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What do you know to be true now that you used to think was false? What do you know to be false now that you used to think was true? What is something you’ve always thought true that remains true?  I once heard a conference presenter ask a version of these questions and now I occasionally use them in my teaching. Such questions suggest that the status of knowing grows and changes, shifts and turns over time. This is good news for teachers and students everywhere!  The pliable character of knowledge is also a political matter. Libraries and lives are filled with stories about the politics of teaching and learning, particularly around matters of deeply held faith convictions and religious practices embodied in various histories, bodies, and communities today.  Learning itself evokes a kind of devotional practice in which the desire to learn and to unlearn are political acts of room-making in the mind, heart, body, soul for more than this moment’s capacity. Deep learning is often accompanied by a desire to be moved, even an expansive desire that surprises us in the learning process.  In and beyond my seminary teaching and learning experiences in middle America in this political climate, I am seeing a troubling divergence around the changing status of knowledge: is learning now less or more important than ever? Do expectations of room-making lean toward being moved or rather thirst for antagonistic encounters? With the striking contrast of embracing the urgency of deepening learning around current social issues such as #syllabi devoted to blacklivesmatter, sanctuary cities, women’s health, islamophobia, refugees, and more on one hand, and abandoning intellectualism in favor of relentless questioning sources of expertise or even verifiable facts on the other, how do we teach into a political moment that threatens the status of learning itself?  Five Threats to Syllabi “It’s in the syllabus” is the punch line to many an academic riddle. Syllabi are blueprints, detailed instructions for shared learning experiences. Syllabi outline plans for the way in, through, and out of the course of study. The best syllabi align student learning outcomes, assignments, and learning activities in clear and compelling ways.  A syllabus can also be open to change and can never be totally locked in from the start if it intends to guide a living, breathing classroom.  Many syllabi thus include a caveat somewhere that goes something like this: “instructor reserves the right to amend the syllabus for the sake of deepening student learning, but not to add unexpected work.” I usually write a version of the first part on my syllabi and discuss the second part in class because change is work, even and especially change for the better amid threats to learning. In this highly charged political moment that pit bodies and communities against each other, I am seeing an increase in five interconnected syllabi threats: (1) Rejecting Close Reading: I’ve noticed increased charges of irrelevance of reading that takes time in favor of a formula such as “I used to believe that doing the assigned reading before every class was important, but now I see that it doesn’t make a difference.” Discourse includes more and more references to headlines and skimmed resources. (2) Retreating from Deep Connections across Difference: As the political moment threatens to recode inclusion as political correctness, the allure of unrestrained exclusion is appearing in class discussions in relation to readings, to other students, to contemporary figures that appear in a posture of “I don’t have anything to learn from you.” I have heard this disturbing phrase uttered in the classroom directly twice recently. (3) Receding Horizon of Moral Imagination: While I think it’s a mistake to see empathy as perfectly achievable, the act of considering the consequences of my words and actions for other people and places is critical. Therefore, I welcome many voices from texts read to voices represented in the class to perspectives notably absent from any class. Learning in conversation with many voices requires sustained willingness to consider familiar and unfamiliar perspectives – a requirement that appears less compelling in much public discourse today as relationships between texts, persons, and ideas lean far toward the antagonistic pole rather than a desire to be moved. (4) Pressuring Quick Undisciplined Performance: It can take more time to write more succinctly, yet the pace of twitter both models and encourages quick, undisciplined performance. Respond now! The pressure is on to shortchange the discipline of public discourse for rapid response. There is an art to brevity and real-time public debate that can be learned, but right now time-pressure is relentless.  (5) Acting Out Around Power: Power always flows through teaching and learning, sometimes in more subtle and sometimes in more obvious ways. This political moment is evidencing more blatant efforts of grasping, hiding, pushing, and pulling people and ideas out of the way for the sake of accumulating power.  These five threats aren’t unique to the moment, but also describe predictable patterns of dehumanization that we can trace over time through resurgences of oppression that depend on these kinds of threats.