Resources

We walk into our classrooms, be they virtual or face-to-face, and we see the eyes of our students with screens in front of them. Those screens may be laptops, desktops, tablets, or phones but the screens are there. On those screens our students spend an average of four hours per day, engaging moving and still images. We then ask them to read and process something that was written by someone they will never see or hear. We expect them to be fully engaged by the reading. The social justice issues they are reading about are hidden beneath text on a page. While reading is essential, it is limiting, and it especially limits the mental capacity of the students we teach today whose minds are wired to engage moving and still images via stories. Our students need to see to fully connect with that we are studying. If we are to teach to their strengths we need to show them the subject matter. The way we show them is by using documentaries as the foundation of course design. Listen to Albert Maysles as he speaks on the power of documentaries: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_yABhT20Hs[/embedyt] Documentaries put students in the midst of the social justice issues we are studying. They can see, feel, and connect, not just with the issue, but also with the real people who are affected by injustices. Nick Fraser says in his book Say What Happened: A Story of Documentaries, “docs have morphed into contemporary essays, becoming a form whereby we get to experience highly provisional stabs at reality, but, far more than fictions, which are usually finished and fixed in their own reality, they are also transformed by it.”[1] Documentaries are the new essay; we have access to a new type of reading made just for the generation of students we are teaching. We need to honor them by showing them and in the showing they are seeing what was, what is, and what can be. We work in an industry that values the written and spoken word over the visual. We were taught to plan our classes starting with the reading—readings that were written years before our time mostly by dead white males. I always found these readings alien to me when I was a student, and even those I connected with were usually written by people many years my senior. There was still this disconnect because of the faded pages from which I read; I was removed from them by time and space. None of what I have said makes these works irrelevant or useless but it highlights the limitations of readings. When I think about the students I teach today who view more than they read I see that they are deep thinkers, they are intelligent, they can read and write, and they also bring a more expansive set of communicative and interpretive skills to the classroom than I did when I was a student. The question I am raising in this blog is: How do I engage what my students bring to the classroom so that I can show them what I want them to learn? Yes, show them. To answer my question, I am suggesting that we show our students the social justice issues we are discussing in class while showing them how movements work by engaging documentaries as the core content for our courses. I am not dismissing books and readings, but I am displacing their historical place of privilege. Why documentaries? Documentaries speak to the head and the heart. Documentaries help students see and feel by eliciting the emotive response in the visual. More centers of the brain are activated by sound, movement, light, story, and real life characters who lived in the movement. Students see history and how they can make history. I have also found that conversation after a documentary is democratized unlike those after reading discussions. Reading discussions privilege certain types of students whereas discussion around documentaries has a way of leveling the playing field. Students feel more equipped to talk about that which they have seen, engaged, and understood. As Cathy Chattoo says in her book Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, Documentary is a vital, irreplaceable part of our storytelling culture and democratic discourse. It is distinct among mediated ways we receive and interpret signals about the world and its inhabitants. We humans, despite our insistence to the contrary, make individual and collective decisions from an emotional place of the soul—where kindness and compassion and rage and anger originate—not from a rational deliberation of facts and information. By opening a portal into the depth of human experience, documentary storytelling contributes to strengthening our cultural moral compass—our normative rulebook that shapes how we regard one another in daily exchanges, and how we prioritize the policies and laws that either expand justice or dictate oppression.