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One of the cruel ironies of teaching in Atlanta is that the so-called fall semester always begins in the damp-flames-of-hell climate that is August in Georgia. But this morning, as I sit with my coffee on my back porch, I recognize the halting, modest signs that a proper fall may arrive after all, despite all evidence to the contrary. I see a few yellow leaves drifting to the grass from the weeping cherry tree. Likewise, I notice the tip top of the Japanese maple tree is hinting at its fall purple-red glory. The air, while still sticky, carries a whisper of crispness. I could sit here for a while, if I can just slow my mind and let my senses help me pay attention to the world. Embodiment should come easily to me. I am a practical theologian whose specialization is the relationship between theology, education, and ecology. This intersection can hardly be imagined absent a strong commitment to embodiment, to the ways in which we understand our bodies to inhabit particular places and relate to other bodies; to see, to breathe, to taste, to hear, and to touch. In honoring the body’s knowledge, we name its vulnerability, and the ways in which we are tied to the vulnerability of other bodies.[1] I have tried to counter false narratives that would suggest that a real academic somehow transcends her embodied self. I have developed practices to help ground me in my heart and body, and when I’m able to commit to these practices, everything else seems to flow: my research, my teaching, even those administrative tasks. Easier said than done, though. In our institutions of higher education, serious inquiry has been conflated with dispassionate objectivity, learning with the cognitive work of recalling and interpreting.[2] We might even struggle to recognize the needs and honor the knowledge of our own bodies, as individual scholars and human beings.[3] Speaking for myself, I might spend hours crouching at my computer, loathe to break my supposed focus. With high hopes, I might have scheduled a workout or a walk with the dogs for later in the afternoon, only to abandon those plans when it seems I do not have time. I might eat breakfast and lunch at my desk. Now, after two years of remote work and learning, I think the question of embodiment is insisting itself to us in new and powerful ways. I think we begin to find our way toward an answer by first looking within. How do you begin your day? Environmental education scholar Mitchell Thomashow writes, “Consider two different ways of greeting the day. You can step outdoors wherever you may be in order to feel the temperature, wind conditions, light, sounds, and smells, or whatever visceral impressions fill your senses. Or you can immediately glance at your phone to check your messages, email, or whatever virtual information gets you oriented.”[4] On good days, I might begin the workday at my writing desk at home, which faces out a window, and quietly work on research and writing projects for an hour before the rest of the family awakens. Sometimes I might check in online with some colleagues who also arise early to write before turning to our other daily tasks. It’s a tiny act of resistance to the culture of accelerated and sometimes frenetic work demanded by the pressures facing so many of our institutions.[5] But more often than I would like to admit, I start my day by checking my institutional email on my smart phone before my feet even hit the floor. It’s a seemingly small thing, but the net result is that, from the start, my mind is in a reactive state. I respond to every demand, every email, every knock on my door, with little sense of purpose or vision. I end the day exhausted, my eyes and shoulders strained, with seemingly little satisfaction to show for it. This way of being is not sustainable, of course. And as orientation approached this fall, I was confronted in a new and urgent way with the limitations of approaching my work without mental and emotional intentionality. Even deeper, I was confronted with the poverty of the life of the mind absent a steady, trusting, and grounding practice that honors my own body’s knowledge. Thanks to a benign but persistent virus that took up residence in my inner ear in August, I found myself unable to be in crowded spaces, to process complex visual or aural stimulation, to look at my computer screen, or even read without becoming very dizzy. I would clench my jaw and “power through” whatever task was before me, practically racing back to my office to close my eyes—no fluorescents, please!—or rest my head on my desk until the next thing. I barely got my syllabus revised and was grateful for a colleague who volunteered to build my course website for me. To my surprise, though, I could work in the yard, walk the dogs, and even do yoga with little difficulty. The body that found itself queasy and unsteady after just twenty minutes of looking at my computer screen was calmed and centered by these practices that grounded me in sensory experience, slowed my mind, and allowed room to reflect, think, and be present. Embodied practices that I once had perhaps too eagerly broadcast as a countercultural “choice” became a necessity and a source of salvation. As I write this, episodes of dizziness and disorientation are, happily and as expected, becoming less frequent and less severe. Yet I am clinging to a reordered pattern for the morning, landing me here, on my porch, greeting the day with all of my senses, watching the leaves turn and listening to a chorus of birds and bugs. There is so much to do, it’s true. But might you also find a place to pay attention to the world, and your body’s place in it? A place where you could sit, just for a while?   [1] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso Books, 2004), 26-27. [2] Furthermore, the ways in which learning is structured in so many of our institutions reveal a disembodied “implicit curriculum” observable in how our classrooms are arranged, the kinds of assignments we make, and the reduction of embodied exercises and classroom breaks to reluctant “accommodations” we make so that the mind can continue the work of learning, unencumbered by the inconvenient needs of the human body. See Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 97. [3] It is, of course, important to acknowledge that “embodiment” has historically carried additional risks for too many scholars and students in institutions with unexamined racist, sexist, and heteronormative assumptions. See, for example, Carol B. Duncan, “Visible/Invisible: Teaching Popular Culture and the Vulgar Body in Black Religious Studies,” in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, edited by Nancy Lynne Westfield (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008), 3-15. [4] Mitchell Thomashow, To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), 75. [5] Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, “Introduction,” in The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 1-15.

