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The questions that inform my teaching and scholarship focus on representations of violence. This means I spend a good deal of time studying such representations. I learned several years ago that my capacity to answer relatively straight-forward questions like “But is that film really gory?” or “Will I find that book really disturbing?” has dwindled into non-existence. Turns out that when a significant portion of your media consumption is comprised of images of war, torture, sexualized degradation, and racialized brutality, your attunement to the average consumer’s tastes atrophies. From the outset, then, I acknowledge that I might not be the most reliable guide to help sort out how to teach traumatic materials. By the same token, I have taught, written about, and meditated on an array of traumatic materials—and my students, in the main, after initial phases of feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by the questions and contents that organize my courses, have reported finding something valuable in them. So, to open this blog series, I want to suggest that teaching traumatic materials may not be so different from teaching per se. First, I think we are sometimes overinvested in thinking about traumatic materials as a special case. When considering the events, texts, and ideas that comprise the religious studies curriculum, it’s tough to think about what remains after subtracting potentially traumatizing content. War, violence in various forms, imperialism and colonialism, degradation and humiliation, ethnocentricism and racism, sexism and heterosexism—examples of each abound in the language, imaginaries, and practices that we take as our object of study. Do we need additional pedagogical tools beyond the transparency, openness, and attentiveness that we should be using all the time to make sure that we are noticing, and making space for, our students’ varying levels of discomfort, resistance, confusion, and hostility? Given that traumatic materials constitute so much of what we teach when we teach religion, I would suggest that—insofar as we are teaching well—we already know how to teach such materials. Second, I think we overestimate our ability to predict which materials will traumatize. In a former life, when I was an adjunct teaching Constitutional Law, I made a remark about the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution’s solution to the practical problems presented by the Articles of Confederation. A young African-American woman, who had been quiet for the first few weeks of class, spoke up and eloquently explained that she found nothing to admire in a document that still countenanced the ownership of human beings. I carry her intervention with me every time I enter the classroom. My experience of the world shapes what I experience as injurious, as ugly, as painful, as disturbing. In the same vein, I remember distinctly how terrified and paralyzed I felt sitting amongst the enthusiastic cheers that greeted the final scene of Brett Ratner’s blockbuster film, X-Men: The Last Stand, as “good” mutants fought to destroy the “bad” mutants who refused to be “cured” of their otherness. Given that history and mainstream culture are made by and for those who hold power, even the most seemingly anodyne examples can be traumatizing for those who were never meant to survive.    Related to the question of predicting which materials might traumatize, I also wonder about our ability to read students’ reactions. When does silence evince reflection and when paralysis? When is speaking up fueled by enthusiasm and when by rage? Although my course evaluations tell me that my ability to read the energy of the room is far from perfect, I remain convinced that when we strive to remain present with our students in the unfolding of the event that is the class session, then the surprises that inevitably come will be much less likely to catch us off guard in destructive ways. Finally, I think we sometimes overvalue teaching traumatic materials—either by assuming that certain topics are beyond our pedagogical capacity—because they are too upsetting, too sensitive, too difficult—or by valorizing those who have the “courage” and the “finesse” to teach such challenging content. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because I find something important, something tantalizing, something worthwhile in the material. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because it opens a particular perspective on the world for my students. And, like most teachers, I have good days and bad, days my students get it and days they don’t, days I’m fully engaged and days I’m distracted, days they resist what I’m trying to do and days they trust me enough to willingly come with me. The more we normalize the traumatic in our pedagogical imaginations, the more we’ll be able to help our students encounter the ubiquity of trauma that constitutes their world and their lives.

