Resources

Teaching in a two-person religion program at a liberal arts college means you have the opportunity to teach in your field of study, and also in other areas of interest and expertise. It also means your students range from majors and minors to those seeking a general education course. For me, this has meant I teach primarily courses on various religious traditions, including Islam, Qur’an, Asian Religions, and now one on Islamophobia, as well as writing seminars around the topics of gender and race. While the content of these courses lend themselves to discussions that fall under the category of “other,” “diversity,” and other codes for non-dominant traditions, I would argue that the way we teach this content matters as much as, if not more so than, the content itself. To that end, I think a diversity-infused course should not be measured by its content so much as how that content is conveyed. I wish I could say that I knew this, or knew how to accomplish this, when I began my teaching career, especially as it seems so obvious to me now. As luck would have it, a few years ago I coordinated a workshop with a colleague on “demystifying diversity in the classroom,” and we brought Kyana Wheeler and Fran Partridge to help moderate our conversations. In that context, I learned how better to talk about race, whiteness, and white fragility, and I gained some techniques for creating classroom spaces where these conversations could take place. Both in terms of pedagogy and interpersonal connections, it was one of the most eye-opening and liberating experiences that I have had. The facilitators introduced us to a couple of exercises that had us examine our own position in society. We filled out worksheets identifying the various “isms” including sexism, ableism, just to name a few. Additionally, we identified privately our own places of privilege and those of oppression, for example, based on gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. Of note, Kyana Wheeler did not include race in these exercises and when we had finished our intense and engaged discussions, she asked us to add the layer of race and note how much worse the discrimination would be. All of this took place after we had privately taken implicit bias tests online. Leaving race out until the end for a group of predominantly white instructors was for me a very powerful demonstration of not only our own positions in the world, but how we talk about race, racism, whiteness, white fragility, and white privilege. The bottom line is we don’t; and we are very uncomfortable when we do. In the semester following this workshop, I taught a first-year writing class under the theme of white fragility focusing on issues of race and gender. In addition to readings on whiteness, white fragility, and doing race, we engaged in discussions about the book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, by Monique W. Morris. The students, predominantly white, engaged in conversations about the intersectionality of race and gender. We were able to do so toward the end of the semester with minimal defensiveness, I think, because we had engaged in the exercises described above in the first half of the course. Rather than thinking of them as one set of exercises to set the tone for the course, I conducted these self-awareness practices throughout the course as reminders of our own positionality. During the first week, the students engaged in identifying the oppression at work in particular scenarios. Another week, they took implicit bias tests. A week later, they engaged in discussions about where they felt privilege and oppression. I borrowed the technique of leaving out race until the end. It seemed to work. Currently I am working on a course on Islamophobia and want to move away from catering to white privilege or the comfort of non-Muslim students. Based on a second takeaway from the summer workshop, specifically that race and racism are the most powerful underlying factors of most if not all forms of oppression, I believe a course on Islamophobia must engage in discussions of anti-racism. I have decided to take the tools of self-examination with respect to race and racism that successfully created a space for critical discussion of the plight of black girls in the US school and prison systems, to a course that teaches against Islamophobia. Furthermore, I believe that any course, even ones that don’t deal explicitly with racism or other forms of oppression would benefit from these activities as they help us to understand our place in the conversations, and who we might be leaving out.

