Resources

Quarantine strips life down to the bare essentials. My work gets me out of bed each morning and through each day. Admittedly, before quarantine, the demands of work structured most of my days and a significant portion of my life. The difference is that during quarantine I am more willing to admit that I have been reduced to my work with little else left that is life-giving. Facing this reality allows me to face the truth that I have been living through a series of stressors. My life over the past five years has been marked by transitions: relocation to a new city, a new administrative role, a divorce, co-parenting arrangements for pre-teen, now teen boys, purchase of a new home and the attendant address changes, packing and unpacking. These were papered over by a full professional life packed with teaching, academic writing, professional conferencing, mentoring, administration, leadership in my various academic groups. These stressors built to a full boil with the death of my brother in mid-March and the experience of having to view his burial via YouTube. Quarantine has brought escape routes and pathways for deep connections that the hectic pace of academic life under “normal” circumstances would have eliminated with the constant demands for productivity and keeping on top of schedules. Quarantine has reduced my work from its tangible realities to greater screen time that facilitate the escape habits I have honed over the course of my career. Teaching online is not entirely new to me; what is new to me is teaching from the space where the majority of my life and critical life moments are lived out in front of screens and through pixilated images. As waves of grief have come over me in the past weeks, I recognize how work forces me to acknowledge and name my teaching as a coping strategy. The routines of the week require me to perform and to show up for class times, respond to discussion posts, read and grade student writing, attend meetings. I pushed myself through with sufficient practice of showing up and pretending competence. I now see that teaching during these times sits within a simulated world. Simulation has always fed my need to escape, as it has for many other persons. Simulating grief, pain, loss, and stress can only go so far, for as Bessel van der Kolk reminds us, “the body keeps the score.” Teaching can be a means of pretending things are ordinary. Making minimal changes to the syllabus, expanding topics to take account of the current context, or adjusting grade expectations. All these adaptations are coping mechanisms for me to tell myself, and my students, that we were carrying on with the ordinary events of academic life. In these online spaces, we facilitate a grand simulacra and escape to familiar worlds of knowledge and competence. I am fine with the escape only because it is a means of survival at this time. I recognize all too well that the theories of online education presume that the digital world serves as the adjunct to the flesh and blood realities of teachers and learners. Now we are truly in flipped classrooms where flesh and blood encounters form less and less of our daily realities and the digital becomes the default reality. In these days of disconnection, I am finding that other forms of social gatherings in online settings need to be named as pale reflections of the real thing. Part of my grief is wishing I had been next to my parents and siblings as we said goodbye to our older brother. I long for real connections, preferring the comfort of a friend’s voice over an email expressing condolences. I long to be in real conversations with a worshipping community, and not listening to someone talk at me through a screen. These real connections that formed the parts of our real-world communities are a long way off. Until then, I face the reality that I am my best human connection. In normal times I might find this thought too self-absorbed. If disconnection gets me to fall in love with me again, to love the parts of me that are energized by teaching, to love fiercely the liberative work of my academic research, then I am achieving what Derek Walcott refers to as loving “again the stranger who was your self.” Now I am thinking of ways to teach through my body and my responsiveness to my body’s pain, my vulnerability, and longings. This means inhabiting biblical characters with greater empathy and asking students to stretch their imaginations away from orthodox inspired interpretations of biblical texts to find real connections with the feelings, fears, and experiences of biblical texts that in many ways have been formed in the midst of trauma. I’m developing exercises that ask students to read texts as they look through their windows at the world they mostly experience through imagined senses and translate those experiences into looking at the ancient world in the Bible as if peering at them standing at the window of their homes. I am learning how to harness the genius of D-Nice’s Club Quarantine parties that call people together around a screen event lived out in bodily movements in individual homes. To teach online now not only means attending to the onscreen activities, the strategies of well-crafted pixilated pedagogy, but also doing the hard work to pay attention to what happens offline with us as teachers and with our students.

