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Our seminary recently hosted a symposium on beauty. For the occasion, I performed a musical interpretation of a digital art piece entitled “By night and by day,” part of a larger composite of cloud themes depicting God’s presence with his people by artist Sarah Bernhardt. I explored a range of sonorities on the double bass to tell the Exodus story, to depict God’s leading of Israel out of Egypt by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. To guide me in my portrayal of the theme of divine presence, I composed a musical setting based on a melody from a Latin American song entitled El Señor es mi luz (The Lord is My Light) based on Psalm 27. The psalm speaks of Israel’s trust in the Lord’s protection from adversaries who assail her during her earthly pilgrimage. The psalmist also sings of Israel’s eschatological hope to dwell in the house of the Lord forever and behold his beauty in his temple. In my composition I employed word painting, a technique used in sixteenth century music to match a concept in a written text with a corresponding musical effect. The following description of the flow of the piece explains how I used the range of the double bass to communicate various aspects of the biblical story. High pitch harmonics placing fingers over strings      The piece begins with a variation of the psalm melody using high pitch harmonics, which are achieved by touching the strings without pressing them. This technique communicates a sense of God’s presence on high as Israel prepares to cross the sea. It is a calming presence; God is in control. Energetic tremolos with the bow      The harmonics are followed by energetic tremolos made with rapid bow movements to the chorus of the hymn. This technique expresses the tumultuous movement of God’s people away from their enemies, with the pillars of fire and cloud ahead of them as they rapidly (and perhaps a bit anxiously) make their way through the great waters. Hitting strings with the bow’s wood (col legno) to introduce the theme (chorus)      To express Israel’s proximity to the waters of salvation, I play the psalm melody with the back of the wooden bow (col legno technique), evoking images of drops of water falling on or sprinkling faces and bodies as people prepare to cross the sea. Flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow (verse, stanza)      Then I play a flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow, depicting Israel’s safe arrival to the Promised land, which anticipates the final beatific vision of God’s people in his presence. Festive plucking to a Cuban guaracha       Plucking the strings (pizzicato), I play a Cuban guaracha (salsa) rhythm based on the song’s chord progression to express the mood of eschatological fiesta after the people’s safe passage through turbulent waters into the Promised Land. Playing a Panamanian tamborito rhythm percussively on the wood of the bass…      Finally, I sing the hymn’s chorus in Spanish while tapping the top wooden shoulders of the instrument to a tamborito Panamanian rhythmic pattern, using the bass in a percussive way. So, what makes the piece a Latin American interpretation? The most obvious element is the use of a psalm in the Spanish language. But the more interesting ones are the plucking of strings to a Cuban Guaracha (salsa) and the drumming of the wood on the shoulder of the bass to a Panamanian tamborito. But why infuse the text with a Latin American spin? Here the context of the performance matters. I have performed this piece in three settings with similar audiences—predominantly White, monolingual (English), mid-Western church audiences in the United States. By incorporating these elements in the performance, I am inviting the audience to imagine a world in which the biblical story is told, heard, and sung through Latino/a eyes. I am using music as a gentle challenge to see the biblical story in the context of the catholicity or universality of the church, which is a church of people from many ethnicities, languages, and nations. I am also raising awareness about the presence of forgotten Latino/a neighbors whose voices are often not heard, who crave for belonging, justice, and the psalmist’s hope in God’s deliverance. By foregrounding these elements into the piece, my double bass functions as an extension of the Latino teacher-performer’s own identity as a proclaimer of God’s story, a bearer of an inclusive catholicity, and a herald of hospitality, justice, and hope.

