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When I was doing my PhD, I remember being anxious about the readings to be done. Union professors used to assign hundreds of pages to read every week. I am a slow reader and I would always come to class with my readings incomplete. That generated an enormous anxiety that made me fear classes rather than enjoy them. I kept myself very quiet, trying to hide from my teacher as much as possible. Other students, who didn’t do the readings either, would open the text on page seventy-six, read it, and make a comment. These comments were clearly made up on the fly but at least these students participated. I was notably quiet. Only when I was able to read the texts would I speak. I remember a class for which we had to read one novel per week. My goodness, I couldn’t even get close to finishing the novels. I remember the amount of anxiety during that semester. I didn’t know about Cliffs notes and we didn’t have YouTube or Google. One day, when we were discussing a novel in small groups, I mentioned that I had not finished the novel and couldn’t participate. The TA was present in that group. Sure enough, my final evaluation came with the statement that I didn’t read the novels. I was devastated. When I became a professor, this is what I knew how to do: give many readings to my students. It was the way I had been taught. I was shocked when I was at Louisville seminary and Professor Amy P. Pauw told me: one hundred pages is enough. I was shocked. In my first years of teaching I thought it was very poor educating! For me, the amount of reading was proportionally related to the success of the class. But not only that. I realized that my anxiety transferred to the students. Would they read? I never did quizzes, I abhor quizzes, mostly because they were traumatic in my early learning years. Every quiz was a test of my inability, an entrance into my real fake world, a door that would show how stupid I was. Every quiz/grade was a litmus test of who I was and what my future would be. And in that cloud of anxiety, I had to make sure students read all the assignments. I would question some students if I felt they had not finished a reading. I developed ways of knowing when students didn’t read. I could never penalize them, but knowing that students would have not read made me anxious and angry all semester long. It took me a while to understand that my anxiety was not about my students but about my own self, knowing I didn’t do the readings when I was a student. Embarrassing. Fast forward to now; I am just now learning to assign less readings. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it gives me some sense of security. However, I have learned to do things differently. Now I tell my students: There is a lot of reading, but you read what you want, what you can, or what interests you. All the readings have to do with the issue at stake but differ in how they approach it. I have also added movies and art as different resources. Some classes are more successful than others. But what is most important now is that I tell my students they don’t need to read the texts. I stress how important it is to read and that without the texts the class will be boring and less engaging, but that I understand how life is and how difficult it is to make it all work. It is not only that texts will create a great class, but a good class will entice students to read the texts. If therapy has helped me see how much I cast a net of my own projections, fears, and insecurities over my students, teaching has helped me see that I need to constantly change. My forms of knowing and doing change, so my classes change too. However, these changes are necessary not only because of what happens to me but because of the ways societies shift and how methods of educating are becoming obsolete. The transmission of information is no longer critical. Information is everywhere now and easily accessed under our scrolling fingers. We have way too much information. Thus, our classes have to be different. If a class is the same passing of information and content as the scrolling of news, it doesn’t really matter if the class is online or in person, if the class lasts three hours or fifty minutes. The time and medium are different, but the transmission is the same. What makes education unique is this fantastic time/space together when something happens that cannot be gained elsewhere. A time not to create results but to be transformed. To learn and educate each other is to venture into other pedagogical forms that will engage learning differently. We go from passing information to being fully there and bless each other. We then engage knowledge as something to know and to savor, to heal and to transform. We carry something else in our heart and if we can somewhat remember these times is because our bodies loved it. To know comes from a precious moment when we learn together, in a territory, a shared place; living in an eco-system, with other beings. To know as to rediscover the learnings we already carry within us, and recover ancestral forms of knowledges. And classrooms become a place where knowledge is both in me and in you, but most fundamentally, between us. THAT is the place of education! Tião Rocha, an educator from Brazil says that there is a difference between the teacher and the educator. The teacher is the one who teaches, and the educator is the one who learns. Then, how can we all, professors and students, become teachers and educators? Tião Rocha says that the educator needs to know three things about their students: how each person engages their forms of knowing, their doings, and their desires.