If I get shot in my classroom – I’m gonna be mad! Yesterday, a friend told me her church and nursery school were having shooter-on-campus drills for the staff and children. I wondered when our school was going to do the same.  Sometimes my colleagues and I joke about what we would do if an active shooter came into our building. We joke about ways to protect ourselves by fighting back or by fleeing. One colleague said not to plan to assist her in the event of an intruder because, given the opportunity, she would be the first one out of her office window. I made a mental note to see if I could climb out of my window. Thinking about myself climbing out of my basement window tickled me until I remembered it was a strategy to avoid getting shot. The list of schools, churches, and public events that have become killing fields is growing. News reporters occasionally entreat viewers to stay sensitive to the victims of these tragic events.  Interviewers of distraught family members work hard not to appear prosaic. While we do not want to mute our reactions to reports of gun violence, the numbness is difficult to prevent. One of the nine people shot by the 21-year-old white supremacist in the 2015 Charleston church massacre was the grandmother of an alumna. Grandma was at Bible Study when she was savagely murdered. When my student and I get together for lunch, we still talk about the aftermath of the killing and I help her grieve. The amount of effort I have given to the teaching craft has not included ways of staying alive in the face of a gunman in my own classroom (most of the assailants are men). Heretofore, the challenge and un-safety has been in ideas. The danger of classrooms has been in coaxing fearful or belligerent students into new meaning making strategies, or different ways of understanding old traditions. Now, the real danger of potential gun violence feels like domestic terrorism. I am afraid, I am unprepared, and I feel edgy in the familiar safety of my own classroom. The possibility of gunplay in my school looms thick yet wispy in the ethers. I struggle to make sense of this faint paranoia because I know it affects my teaching. In my Teaching Teachers to Teach course, should I teach self-defense and strategies for emergency evacuations? Should I review with students the open-carry laws of the state and nation? Should course preparation include time at the gun range? Suppose classroom attire included Kevlar vests and running shoes? Could I shoot back at a student who was shooting at me? The first time I saw someone shot, I was 9-years old. One school night, my dad and uncle were going to the post office to mail household bills. I gladly tagged along because I enjoyed being with them. Our routine was that once we arrived at the post office, I would be handed the bundle of envelopes, then I would leap out of the back seat of the green Pontiac, dash up the stairs and deposit the letters into the outside mailbox for quick delivery to their addressed destinations. With my uncle driving, we rode with ease - the radio playing, my dad and uncle chatting and me enjoying the view from the back seat. My uncle turned the corner onto a one-way street – we were about a block from the post office. Without warning, shots rang out! --- “POP! POPPOP!” – I struggled to see out of the window because my uncle, with cat-like reflexes, had slammed on the brakes, shifted the car into reverse and, with foot flooring the accelerator, began backing out of the street - all in one gesture. Since this was before the days of seat belts, my child-body shifted wildly with the momentum of the car. Even so, I saw a group of teenage boys chasing a lone boy who was limping as he ran. The limping boy ran across the street, up on the sidewalk, and then collapsed. A boy who was chasing him had a gun at the end of his outstretched arm. That boy ran over to the collapsed boy and pistol-whipped him as he lay on the sidewalk. As if the scene had been choreographed by Alvin Alley, they all ran off down the dark street, into the night, as if on cue - all but the collapsed boy who lay bleeding and dead on the sidewalk. My uncle’s skillful driving sped our car backward around the corner and away from the mayhem. Uncle commanded the car out into the intersection, then gunned the gas, propelling us forward into streets with no shooting teens. I stared from the back seat in horror.  My beloved friend Zenobia is a retired warden from New York City corrections department. She spent twenty plus years on Rikers Island and other prisons. Years ago she used to talk with me about the ways of assessing a room for my best escape in the event of unexpected emergency like a gun being fired in the room. When we would sit in restaurants, she would casually ask me over her menu to tell her where the exits in the room were. I was to have noticed them and made mental notes as we walked into the space. Most days I could not answer the question because I had failed to take notice. I did not like this game. I resisted her teaching because I deemed those skills as needed only in places like prison. The applicability of Zenobia’s lessons for my classroom setting is soul withering. Tomorrow, I’m gonna call her and ask for a refresher lesson.  I do not own a gun because if I did I would undoubtedly use it.  I would use it when I felt fearful or angry.  I do not think clearly when I am fearful or angry. 