[2] Documentaries connect with us because we are wired for story and true stories told well speak truth to us and set us free to be part of the freedom movement. So if we are to start with documentaries as the foundation of our courses, and use readings to complement the documentaries, where do we start? Let me offer a few questions that might get you thinking: What do I want my students to see? Why is the visual experience of this course as important as the reading(s)? What do I want my students to hear? What do I want my students to feel? Why is it important for my students to engage the sights and sounds of this experience so as to bring to life that which we are studying together? What do I want my students to do about social injustice as a result of experiencing this course? How can I create and curate a visual experience that is buttressed by quality readings that will make this course be more than memorable, but will make it serve as a launching pad for social justice initiatives and actions in the real world? How can I make the viewing experience a communal experience and make it as unlike the isolating experience of reading as possible? What documentaries are worth my students’ time, in that they are well told stories, well researched, historically accurate, factual, and emotionally stimulating? So now you might ask what could this look like? What are some documentaries one might consider? There are of course many but allow me to offer a list I have used for courses where the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s has been the foundation of the course. The list below is just one such list to get you thinking about what a curated list of documentaries would look like, and about the order which they would be engaged. A Civil Rights Course Lineup (in this order): The Murder of Emmet Till (2003) 53 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (1999) 86 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson Eyes on the Prize: Season #1 – 1952 to 1965 (1987) 42 minutes each Directed by Henry Hampton and others Mavis (2015) 80 minutes Directed by Jessica Edwards 4 Little Girls (1997) 102 minutes Directed by Spike Lee Mr. Civil Rights: Thurgood Marshall & The NAACP (2014) 57 minutes Directed by Mick Cauette Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015) 115 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003) 90 minutes Directed by Nancy D. Kates and Bennet Singer Movin’ On Up: The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions (2008) 90 minutes Directed by Phillip Galloway Freedom Riders (2010) 117 minutes Directed by Stanley Nelson John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020) 96 Minutes Directed by Dawn Porter King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis (1970) 240 minutes Directed by Sidney Lumet King in the Wilderness (2018) 111 minutes Directed by Peter W. Kuhardt The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) 92 minutes Director Göran Olsson Wattstax (1973) 103 Minutes Directed by Mel Stuart Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004) 66 minutes Directed by Shola Lynch I Am Not Your Negro (2017) 93 minutes Directed by Raoul Peck Documentary Associations and Resources: Fireflight Media http://www.firelightmedia.tv PBS Civil Rights Documentary http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/explore/10-black-history-documentaries-to-watch/ HBO Documentaries https://www.hbo.com/documentaries International Documentary Associations https://www.documentary.org Doc Society https://docsociety.org Odyssey Impact https://www.odyssey-impact.org Impact Field Guide https://impactguide.org American Documentary https://www.amdoc.org/create/filmmaker-resources/ PBS POV http://www.pbs.org/pov/ Netflix Best Documentaries https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/6839 Notes [1]Nick Fraser, Say What Happened: A Star of Documentaries (London: Faber & Faber Press, 2019), 28. [2]Cathy Borum Chattoo, Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 207.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents many challenges for professors and students who seek to practice inter-contextual biblical interpretation with a concern for social justice. Among them is the need to engage deeply and empathetically with people experiencing injustice at a time when the risk of serious illness rules out face-to-face interaction. Figuring out how to meet this challenge in a course on African American and womanist hermeneutics is one of the goals of a Wabash Center grant project that Dr. Mitzi J. Smith and I are codirecting.[i] In this post, I will begin by sharing a resource related to that goal. Dr. Smith’s design for a recent biblical hermeneutics course used video documentaries, Zoom-based interviews, and reading assignments to prepare students for interpreting the Gospel of Luke through the lens of home and homelessness. An especially valuable reading assignment was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.