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The term “pedagogies of cruelty” was created by the Argentine-Brazilian, feminist, anthropologist Rita Laura Segato.[1] Her development of the term has to do with the ways we must learn nowadays to get used to the cruelty of our times. This can be clearly seen in the ways governments are dealing with the SARS-Covid-19. As we have seen, politicians are telling us that this virus, whose first name is always absent, SARS- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is just a flu and some necessary death will happen in order for the economy to go back to normal if we all want to survive.[2] The perversity of capitalism demands an education based on violence, terror, and cruelty. One that destroys any form of solidarity or empathy. We have to learn to see suffering, cruelty, and death as normal, and even inevitable presences in our times.  Since the liturgies of the state must be liturgies of cruelty, control, and death if it wants to survive, the pedagogies of this capitalistic economic system train us that we must accept any liturgical form of cruelty necessary. In other words, necropolitics needs necropedagogies. Thus, we must get used to the prison system because this is necessary for our safety. We must get used to debt because there is no way to live without debt. We must get used to climate collapse otherwise we can’t get all we want. We must get used to health care offered to some people and not all because the costs are too high to provide for all. We must get used to poor people dying because they have no reason to exist. We must get used to walls against foreigners because we can’t accept all immigrants. We must get used to mental illness because this is a crazy world. These “new” pedagogies of cruelty appear as a continuation of previous pedagogies of cruelty already normalized in our social living: we have already gotten used to the notion of private property, staggering salary differences, lack of rights for workers, use and abuse of women, the need to be constantly at war, and so on. The co-opting of the commons by private sectors have financialized health, education, and the earth, turning what is common into “resources” owned by a few proprietors. Due to that, Segato says we cannot understand the capitalism of our time without thinking about the owners of the world’s richness. The speed of the concentration of wealth is alarming, eroding the world’s entire networks of systems and balances. The case for education is the same. Turned into profit, we must now get used to education being for the few and accept its systems of cruelty. Thus, we must get used to student loans and large amounts of debt because higher education is necessarily costly. We must get used to the gap between schools’ administrators and teachers because, you know, it’s a matter of responsibility. We must get used to working for big endowments that grow off the exploitation of the earth and people because we need to offer a high-quality education. We must get used to paying adjunct teachers less and no benefits so we can compete in the market. The same argument surfaces in Brown University’s president Christina Paxson recent article where she calls for returning to campus this Fall. She says: “The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple—tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.”[3] In other words, school is based on profit and we, the people, not the state, not the government, must pay the price for its existence. It’s simple! We must pay the salaries of high ranking business educators too. Pedagogies of cruelty aim at depleting any source of solidarity and any form of vincularidad, of connection between people, people with animals, and the earth. We must learn to cope with the pain of the other and make sure to pay attention to ourselves since this is a vicious world and we must survive at any cost. Using military strategies of deflating the power of pain of the other, pedagogies of cruelty teach us to look at the death of other and say: such is life, or what can we do, or I am sorry and move on.  Who cares if the largest number of deaths due to SARS-Covid-19 are in poor areas and among minority people? Who cares if black people are dying in greater numbers? Who cares if poor white people are dying? Who cares if migrants are dying in private prisons or if black people are dying in prisons? They are all already expelled from society. What can we do? This is the crux of the pedagogies of cruelty: to take away any sense of agency and political action from us. We are lost. Both main political parties are suffused with these pedagogies even if in different modules and intensities. We feel we have no way to go. When we teachers go to the classroom, we come already indoctrinated by these pedagogies. To care for the students is getting more and more difficult. Both because they are not our business and because we must protect our schools so we can keep our standing. If we can fulfill the “learning outcomes” we are doing our job. The subjectivities of our students paired with their objective lives must be placed in a second plane of awareness. At the end, they are on their own as we are on our own too. We can lose our jobs at any time. Unknowingly, we reflect in some way or another, these pedagogies of cruelty in our classrooms. Our task then is to constantly raise a sign and scream: NO! we must continue to be in solidarity! We must continue to create bonds of affection and care! We must keep the threads of vincularidad, of connection, of mutual belonging. We must join other groups and expand the public spaces that have been encroached on by capitalism. We must foster communities of alterity, of other forms of living, thinking and relating to life. In Latin America, there are many communities who live on the exteriors of our systems: indigenous, quilombolas, raizales, palenqueras, communities led by women in the Amazon and the Zapatistas.