This book presents a duoethnographic exploration and narrative account of what it means to be a teacher educator today. Adopting a narrative approach, the book presents different personal, political and institutional perspectives to interrogate common challenges facing teacher education and teacher educators today. In addition, the book compares and contrasts the teacher education landscapes in Australia and the UK and addresses a broad range of topics, including the autobiographical nature of teacher educators’ work, the value of learning from experience, the importance of collegiality and collaboration in learning to become a teacher educator, and the intersection of the personal, professional and political in the development of teacher educator pedagogies and research agendas. Each chapter combines personal narratives and research-based perspectives on the key dimensions of teacher educators’ work that can be found in the literature, including self-study research. Readers will gain a better understanding of the processes, influences and relationships that make being a teacher educator both a challenging and rewarding career. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable asset for university leaders, experienced and beginning teacher educators, and researchers interested in the professional learning and development of teacher educators. (From the Publisher)

I've been sketching, drawing and painting since I was a child. Sometimes people ask, "How do you draw so well?" On occasion I respond, "When you do something every day for a long time you can get pretty good at it." I've been teaching online for 22 years. By now, I've gotten pretty good at it. Here are 15 things that work in my online courses, and three that didn't. 1. Fully outlining the course using a mindmap.  Drafting the outline of the course in detail before I even create the online course shell saves hours of guesswork. The branching logic of a mindmap also helps me avoid superfluous content. This is a very efficient brainstorming, planning, and design method; by now I can outline an entire course within one hour. 2. Creating a clean interface design for students. Striving to view my course site from the perspective of the student helps me keep the course design clean, uncluttered, and with a logical flow that is intuitive to navigate. I remind myself that "figuring out your course site is not an assignment." Adding consistent visual cues helps students navigate the course site, recognize standard segments, and important items. 3. Creating an atmosphere of both welcome and challenge. Reminding students that they are taking a "course" and not a "class" helps them appreciate that online learning is a different experience than the classroom. Setting the atmosphere includes an "introduce yourself" forum which can include sharing common experiences, using humor. When a student posts a great response, I will sometimes give them "1000 extra credit points." They don't cost me anything and they don't actually count for anything, but students get excited. Just like a classroom course, I strive to create a "class culture" conducive to learning. 4. Providing a reading schedule checklist and other helps. Because I'm not as present as I am in a classroom, I provide students with helpful resources to help them self-monitor their progress. For example, this handy reading schedule checklist helps students stay on track and helps avoid the "when is the assignment due?" question. 5. Allowing up to two weeks of reading days before the first session. Because my online courses encourage critical reading and interaction with texts, I give students plenty of time to read ahead before requiring them to post responses. Additionally, I have a standard "How to read for this course" orientation that helps encourage reading for understanding, synthesis, and application rather than for coverage. 6. Scheduling one week for wrapping up the course. During the final week of the course schedule no posts or learning activities are assigned. This allows students to catch up on posts they've missed and gives them time to finish the summative paper or project before the submission deadline. 7. Being selective in content and student learning activities. I anticipate that my online class will require more work from students than a classroom version. Therefore, the content coverage becomes more focused (and the amount cut it by half). Aligning student learning activities to the course's student learning outcomes helps avoid overwhelming students with superfluous activities. Aside from reading and posting on forums, two additional student learning activities is the most I ask of students. One of those will often be a summative writing assignment or project. 8. Keeping all course sessions open. Keeping all sessions open allows the student a meta view of the scope of the course, which aids in comprehension, integration, and helps them plan their own schedules. It also allows for eager students to work ahead and for some to catch up as needed. I have found there is little value in keeping things "hidden" from students. 9. Being heavy-handed in responding to student posts for the first two sessions. During the first two sessions of the course I respond intentionally to student posts, communicating what I look for in student responses, highlighting what an effective student post is (and why), pushing for deeper thinking though follow up questions, etc. I emphasize that questions asked by the professor and by students are "real" questions which must be responded to. This provides cues to students about the expected quality of posts. 10. Scheduling two 45-minute log in times for myself. One rule I follow is "never work harder than your students." To avoid being overwhelmed by student posts and to help manage my time I schedule one 45-minute time slot in the morning and in the afternoon to read and respond to student posts. I don't respond to each individual post, rather, I select those posts that provide a chance to "teach to the class" with a response. When I note a student starts getting behind in their posts, I send one check in e-mail, but no more. 11. Providing supplemental enrichment resources. There is a lot of good content available on the internet. Providing optional enrichment resources allows students to "go deeper" into the study and review alternate ways of accessing content (video, podcasts, demonstrations, interviews, model lectures, etc.). However, I try to be judicious and selective to avoid offering too many options in any given session. Alternatively, I sometimes assign students to do an internet search for appropriate and helpful recourses and have them post them on the course site (they must share why the resource is relevant and helpful). 12. Creating opportunity for immediate application. I strive for immediate application starting with the first discussion forum session. The application can be in the form of interpretation, analysis, providing an example, providing a critique, challenging an idea, or applying a concept to the students' experiences. Throughout the course I strive to address multiple modalities of understanding (see Wiggins & McTighe's Understanding by Design taxonomy). 13. Including a mid-course metacognition opportunity. At mid-point in the course I provide a forum with metacognition questions and prompts to help students "step back" and reflect on their learning experience. This provides helpful process feedback for both student and professor. 14. Including a 50-minute Zoom "open office hours." This practice provides novelty and can be helpful to foster a sense of connectivity and to provide an opportunity to discuss concepts that may need a more nuanced treatment. I typically don't schedule more than two during the course. 15. Including a "course closure" section. I have a firm deadline for course closure at which time all assignments are due, no exceptions. I post a firm notice at the start of the course, and on the syllabus, that I accept no late submissions. The course closes on the final date of the course schedule. The final session provides a place for students to post their assignments and a forum where they "sign off." When a student submits a post in this final forum it signals to me that have completed the course, so I don't have to guess when a student is "done." Three Things That Have Not Worked Requiring synchronous sessions forcing students to log on at specific days and times. Requiring students to check in at specific times for a live session tends to not have a significant pedagogical value in my experience. Aside from checking in from different time zones, the necessity of the right equipment, and need for stable internet connections, I haven't found that a "live" session is of significantly high value for the learning experience. Posting a narrated 20-minute slide presentation for content delivery. Early on I tried to translate the classroom lectures with slide presentations to the online environment. That resulted in 20-minute narrated slide presentations students needed to sit through. Ultimately I found it more effective to provide students with a textual narrative of the content. Students can read faster than listening to a slow-paced narrated podcast, and it's easier to review the content. Sure, visual and audio presentations have their place, but the question is, "What pedagogical function does it serve?" Requiring quizzes and exams for a grade. Since students demonstrate achievement of learning through their posts (which are assessed immediately) and in a summative paper or project that synthesizes evidence of higher order learning, quizzes and tests are of little value. On occasion I do provide quizzes for self-assessment and review. Students can take those to reinforce and assess their own learning.