There are two subjects about which I am passionate as a teacher and scholar: leadership formation and decolonial praxis. These areas may seem to be at odds with one another, at least in white western worldviews; but disrupting colonial frameworks and ways of being and doing leadership in ministry and theological education is a necessary endeavor for those of us who continue to long for worlds beyond death-dealing hegemony and homogeneity. As an early career Latina teacher and scholar, I feel this longing in my bones. Perhaps more importantly, I experience these longings from students both in my courses and in the wider institution. But what do you do when the very students who express such deep desires for change—even explicitly longing for a dismantling of western/white/colonial structures, processes, and epistemologies—function in ways that are wholly aligned with “possession, control, and mastery” as the ultimate display of white, self-sufficient masculinity, as Willie James Jennings articulates?[1] In other words, how does one teach decolonial praxis in a course about decolonial praxis, particularly with well-meaning and well-intentioned white students who praxis coloniality? The first time that I taught a course on ministry leadership and decolonial praxis, I was not prepared for the embedded resistances that I encountered from students, particularly socially and/or politically progressive white students, that sometimes contradicted the very praxes we were reflecting upon that same week. Of course, such actions were so subtle and automatic that the students themselves were unable to recognize them; but that’s how colonialism works its deadly charms—in the corners and cracks of the unconscious. As educators, our most important task is to unmask that which lies just underneath the surface of what students articulate in word, speech, and affect, as a learning for the whole, and with kindness, respect, and compassion. As bell hooks said, “We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community.”[2] After that first course, and like any good scholar, I researched what others had written about decolonial pedagogies in the classroom and white racial identity formation and resistances. I also engaged in wisdom-seeking conversations with trusted educators and scholars on their own practices for mitigating colonial praxes in their classrooms. Through this process, what began to appear were patterns of behavior for what I and others had experienced. In gaining clarity about the nature and origins of some of these movements on the part of white students, I was better able to respond in the moment and incorporate pedagogies and practices to mitigate these in my courses. Here are just a few of the subtle embedded resistances that were unmasked.[3] Co-optation. Whether it be in online or in-person discussions, many white students—unintentionally and without awareness—often take up time, space, and/or voice in class conversations and take over ideas, characteristics, and practices of nonwhite others, collapsing them into their own worldviews and subsuming them for their own purposes. For example, I noticed that a few white students in my class resonated with particular attributes or characteristics associated with some postcolonial and decolonial communities and leadership. Identifying that their own communities and/or leadership exemplified some of these attributes, they signified their ministries to be “decolonial” (yet remained situated contextually as majority white, middle-upper class congregations not necessarily allied with those most harmed by colonization and colonialism nor engaged in any kind of stated decolonial praxis). These attempts at possession and control also come in the form of collapsing decolonization into movements for gender, LGBTQ, or socioeconomic equity without acknowledging the racialized foundations and socio-historical trajectories of colonialism. Ultimately, students’ desires to not be seen as carriers of colonialism resulted in them perpetuating the very colonial characteristics they were attempting to deny. Silence. Several of the scholars with whom I spoke shared their experiences of white students maintaining silence in class in order to give space to students of color to speak or share or, more often than not, out of a fear of doing or saying “the wrong thing.” Unfortunately, this itself highlights the privilege one has to practice opacity as an exercise of power, leaving others to perform vulnerability for the benefit of white students’ learning. In my experience, white students—and even white colleagues—who say little to nothing in intercultural or interracial spaces often end up perpetuating the “white gaze” on students and colleagues of color as if they are being monitored or put upon to present in particular ways. Resignation. When the depths of our collective entanglements with colonialism are realized more fully, one of the most frequent responses from white students is to “burn it all down,” a form of resignation to the irreparability of religious and secular systems alike. It’s as if starting over completely, dismantling current structures, or working outside of institutional church spaces to create something new will rid us of our colonial ways of being and doing. Such a totalizing response arises from the privilege of being able to transcend or separate oneself from those very structures with little consequence or loss of power. Students of color in my courses have tended to not articulate such statements because the legacies and forces of colonization impact them more intensely and intimately than their white counterparts (though, of course, intersections exist). These students have not had the option or power to “burn it all down” and have learned to navigate within such systems for survival, with many finding spaces of joy and flourishing in spite of colonialism’s strongholds. Simply burning something down doesn’t make it disappear; it simply takes on another form. Unmasking such praxes in the classroom takes discernment, patience, and care on the part of the instructor. In the next blog post, I will share some of my pedagogical learnings around unmasking.   [1] Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020). [2] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43. [3] While postcolonialism and decoloniality are intersectional in nature—meaning that they also seek to dismantle imposing eurowestern constructions of gender, sexuality, class, caste, etc.—the construction of racial hierarchies and white supremacy in the subjugation of non-white “others” assumes, historically and presently, a foundational place in the colonial project. Furthermore, because I noticed this phenomenon taking place with white students (regardless of their gender, sexual identity, or class), the praxes named here necessitate a specific focus on race as a socially constructed phenomenon.

One of my favorite genres of fantasy fiction is the “magical door” story – tales where a person finds a mystical, strange doorway into another world. Alice in Wonderland is probably the best-known example, but I’m more fond of the contemporary takes, especially Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway (2016) and the Wayward Children series that follows it. In McGuire’s books, children disappear into doorways that lead them to worlds where they feel profoundly at home – sometimes pretty ones, like a world where everything is made of candy, but just as often menacing worlds where lightning can raise people from the dead or where they fight alongside merpeople against the Eldritch horrors of the deep. Besides being the ultimate escapist fantasy for anybody who felt wildly ill-at-ease and out of place in their adolescent years (everybody, perhaps?), these stories also convey that we aren’t really looking for a docile, perfect place to be – we just want to be where we know we fit. This magical door framework recently snuck up on me during an exercise on teaching – we were asked to artistically represent our teaching selves, or the “bother” that spurs us on as professors. Without realizing the connection to some of my favorite books, I quickly crocheted some drab ribbons into a doorway – and on the other side of that doorway, I painted wild and colorful movement, represented in glitter and pom poms and sticky foam. This is how I see my teaching in theology – trying to coax students through a doorway into a world that is bright and overwhelming, chaotic but lovely. Looking at my hasty picture afterwards, I found myself realizing again why students can be so hesitant to jump into this wild world. The doorposts are pretty, in their own way, and they certainly are familiar. We all cling to groundedness when we’re uncertain, and higher education is constantly uncertain, with students suddenly struggling with topics they once found simple, oscillating between the career plans they expected and the ones that better fit their skills, fretting at each new professor’s style of teaching and grading. While my students as a group aren’t particularly religious, for some, their fundamental beliefs about God or the universe or that everything happens for a reason are one of the few stable parts of their identity. My theology class threatens to shake up even that. So, at least on the tough days, they cling to the doorposts and lintels like a toddler avoiding a bath, grasping onto anything rooted until the danger has passed. Or, maybe just as often, they go quiet and inward, not wanting to step through the portal into a conversation they feel unprepared for. Questions and options seem to help – “Do you want to get into groups now, or should we do a poll first?” “I know we might not know much about vows of silence, but who in here needs complete quiet to do homework?” I get them talking about themselves first, and our content second. That way, they can peek through the windows before deciding whether to come outside, and that first tiny step might be enough to build momentum. It’s a helpful reminder that my students are always doing hard work to engage with me and the readings I assign – almost any class day brings up questions. “Do I believe this?” “Could I live that way?” “What commitments would I die for?” “What commitments will I live for?” Even for the non-religious, theology class always holds the potential for deep introspection alongside factual learning, and introspection is hard. With my doorway image in mind, I can recall the importance of gentleness and compassion in my role – not easy-ness, but a gentleness that reminds me to notice the uncertainty, even fear behind the disengagement, and to be ready to try again and again to connect with each individual. I can see more clearly how chaotic and overwhelming the field seems, especially to those who have never crossed the threshold, and look for ways to reassure them that there is something familiar and good on the other side, and that I’ll accompany them until they find it. I remember well a young Latina student pulling me aside after the last day of class and whispering to me, almost like a secret, “Until this class, I didn’t realize I could be both Catholic and a feminist!” She had found her place to belong in the mess of it all. It helps me remember how badly we all want to find a place where we feel welcome, and to create that with both my affect and my syllabus. Every day is a doorway in theology class, and my role is to stand behind it, beckoning, and reassuring, “It’s wonderful here. All you have to do is take another step.”