[4] They are the deepest target of pedagogies of cruelty, for they still hold a counter narrative to the system. However, they are the ones who can teach us how to resist, how to create pedagogies of affection, of relationality, of vincularidad, of production of collective means of care and a common life with other people, species, and the earth. The task at hand is immense or even impossible. But as somebody said: Who said the impossible wouldn’t be difficult? [1] Pedagogies of Cruelty is a development of Hannah Arendt’s political education in Hanna Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. Segato understands the current form of ‘capitalism of cruelty’ as one that creates forms of education to keep the edifice of the system protected and moving. In her words, “the pedagogy of cruelty is the system's reproduction strategy… which is “absolutely essential to the market and capital in this already apocalyptic phase of its historical project.” in Rita Laura Segato, Las Nuevas Formas De La Guerra Y El Cuerpo De Las Mujeres (Argentina: Tinta Limón, 2013), 23, 80 [2] Trump’s Deadly Mistake In Comparing Coronavirus To Flu, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-flu-comparison-trump/?comments=1; Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living,' https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493879-texas-lt-governor-on-reopening-state-there-are-more-important-things; Chris Christie argues for reopening economy because "there are going to be deaths no matter what," https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-christie-reopening-economy-deaths-no-matter-what/ [3] Christina Paxson, College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-colleges-universities.html [4] Eliane Brum, The Amazon Is A Woman, https://atmos.earth/amazon-rainforest-indigenous-activism-history/

Serving as both a campus pastor and an adjunct instructor, I know that web-based teaching can feel disconnected for the students I'm called to serve. I'm also not satisfied with this reality. Thankfully, neither are my colleagues. Together, we're learning how to better design our web-based content to move from online teaching to digital formation. Formation is teaching that is received and incorporated into the development of a student’s knowledge, skill, vocation, or identity; all formation includes teaching, but not all teaching results in formation.  My desire to teach at the college level came from a yearning, even a calling, to connect with students in their critical years of identity development and vocational exploration. I want to empower them with reason, wisdom, and knowledge that they might find not just lucrative careers, but rewarding lives. In other words, I desire to teach in a way that promotes formation. Online education doesn't change that intent, but it surely changes the methods.  • Relate your pedagogy to student's priorities. Many of my students now have entirely different schedules than when we were all on campus. Some are out of work entirely, while others are working twice as many hours in shipping centers and grocery stores to make up for job loss experienced by other family members. Expecting everyone to be available at the time we agreed upon when the world wasn’t in the midst of a pandemic doesn’t work with the entirely different set of priorities that have emerged for them—and for us. Adjusting some class times and providing asynchronous modules has been essential in retaining student engagement. • Reformat your office (on campus or at home) to enhance engagement. There are many content creators who have helped us think through simple logistics to make recorded and live interactions more engaging to your audience. This short and particularly helpful clip from the VlogBrothers offers some insight into space, lighting, and equipment. Helping your students see your face, hear your voice, and appreciate your context provides multiple points of connection for those on the other side of the screen. • Augment--or avoid--information dumps. Information dumps are a mixed bag. For many of our courses, a certain amount of information is essential. Many of us are used to giving that information via lectures, while others utilize activities in class that require creativity. While it’s relatively easy to record a lecture for students to watch, that doesn’t necessarily promote content retention. Youki Terada provides a helpful literature review and provides five strategies to promote increased cognitive recall. I’ve found success with two of those suggestions in particular. ◦  Peer-to-Peer engagement, a common tool in physical teaching, can still be accomplished in online learning. If meeting in a synchronous class, technology like Zoom allows educators to separate the class into smaller groups to promote discussion among peers and then return to the larger group for a report back on their discussion. In asynchronous models, additional assignments to meet outside of the lecture and reading provide students a similar opportunity. Students can record brief summaries of the conversation and send them to the instructor. This increases their repetition of the information as well as provides accountability for participation.  ◦  ​​Incorporating images with teaching helps many types of learners access an additional reference point for the essential information. I’ve had particular success utilizing a core image to guide a theme, sometimes for one class, a section, or even an entire semester. This provides a sort of touchstone, to which other selected images then relate. One hint here: too many images can become distracting and reduce student interest. I only utilize images--and, at times, videos--for major themes in any given class (usually about 3-5 per class).  • Gamifying still increases engagement. My mother-in-law, Kim Conti, is a math whiz and Senior Lecturer with SUNY-Fredonia. She taught me the wonders of Kahoot, a learning platform she’s used to rave reviews in her classroom for courses like Math for School Teachers. Quizlet, another resource she commonly uses, reports that 90% of students who use it earn higher grades. These tools allow users to utilize content created by other professionals or create their own games. Initially designed for use in a physical classroom, they’re introducing new features for web-based interactions.  In all of this, it’s important to remember that alternative delivery methods aren’t lesser delivery methods. We may, however, have less skill at these methods, which requires more of us to learn and employ new ways of forming our students. That, then, is the key to doing this all well. Simply taking all of our in-person content and deploying it in the easiest fashion (for us) on the web can be called online teaching, but it doesn’t necessarily promote digital formation. In periods of crisis--and indeed, in all eras of education--we ought to design courses in ways that promote true formation. The best online teaching utilizes web-based tools to create points of contact that foster digital formation. The above suggestions can enhance our practices in ways that promote digital formation through our delivery of online teaching.