[1] Students already hold many forms of knowledge. What are they? How did and do they go about knowing the things they know? Students already do things and engage life practically. What are they doing and how do they do it? Students already have many forms of desire in them and they go about life desiring and living life from these desires. What are these desires? What are the desires to unlearn, what are the desires to learn? Education only happens when we learn about each other’s knowings, doings, and desires. That means that we learn the theoretical/practical ways of living so we can give contours to life, can change our realities. That also means that the format of classrooms should change. Our syllabus should be an unfinished map. Teachers must offer different forms of learning, different configurations of classrooms, different forms of engaging texts, different ways where bodies can actually think, different strategies to do assignments. That is when art can help us by expanding the venues of learning and doing. I offer my students creative forms of engagement with the class. A student once offered a dance as a final project and wrote about it, and it was fascinating. Final papers done together. Half of my class is discussion. The other half is practice. As we think/do/desire this craft we do, we can’t forget that the vortex of energy behind us is capitalism and the key and center of anything is the production of stuff. We have to produce good classes with good results and the students must produce good results to feel that they have accomplished something. We end up striving more for the diploma than for the journey. We are all hooked up into this modulation of learning. And it is hard to change. When we go to AAR or other guilds for instance, the pedagogy is the same: three to five people sitting at a table in the front talking for three hours to an audience who stays seated until they can say a thing or two. After a whole day going from one seating to another we are exhausted. Nonetheless, we produced a good day of learning! To change this would be to fall into wishy-washy stuff. And yes, I understand, there is a lot of that around. But I wonder how we move from the producing of things for the sake of results to a form of knowing that creates community where being together, telling stories, and sharing about the struggles of our lives is more important than the outcomes. My quest is to discover how texts and ways of teaching and learning can help turn our experiences into learning together that orients the practices of our lives. Not experiences that take us into forms of autonomy but rather, into what Derrida once called “heteronomy without servitude.” I wonder how we can find a way together in class when our stories are woven into a form of a certain common tapestry, when what we speak about ourselves is not as narcissists but as collective knowers, implicated into each other’s lives. If education is about desire as Tião Rocha said, then this is something we can strive to do: Passion above all creates a dependent freedom, determined, bound, obligated, included, founded not in itself but in a first acceptance of something that is outside of me, of something that is not me and that that, precisely, is capable of falling in love.[2] That is the place where we are grounded, in that classroom, in that neighborhood, in that environment, with many forms of living. That is the place of coexistence and dependent freedom. That place is the “in between” place as we teach and learn together with all of our knowing, doing, and desires. Assigned readings then, are invitations to join much larger communities, made of those who we might know a bit but also, made of those we have no idea or have nothing in common. They are just that: invitations! With these invitations (intrusions) we build a class, a village! Perhaps that is what we might call a good class: a village! Or as Brazilian thinker Alana Moraes says: A good class invites us to think together, including what the best texts can be to accompany us on this journey. Obviously, professors play an important role in this choice, but there needs to be space to think with students about the best paths for a unique collectivity. It is more difficult, it requires more openness, but it is no longer possible to defend democracy in the abstract if we are not able to radicalize our everyday ways of teaching and doing research in any way.[3]   [1] A Arte De Educar Com Tião Rocha, https://www.cpcd.org.br/portfolio/a-arte-de-educar-com-tiao-rocha/ [2] Jorge Larrosa Bondía, “Notas Sobre A Experiência E O Saber De Experiência,” Revista Brasileira de Educação, Rio de Janeiro, Jan/Fev/Mar/Abr 2002 Nº 19, 19-28. [3] Alana Moraes, Twitter, August 26, 2022, https://twitter.com/alanamoraes_x

The seminary professor, a man of color, just walked out of the academic dean’s office. He had been teaching at the mainline Protestant theological institution for eleven years. The academic dean, a white woman, called him into her office to talk about a recent article he published in a mainstream magazine. He had written about white supremacy within American Christianity and the manifestations of racism in Protestant churches, including in churches that supported the seminary. The dean noted that she had received several complaints about his article. The professor asked the dean if she disagreed with anything that he wrote. She evaded the question and changed the subject to how the professor might repair relationships with some donors. She also reminded him that his review for promotion was coming up shortly and that she worried how this “controversy” could disrupt the review. The conversation ended with no resolution, but the dean said they could revisit “next steps” in a day or two after some prayer and reflection. The seminary professor was enraged, exhausted, and frustrated. In a word, he felt defeated. The professor began teaching at the seminary immediately after graduate school. He loved teaching his students and especially appreciated the increasing racial and ethnic diversity within the student population. But over the years, the racism that he experienced, and the racial harm that he witnessed his colleagues and students of color encounter, had taken a deleterious toll on his wellbeing and health. Being called into the dean’s office was the latest in a long series of episodes in which he and other colleagues of color were assailed because of what they taught, how they advocated for students of color, and how they challenged their institution to live up to its moral, pedagogical, and spiritual commitments to racial diversity, equity, and inclusion. In recent years, seminaries throughout the United States have grappled with racial discrimination. At some seminaries, there have been a handful of discriminatory incidents whereas at other schools the problems of racial prejudice have been widespread. Immediately after departing the dean’s office, this professor sat down on a bench outdoors and wrestled with whether his meeting with the dean was racially discriminatory. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that “it is unlawful to harass a person because of that person’s race or color” and explains that “harassment can include, for example, racial slurs, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person’s race or color, or the display of racially-offensive symbols.” The law does not forbid “simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious,” but it also outlines how racial discrimination is “illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).” The professor acknowledged to himself that the meeting may not have fallen into the legal delineation of harassment, but he knew it was racially harmful and he could feel the pain coursing through his body. The professor concluded that he had three options. The first option was to compromise and agree to a plan to talk with some of the offended donors. He would not apologize for his scholarship, but he would discuss his article with them and listen to why they thought he was wrong. The second option was to seek the support of his colleagues of color. The faculty of color had confronted the administration before, and he believed they were prepared to do so again on his behalf. The professor thought that his resistance might also garner media attention and perhaps he could write another article for the magazine explaining what happened. But the professor was weary. He thought about his health and his family. He did not know if he, or his family, had the energy required to enact the second option. Therefore, the professor was strongly considering the third option, which was to simply resign from the seminary. He would miss the classroom dearly, for it was his sanctuary, his refuge, and a holy site where he experienced rejuvenation through the wonder of learning together with his students. But in this moment, the professor did not know how much longer he could bear the pain in his teaching body. Questions What does this case study tell you about the seminary and how it engages matters of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion? What would you do if you were the professor? Are there other options the professor should consider? If you were the academic dean, would you have done anything differently in this situation? If so, what? If not, why not?

#1        I am hoping we can learn to teach toward justice.   Teach what justice looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like, smells like. Learn to know justice with our intuitions, our inside knowledges that see, smell, taste, hear or just know because some things are just known.   #2 What kind of study, pilgrimage, lessons for us to learn how does justice live and breathe and find meaning and have meaning and purpose? How does justice enflesh itself? When you gather in a circle of like-minded people working on behalf of justice and you talk about what you are teaching toward – what is the conversation if, instead of focusing upon what you are against, the sustained talk is about what you are in favor of, visioning, dreaming and futuring? How can we materialize justice? How can we learn, together, to conjure justice? What if – should we not be able to talk together, vision and dream of our collective future that then that is why we are stuck?   #3        Knowledge without action is impotence.   #4        War mongers depend upon our fear. They depend upon our good-hearted willingness to use up our resources in insignificant skirmishes and the business of charity for which no permanent change results.    #5        This is not a question of nuance. I am not splitting hairs between knowing what you are against as opposed to knowing what you are in favor of. Knowing where NOT TO ride your bicycle is not the same thing as knowing where TO ride your bicycle. The lessons of “no, don’t, stop, halt” are not the lessons of “yes, do, proceed, go.” Living in yes takes practice.   #6        You can be against war – but do you know how to work for peace? You can be against misogyny – but do you know how to love women and our contributions? You can be against racism – but do you know the cultures, ways, histories, traditions, experiences of BIPOC peoples? You can be against poverty – but do you know how to create a society without starvation, homelessness and enough prideful work for all people? We all been taught to be anti-Black even those of us who are Black. Mis-education is just that.   #7        In too many of our classrooms – we are quite adept at training students in deconstruction, negative criticism, dismantling analysis and scathing critique. How do we train our students in the know-how of construction of ideas, formulation of strategies, creation of newness – regardless of field, discipline, or school? What would it mean to teach our students to be visionaries, able to converse with one other about the complexities of political identities and agendas, then, together, design the new? Simplistic thinking is killing us.   #8 Learning to teach toward new visions, new communities, new systems requires different muscles, different thinking, different strategizing, different knowledges than teaching against current injustices and exploitations. This is why it is not enough to be against. Learning the terrains of being-for requires particular perspectives, new moorings, and emotional maturity to withstand those who thwart the new, the needed, the possible.   #9        Octavia Butler said, “So be it. See to it.” I think she meant us, about our teaching toward justice, and right now.