Thanks to the collegiality of Dr. Mitzi J. Smith and the generosity of the Wabash Center, I have the opportunity to engage in learning that moves beyond professional development to include personal transformation. This summer I will participate as a learner in an intensive that Mitzi will teach on The Gospel of Luke and African-American Interpretation. Mitzi is J. Davidson Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and a leading womanist biblical scholar. She and CTS have graciously agreed to include me and 21 students from Bethany Theological Seminary and Earlham School of Religion in the course. Mitzi and I are also co-directing a Wabash Center small grant project titled, “The Challenges and Effective Pedagogy of a Trans-Contextual Online Collaboration for an African-American/Womanist Hermeneutics Course during Covid-19.”  Dr. Marcia Riggs (also of CTS), and Dr. Mary Hess (Luther Theological Seminary) have joined the project as consultants, bringing expertise in the areas of ethics and education. The grant creates space for us to reflect on pedagogy and social justice in ways that go beyond our usual reflective practice. This blog is a way to make our learning public. Both the course and the grant project feel challenging to me--a white, straight, cisgendered male with a history of privilege. Unlike Mitzi and many of my students, I have not experienced biblical texts being used as a basis for marginalizing me, requiring me to be submissive because of my gender, or excluding me from leadership. In most churches I have attended, it is socially acceptable to ignore biblical texts that challenge my middle-class lifestyle, such as Luke 14:33. Students in my courses are welcome to “talk back” about the Bible with or without the “sass” that Mitzi encourages;[1] I, however, have been more inclined to emphasize that New Testament texts are inspiring and worthy of careful study despite their flaws. Mitzi’s hermeneutics of suspicion may challenge me to critique biblical interpretations and texts more assertively in light of core biblical values such as justice, mercy, and love. My approaches to hermeneutics and pedagogy have long emphasized inclusion of a wide diversity of interpreters with the understanding that Jesus often speaks through people who have been marginalized. My revised introductory survey course is now titled “Reading the New Testament Contextually,” and it includes True to Our Native Land as essential reading.[2] I am fluent enough to teach in Spanish and have enjoyed leading bilingual intercultural hermeneutics seminars in Puerto Rico and California. I have also had the privilege of team teaching with several Nigerian scholars through video-linked classrooms in Jos, Plateau State, and Richmond, Indiana. Those efforts, however, have not qualified me to foreground the experiences of African-American communities in all the ways that justice, love, and good teaching require. In order to understand and embody Jesus’ teaching faithfully in this time, I need to recognize the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color, especially on African-American communities. I need to speak out more forcefully against the discriminatory police violence that has continued unabated even as other activities shut down for the pandemic. I need to engage more deeply with African-American neighbors and biblical interpreters in order to hear what Jesus is saying now through them and through scripture. And I need to step up efforts to recognize and confront racism in myself as well as in society. In a recent consultation, Mitzi, Marcia, Mary, and I exchanged ideas for helping students become aware of their own contexts and identities, including their experiences of race. Marcia reminded us that storytelling rooted in personal and communal experience is an essential practice of womanist theology. Mary and Marcia each suggested prompts that could encourage students to write thoughtfully about the identities and experiences they bring to a course in African-American and womanist biblical interpretation. For example, “What are systemic patterns of racism that you observe in general society today? How do you participate (even inadvertently) in these patterns?”[3] We agreed that it is important for both students and professors to know their contexts, to remember their own stories, and to tell them in ways that create space for honest conversation. I plan to share more of my story and learning as the project continues, and I look forward to interacting with posts by Mitzi and other participants. As a reader of this blog, your constructive comments are also welcome as we journey together toward deeper understanding. Read about Mitzi Smith's Experience with Dan Ulrich   [1] See Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018); also Mitzi J. Smith and Yung Suk Kim. Toward Decentering the New Testament : A Reintroduction (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018). [2] Brian K. Blount, ed. True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). [3] Rima Vesely-Flad, “‘Saying the Wrong Thing’: Experiences of Teaching Race in the Classroom,” Spotlight on Teaching, Religious Studies News (November 5, 2018), https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/anti-racism/saying-the-wrong-thing, accessed June 18, 2020.