[ii] This Pulitzer Prize winning ethnographic study weaves together the stories of eight families who became homeless while Desmond was living among them in two Milwaukee neighborhoods between May 2008 and June 2009. Desmond recorded the families’ stories with their permission while acting as a friendly nonjudgmental neighbor. He describes them struggling to pay rent, avoid eviction, and find housing again after they had lost it. Readers who are interested in a scholarly study of eviction and homelessness can study Desmond’s 68 pages of endnotes as well as an important epilogue in which he proposes policy solutions, but personal stories are the heart of the book. They make Desmond’s work compelling for students, deepening their empathy as well as their understanding. In an end-of-course survey, we asked students to rate the impacts that various resources had on them, using a scale of 1 (very ineffective) to 4 (very effective). Students gave high marks to Evicted for its effectiveness in increasing their empathy for people experiencing homelessness (average 3.8) and in informing them about the causes, conditions, and possible solutions of homelessness (average 3.7). The students’ high ratings of Evicted are consistent with the impacts that we observed in their written work. Dr. Smith required them to share a key learning from each of the book’s three main parts and a question for further discussion during the week just before our intensive Zoom meetings. Their messages reflected emotional and intellectual engagement with the struggles that Desmond described. The fact that many students also referred to Evicted in their final interpretive essays is significant because they were not specifically prompted to do so. An excellent example is an essay titled “The Disciples Discriminate: A Contemporary Reading of Luke 18:15-17” by Amanda Bennett, an MDiv student at Bethany Theological Seminary who has given me permission to discuss her work here. Bennett read the story of disciples turning away children in the light of the discrimination faced by Arlene and her sons, Jori and Jafaris, as they searched for affordable housing in Milwaukee. Although housing discrimination against families with children is illegal in the US, it remains widespread, and Desmond shows that it was one of the barriers that blocked Arlene from finding permanent housing. She persisted with her applications despite repeated rejections, sometimes lying about how many children she had in order to have any hope of being considered. Finally, after eighty-nine rejections, she found a landlord who would “work with” her and her sons. Even then there was discrimination. Landlords face penalties if too many of their tenants dial 911, and Arlene’s landlord objected after she called for an ambulance during one of Jafaris’s asthma attacks. A few days later the police followed Jori home from school after he had an altercation with a teacher. At that point the landlord gave Arlene the choice of facing formal eviction or moving out immediately with a refund of her first month’s rent and security deposit. She chose the refund.[iii] Bennett asked reasonably whether the teacher had engaged in racial discrimination when she decided to call the police instead of Arlene. In Bennett’s reading of Luke, Jesus offers essential resources such as food and healing. The families who bring children to Jesus are like Arlene, who persists in seeking resources for her children. Jesus’ disciples are like white supremacist landlords, teachers, officers, judges, and health care workers, who discriminate against African American families and block them from getting the resources they need. Instead of the Sunday school image of a smiling white Jesus surrounded by children, Bennett imagined a dark-skinned Jesus sitting alone because his disciples have locked their arms to shut children out. She heard this Jesus confronting disciples today: “I will tell you over and over again, until you depart with your discriminatory ways. I welcome all.”[iv] While applauding Bennett for her outstanding interpretive work, I also give credit to Desmond for recording and publishing stories that sparked Bennett’s analogical imagination. Evicted has limitations. It is not recent enough to account for the current housing crisis due to COVID-19. Students also noted that Desmond is a relatively privileged white man and wondered how that background may have shaped his way of selecting and telling stories. Even so, Evicted clearly met our expectations as a resource for building empathy and helping students interpret Luke through the lens of home and homelessness. I would also use it in a course where students can interact face-to-face with people who lack permanent homes. Notes [i] For more information about this project, search for other blog posts by Drs. Mitzi J. Smith, Marcia Riggs, Mary Hess, and Daniel Ulrich, beginning with “Learning Womanist Hermeneutics during COVID-19” at https://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/2020/07/learning-womanist-hermeneutics-during-covid-19/. [ii] Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2016). [iii] Desmond, Evicted, 231-32, 282, 285-87. [iv] Amanda Bennett, “The Disciples Discriminate: A Contemporary Reading of Luke 18:15-17” (unpublished academic paper, August 20, 2020), 14.