I remember the first time I felt a sense of awe and wonder about theology. It was in my required Problem of God class at Georgetown University, where I received my undergraduate degree. I had picked a section of the course based on my interest in a list of readings provided with the registration materials the school sent me before I started my freshman year. The professor of that course turned out to be Fr. Thomas King, SJ, who had a reputation as an excellent teacher—something I had no idea about at the time I signed up for the course. I do know I was very fortunate to have done so as my friends who wanted to take his class in the following semester often had trouble finding a spot in his classes. At this point—over twenty years later—I remember little of the specific content of that class, but in terms of overall structure, Fr. King had basically divided everything into groups of three. We examined a variety of readings—from Augustine to Sartre—and Fr. King’s lectures helped us to understand the way each reading explained the nature of God. In the final class of the semester, Fr. King reviewed all the previous content, illustrating how each author’s approach to God (even Sartre!) could fall into one of three categories of ways of talking about God—ways that ultimately could be thought of as an understanding of God as the Father, an understanding of God as the Son, and an understanding of God as the Spirit. As everyone packed up on that final note, my friend Mike and I sat in our seats, completely dumbfounded. Mike turned to me and said, “He just solved the problem of God.” In that moment, for me, a spark had been lit. I had a sense of awe and wonder about the concepts we had examined, and I wanted more of that sense.  In this piece, I aimed to get at a representation of this spark of awe and wonder. The triangle represents the mystery of the divine—a triangle to represent the Trinitarian God of my tradition of Christianity, with a question mark to show how humans, in this life, can never fully know or understand the divine. The heart is meant to represent the sense of awe and wonder that I feel. I would describe it as a sense of joy burning in my heart—similar to the language Blaise Pascal used in his “memorial,” a description of a mystical experience he had that is often published as part of his Pensées, and echoing, of course, Augustine’s idea of the restless heart. The hands are meant to represent my continued seeking of that awe and wonder in my study and research. After creating this, I realized that my imagery had unintentionally mirrored a drawing that one of my other undergraduate professors, Fr. Otto Hentz, SJ, used to draw on the board. In my senior year, I happened to meet an alum who told me this image was all I needed to know in Fr. Hentz’s class—that the triangle represented the mystery of God and the two lines represented the human response to the mystery of God. I recall a bit more discussion in Fr. Hentz’s class about our reading assignments, but his lectures almost always included a reference to this image. When I first considered graduate studies in theology, these Jesuits were the model of the teacher that I wanted to be—one who narrates the content through lecture to try to amaze my students and thus produce the same spark of awe and wonder in my students that had struck me so many years previously. However, I eventually drew on a different undergraduate experience of awe and wonder as a model for my teaching—the experience of reading Pascal’s Pensées in French while studying abroad in Strasbourg, France. This was in the context of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature course, not a theology course, but as I read and interpreted the text for myself in that context, I found a sense of profoundness and truth in what Pascal wrote. For example, one of my favorite fragments states, “Why do you kill me? What! do you not live on the other side of the water? If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner. But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just” (fr. 293). This fragment really illustrates the absurdity of the ways we divide and separate our human family. I found through this experience while studying abroad that I could find the sense of awe and wonder for myself, that I didn’t need a professor to tell it to me. Rather, reading, interpreting, and making meaning for myself through these texts could produce that same sense of awe and wonder. Thus, when I teach today, I aim to help my students learn to read, interpret, and discuss texts for themselves. I know that not everyone will find that spark of awe and wonder, but I still aim to provide them with an opportunity for it.