[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JR_5IQlhxk&feature=youtu.be"] Last year I participated in a Colloquy at Wabash entitled “Teaching the Black Presence.” Not long after, for the first time in my career, a white male New Testament scholar, Dan Ulrich, approached me about teaching an African American biblical interpretation course for students, primarily white, attending Bethany Theological Seminary in Indiana; for some reason I imagined them to be primarily male. Dan had read and assigned students to read the essays I wrote in True Our Native Land (2007). By Dan’s own admission, he might have been “scared away by the strong hermeneutics of suspicion developed” in my recent work, much of which he has now read for this course. That reflects change. In my experience it is not unusual for scholars in biblical studies to be more familiar with the work of black males than with the scholarship of black females, but that is changing. This collaboration between Dan and me is novel for both of us, and taking it online in the pandemic brings its own challenges. We each carry our own ‘baggage,’ and we are committed to working through it to create a pedagogical experience that will enhance learning for the students enrolled and for ourselves. I am the teaching faculty for the course, the expert in African American and womanist biblical interpretation, although my dissertation and the book I published from it are readings of the Acts of the Apostles. I am a biblical scholar--this is often lost on some colleagues across the academy, as well as students, in my experience. So, as we navigate our way through this course—become acquainted with each other as scholars and human beings—our ‘baggage’ will trip us up at times. But hopefully we will also shed some ‘baggage.’  This is not an easy journey for either of us because of experiences, the ways that we have been socialized in the academy and society, both of which are racialized and gendered in favor of white males and the scholarship they do. We both have been shaped in ways we can and cannot immediately identify. In a meeting during the Colloquy with our consultants (Dr. Marcia Riggs and Dr. Mary Hess), Mary provided feedback to Dan on his first draft blog. It was feedback that I withheld because I did not believe Dan could receive it from me. This is my baggage. After Mary spoke, I confessed that I had a similar impression, but did not want to ‘hurt Dan’s feelings.’ But as I reflect now that was not the reason I withheld my critique. I believed that Dan would not receive my critique, and so why offer it. I was guilty of what I and other black scholars and scholars of color believe (and have experienced) too many white scholars to be guilty of, which is of not providing needed critical feedback to black students and other students of color, of being patronizing and assuming they can’t handle it or are not up to doing the work. I never fail to provide critical feedback to students, regardless of race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. But I neglected in Dan’s case to offer useful critique, and my failure was not beneficial to him. I didn’t give Dan the chance to receive my feedback with grace and collegiality until after the white woman scholar offered hers. Going forward I must be honest with Dan, tactful, but honest in offering critique, because he has said he is participating in this collaboration as a learner and peer. This change would reflect neighbor-love informed by a self-love that values critical feedback as necessary for success. As a learner-collaborator, I am grateful for the idea from our consultants to ask students to write more than a two-paragraph statement describing the contexts that impact their selection and reading of a pericope. Our consultants have encouraged me to ask students to write an extended hermeneutical autobiography that will assist them in thinking more critically about their contexts and how culture and social identities, for example, shape them. This collaboration is not easy, but it is giving me life and pedagogical strategies and ideas. Read About Dan Ulrich's Experience with Mitzi Smith

This book explores the impact of eLearning on the quality of teaching in higher education, focusing on three main issues: university teachers’ perception of quality teaching, their strategies for achieving quality teaching in practice, and interventions that design and implement online collaborative activities in a large class. The book argues that if eLearning targets the real problems in practice and is appropriately designed and implemented, it can improve the teaching quality at universities. It also demonstrates the complexity of teachers’ perception of quality teaching and contextual factors that affect teaching practice and quality. Further, it explores university teachers’ perception of quality teaching in Italy, the UK and China – an aspect that is rarely addressed in the literature – and reveals why the impact of ICTs on university teaching is not as great as in other fields by explaining the issues that threaten the quality of day-to-day teaching. Lastly, it confirms that traditional lecturing, combined with online collaborative activities, improves the quality of teaching compared to traditional lecturing alone. As such, this book is a necessary and important resource for the research community. (From the Publisher)