I recently read Valarie Kaur’s remarkable book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. At one point in her story, she describes her struggle to find herself “inside the law” at Yale Law School as a Sikh woman with communal commitments to justice developed in a post-9/11 world where racist and religious violence had impacted her own community profoundly. She feels so alien to the hallowed halls of an institution created to be impenetrable for women of color that she begins to imagine it as Hogwarts, a strange place where it is her job to learn the law as if it were a set of “magic spells, incantations that when spoken in the correct order had the power to compel individuals and institutions to do things in the world” (172-173). One day, Kaur and a classmate “found the basement” they previously had not known existed: It was a different world, frenetic and urgent, coffee cups strewn on tables, students strategizing behind closed doors about their clients—inmates on death row, immigrants in deportation proceedings, detainees at Guatánamo… Here students represent real clients in real cases under the supervision of professors. It was as if two schools existed in one—one removed from the world, one enmeshed in the world; one for learning the spells, one for using them. The minute we walked in, we knew that we had found our home. Lauren joined a human rights clinic and I joined an immigration clinic. We had found our Justice School. (Kaur 2020, 178) She goes on to detail the work of Yale’s “Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic” and her own formation through working with the East Haven community to reduce civil rights violation by the local police force. She later notes that this work with her student partner Tafari and her faculty mentors “defined her legal education.” The basement was her educational home, full stop. Since I read this passage, I have been wondering where the unknown basement might exist in my own graduate theological school. Where do students and professors work together in strategic, on-the-ground work for justice? How might we bring about the kind of partnered learning about prophetic leadership that calls both student and professor together to enact visionary work in partnership with local communities? Is there such a space where the most essential formation of capacity for on-the-ground praxis related to justice occurs? How did the faculty who established these clinics come to create such a conducive climate for the formation of their justice-seeking students? Could I be a part of the same in my own school? And I admit that my imagination falters a bit. I teach primarily middle-aged adult students who are squeezing their academic work into the corners of fully deployed lives. They are parents, employees, already serving churches and working jobs in nonprofit organizations that involve full-time work for part-time pay. They live scattered across forty-four states. We rarely gather in brick-and-mortar classrooms, much less the exciting clinic and community spaces after hours and outside of credit-structures that Kaur describes. To be honest, in a small, freestanding theological school related to a denomination that is in crisis due to its own justice-related fights about sexuality, most of my time and that of my faculty colleagues is being recruited to innovate to attract new learners who will help provide revenue to support the expensive graduate degree programs that we hope to sustain into the future (without an endowment like Yale University’s). While I know that the real story of how that clinic came to be and the work that kept it going is probably full of struggle, scrappiness, and determination on the part of the mentoring faculty, it also feels very far from my Canvas classroom. The dream of that vibrant basement space, where the real education occurs, feels about as magical and distant as the enchanted castle of Harry Potter’s learning that inspired Kaur’s quest. Then I, too, have to shift my imagination again, and stop longing for the resources and available time that undergird the situation described by Kaur that are not a part of my own context. I begin to notice that my students are often already in positions with influence and power in their own communities. The very realities that make it harder for them to carve out time for the traditional academic work in a classroom keep them deeply connected to the contexts of their home settings. They have not left to immerse themselves in some constructed community away from their homeplaces. They have continued to invest in work and home spaces where their influence is established, and they maintain relational connections even while they are giving their all to take on the challenges of graduate theological work. What they, and I, need is permission and vision to work for justice within what Dr. Gregory C. Ellison, II, calls the “three feet” that surround them. When I make this shift in my own imagination, I see much more possibility for how to support their justice-seeking vocations in context. I can imagine how they can draw upon the resources in their communities to do the work that is there, just as I make the connections and attempt the work I am called to do in my own three foot radius. And that work matters. While I might long for the collaboration and shared struggle of the magical basement clinic, and yearn for the kind of influence and resources that would allow us to be together to engage in world-changing work, I am reminded that important justice work can happen in each of the institutions and relationships and churches that my students are involved with. Learning to shape my imagination for this reality, a learning community of overburdened adults dispersed across a wide geography, helps me to show up to that challenge and continue to support their vocational development in justice-seeking rather than grieve the lack of the gathered clinic in my own setting.