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When I began my first full-time professor gig in 2008, I quickly learned to be fiercely protective of my own time. I understood that the long game of an academic career necessitated the publication of my first book. I loved teaching, but I intentionally restricted my own preparation and grading time in order to turn my thesis into a book. This protection of time was particularly difficult as a new faculty member embodied as a Korean American, and facing the faculty service minority tax. Over time, I published that first book, received tenure, and eventually promotion to full professor. With the security of tenure, I was more open to paying the minority tax, but not out of burden. I would happily serve in ways that are generative for Asian American communities, while protecting the time of junior scholars. I understood this service as an expression of my vocational call as a theological educator and biblical scholar. In 2020, I accepted a position at a new institution in Atlanta. In the midst of pandemic, nearly all of my classroom and service interactions were online and via Zoom. These circumstances severely limited my visibility to the dynamics of my new school. Accordingly, I deliberately planned to spend my first-year learning and acclimating to the institutional culture. But the horrific events of the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings forced a pivot. All of a sudden, my institution had to confront this terrible tragedy within our city limits that symbolized anti-Asian racism, patriarchy, Orientalization, and class oppression. I no longer had the option to sit back, learn, and acclimate. With my vocational call and protection as a mid-career faculty member, I pivoted to accelerate my own service to the community. In the ensuing days, I made sure to mention the shootings in each of my classes, if only to allow students to see my own grief and anger. I recognized that many of these students had limited exposure to AAPI perspectives. This tragedy begat a commensurate responsibility at the institutional level. I was grateful to be part of diverse faculty with several fellow professors of Asian descent. I ended up doing quite a bit of public and private care in the week following the shooting. I had speaking events on three consecutive days: recording a sermon for a future chapel, giving the devotional message at a prayer vigil of remembrance, and participating in a panel discussion on anti-Asian racism with over four hundred participants. Of course, I was also teaching a full-time load. By the end of the third event, I was exhausted. The weekend after the panel, a national organization held a major AAPI rally in Atlanta to address the shootings in the context of the surge of anti-Asian violence. A friend flew in from Chicago to speak at the event. Another friend was driving in from Nashville to attend. The rally was held fifteen minutes from my house. I did not attend the rally. If you are anticipating that I used this time to catch up on grading or work on my research, then you are going to be disappointed. I did none of those things. I used the time to rewatch episodes 7 to 9 of Star Wars and cook Korean pork belly for the family. I needed that time to restore my emotional and physical strength. A pivot is not a 180 degree turn. Rather, a pivot is merely a shift. Although the shootings compelled an urgent commitment to service, I did not abandon my commitment to a vocational life that is centered and sustaining. I have tried to honor these values from the beginning of my career. I plan to continue to honor them in the future when I pivot to senior scholar. This is how I commit to the long game.

For the past twelve months, I have made several pivots in my teaching to meet what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified in his 1967 speech on the war in Vietnam at The Riverside Church in New York City as “the fierce urgency of now.” Dr. King began by affirming the activists from Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam for their moral vision in organizing people together with the following call: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King then connected the organization’s call with his own challenge to act for peace in Vietnam and join in the global struggle against poverty and racism: “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” In addition to teaching through a global pandemic, we are tasked with the responsibility to educate toward racial, social, and intersectional justice. We teach in different disciplines and at diverse institutions, but we inhabit the same world. We live in a world where millions marched to protest the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, anti-Black racism, and police brutality in May, June, and July. We all witnessed the violent insurrection and mob violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. More recently, we grieve and rage at the horrific murders of Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and Paul Andre Michels