Discussion forums in online classrooms are unfortunately named. The name evokes just talking about stuff. This can be a good use of the discussion forum; dialogue is an important part of higher education. The opportunity to test and develop ideas in conversation with trusted colleagues, both classmates and professors—yes, the discussion forum is a place to do that. But, I find I often get into a rut in these forums. I introduce and assign readings, then ask a series of questions to jumpstart a conversation. At its worst, this is about making sure that students are doing the reading and making some sense of it, a kind of accountability busy work. At its best, this is a way to integrate and work critically together with those materials in ways that help them come alive and become true conversation partners for the developing wisdom of my students. I am always looking for other ways to better use these dialogical spaces with students. One of the metaphors that has been helpful for me is to use these spaces for students to “curate” materials for one another. By “curate,” I mean something like this: “to collect, select and present information or items such as pictures, video, music, etc. for people to use or enjoy, using your professional or expert knowledge.” For example, wise curating is what Maria Popova does in her excellent podcast and website, “Brain Pickings” (https://www.brainpickings.org/). Curating in discussion forums can take all sorts of forms, depending on your purposes and the disciplined knowledges you are attempting to teach. Here are some of the ways I have used it as a religious educator and practical theologian: • Curating Examples from Daily Life: When I am reading dense theoretical pieces with students (imagine Pierre Bourdieu or Paulo Freire), I invite them to find a website, image, or current event that illustrates one of the key theoretical concepts in the reading. This brings about a great deal of reflection on the concepts as the students try to imagine what might serve as a useful example of the concept in action. They often consider and reject many concepts as they try to find the one they will share, thus generating a more careful review of the reading. They post a link to the event or website and explain the concept that they see it illustrating to their colleagues. This has the subtle effect of helping them imagine that engaging these theories is not to demonstrate their competence for a grade, but to gain tools to better understand how the world works. It also serves as a test for the theories as we begin to see which ones have heuristic value making sense of daily life. • Curating Images: When we are working in my practical theology class on forming theological questions grounded in human experience, I invite students to offer a photographic image from their home or neighborhood that raises significant theological questions for them. As the collection of images are curated, they begin to see how questions are related to particular contexts and communities, as well as begin to think about what makes a question theological at all. Their colleagues’ reflections on their images generate a range of different theological questions and demonstrate the role of perspectival framing not just in the answering of questions, but also in their initial framing. • Curating Practices: In a religious education class I ask students to search the web for examples of contemporary religious educational practice happening inside or outside of communities of faith. They share the examples and analyze them, naming their strengths and limitations and how they might imagine using them in their own practice as educators. This not only gives them practice in identifying and analyzing resources, but also expands all of our knowledge about what is currently happening in the practice of the field and how it relates to the academic texts we have been reading. • Curating Stereotypes, or Common Misunderstandings and Misrepresentations: In youth ministry classes, I have students curate examples of the ways that adolescents are stereotyped and used as tropes in popular culture. They then take apart those stereotypes and tropes and compare them to what we’ve gleaned from developmental, sociological, and cultural studies of adolescence we have been reading. This enables them to identify where the tropes may have roots in those theories, but also where they have become distorted. Curating would serve different purposes in different disciplines, and I am sure you have creative ideas here. Students might curate examples of a particular Biblical text or historical event in visual art, poetry, literature, or song and talk about the interpretive choices made in that artwork. They might collect examples of practices from religious traditions in popular culture, or on YouTube, and analyze how they are represented in those forums in relation to the academic interpretations you are reading about those same practices. They might curate helpful video lectures or social media posts of an author you are reading, giving them a chance to listen to their embodied voices and discover something of the human behind the academic work you are reading. They might find examples of how historical events that you are studying are depicted on websites intended for elementary or middle schoolers and talk about the implications of historiographical choices made in those settings. They might curate academic articles that build on the theory you are reading in an area that is relevant to their own vocational path. The beautiful thing about online discussion forums is that curating, posting a photo or link, and then writing a brief analysis of the artifact, is very easy to construct. It leverages the investigative power of the students and allows them to follow their interests, integrate knowledge, engage in application and analysis, and discover connection between the subject matter and the broader world in which they live.