It has now been over a full year since the 2016 presidential election. Yet, I still remember vividly the dark and raw thoughts I had the morning of November 9, 2016. When I woke up and learned of the election results, I was horrified that so many people had made a conscious decision to elect a person who embodied and condoned the evils of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to be the world’s most powerful leader. Most of the discussions I had that day with my family, friends, and colleagues centered around our inability to understand the political stances and ideologies that were reflected in so much (but not the majority!) of the popular vote. In that grim day after the election, I remember thinking that educators, like myself, must have completely missed the mark. As a professor of theology, I was particularly troubled. The election had touched one of my core beliefs deeply—that is, the purpose of theological education is to form persons to think and act responsibly in the church and society. I remember thinking that my field had failed, and that we needed to rethink everything we had been doing in the classroom up to then. As I read the analyses that were pouring in that day, one particular headline caught my eye: “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch. Higher education is isolated, insular and liberal. Average voters aren't.” The article was written by Charles Camosy, a professor at Fordham University, who was proposing that the election reflected a divide in our country between those who have a college degree and those who do not. “The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump,” he declared. I had been thinking more about age-old racism and the divide between whites and non-whites as the reason for the election results. But, Professor Camosy presented a different analysis, one that has been troubling me and my role as a theological educator ever since I read it that day. He said: “College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump.” What really stopped me in my tracks was his remark about how college-educated persons, “have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses . . . . [M]any professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.”[1] This statement made me pause, because it resonated deeply with my own experience, and, therefore, called me to task. I began thinking: Are the ideologies expressed in my assigned readings and classroom assignments monolithic? In my efforts to form persons to think and act responsibly, have I promoted an insular way of thinking? As educators, we have a great opportunity (and perhaps even a responsibility) to present certain sets of values persuasively. I even state some of these values explicitly in my course syllabi. For example, I want my students to know that I value the theological voices of those on the margins, both in history and contemporary society. I am edified when students come to adopt this value of mine as their own. In addition, if certain values, like racism, ignorance, and bigotry, are displayed in my classroom, I clearly denounce them and explain why. But, in my effort to rethink everything I have been doing in the classroom, Professor Camosy’s article has led me to consider a different approach: that I should be giving some attention to racism, ignorance, and bigotry, before simply denouncing it. In the classroom, this would entail assigning readings from the alt-right, for example. The goal would be to better understand the political and theological stances that undergird these values, which are often underrepresented in higher education, so that we and our students would understand them better. If I want my students to think and act in the world responsibly, shouldn’t they be able to understand the values they will be encountering and engaging outside of the classroom? In the required texts and readings assignments on my course syllabi, I strive to include diverse authors. I understand “diversity” in this sense to mean the inclusion of writings by people traditionally marginalized because of their race/ethnicity, gender, class, etc. But, lately I have been thinking that I might do better to reconsider my definition of “diversity.” Perhaps it should include those marginalized by educational levels, age groups, geographic regions, values, and political standpoints? To be honest, what has held me back thus far in assigning texts from certain political standpoints, such as those that are entangled with white supremacy, is my own aversion to them. I also do not want to be misunderstood as promoting the values espoused by such writings--or worse yet, risk students being convinced by their rhetoric. So, I’m curious: What do you educators, who might be reading this, think is at risk in extending this definition of “diversity” or not extending it? On the most practical level, have any of you begun to include diverse political standpoints in your reading assignments? If so, how do you present the material to your students? Do you follow any rules or guidelines? Perhaps most importantly: Is your working definition of “diversity” effective, do you think, in preparing students to intellectually and socially engage with the world outside of the classroom more effectively?  [1] Carles Camosy, “Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch,” Washington Post, November 9, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-college-educated-americans-are-out-of-touch/?utm_term=.3634cedb1e19 (accessed December 13, 2017).