across several spas in metro Atlanta on March 16. In meeting “the fierce urgency of now,” my teaching pivots, as an historian of Christianity in the United States, to reveal that the scourge of hate and violence against Black, Indigenous, and other Persons of Color and the sins of white supremacy and misogyny have roots in Christian traditions with long records and unjust legacies of nativism, settler colonialism, sexism, and slavery. I have pivoted to share honestly with students about how my education at a predominantly white and theologically conservative seminary left me unprepared to confront the challenges before us because of several pedagogical imbalances and gaps. The pedagogies of my professors overemphasized the courageous ministries of Christian heroines and heroes who strove to combat injustice and underemphasized the complicity of Christians in perpetuating discrimination and hate against women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons. These pedagogies also elevated white men by treating their perspectives as normative and either erased women, persons of color, and LGBTQIA+ persons or reduced the presence of “diverse” voices to recommended (versus required) readings or one isolated lesson under a mishmash of topics. With this pivot, I am implicitly prompting students to assess what they are learning in my classroom as well as in the classrooms of my colleagues at our seminary. Is my pedagogy as a teacher better than what I experienced as a student? Does the teaching and learning at my seminary connect in meaningful ways with the congregations and ministry contexts our students inhabit? In reflecting with my students over the past year, I can offer two insights. The first insight is that pivots to address anti-Black, anti-Asian, and other forms of racial injustice are most helpful when they reinforce and strengthen existing course content. When a course syllabus already contains multiple lessons about communities of color with assigned readings from many scholars of color, pivots to cover urgent events are organically integrated to the foundational structure of the teaching and learning. When a pivot requires the introduction of different lessons or a sudden detour to new assigned readings, it may reveal a larger imbalance or gap in the course syllabus specifically and teaching philosophy more broadly. The second insight is that pivots are generative and effective when they cultivate collaboration in the classroom. In other words, a pivot works best as an invitation to learn together with students rather than an opportunity to be the “sage on the stage” with all the prescriptions to the world’s most pressing problems. One of the most useful prompts in my pivots is to ask students to share what is happening in their families and communities of faith and to discuss together how certain religious beliefs in our diverse Christian traditions have shaped different responses to racial, social, and intersectional justice in the forms of righteous activity, passive inactivity, and hateful violence. Heeding Dr. King’s message, we seek to confront “the fierce urgency of now” through genuine, vulnerable, and collaborative dialogue engaging the challenges, prejudices, and opportunities in our communities of faith.

The narration below is my recollection of a typical interchange between my mother and my father when I was a child. Be mindful that we lived in a large home and invariably during these conversations my father would be on the first floor and my mother would be on the second floor.  So, as you read their exchange imagine loud voices between two people who cannot see one another.   “Nancy, where is the wah-wah-wah!” said my father standing at the bottom of the staircase. My mother, likely sewing, or making beds, or doing some household work on the second floor, answered, “Look in the kitchen; in the drawer under the cabinet with the water glasses; it’s on the left-hand side.” Dad goes to the kitchen, opens a drawer, and rummages around the drawer, but cannot locate the wah-wah-wah. Dad returns to the bottom of the stairs to ask to my mother again. “Nancy, I don’t see it. It is not there.” “Yes, it is! Look in the drawer – the one with the red handle; the wah-wah-wah is on the left-hand side.” said my mother. Dad returns to the kitchen. He checks to see if he had previously opened the correct drawer. He had not. This time he locates the drawer with the red handle, opens it and rummages around in the drawer, but does not see the wah-wah-wah. A third time, he returns to the bottom of the stairs and in a louder, frustrated voice says, ‘Nancy! It’s not there. I can’t find the wah-wah-wah!!!” My mother, in a calm, and loud voice replies, “Keep looking!” My father, convinced my mother is mistaken about the location of the wah-wah-wah, gives up. Acquainted with my father’s sensibilities, my mother stops the work she is doing, and goes downstairs to the kitchen. Hearing my mother’s movements on the stairs (and our dog running ahead of her as she walks), my father waits in the kitchen for my mother – glad she has come to find the wah-wah-wah for him. My mother walks past my father, pulls open the drawer under the cabinet with the water glasses, the drawer with the red handle. Seeing the jumbled contents of the drawer she makes a mental note to reorganize the drawer at dinner time. She reaches into the drawer, near the left-hand side, and pulls out the wah-wah-wah. Shocked, my father takes the wah-wah-wah and contritely kisses my mother on the cheek as a thanks for finding it for him. My question for reflection is not so much about my mother’s skills of household item curation, but about my father’s inability to see. Why could my father, even with the most specific directions, not see that for which he was searching?  