communities, as well as in racial/ethnic minority Christian communities in the U.S. When a professor teaches this kind of course, she may be overwhelmed by the amount, scope, and weight of potential course materials. Contrary to Westerners’ presumption that the non-Western world is void of theological and biblical knowledge, one can’t possibly approach the wealth of knowledges that the Other has produced.   An alternative way of thinking can emerge when perceiving globalization’s impact on the university system or higher education. Under neoliberal capitalism, universities have been privatized and corporatized. The commodification of universities has facilitated the global disparity in academic and education systems where scientific knowledge can be easily appraised for its market value. Some notice that the humanities decline because they have no market worth. What about disciplines such religion and theology? I am amazed, in these circumstances, at dominant biblical scholarship’s claim of scientific value-neutrality of interpretation. Biblical scholars who identify themselves as historians value the original texts in the ancient languages and their objective meanings. Early Christian studies has particular significance because Western civilization is founded on ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Medieval Western Christendom…; the list goes through the Reformation on to liberal democracy. We are fascinated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but few are interested in the Chinese ancient scrolls, a seventh-century reconstruction of the historical Jesus as the Sutras. What about the Mughal Jesus in India? One may be surprised by the richness of Asians’ portrayals and biographies of Jesus produced in Asian soils of Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and minjung, let alone the historical presences of ancient Christianities in Northern Africa such as Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia from the first century on. I do not intend to degrade the significance of the text, interpretive tradition, and the authority of Western scholarship. However, alongside Santos’ concept of the “epistemologies of the South,” I wish to challenge the assumption of the “Eurocentric epistemological North as the only source of valid knowledge,” in contrast to the South as “the realm of ignorance” or absence.[2] While racial justice demands acknowledging the white privilege of white people, our teaching promoting global justice and civic engagement should likewise recognize the epistemic privilege of the West or the Global North, and plurality of knowledges. Global learning has been available for universities and theological schools with resources in developing international outreach programs, but since the pandemic, our teaching and learning is even more accessible to global, indigenous, and vernacular traditions and knowledges. How do we alternatively think of alternatives to West-centered, capitalist, and elitist educational environments? We must embrace cultural humility, practice deep listening, and being open to solidarity with those struggling for a more just global world.   [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), viii. [2] Ibid, 7.