A few years ago, during a search for a New Testament professor, I asked two questions during the interview – two questions I ask of every candidate for a position with our institution regardless of rank or discipline. The first is innocent enough: “How important is racial/ethnic diversity to you when teaching?” All candidates, to a fault, enthusiastically answer in the affirmative. Then I ask my second question: “Which scholars and/or books from racial and ethnic minorities do you include in your syllabus and why?” Here is when the squirming usually begins, revealing the lack of academic rigor of the candidate under consideration. During this particular New Testament search, two separate candidates from different Ivy League schools provided problematic responses. The first responded that as much as s/he was committed to diversity, s/he could not think of any scholar of color off the top of their head who has written a credible text concerning the biblical text. Let the response of this biblical scholar sink in for a moment. The second scholar, grasping for straws, offered the name Paul Ricœur, and then proceeded to convince me why I should accept his answer. I didn’t. While these two particular individuals best illustrate the depths of the ignorance of many white scholars concerning the scholarship emanating from what will soon be – combined – the largest U.S. demographic group, others have provided slightly better answers, but no less ignorant. For example, often the names offered are of scholars whose works were well known in the last century. Although they name foundational thinkers, they lack knowledge of current contributors to the discipline. Other times Latin American liberationist scholars are mentioned as if they are representatives of the U.S. Latinx context. Or white women use the term mujerista as the Latinx equivalent to womanist revealing their total lack of knowledge concerning the rich feminist discourse occurring among Latinxs. One’s pedagogy, or scholarship for that matter, can never be cutting-edge if one is ignorant of all aspects of their discipline. As a Latino man, my teaching must not just include the thoughts and writings of eurocentric and Latinx scholars; but also those of Indigenous, Black, and Asian-American scholars, as well as Queer and Feminist voices. Not to be familiar with the contributions of all marginalized communities does a disservice to my scholarship, and more importantly, to the students in my classroom. Many white scholars fall short of academic rigor because they can succeed, be published, and thus paraded as the fattened calf due to the prevalent institutional racism which continues to support a white affirmative action which protects their job opportunities and current positions from better qualified and more knowledgeable scholars of color. As a Latino going through my Ph.D. program, not only did I have to master Eurocentric thinkers, methodologies, and theories (as I should have), but I was expected to also be fluent with the thinkers, methodologies, and theories arising from my Latinx context. And yet, it was my white colleagues who were considered among the “brightest and the best” who lacked any requirement or need to read or know anything about my context - or any other marginalized context. How can anyone ever be considered knowledgeable with such a limited understanding of a sliver of their discipline? Part of the problem is that so many of the so-called top schools promote ignorance because they lack scholars of color, especially Latinx scholars. All you need to do is count how many core Latinx faculty are present on the faculty of the so-called Ivies to prove my point. You can count them on one hand, and maybe have a free finger leftover to give. Simply stated: If the faculty fails to represent the diversity of the population, then that school – even if it claims to be among the Ivies – lacks academic excellence and rigor – regardless of how large their endowments may be. Of course, this institutionalized racism is not limited to the Ivies. Gaze upon your own religion department. How many Latinxs are among your core faculty? Our presence may be requested to demonstrate a politically correct diversity; nevertheless, our scholarship remains confined to our barrios. Latinx, who comprise the largest ethnic group in the United States, remain the least represented group of all full professors in the academy, usually relegated to the “instructor” or “lecturer” rank where we possess little if no voice on how the academic institution structures itself, or in influencing doctoral students. The voices of marginalized scholars must be prevented from fully participating in shaping the academic discipline. For if they were truly given a seat at the table, they might reveal that the discipline which has been upheld for the past centuries as universal is simply a privileged eurocentric method of theological contemplation which in reality is but a very limited form of the particular.  