Or, why cannot our students, even with detailed syllabi, thick instructions for assignments, accomplish assignments? In other words, what does it take to see when searching?   One answer is perseverance. Keep looking! My experience is that adult students want to Google once and call it research. Or they want to read once and expect to understand dense materials. When my mother instructed my father to keep looking! she was calling for skills of perseverance. “Keep looking!” means that even if it is not in your experience or imagination, (or the drawer you are rummaging through) it is in the imagination and knowledge of your teachers, so endure until you get to the end. As teachers, providing opportunities for our students to develop perseverance – the ability to keep looking until you can see it, find it, know it, understand it, get insight from it - is invaluable. The inability for students to see is often vividly expressed in introductory classes. Teaching introductory courses often means that newly matriculated students’ conveyance of what they know and the ways they approach the course is primarily through life experience or learnings from other degrees in other schools. New students grappling with new materials, new approaches, new vocabulary, and new praxes often make for frustrated learners and fearful adults. Adult learners, for the most part, do not like attempting the new. They prefer being affirmed for what they already know. For some, learning anew feels insulting, uncomfortable – as if it is personal judgment for not knowing what they should know. Studying religion and theology exacerbate these feelings of judgement – woulda’ known, shoulda’ known’, and coulda’ known - are haunting experiences which free float in classrooms. For students who come from traditions steeped in particularly exacting ways of knowing sacred texts and sacred ways, the experience of not knowing can be devastating. There were semesters I would assign one critical essay to be written over the duration of the entire semester. Incrementally, students would need to turn-in drafts of the essay. Without assigning a grade, I would edit the draft then return for further research, thinking and rewriting. At the end of the semester, the essay, now polished by the drafting process, would be submitted for grading. Many students let me know that this iterative process was emotionally very difficult. They did not want to keep “re-doing” the essay.  They saw little value in moving from a weak version to a stronger version, especially if each version did not receive a grade. They found it challenging to keep looking for the same thing until it was found, created, written - well. This assignment exposed the narrow edges of their skills of perseverance. At the risk of overworking an illustration, the previous scene of my parent’s typical conversation has its limits concerning teaching and learning. Consider that my parents, as spouse of one another, did not have the contract of teacher and learner. A contract between student and teacher is a different contract than between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee. The contract between teacher and learner has its own distinctiveness. The contract between teacher and learner is meant to create space so the learner can disclose, be vulnerable, expose their curiosity, and their want to expand and find insight. In return, the teacher provides opportunities for new knowledges, and maturity. So, here is the judgement call unique to the teacher/learner contract and the notion of perseverance. In the moments before sight (understanding) by a learner, in the moments of frustration when what is searched for cannot be located or seen, the teacher has got to allow the learner the honor of the moment of not-knowing – the moment of struggle. For the teacher to rush in with the answer (rush in to rescue) is to deny the learner the moment of ah-hah! The ah-hah! moment of magic, achievement, and growth when what was searched for is found is why, in part, students want to learn. Teachers must be willing and able to stand in the moment when the student is frustrated and not act. In this moment it is easier to simply rescue them from the pain of learning, but resist. This is a truly difficult moment for teachers to hold. In these moments, we must learn to persevere.