An important backdrop to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals involves consideration of the impact of a ‘new demographics’ derived from the interaction of two global developments. First, high levels of internal and cross-border mass migration, stimulated by climate change, violence and disparities in wealth and social stability within and between different countries and the global South and North. Second, the phenomenon of increasing longevity and rapidly ageing populations, especially in the developed world. This book explores the central role that socially engaged higher education might potentially play in helping address these challenges, enhancing lifelong learning opportunities and facilitating more positive outcomes for both individuals and societies. The contributors to this book are scholars of higher education and lifelong learning based in twelve countries from Europe (Germany, Ireland, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom), the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the USA), Japan, Australia and New Zealand. (From the Publisher)

The social justice issue that I have consistently raised in my biblical exegesis courses has been US immigration. As I tell my students—mostly white middle-class Protestants fixed on parish ministry—engaging this topic in a sermon will likely incite some criticism from parishioners or even set in motion a premature resignation.  Despite my school’s borderlands location and the exilic content of the Hebrew Bible, pivoting to the topic of US immigration in a biblical exegesis course cannot be done haphazardly. In terms of texts, I find that Genesis (12–50), Exodus, Psalms 120–134, Second Isaiah (40–55) and Lamentations are especially apt for engaging this complex sociopolitical topic. What is unavoidable in these texts are stories about people on the move because of famine, jealousy, conquest, or faith—to name just a few. Yet still, connecting these biblical stories to the lived experiences of migrants in places like the US-Mexico border is by no means a linear process. No matter how convinced I am that Abram’s journey from the Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan (Gen 11:31) is a migration story, in order to bring my students along I must confront the assumptions that inform their understanding of migration. A common assumption they often have about migration and by extension immigration is that both phenomena represent a social problem or challenge. At the source of this assumption is indeed not an ancient notion of migration but rather their nation-state formation. By contextualizing the latter, students discover that the problems most associated with migration and immigration in US dominant society—like border crossers as “illegal,” economic strains, cultural threats, and spreaders of disease—stem from Western nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion. After discovering their own nation-state biases about immigrants, I find it easier to shift to the theme of migration in the biblical text, contrasting along the way the ancient assumptions that likely informed it. As opposed to nationalist thinking, the biblical text often starts with the assumption that humans are free to move and that this movement constitutes an act of faith rather than a crime. Emphasizing the freedom of movement and the faith that accompanies it in the biblical text, I then pivot to US immigration and the sociopolitical injustices produced by the nation-state’s control of human mobility. Though migration studies, forced migration studies, and refugee studies are useful resources, their approach to immigration is often based entirely on the modern concept of the nation-state and hence tend to view borders, citizenship, and state sovereignty not as human constructs but as natural to our earthly existence. This nationalist-centric agenda can also be transferred unwittingly over to the biblical commentary material that relies on the social sciences.  For this reason, I supplement my immigration bibliography with migrant artwork (See https://artedelagrimas.org/), particularly the kind that emphasizes the freedom of movement and faith as in the drawing below: Dayana, “Mi Jornada (My Journey),” colored pencil and marker, 2014, 9 x 12, Arte de Lágrimas Gallery. Dayana is from Guatemala and was 7-years old when she drew this art piece about her asylum-seeking journey to the US. She and her mother travelled by car and then by bus. She remembered that the road was long and gray (left side). Her picture narrative ends with them crossing the Rio Grande on a makeshift raft (lancha). She first drew the rocks (piedras) in the river and then the river banks. Next, she drew the makeshift raft in the middle of the river with her and her mother inside it. I asked, “Did anyone say good bye to you?” She replied, “My aunt.” She placed her aunt on the Mexican side of the river waving goodbye. I then asked, “Was there anyone else?” Not saying anything, she removed the rosary from around her neck and traced the plastic crucifix over the Rio Grande. She then began to sing the hymn “En la Cruz, en la Cruz, yo primero vi la luz, y las manchas de mi alma yo lavé, fue allí por fe yo vi a Jesús, y siempre feliz con El seré (At the Cross).” Her and her mother sang these words while on the raft. In the drawing the cross is the symbol of faith that accompanied Dayana’s migratory movement across the Rio Grande—the symbol of a territorially bounded state. Like Abram’s story, her faith assumes the freedom of movement.