Students sitting in classrooms of white professors are often prevented from obtaining a cutting-edge education because of the strategies employed by so-called top schools, either consciously or unconsciously, in maintaining and sustaining eurocentric academic supremacy. Speaking only from the Latinx experience (although I suspect it may resonate with other marginalized groups), when some schools seek to hire Latinxs they often search for the brownest face with whitest voice. Quotas are thus met without having to deal with the scholarship being generated by nuestra comunidad; or worse, fuse and confuse Latin American theological scholarship with Latinx scholarship. Better yet is to find an actual white professor who can teach the Latinx context. A second strategy is to hire junior scholars (or in one case I know, a senior scholar), without tenure, to teach courses about the Latinx context while continuing the historical trend of seldom granting tenure. In this way, after seven years, the school can find a new Latinx to use, misuse, and abuse ensuring they will never amass the power to challenge, influence, or change the discourse at the institution. And finally, the school can invite well-known Latinx scholars to serve as visiting professors. Again, while the Latinx context is momentarily explored, the institution protects itself from structural change, because, after all, once the year appointment comes to an end – the scholar returns to their institution violence. As radical as they may have been, their absence quickly helps the institution forget whatever challenges may have been raised, and of course, if the challenges hit too close to home, they can always dismiss the Latinx as angry. A pedagogical problem exists with white professors because of the continuous racism and ethnic discrimination prevalent in our schools that still relegates our voices, our thoughts, and our bodies to the margins. I leave it for you to ponder how racist your school might be. I, on the other hand, wish to close praising those white students and scholars who refuse the temptation of scholastic laziness and spend a good portion of their academic training learning about the context of their racial/ethnic Other. Although they can succeed in the academy without having to do this extra work, nevertheless, they have come to realize they can never truly possess scholastic rigor if they lack the breadth of their discipline. These are the white scholars I crave to call colleagues! Their integrity prevents them from speaking for us, or in place of us; rather, they master the contributions made on their margins so as to better inform their own thinking and become more effective in sharing our contributions in the classroom. They have come to realize they can never be good teachers if they are ignorant of the full scope of their discipline. 

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This book gives both more and less than what its title promises. For the editors of this collection, teaching “the whole student” requires engaged learning (“active, participatory, experiential learning that links doing with thinking”) and integrative pedagogy (“crossing and stretching traditional intellectual disciplinary boundaries”) (1). In turn, these commitments are part and parcel of a larger commitment to educating for social justice, and the essays take on a wide array of topics, including effective and balanced service-learning, learning communities “done well,” and the importance of meaningful, sustained diversity engagement. Some of the essays are rather auto-biographical while others focus on a particular course or program. As is the case with many books of this type, the collection is an uneven assortment, and it is not always clear how an essay pertains to the promised subject of “teaching the whole student.” For those reasons, it can be somewhat disappointing. Read in one way, however, hope emerges as a kind of connecting line and important theme. This is addressed most directly in the essay by Gillies Malnarich, who describes a moment of personal crisis as a teacher. She lay awake at night wondering, “What does it mean to educate for hope?” How can we make space for “raw, angry, heartbreaking, life-affirming hope… especially in our classrooms,” she asks, drawing upon both Paulo Freire and Rebecca Solnit’s writings (58). It also becomes clear that the kind of relational pedagogy being prescribed by many of the writers requires a willingness on the part of the teacher to bring his or her whole self into the classroom. In her essay on “Incorporating Social Justice into Teaching,” Kathleen Manning encourages readers to think of teaching as a spiritual act: “Teaching is not something learned once and perfected. The ever-changing nature of students, theory, and your personal and professional cycles as a person and professor make teaching an art. Because you are affecting people’s lives, approaching teaching and learning as spiritual practice places it in the realm of transcendence. Particularly when using principles of social justice to work toward a more just world, faith, trust, and authenticity must be part of the teaching and learning processes” (52). There are many helpful ideas and strategies here, including the “Where I’m From” poetry assignment, a powerful way for students to disclose important aspects of their identity and express “links between their faith tradition and ethnicity,” among other things (164 - the activity comes from Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Can We Talk About Race? [Beacon, 2007]). Some of the essays include useful appendices - see, for example, the collaborative learning self-assessment (77) or the chart describing experiential classroom activities to promote dialogue (143). Ultimately the strength of this book can be found in the questions that it poses more than in the answers it suggests. Each essay concludes with a set of reflection questions prompted by the content of the essay, and a patient, thoughtful reader could work her way through this book and be richly rewarded.