In a previous post on this blog, I reflected on a common misperception among students preparing for ordained ministry and other leadership roles in Christian community: that studying theology in a formal sense is not of obvious utility in pursuing and exercising one’s larger vocation. I offered several reasons why that might be the case. And I described an assignment I had developed and used for the first time as a result of participating in the Wabash Center’s Teaching with Digital Media workshop. This project entailed making and sharing memes on theological themes and then reflecting on what was learned through that exercise. The goal was to give them a concrete experience of selecting specific theological concepts to communicate to a specific audience in order to elicit specific formational outcomes. The assignment required students to do small-scale, but active, public theologizing and employ techniques of metacognition to help them perceive more clearly the need for solid theological grounding as part of their formation and, by extension, for the formation they will be responsible for in others. For this semester, I created an assignment that amplified that intention by requiring them to offer a bit of formal theological instruction in a more direct and standard mode, but still in a digital form. The prompt for the assignment was this: Imagine that you are the rector of a program-sized parish. In substantive conversation with at least five readings assigned [in the previous unit], create a 5–7 minute presentation to teach your clergy staff about how one’s eschatological imagination can be a resource when engaging those of other faiths or of no faith. Create a TED-style talk, a narrated PowerPoint, a VoiceThread, or a video of another kind that your staff can view on their own time. It must include video, sound other than just your voice, and still images. Think carefully about what it is you want them to know and tailor the use of the technology to ensure that it is communicated to them clearly. Focus on the theology at the heart of your teaching. Ground your theology in the sources and be sure you let your hearers know when ideas are not your own, especially if you quote anyone’s writing. Students were given a deadline by which these presentations needed to be complete. I then posted them as separate threads in a Moodle forum open to the class. There was then a second deadline by which each student was “required to have watched all of the presentations and to have made substantive comments of a theological and/or pedagogical nature on at least three of them.” Finally, there was a third and final deadline by which students were “required to have replied thoughtfully to all comments made” on their work. I then viewed all the presentations and read through the discussions, and I assessed the projects based on a previously provided rubric of seven criteria, each with four levels: above standards, meets standards, near standards, and below standards. The seven criteria (with the maximum number of points earnable for each indicated in parentheses) were: use of sources (30), original and critical thinking (15), structure of presentation (15), pedagogy, meaning the clarity and achievement of the presenter’s learning outcomes (10), required elements (10), comments on peers’ presentations (10), and responses to peers’ comments (10). Interestingly, students were less intimidated by this assignment than by the meme assignment. Presumably, this has to do with the medium: all students have experienced an instructional presentation online, but not all are familiar with the syntax and culture of meme-making. During the Wabash workshop, we were encouraged to assign multimedia projects of this kind with very short time durations. Nearly universally, however, students bemoaned not having enough time to communicate all they wanted to say, wishing they had been able to provide more nuance in their presentations. I was surprised, but gratified, by this. Next year, I will increase the time limit, but I will also warn them that more time means a greater temptation to wander too far from the central idea the presentation is meant to communicate and that they must diligently maintain that focus throughout. The extent to which most students readily grasped the importance of providing ongoing theological formation for their clergy staff was highly gratifying. They attended to that task with rich creativity, substantive theology, and an inviting personal presence. As teachers-to-be, I think it was useful for them to see themselves and their colleagues in this role. Students were eager to discuss pedagogy in the forum, but a little less forthcoming about their specific theological choices. As the one evaluating and providing feedback on their approaches to the theological formation of others, I would like to know more about that and I will ask for more detail about that in the future. Overall, the use of digital media in connection with this assignment appears to have ignited the imaginations of the students to think about doing theological formation in the milieu they are most likely to do this in their careers: the parish. Education in formal theology in the seminary is meant to equip students for bringing the riches of the theological heritage and discipline to bear in the work of ministry. This assignment seems to have contributed well to that outcome.