It seems to me that, in order to create truly democratic and equitable classrooms, we need to first think about how to create classroom “communities”—something that, as Anna Lännström has noted previously, is especially hard to build right now. Communities that create space for all people and perspectives don’t just happen randomly or necessarily; they require a great deal of intention and attention. Rules, norms, guidelines, or whatever you want to call them can foster a democratic learning environment in which students feel like they can bring their full selves, ask questions, share misconceptions, try out new ideas, debate, create space for others, plan for action, and grow. I try to build community in lots of different ways in my classes, but an essential activity early on always involves the co-creation of a set of community norms that we all commit to upholding for the semester. As an initial homework assignment, to prime the community building, I have students fill out a “getting to know you” questionnaire I have fine-tuned over the years. One question, near the end, prompts students to fill in the blank: “As a learner, I do best when my peers….” Then, in class, I ask students to share what they wrote. (In-person, in the past, I would use an anonymous polling software like PollEverywhere. On Zoom, I just have students type into the chat box) As we review and discuss their responses, we all start to get a sense of what kind of support students would appreciate from each other. I then put students in groups (breakout rooms in Zoom) of about 3-5 and ask them to brainstorm answers to the following: What would it look like if we were to bring our “best selves” to class every day? What standards do we want to uphold? I tell students to keep in mind the responses they all shared to the “As a learner, I do best when my peers….” prompt. Each group types their ideas for norms directly into a shared Google Doc (no log-in required) and, once they are finished, we go through each proposed norm, one by one, making sure we all understand what it means, we all know how it would manifest, and we all can “live with it.” I usually lead this exercise on the second day of class; sometimes it flows into the third. We discuss for as long as it takes to reach agreement. Along the way, I actively encourage discussion and even dissent; right from the beginning, students know it is okay to critique and disagree. Generating community norms together not only starts the very process of building a democratic classroom community, but it also provides many “teachable moments.” For instance, students will often propose a norm like “respect each other.” But what the heck does this mean? I ask them to clarify: how do you understand this word, “respect,” and how do you know when someone is “respecting” you—or vice versa? A culture of politeness and “civility” reign at our institution, so I am particularly invested in ensuring that any expectations of “respect” don’t serve to stifle or silence. Many typical standards, like “respect,” are so vague or generic as to be useless and all too often end up centering the dominant groups or perspectives; this in-class activity allows us the space for this discussion. It also gives me a chance to suggest some norms of my own, since I’m a member of the classroom community too. I will usually propose some from AORTA’s Anti-Oppressive Facilitation Guide or “Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education,” such as “Strive for intellectual humility. Be willing to grapple with challenging ideas” and “Identify where your learning edge is and push it.” The community norms that the students and I co-create then stay with us over the course of the semester; this is not a “one and done” activity. We revisit them regularly. I project the norms at the beginning of different class periods. I give students a chance to review them and ask if we need to make any amendments. I check in every so often to find out how we think we are doing with the norms. The community norms guide all of our time together. (They also make it much, much easier to address any problems that might emerge in class, because I can simply refer back to the norms that we all agreed to.) At the end of every semester, in their final exams or their final course evaluations, students routinely remark on the “community” feel in my courses, with appreciative comments such as, “The class really seemed like a community, which made it easy to share and participate, and it was clear everyone liked the class and wanted to be there.” Without such a community in place, the difficult work of teaching for, about, and toward democracy would, I fear, be a non-starter.

Twenty-five springs ago I sat in a class on African American literature. On a small, rural midwestern campus, this course was taught by a white professor. Two of the seven Black students on campus at that time were in the class, the remaining twenty-five or so students reflected the demographics of our predominantly white institution. One Monday we filed into class and learned that a fight had taken place over the weekend. The details were still emerging, but one of the seats in our classroom was empty. The one detail that had been confirmed: racist slurs were a precipitating factor for the physical violence. In this moment, the professor faced a choice: to continue apace with our scheduled reading of Beloved, A Gathering of Old Men, and other, now canonical works, hewing close to the text; or, to break the fourth wall and talk about what happened, call us to the uncomfortable acknowledgment that we could not confine our discussions of race to the characters in books that could be sold back to the bookstore when the course ended. Like most students, I suspect, I was largely unaware of all that went into that deceptively simple choice. This past week, as I prepared for a class discussion on Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist and Fania Davis’s synthesis of racial