When I arrived on campus as a first-year student, I had the name of an economics professor to track down, given to me by close church friends who knew that he and his wife belonged to a church in my new college town. When I knocked on his office door, he was both delighted and surprised; “I assumed you’d come about enrollment in my seminar. No student has ever asked me about church.” Four years later, he celebrated my graduation with other members of the church I’d faithfully attended. Admittedly, I was an outlier. But my story helps dispel the myth that college is a place to go to lose your faith. Widespread assumptions hold that campuses are secularized spaces where religion surfaces only when it becomes a threat (“Fundamentalist students might endanger others”) or a nuisance (“Religious minorities might protest intolerance”). Contributors to Religion and Higher Education in Europe and North America argue that ordinary, everyday religious experience on campus is more common, less problematic, and more nuanced than many realize. Editors Aune and Stevenson collected thirteen essays by researchers and theorists representing different disciplines and approaches who are all curious about how students negotiate the university environment. Section One shares findings from survey research demonstrating, for example, that when it comes to retaining their religious affiliations, practices, and beliefs, students differ from non-students of the same age only in identifying even more strongly with mainstream religious institutions upon graduation, and in shedding their belief in miracles. Other research shows that all groups, including the ‘nones,’ encounter campus climates hostile to their worldviews. This section tries to render empirical the question of secularization and higher education. It affirms both that religion is a slippery thing to measure and that more research is necessary. Section Two presents qualitative research into the experience of being religious in ostensibly secular British, French, and Canadian universities. It challenges the idea that as a pluralistic, secular ethos grows at the institutional level, loss of faith results at the personal level. Becoming friendly to students’ faith would mean, among other things, ceasing to bracket religion as something purely private and propositional, moving beyond mere tolerance and accommodation toward formation of the whole person, expanding vocabulary beyond the moderate/radical binary (Islam), and creating safe and inclusive space for all. Section Three argues for evidence-based institutional policies that treat religion as a social practice rather than an identity characteristic. One chapter addresses the relationship of religiosity to teaching and learning. Contributors call upon institutions of higher education to promote literacy, connection, and dialogue with respect to religion rather than continuing to fall back on the impersonal, secular, and reductionist norms of civility and free speech. In other words, secularity is not neutrality, and the college or university is not ultimately an arbiter of conflict but rather a pedagogical community. This thought-provoking volume, which deliberately addresses higher education outside the United States, will interest several audiences, including campus life personnel, sociologists of religion, chaplains, teachers, and administrators

Although it is not immediately apparent from the title this is a book on pedagogy, and it contains many useful ideas for the teaching of religion and theology. Each of the chapters in this volume suggests a way in which teachers in secondary and university education can use popular works of Fantasy Literature to teach critical literacy. Fantasy Literature is difficult to define, but it is hard to deny the enormous influence it has had on popular culture. Rather than dismiss this literature as mere genre fiction, the authors of this book see the popularity of Fantasy Literature as an opportunity to reach and engage a variety of students in serious questions about race, gender, class, and privilege. The book begins with a brief introduction that defines critical literacy broadly, noting that as a blanket term it encompasses Marxist, feminist, postmodern, and other critical theoretical discourses. Following this, most of the chapters in the volume focus on one or two works of Fantasy Literature, demonstrating how they can be used to teach an important concept in critical discourse. Here I will mention a few examples. In the first chapter Neil McGarry and Daniel Ravipinto assess the conservative, patriarchal, and heterosexist autocratic ideology at play