[i] All five of these threats to learning were sharply evident in the classes I taught during the 2016 US Presidential election.  This semester, several of the same students enrolled in a different seminar class.  What’s a teacher to do to support pedagogical response to these syllabus threats to the promise of becoming?  How could I respond to these threats pedagogically, helping to transform my teaching plans into a syllabus of becoming?  As a scholar discerning which organizations and conferences to attend, writing projects to adopt, I often ask myself, “to what extent does this support my learning and becoming?” A syllabus of becoming opens this question in the arena of teaching and learning: does this assignment, set of texts, teaching practice invite becoming? A moving syllabus transforms predictable threats into invitations of becoming. I am experimenting with the following responses to the above threats to learning: A Syllabus of Becoming (1) Reading More: In my seminar this semester we are reading fewer texts, but more closely. There is much to read. And sometimes, the very texts needed to translate careful study into prophetic and pastoral speech in today’s contexts are not yet written.  So we are also creating original texts that are not eliminating, but beautifully and quite unexpectedly responding to the above threats. (2) Connecting to a Sacred Third Text: Every week, the seminar shares in common assigned reading of published texts and reading of the class itself.[ii]  In addition, I invited each student to choose a third text that they consider sacred in their context. Across the first half of the semester, students have engaged lectionary readings, other Bible texts, a musician’s canon, music in general, visual art, photography, and poetry.  Assigning a search for the sacred without predetermining the form has opened unexpected depth this semester. (3) Imagining Publics, Remembering What’s at Stake: In crafting the short weekly writing assignment, I left open the possibility that the set of texts we produce, or a subset of them, could be assembled as a devotional resource for a larger public within and/or beyond the seminary. Reading the first half of Patrick B. Reyes’s new book Nobody Cries When We Die[iii] early in the semester has provided language for remembering the real lives and loves at stake in reading and writing about human suffering and healing. An imaginary public also joins the room when each student reads their reflection aloud during class each week.  (4) Practicing Every Week: Even though the pace of reading, writing, and conversation is deliberately slowed down with less reading and shorter writing assignments, I am amazed how class time flies by. Instead of the increased resistance and fatigue with many of the same students last semester in which I decided to scale back on practice in class (we were all exhausted and shocked albeit for many reasons), in this seminar, energy is sustained at a high register. Weekly practice with each other is creating room for mutual invitation, calling out profound connections between texts and students. (5) Sharing Voice and Power: Instead of coordinated turn-taking across the arc of the semester with different student presentations different weeks, I am trying a model where everyone shares their brief reflection or summary of it every week. Instead of power-grabbing, there are palpable and powerful moments of power-sharing every week.  Politics are interwoven with personality and it doesn’t escape me that every class is its own microcosm so that what works in one class can be less successful in another and vice versa. However, I am astonished that structuring a syllabus of becoming has not only tempered palpable threats of the contemporary moment, but also made room for invitations of becoming.  When discouraged at the very real threats to learning at this historical moment, I am reminded of the power and promise of a syllabus moving toward room-making. What have you found moving in your teaching and learning in such a time as this?   [i] To interrogate this point with my students, we are reading Beverly Eileen Miltchell’s Plantations and Death Camps: Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009).  While Mitchell makes plain patterns of threat that contribute to the violence of dehumanization, books like Angela D. Sims, Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016) reminds us how taxing remembering these patterns can be, especially for more made-vulnerable communities.   [ii] The field of pastoral theology uses the metaphor of “the living human document” to point to how humans can learn to read (and misread) each other on par with published texts about human experiences.  For a brief overview of this metaphor, see Robert Dykstra’s Images of Pastoral Care: Classic Readings (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2005) or a more recent postcolonial interpretation in my “Literacies of Listening: Postcolonial Pastoral Leadership in Practice(s),” in Postcolonial Practice of Ministry: Leadership, Liturgy, and Interfaith Engagement, eds. Kwok Pui-lan and Stephen Burns (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2016). [iii] Patrick B. Reyes, Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2016).