The Pandemic Amidst shelter-in-place orders and the hasty swap of physical classrooms for virtual learning spaces, it is clear that Covid-19 is being taken seriously by institutions of higher learning; daily, they are learning to re-shape themselves. Summer courses are going virtual as the duration of national isolation measures are still unknown. It is becoming more likely that a society in flux will delay the return of a “normalized” education system as distancing may continue well past the summer months.[1] Educators learn a number of lessons when thrown into pedagogical precarity and novel teaching circumstances. The first is not to master Zoom’s many features, nor protest the abrupt pedagogical transition,[2] but to closely examine what this moment reveals about their students.[3] This has been the case for me. The first week of teaching-online, the disposition of my class felt strong. Too strong. I questioned the fortitude emanating from many of them—the majority Black. I knew they were experiencing the same pandemic as the rest of the institution. Their tenacity was both admirable and alarming. Many of my students were ready to dive into the new format and keep going. This was their habit; they willed themselves to keep moving because they have always had to, because they have never had the choice of being considered “enough” to have a different response to crisis. No matter the circumstance, even a global pandemic, many had come from a culture of persistence and knew how to respond dauntlessly to tragedy. It was stitched into the fabric of how they knew how to be. The Predisposition This display of scholastic perseverance is racial, historical, unjust, and the aftershock of generational trauma. Many of my students have normalized being in a perpetual state of crisis. But the danger in this is that they rehearse how to feel and be; they do not quite let in what they actually feel, how they actually want to be in this moment. This barrier to them feeling the fullness of their personhood and humanity needs to be toppled. The truth must be named: teaching minoritized students during a pandemic is drastically different than teaching privileged ones. In my class’s case, all of my Black students had a "making a way out of no way" mentality. They assumed a pandemic could be added to the list of traumas they have experienced, witnessed, or accepted as their legacy. The idea of suffering towards one’s success has been concretized in their imagination as descriptive of what their lives should entail. Black students are used to trauma in every area of their lives, including education. Although this pandemic is significantly disrupting their lives, their mentality is to make it work, find another way, hustle, suck it up, and take it on the chin, rather than lament, rest, and most importantly, ask for the leniencies, grace, and benefits other peers are requesting. Though in class they argue passionately for equity, when it comes to tangible opportunities, many Black students do not feel it worth asking for what others are receiving; history has told them their asking is futile. This pandemic is uncovering how truly disturbing the disparities are. Historically privileged students unaccustomed to this level of stress exist on a completely different ontological plane than their minoritized peers. For them, extreme stress is the norm. For privileged students, extreme stress is a disruptor. Minoritized students adopt the “make a way out of no way” posture because hardship is not new, is not jarring. This should alarm instructors. For too many minoritized students, pandemic trauma feels no different in their bodies than the other traumas they have experienced on a normal basis. Responses from privileged peers can then be infuriating for weary-but-way-making-minoritized students. They have never had the option for an entire educational system to respond mercifully or so drastically to their fiscal, familial, or personal traumatic experiences. Mercy in the time of a pandemic, to some minoritized students, can look and feel like privilege.  A Counter-Response Educators need to encourage their students who have experienced historical neglect to allow themselves to feel the weight of this moment, to not tirelessly fight through it. We must grant them permission to reimagine strength and productivity. We must grant the humane treatment they have become resentful seeing granted to others and not themselves. We must help them understand that “success” is in the fullness of feeling the moment and letting our bodies, minds, and souls react how they want. We must, in our own respective platforms, change the metrics of achievement to focus less on succeeding, and more on simply arriving.[4] Our job is to impact how our students receive information; what greater place to begin than within. [1] Ed Yong, “Our Pandemic Summer,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-summer-coronavirus-reopening-back-normal/609940/ (Accessed April 17, 2020 [2] Rebecca Barrett-Fox, “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox (blog), Accessed April 17, 2020, https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/. [3] Nicholas Casey, “College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are,” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/politics/coronavirus-zoom-college-classes.html (Accessed April 17, 2020). [4] Paul Ollinger, “Your Only Goal is to Arrive,” Forge by Medium. https://forge.medium.com/to-survive-the-quarantine-change-your-metrics-e345d79be14b. Accessed April 17, 2020.