In a previous blog, I detailed some of the ways in which white students’ practices of coloniality are manifested in the classroom through co-optation, silence, and resignation. Such praxes—often unconscious and subtle—must be unmasked, especially for those who consider themselves to be allies for justice with communities of color. Such learning is not limited to white students, however, as students of color witness how instructors address dynamics of privilege and oppression in their courses and, as a result, learn who can (or cannot) be trusted to sojourn with them through their educational experiences and beyond. But how do instructors unmask such subtle, ingrained responses (also known as embedded resistances)? Wisdom gathered from decolonial scholars and teachers within theological education, engagement with materials on decolonial pedagogy, and attempts to incorporate specific practices within my courses have led me to some core insights. I offer these not as a step-by-step “how to,” but with the hopes that they might inspire others to praxis unmasking coloniality and invite colleagues and students alike to share in this work. Give more attention and intention to the processes by which learners engage with one another in the course than to the content of the course itself. I realize that this might be blasphemous to some, so try to give equal attention and intention to both the what of course materials and the how of individuals’ relations across identity, power, and difference. A few questions to think through include: What values are you explicitly and implicitly privileging in your courses? For example, if academic rigor is a central value, what standards and signals do you incorporate to exemplify rigor and how might eurowestern colonial norms be privileged within these standards? How do students come to know and experience these values and how might white students experience them differently than students of color? How might you create a space that does not privilege the voices, perspectives, and participation of those for whom the academy was designed—namely, white (and male, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied) students? What commitments and modes of relating are you incorporating into the course design? What role do learners have in shaping these ways of relating, and what else is needed by you as the instructor to mitigate co-optation, silence, and resignation from white students? When you encounter particular actions or patterns by white students that are likely replicating or reinforcing colonial dynamics, consider the following: Ask neutral questions—ones that do not have opinions embedded—that invite individuals to dig deeper into their own stories, assumptions, and experiences.[1] This should be done with care and the intention to assist in students’ learning, but also with a genuine desire for the instructor to learn more about what lies underneath said actions or articulations (because our own assumptions are equally worthy of investigation). Questions can also be accompanied by, or followed up with, personal observations. It has been helpful for me to use “I” statements that reference my own observations or feelings in terms of the impact of particular noticings. In these cases, I tread a careful line as someone with positional power in the pedagogical relationship but who is also a person of color impacted by colonial dynamics. At times, I name and reflect upon my own complicity and unexamined colonial actions as a woman whose ancestry includes white colonizers and who continues to benefit from a system that privileges lighter skin. If students are able to acknowledge colonial underpinnings within their own embedded resistances, invite and/or offer alternatives to such resistances in order to decolonially reframe and re-praxis. For example, with white students who rely upon silence to avoid saying “the wrong thing,” I have asked them—along with others in the space—to imagine ways of participation beyond silence that encourage vulnerability and trust. In a virtual space, this has included the use of various art forms and nonverbal visual or auditory affirmations, as well as the usual verbal contributions to synchronous discussions. It helps if values of imperfection and leaning into tensions have been privileged in the course already to encourage actions beyond silence, as well as acknowledging that silence is necessary at times. These insights reside at the water’s edge of an ocean of practiced wisdom from educators who have been attentive to decolonial pedagogies for decades. As someone who is at the beginning of that journey, I know such learnings will only be shaped and tested with more time and experience and are subject to shifts based on context, timing, and a variety of other unique forces shaping each relational moment. Depending upon what visual representation is conjured by the imagination when one thinks of unmasking, the act itself might be quite simple, a bit uncomfortable, or downright painful (especially if one is a fan of horror films like me). Unmasking assumes that there are layers hidden beneath the mask that must be revealed in order for truth or healing to ensue. If we as teachers remain at the surface of course preparation and design by focusing on the attainment of intellectual knowledge, our students fail to encounter the depths of what they both desire and deserve as divinely breathed beings. Such failure clearly is not theirs; it is ours. White students, especially those with longings to cultivate communities of justice and equity in solidarity with their colleagues of color, deserve our reflective questions, our noticings, our own acknowledgments of complicity, and our personal discomforts with tension as co-learners. The irony of unmasking colonial practices in the classroom while teaching about decoloniality is not lost on me; but the truth of the matter is that colonial practices should be unmasked in all educational spaces and places.[2]   [1] Liz Lerman and John Bortsel, Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022). [2] I am grateful to the following teachers and scholars who shared with generosity their wisdom, experiences, and best practices related to decolonial pedagogies: Cristian De La Rosa, Christine J. Hong, Willie James Jennings, HyeRan Kim-Cragg, and Melinda McGarrah Sharp.