This is the third and penultimate blog in a series of posts in which I have sought to meditate on the question of how one might present theoretical/conceptual arguments to students in an introductory course on Islam in a manner that does not burden them with theory talk. To recap, in the last two posts, I shared some thoughts on this front in relation to teaching about the category of religion and in regards to teaching Sufism. In this post, I want to continue this theme by reflecting on the topic of what could broadly be categorized as “Islam and colonial modernity.” Through this topic, I want to reflect on the experience of teaching two central and interconnected theoretical arguments: 1) that tradition/modernity is not an oppositional binary, and 2) that conditions and discourse are always intimately connected such that new conditions generate new kinds of argument and ways of arguing. These two points are by now staple to the humanities and to the study of religion. But what are some specific ways in which they might be impressed in an introductory Islam course? Here are some examples that speak to this question. In this context, I have found most helpful working with collections of primary texts, such as the anthology of Muslim Modernist writings (edited by Charles Kurzman) and the anthology of Islamist texts (edited by Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Roxanne Euben). Let me walk you through some moments from my teaching when I draw on these anthologies. I employ the relatively straightforward tactic of locating and then discussing places in a primary text where the author’s argument is indebted to modern conditions. So for instance, in the Modernist Islam sourcebook, we find the example of the 19th century Indian Muslim scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) arguing that Muslims should alter their explanation for why the Qur’an was miraculous. Rather than attach the Qur’an’s miracle to the inimitability of its language (a long running argument in the tradition), he argued that Muslims should instead locate the miracle of the Qur’an in the inimitability of its meaning and guidance. More crucial than the argument here (which was not altogether novel) was the logic behind the argument: namely that a linguistic explanation for the Qur’an’s miracle “cannot,” in his words, “be put forward in confrontation with nonbelievers” (Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 300). He continued tellingly, “it will not satisfy their mind” (Ibid). Clearly, the new condition of missionary activity and competition in colonial India had a lot to do with the content and framing of Khan’s argument. Similarly, elsewhere in the same anthology, we find the Lebanese/Egyptian scholar Rashid Rida (d. 1935) expressing his admiration for European “nationalism” (Ibid, 82). And even more illustrative is the case of the 20th century Central Asian intellectual Abdurrauf Fitrat (d. 1938) who championed a new system of education as a way to cultivate “perfectly civil, patriotic Muslims” (Ibid, 247).  I have students reflect on the question of how desires such as nationalism and patriotism might be contingent to the emergence of the nation state as the center of modern politics. Would these desires have existed even a couple centuries ago? What would they have looked like? Again, what I am after in posing these questions is to have them ponder, even if indirectly, the interaction of conditions and discourse. Perhaps the most effective case study for this task is the extract from the 20th century Egyptian thinker/activist Sayyid Qutb’s (d.1966) landmark text Signposts Along the Road in Zaman’s and Euben’s anthology of Islamist thought. There are many moments in this text that can be mobilized. Let me offer one particularly cutting example. In pushing for an exclusively Qur’an centered understanding of tradition, Qutb exclaimed that Muslims should read the Qur’an “like a soldier studies ‘the daily command’ to act immediately upon what he learns in the battlefield” (Zaman and Euben, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, 141).  “Knowledge is for action” (Ibid), he had memorably continued. Again, these quotes provide an opportunity to have students think about possible connections between approaching the Qur’an as a soldier’s manual and new technological conditions such as the efflorescence of print and the concomitant materiality of the Qur’an as a bound printed book. Having worked through some of these examples, I put on the board a list of different categories of conditions including political (rise of the nation state, colonialism etc.), technological (print, commerce, railways), institutional (new educational institutions etc.), and epistemic/intellectual (valorization of science, championing of secular reason and progress etc.). In another column, I list the discursive moves of the authors we have examined that depended on and were made possible by any of these conditions. The point of this exercise is to show students that in analyzing discursive arguments, it is important to carefully consider the conditions, the terrain so to say, that make those arguments thinkable in the first place, and that shape the modality of their articulation. This of course is the now familiar conceptual point advanced and executed most forcefully in the work of Talal Asad. A careful navigation of and commentary on illustrative primary texts holds the potential of at least attuning students to such a conceptual orientation that takes seriously the interaction of discourse, conditions, and ultimately, power. There are two limitations of this method that I should like to briefly mention by way of conclusion. First, while this exercise is effective in demonstrating the dynamicity of tradition by showing ways in which it adapts, responds, and negotiates modern conditions, it is less successful in interrupting a celebratory teleology of modernity. “Ok, Muslim scholars can also desire modern stuff” is an all too convenient conclusion that some students might draw. Constantly reminding them about the power differentials involved in how modern conditions shape indigenous discourses and about the violence of colonial modernity (physical and otherwise) is thus very crucial. It might also be useful to frame modernity as a “narrative category;” a narrative that dramatizes its own claims to have eclipsed the past and tradition. I have found that students respond favorably when asked to think carefully about the kind of story modernity tells about itself and to reflect on the problems attached to that story. And second, the teaching tactic described in this post makes acutely palpable the absence of a substantive anthology that engages the work of Muslim traditionalist scholars (the ‘ulama’). Certainly, many among the modernists and Islamists were also trained in traditionalist methods. But still, there will be much to benefit from a reader (like Kurzman’s and Zaman’s and Euben’s) that takes as its focus the writings of modern Muslim traditionalist scholars. Such a resource will be especially useful for discussing continuities and ruptures in Islamic legal and ethical reasoning in the modern period, a topic that adds a particularly rich layer to this discussion.    