Last semester I spent two weeks in Zambia teaching a Doctor of Ministry course to students from eight different African countries. This was an important experience for me because it magnified many of the similar cross or intercultural exchanges that I have experienced in the classroom here in the US. Of concern to me was the notion of cultural competency in order to have a creative classroom experience that enhanced students’ learning. Cultural competency may be defined simply as “the ability to successfully teach students who come from cultures other than our own.” It has also been defined as “the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.” The first definition is a bit too utilitarian for me. It is measured simply by teaching students, and students learn all kinds of things from us—including sometimes what they do not want to be like. The second is a better definition, since the focus is on the interaction between the teacher and students. I think it is important to study our students and learn as much as possible about them, in order to build rapport with them and creatively relate our course content to their lives and contexts. As I prepared for this experience in Zambia, there were many contextual aspects to consider. First, I was clearly an outsider. Even upon arrival at the international airport, individuals looked at me and could tell I was not only different, but also an outsider. Many of the students came from countries that suffered under the yoke of colonialism, and much of my training in the Academy has sensitized me to its effects and the necessary work of conscientization among the oppressed.  Secondly, I had to consider how distance would affect us. In African countries, students are generally used to getting to know the instructor and spending time with them. I had met the students virtually via online discussion boards, but their cultures require a person-to-person engagement. Several students had limited internet services and/or sporadic cellular services. Sometimes their cities experienced brownouts or blackouts that limited their online engagement and even their submission of assignments in a timely manner. Being present with the students made a difference and they made it known to me how much they appreciated me being there in person.  This type of situation can be frustrating. Conflict may arise unnecessarily. My ethnic background is that I am Latinx and specifically of Honduran heritage. I have also been immersed in North American education culture for most of my adult life. The Academy has its own culture and expectations. I constantly asked myself how I was to navigate these cultural differences and build bridges to students with completely different experiences and expectations in the classroom. The heart of the matter was that I first had to get over myself. I am Latinx, but even among my community I have always heard things like “hay que mejorar la raza” (“we must improve the race,” meaning we must act European and live among “whiter” races); or “trabajar como negro para vivir como blanco” (“working like a black person in order to live like a white person,” implying that white people always live better than black people). Work among people from different ethnic identities and cultures requires humility. We must have a posture of asking questions and learning from the other—not passing judgment. We must become students of our students. I went into the Academy to be ever inquisitive, to seek out new experiences, to have new ideas, and to somehow make this a better world. This meant that I also had to move beyond my own stereotypes of Africa. Colonizers referred to it as “the dark continent.” One of the first references I had to Africa was seeing hunger portrayed on television through human disasters in Ethiopia and Somalia. More recently, a president referred to countries outside the US as “s—hole countries.” Our mental sketches and mental images need deconstruction. But deconstruction is the easiest part of the process. Anyone can tear down, criticize, or point out flaws and errors. The hard part is to reconstruct a new just and fair structure or mental scheme once the previous ones have been torn down. As for creativity, on the first day of class I asked my students to create a list of positive African values and ideals that they strove to live for. Among the many things they shared were Ubuntu and music. Ubuntu is a South African term that means “I am because you are,” or “humanity towards others.” It is a philosophy adopted by many people of Africa that emphasizes relationships, listening, and being heard. Ubuntu gives them a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in their relationships with others. Music stood out to me because music is everywhere in Africa. Through drums, in their ministries, and in their homes, my students in Zambia love music. I asked myself how I could use these values to create a classroom environment that would appeal to my students. Our classrooms in North America tend to be cold, dry, and stale. We tend to see education as disseminating the right information so the students can think the right way and act the right way in this world. It is a manner of doing education that prioritizes intellectual ability to the detriment of students from different cultures. The students in Zambia appeared to be pointing me in a direction through Ubuntu that was warm, relational, and alive. The concern was not only in receiving the right information or learning the right way of doing things, but in being in the world and being in right relationship with one another. Music accentuated the quality of pathos, in the sense of evoking emotions or affections that seemed to satisfy a desire to be in right relationship with one another. After finding out what the students valued, I decided to tweak my lesson plans and include activities that were more dialogical and that included music. In my following blogs, I will continue discussing specific ways in which Ubuntu and music helped establish a positive rapport with my students from African countries.