It isn’t over. “It,” of course, is the Covid-19 crisis that has moved students, faculty and staff off our physical campuses, moved learning to online platforms, and disrupted the normal rhythms of an academic year. What is certain right now is what is not happening: honors ceremonies, graduations, conferences and research days, sports, dances, and chance encounters with friends and colleagues on walks across the quad. Everything else is uncertain, unbounded, unknowable in its detail, and often frightening, especially as this crisis is malleable and continues to unfold globally. It is an anxious time. That anxiety is in our [Zoom, Google, WebX, Canvas] classrooms, and despite not having its own picture box, it takes up a lot of space. This leaves faculty in a quandary: should we address the anxiety in the room, potentially inviting difficult or emotional reactions from students, or should we turn away from it, focusing as much as possible on business as usual, even as we acknowledge that nothing is usual right now. I have written before about using dialogic practices to meet disruption, arguing that structuring classes for curiosity and genuine encounter across difference gives students the tools they need to lean into the wobble that comes from meeting something new or strange. Teaching curiosity, holding up listening as a value, and giving people the tools to do it better creates brave spaces where students can genuinely explore themselves, others, and new ideas. These are skills we all need right now. They allow us to invite the kinds of conversations and reflection that can recognize anxiety and then nudge it toward connection, purpose, and hope. What does this look like? Last year, after the Tree of Life synagogue and New Zealand mosque shootings, it meant taking time in class to recognize those events, and then offering a path to agency in the face of horror. I gave each student a 3 x 5 notecard and invited them to finish the sentence “I can . . . ” on one side, and “I will. . . ” on the other. I didn’t collect the cards. Some students report still having them, and one recently called the experience formative in the way she has come to find purpose in the face of overwhelming events. Right now, it means inviting students to reflect on when they have met challenges before, relationships and connections that are important to them, specific things that the virus has changed, and opportunities that their new situations provide. Doing this has allowed my students to realize that this is not the first time they have successfully met the challenges disruption brings, and to find sources of inner strength and social support as they recall those who helped them before. Asking students to name one thing that has changed for them narrows generalized anxiety, making it concrete and approachable. One student mentioned that “bumping into people” in Zoom meetings, while a poor substitute for the cafeteria encounters they missed, did help fill that gap. Asking about opportunities leads students to think about purpose and even hope in the face of loss. Students talk about the gift of time with siblings and parents, slower and less regulated days, and new grading standards that are letting them dig more deeply into subjects they love. Taking the time to lean into the discomfort of the current situation also creates and reinforces the social connections that keep the demons of anxiety at bay. I’m on research leave this semester, but invited students I taught in the last year to a Covid-19 dialogue hosted on Zoom late one Friday afternoon. A handful came. We had a genuine and moving conversation using the questions outlined above, and before we dispersed, they asked if we could do it again, every Friday. We can, and we will. This is what hope, connection, and community look like in the face of Covid-19. They’re still here, and so are we. Suggestions for check-ins (choose one question and invite students to reflect on it for a minute, then report back in one breath): • Tell us about one thing that’s made you feel rooted in the last few days. • Talk about one person you’re supporting right now. • What’s the best thing you decided to do this week? • Bring an object from where you are to share. What’s meaningful about it? For longer discussions: • Tell a story about a time you overcame a challenging situation. • What strengths did you draw on? Who supported you then? • Tell a story that would help us understand what’s changed for you as a result of the virus? • What hopes or opportunities might you see in your new situation?

One page Teaching Tactic designed for a medical ethics class from a Christian, theological perspective. A learning outcome for this course involves moral reasoning from a range of different ethical systems.

One page Teaching developed to address the dissatisfaction students have experienced with one familiar approach—parsing a pregiven list of popular or academic definitions of religion for their shortcomings.

A one-page Teaching Tactic developed at a large public research university for students in lower-level introductory courses like “Introduction to Western Religions” and “Scriptures of the Near East.” It has also been used effectively in upper-level New Testament courses.

In his work as a scholar and educator, James Cone developed leaders. He built a network of scholars, clergy, and activists committed to the power of God in history and to the role of the poor and dispossessed in realizing earthly freedom. Cone’s courses began with the situatedness of the theologians being studied and always returned to the problems of the world that theologians sought to answer. He challenged his students to do the same, identifying and answering the crises of our communities, doing theology in the struggle for justice and liberation. This is one of several short essays presented by recent students at a public forum at Union Theological Seminary after his death in 2018.

James Cone is known primarily as the founder of Black liberation theology. Yet for those who were his students, his teaching was equally as powerful. Cone managed to mentor people, create dialogue, and foster collaboration, all around the common collective task of seeking justice and liberation through theological study and construction. These things made Cone such an effective teacher. His work existed on a continuum, in which the liberation of Black people, of all the oppressed, was a non-negotiable baseline. While he used “traditional” methods, primarily lecture and seminar formats, the purpose behind his teaching wasn’t traditional at all. And as a result, he has put in place a network of clergy, academics, and of many other vocations, who in one way or another are promulgating that commitment to liberation and justice quite literally throughout the world. This is one of several short essays presented by recent students at a public forum at Union Theological Seminary after his death in 2018.