in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin. Given the current popularity of the latter’s works, this chapter could inspire a variety of pedagogical interventions. Martha Johnson-Olin reads a current text using historical example in her chapter, “Strong Women in Fairy Tales Existed Before Frozen: Teaching Gender Studies Via Folklore.” Several other chapters use the Harry Potter series: Editor Mark Fabrizi’s chapter uses Harry Potter to teach Machiavelli, while Claire Davanzo uses the actions of Dolores Umbridge and Cornelius Fudge, especially in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to teach Marxist ideas about oppression and resistance. While most of the chapters in the book examine one or a few works in light of one critical concept, Nathan Frederickson’s chapter follows a different approach, and is the chapter that would likely be of greatest interest to the readers of this site. In his chapter, Frederickson lays out his plan for a course on religion and Fantasy Literature that focuses on critical pedagogy. This course is divided into eight sections: (1) defining key terms, (2) colonialism, (3) capitalism, (4) perspectivism and pragmatism, (5) feminism and queer theory, (6) interrogating the self, (7) royal ideology and the monomyth, and (8) critical pedagogy and reflexivity. Frederickson provides annotated lists of suggested texts for each of these sections. He also helpfully breaks these lists into those works that are best suited for high school, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms, making this syllabus useful for a wide range of educators. The syllabus chapter is particularly useful, but given its broad scope, it is likely that many teachers of religion will find helpful ideas and suggestions in this book for weaving popular culture and critical literacy into their courses.

Hybrid Teaching and Learning defines and explains the hybrid approach to teaching and learning by providing answers to questions surrounding this phenomenon. This method of teaching and learning is often referred to as blended pedagogy. Answers to questions and conclusions are arrived at through eleven chapters that together give a strong and comprehensive explanation of hybrid teaching and learning. The authors of the chapters are Kathryn E. Linder, Patsy D. Moskal, Linda S. Bruenjes, Sarah A. Smith, Traci Stromie, Josie G. Baudier, Jason Snart, Faye Haggar, Bruce Kelley, Weichao Chen, Daniel Newman, Michael Dickinson, and Kirsten Behling. Kathryn E. Linder defines hybrid teaching as a pedagogy that utilizes technology to create a variety of learning environments for students (11). This method of teaching and learning reduces the amount of face-to-face encounters between teacher and learner. However, technologically facilitated activities outside of the actual classroom often make the face-to-face meetings more active and meaningful. The teacher of hybrid courses must be intentional in setting up these activities. Each chapter describes its objective clearly and explains it very well for the reader. The pedagogy of hybrid teaching and learning has components similar to other successful pedagogies, including learning outcomes and objectives. A best practice in hybrid pedagogy is to start at the end and work backwards in planning courses. One should know what the desired final outcome is before planning activities. This type of teaching and learning involving backward design requires planning the entire course and may be difficult for teachers who are accustomed to planning classes weekly. This book works well as a framework for understanding hybrid teaching and learning. It is very timely for institutions considering a variety of methods for instruction. The authors suggest ways of keeping the values that come with face-to-face teaching and learning while taking advantage of the many new technologies that enhance teaching and learning. I found chapter 9 to be of particular interest because the author makes a strong argument to teachers about accessibility. Teachers of hybrid courses must ensure that all students can access courses in face-to-face spaces as well as technological spaces. The only weakness that I can identify in this book is that perhaps it could have given more information or insight about the pros and cons of hybrid teaching and learning. This might help others avoid some pitfalls. Overall, I found this book to be a valuable asset. As one who uses hybrid pedagogy I think this book is a helpful tool for all teachers who prepare and plan to teach in this format. Individual chapters or the entire book will help others learn more about hybrid teaching and learning.