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.

Reading. Our family was a reading household. Newspapers, magazines, books – purchased and borrowed from many kinds of libraries – were sprinkled throughout our home. Each day three newspapers were delivered to our house: the Philadelphia Enquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News. On Tuesdays and Thursdays my dad purchased the Philadelphia Tribune from the corner store. On Sundays, my mother received the New York Times for the fashions and crossword puzzle. Also, our list of magazines subscriptions was plentiful. Each month the postman delivered: Psychology Today, Ebony, Jet, Better Homes & Gardens, Reader’s Digest, Life, National Geographic, Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook. My brother and I shared (fought over) Highlights. We also regularly purchased comic books, coloring books, and puzzle books. When my parents purchased a set of the World Book Encyclopedia and proudly displayed them in the living room for guests to see, my brother and I were baffled by their excitement. We made use of those encyclopedias for many, many years. ~~~~~~~ We think of literature as being divorced from people, when in fact, people are intimately connected by reading. What we choose to read is often cherished. I didn’t realize it as a child, but now I know that connections between family members, friends, and colleagues are strengthened, deepened and improved by reading. We can, a little bit, glimpse an individual’s inner-self by understanding their reading choices. ~~~~~~~ The required reading in courses speaks about who the teacher is. ~~~~~~~ By the time I was age 10 or 11, the periodical I read most consistently and thoroughly was Psychology Today. Some of the content I understood. Most – I did not. I was aided by the well-placed photos, bold sub-titles, and the frequently included colorful charts and grafts. I read the magazine because my dad read it. My dad was a school psychologist. Every two weeks, he checked-out books from the library on child and adolescent psychology, pedagogy, epistemology and anthropology. At the library, I helped him in the card catalogue search using the Dewey Decimal system. Of course, when I tried to read his library books, I could not understand them – too dry and no pictures. But I quickly learned that I could read, at least a little bit, the Psychology Today magazine. I read what my father read to better understand his curiosities, interests and concerns. Reading what he read helped me glean his love for teaching and his commitment to children. ~~~~~~~ Reading illumines. For several years, I took Master of Divinity students with me to the professional guild meeting and conference of scholars of religion. Together, we attended the American Academy of Religion and the Society for the Study of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL). The best part of attending the conference with my students was their joy in meeting the authors of the books we assigned in courses. When they met the authors, asked for their books to be signed, and took selfies (yes – it was that kind of moment!) – my hunch is that the students’ respect and perspective about the texts deepened. One such joyous moment was when a group of students gasped, then ran down the hotel corridor to meet Dr. James Cone. Dr. Cone, flattered, paused, took selfies and signed all their books. Many other scholars at the meeting received similar “star” treatment. We had fun. ~~~~~~~ What we read does not float in the ethers untethered from their authors and readers. ~~~~~~~ At the start of my courses, soon after rehearsing the syllabus, I would show pictures and or have my students view TedTalks and YouTube videos of the authors of the assigned texts. Throughout the course I invited the authors of the texts as guests – either live or on zoom. I wanted students to experience the authors’ voice, personality, and quirkiness. Inviting authors into the classroom brought an excitement and added dynamism to the conversation. It matters who wrote the book. Knowing the author’s social location, political bend, and intention assists the student in reading critically, emphatically, and with deeper meaning-making possibility. Hearing directly from the author about their scholarly lives and writing made learning more human. I wanted students, especially when the authors were BIPOC colleagues, to know that people who write books are as assorted as the books themselves. ~~~~~~~ Ask your students what kinds of texts they routinely like to read and why. Ask yourself what you like to read and why. ~~~~~~~ I have learned that an effective way to gather people, have good conversations, establish relationships, is to start a reading group.  Twice, just after moving to a new town where I knew hardly any one, I started a reading group. Both groups, in relative quick fashion, coalesced into a group who enjoyed one another’s company. In both cases, even though I no longer live in either place, I still maintain friendships with the people who were members of those groups. The intimacy of reading, discussing, sharing, sometimes arguing and fussing, together, is the stuff of friendship and collegiality. ~~~~~~~ Invite students to texts they would not find on their own. The magic of reading is that it can and does connect, expand and illumine all of us.