Develop effective models of practice and positively impact institutional teaching and learning quality. This volume provides examples and evidence of the ways in which post-secondary institutions in Canada have developed and sustained programs around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) that impact the institutional pedagogical climate. Topics include: - the historical development of SoTL in Canada, - institutional SoTL practices, including evidence of impact, - program design and case studies, and - continuing challenges with this work. This is the 146th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education series. It offers a comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review No longer relegated to just the classroom, learning has become universal through the use of social media. Social media embodies constructivism itself as the users engage in the development of their own meaning. And, constructivism is relevant to education, and learning theory and technological advance can be better understood in the light of one another. This volume explores: - particular areas influenced by constructivist thinking and social media, such as student learning, faculty development, and pedagogical practices, - practical and useful ways to engage in social media, and - dialogue and discussions regarding the nature of learning in relation to the technology that has changed how both faculty and students experience their educational landscape. This is the 144th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education series. It offers a comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers. (From the Publisher)

Journal Issue.

Why is it important to learn about higher education in international contexts? Why learn about curriculum, teaching, and learning at Dubai Women’s College of the Higher Colleges of Technology? Global education systems have remarkable contributions to make to understandings of 21st century curriculum, teaching, and learning. Adult educators across the globe are exploring how to make learning meaningful in a world that is experiencing change, global migration, rapid development, cross-cultural communication demands, and systems with mandates for accountability and international standardized measures of quality. Dubai is an Emirate in the United Arab Emirates that has experienced these issues, which have had a profound impact on higher education for Emirati women. The international educators who contributed to this book reveal how they designed and implemented a curriculum that represented a complex balancing act replete with recognition of local, global, religious, cultural, and societal implications. There is no other book like The Balancing Act: International Higher Education in the 21st Century. It reveals the nature of a highly devoted team of international educators who designed a contextually and globally relevant transdisciplinary, 21st century curriculum. “Dr. Mary Gene Saudelli has tremendous knowledge and experience with delivering world class education in the Middle East. She has a deep commitment to progressive education and an understanding of global mindedness. It is wonderful that she shares her research on a wide range of topics in educational curriculum and global issues. In The Balancing Act: International Higher Education in the 21st Century, Dr. Saudelli opens the dialogue of reciprocity in learning from higher education in diverse contexts. This book honours Emirati women’s backgrounds and differences, yet cherishes the uniqueness of the international educators involved in this study.” – Kim Critchley, Dean and CEO, University of Calgary in Qatar (From the Publisher)

Teacher, Scholar, Mother advances a more productive conversation across disciplines on motherhood through its discussion on intersecting axes of power and privilege. This multi- and trans-disciplinary book features mother scholars who bring their theoretical and disciplinary lenses to bear on questions of identity, practice, policy, institutional memory, progress, and the gendered notion of parenting that still pervades the modern academy. (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review Presenting current trends in transformative learning and adult higher education, this volume paints a vivid picture of the Transformative Learning theory in action. The concepts that knit these articles together despite the variety of educational settings and populations are: relationships, community, and the body experience - often missing in higher education. This volume includes: - the voices of marginalized populations often excluded from research studies such as community college students, emerging adults with learning differences, English language learners, native Alaskans, African-American health educators, doctoral students, and yoga practitioners; - new paradigms for thinking about adult undergraduate education; - new ways to deal with social conflict and advise doctoral students; and - personal stories from Black women leaders, college teachers, student writers as well as pregnant women, and social service providers. This is the 147th volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education series. It offers a comprehensive range of ideas and techniques for improving college teaching based on the experience of seasoned instructors and the latest findings of educational and psychological researchers. (From the Publisher)