Recently, I finished a book called Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work (Hurney et al. 2021). It’s about a program on college campuses in which faculty members invite a colleague to come to their class at the mid-semester point to find out how the course is going from the students’ perspectives. This is a program offered at my institution, and many others, usually through a professional development or teaching and learning center. The book, and such programs, got me thinking about soliciting feedback from students, beyond simply what most of us are required to do in the form of final course evaluations. Think about it: course evaluations, if we even read them (and so many of my friends don’t, because it’s such a stressful experience), only let us know how the course was, how we did, what a group of students that is no longer enrolled with us thought about our teaching and their learning. Notice the past tense. Certainly this information can be useful for future courses (I am—usually—the same person teaching Religions of the World this time as I will be next time, after all), but it doesn’t exactly help those particular students in that particular course. (And I won’t even dive into the controversy around the utility and validity of student course evaluations here; suffice it to say, those evaluations are one of the only times that we actually ask students, the primary recipients of our teaching efforts, what they think about those efforts.) The point of a program like the one profiled in the book is that we can ask for feedback from students before the end of the semester, before the experience is over, when there is actually time to make changes or reroute. The small group instructional diagnoses occur at the mid-semester point. (You can check out the book to learn more about the process; it’s pretty cool!) Typical questions asked of students are: “What has helped your learning in this course so far? What has hindered your learning in this course so far?” and “What suggestions do you have for improvement?” The focus is on learning, not what they like/dislike or the instructors’ performance. At JMU a few years back, we also added companion questions focused on the students’ own behaviors, for example, “What are YOU doing that has helped your learning in this course so far?” as a way of conveying that they are also, and I would argue, ultimately, responsible for their own learning.) Then, with this information, instructors can decide what, if any, changes or clarifications they’d like to make during a follow-up conversation with the students and for the rest of the semester. In the absence of such a program, or colleague support, you can always ask these questions yourself (e.g., through anonymous paper forms in class, an anonymous ungraded survey on your LMS, etc.). But there are lots of other ways to check in with students and get actionable, important feedback. You might have students fill out a weekly online “how’s my driving?” Google form, as one of my friends does, or you might lead an in-class discussion every so often about how everyone is doing, or you might ask students to fill out a word cloud of how they’re feeling at the beginning of class on a particular day. There are lots of things we can ask about: students’ moods, feelings, and stress level; whether they understood a particular concept, lesson, or reading; how that recent test or lecture went; what study strategies seem to be working well for them; and so on. I use a variety of ways to check in with my own students and get their feedback in all of my courses. Last semester, for example, I had experimented with a great deal of flexibility around the exams (e.g., they were take-home and not timed), to try to ease the anxiety and overwhelm that I knew students were experiencing, and I wanted to know how this approach was working for them. I spent time in class after the midterm on a debrief. It turned out that many students were taking hours to complete their work, even though I had intended the whole thing to be over in 75 minutes. This was stressing them out more—the opposite of the effect I was trying to achieve! I took their feedback, which I would have never realized if I hadn’t simply asked, and made some changes to the final exam (e.g., reduced the number of questions). Students noted in my course evaluations (as they do every semester) that they appreciated how I asked them for feedback and how I adjusted parts of the course as a result. Indeed, research on mid-semester feedback programs demonstrates that students appreciate being asked. And, of course, this kind of feedback process can benefit us too, as we open up lines of communication with students, convey care, and possibly learn which adjustments to the course will better facilitate their learning. After all, who wants to be teaching a course that’s not going well? Who wants to dread going to class every day? Who wants to be giving failing grades on projects? Who wants to be meeting resistance, but not knowing why? It often doesn’t occur to us to just ask students when we want to know more. But we can. What do you want to ask?