justice and restorative justice, my class and all other classes were canceled by our administrators in a show of support for a student organized walk-out. The walk-out was a response to a blatant act of racist hate speech that targeted one student. Hundreds gathered on our main courtyard to listen to their peers speak their truths about being a person of color on our campus. For many students at our predominantly white institution this was, as they later acknowledged in class, the first time they had heard unfiltered, unmediated stories about the lived experience of blackness from people they actually knew (or thought they knew?). The night before the walk-out, I thought about my own professor’s choice twenty-five years ago. I had no doubt we would center the incident and the campus response in the coming weeks in our class discussions. And I have no doubt that my immediate clarity on this choice owes a debt to the professor who chose discomfort over distance, modeling the way in which good teaching demands recognition of the explicit and implicit ways the world consistently breaks into our classrooms. With so much political hand-wringing about conflating activism and academics and looking over the shoulder as some iterations of  “cancel culture” paralyze our classroom discussions, tempting us towards pedagogical paths of least resistance and convenient half-truths, I am left to wonder if our classrooms can still serve as activating spaces, as spaces where the world doesn’t just break in, but where we prepare students to break out into the world. I want to believe that this is possible, realizable, and not just part of the trite, pedagogically elusive language of university mission statements and branding slogans. But I confess that one-on-one conversations with students after class this week—in a course intentionally focused on racial equity—have tempered my optimism about the classroom as an activating space. Or, perhaps it has once again reminded me of the perennial, now hyper-polarized and politicized, challenge of teaching: what activates one student often deactivates another. With its now ubiquitous undercurrent of subtweets and their offline consequences, is the classroom the right place for these conversations? For the moment—no, for the movement—my answer has to be yes. The impossible possibility of conversations about race in the classroom remains for me a pedagogical, even if paradoxical, imperative. Like Reinhold Niebuhr’s impossible possibility of the love ideal, conversations about race in the classroom confront us with what we know to be true and right in our assertions of basic human dignity, even as these conversations remind us of how often we fail to fully actualize the ideal by which we are guided. In recognition of that gap and our moral obligations as teachers to stand in it, I share, with no small amount of trepidation, the email I sent to my class the night before the walk-out, my own attempt at reclaiming the classroom as an activating space not in spite of, but in the midst of its impossibility. Message to Living in a Diverse World Class, March 2021 Hello Students, I had planned to address the hate incidents in our class discussion tomorrow. The tragic irony is not lost on me that our focus in this week’s reading is the intersection of racial justice and restorative justice as outlined in the chapter by Fania Davis. In the days and weeks ahead, I ask that you consider what is your role to play in supporting students directly and indirectly impacted by this incident as well as in addressing the elements of our campus culture that give rise to these types of incidents. The framework of restorative justice centers the needs of the victims even as it makes clear that harms caused by acts of hate and violence extend out into the community and, therefore, require both individual and community responses. We are all trying to sort out how it is that we have come to this moment in history when hate speech is too often conflated with freedom of expression. And, tragically, we are bearing witness on our campus and in our wider culture to the normalization of violence this conflation inevitably leads to. In this moment, I want to challenge us to move back into the uncomfortable space of talking directly about racism and anti-racism as they manifest offline in our very midst; it is, for me, one necessary way we must hold ourselves accountable. This is not about reducing these incidents to a “teachable moment.” This is about the distance we too often try to maintain between the classroom and the world. And how these incidents reveal this distance for the illusion that it is. The “world” breaks into our classroom, regularly. Our denial of this fact is, itself, a form of white, heteronormative privilege. In these moments, I think it is also imperative that we ask: can the classroom also break into the world? Can what we do together in class the remainder of this semester be responsive to, and a form of taking responsibility for, the injustices that shape individual students’ lives on our campus in radically disparate ways? At a minimum, I think we owe this to one another in our class, but more importantly, we owe this to those targeted by the hate and violence. In closing, I offer I drafted in response to national racial and religious hate incidents over the past couple of years, words I had hoped (perhaps naively) would never be needed as a response to incidents on our campus: Let us stand together committed to forming our lives in this community, daily, through practices of hospitality and not hate, in acts of compassion and not callousness, and as witnesses to the promise of peace and not the pathology of violence. While our various religious and spiritual traditions call us to imagine a world when this daily work is no longer necessary, they are not naïve to the world as it is. As wisdom from the Jewish tradition reminds us: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to refrain from it.”