“You are a creature in the midst of creation.” Those words, which I have heard or recited in versions of the Ignatian Examen countless times in the past decade, kept returning to my mind as we gathered in our outdoor classroom. That space and time made it possible to better notice and appreciate our communities of fellow creatures, human and nonhuman. As I noted in my first blog in this series, my students in “Contemporary Theology” and I found it almost impossible to sustain discussion indoors while masked and socially distanced. Outside, though, our conversations often flowed freely. Experienced educators work hard to cultivate a sense of belonging, and each class develops its own collective personality. I have noticed that the classroom communities that I have had since beginning to teach outside have often been markedly stronger—students are more resilient, more engaged, and more willing to be challenged constructively—than those I was able to foster indoors. I took primary responsibility for setting up and tearing down the classroom—including moving our portable whiteboard, stored chairs, and a table for my laptop for Zooming students. But I invited students to share in such responsibilities and many commented that doing so enhanced their learning and sense of belonging. By meeting outside, despite the challenges, students noted that they knew they were doing their part to keep our community safe. The distinctive contingencies and flexibility required to be outside enhanced our sense of togetherness. The specialness of the opportunity to be outside seems to have primed us to attend well to one another and to the unique tasks of the moment, working to ensure that we could safely and fruitfully continue meeting. Neighbors and members of our uncommon community often passed by and through our classroom. Students, faculty, staff, administrators, prospective students, and other visitors passed by, reminding us of the institutional context of our shared work and of our accountability to one another. We were reminded of our relationships with and impacts on the nonhuman neighbors in our community constantly. I was not the only one to root around in the mulch—one day when I reached into the soil to show my students the mycelium, I discovered instead a beautiful millipede going about their own work of decomposition. We were joined by towhees, robins, and countless other birds who made a ruckus in the leaves and mulch of the flower beds as they searched for food. Sometimes five-lined-skinks, catching the sun with electric blue tails, skittered by or paused to soak up the heat from the bricks. Bald eagles, ospreys, red-tailed hawks, black vultures, and turkey vultures soared above us majestically. The bird song sometimes overwhelmed us in its constancy and diversity. In late summer and early fall cicadas serenaded us with the birds, and in the spring upland chorus frogs and spring peepers made their contributions to the soundscape. On a warm early spring day in March one class asked if we could meet for class on the bank of the French Broad River down the steps from our normal classroom. An otter, a great blue heron, and countless bluebirds joined us that day—or rather, we joined them. Sometimes harmless but intimidating carpenter bees insisted on participating in our discussion, buzzing and bumping along the picnic tables. On multiple occasions I had to rescue wasps and spiders from terrified students, gently scooping them up and relocating them away from danger. God had created them and declared them good after all (Genesis 1.21, 24, 25), our ignorance and incredulity notwithstanding. Just as God does not need us (Acts 17.25), I reminded everyone (including myself) that God does not need them; but God nevertheless calls us and them into being out of love. One September day immediately following class a student shouted my name from just up the stairs: “Dr. Gordon, there’s a snake!” A midland rat snake was crossing the road towards our classroom. The distressed serpent had crawled through erosion control mesh that was cutting and constricting its body. It was a poignant reminder of how human decisions and assumptions cause suffering for our nonhuman neighbors. I borrowed a pocketknife from a student, freed the snake, and released it down the hill. Once, a flock of thousands upon thousands of starlings brought class to a complete standstill. The deafening cacophony of their calls left us no choice but to watch as they moved from tree to tree over an area where the undergrowth consisted solely of English ivy. Both groups of organisms were clearly thriving, but they do so at the expense of our native nonhuman neighbors. They are both here in east Tennessee, I reminded us all, because of human choices. In my classroom without walls, we often talked about God’s transcendence and otherness, but we learned also of God’s nearness, God’s care for our particularity, and that our particularity is bound up in countless relationships with other persons, and with our nonhuman neighbors—both animate and stationary. Such lessons came to us outside without much effort on my part. Resting in the cool of autumn and the early warmth of spring, listening to the birds and cicadas and frogs and lawnmowers and children, smelling the damp mold and blooming roses, setting up and putting away chairs or shade canopies, we could sense and know well our connections to one another, to the place itself, and to God, as “creatures in the midst of creation.”

Experienced teachers recognize the need to continually learn about the art and craft of teaching. With the aim of improving our own teaching, a group of Wabash Center colleagues and I set out to observe classrooms beyond typical higher education settings. Our first session was with a museum docent.  The plan was for our small group of colleagues to meet the docent, then along with a group of first-graders, take the tour of featured exhibits. I was very excited about the museum tour and the first-graders. A museum docent, volunteer or staff, is a person who leads tours of exhibits in museums. The docent has interest in art, might be an artist themselves, desires to interact with persons who come to the museum for an experience of the art, and desires to assist persons to discover their own interpretation the artwork. Docents are guides who help museum visitors better see the artwork. Our docent was named Ann Marie (not her real name). She had been a guide, teacher, trainer in this museum for more than fifteen years. The colleagues and I arrived at the museum before the first-grade class. We were greeted in the lobby of the museum by Ann Marie. Ann Marie was a white woman, mid-to-late fifties, with a cheery disposition. She gave us a brief overview of the museum and talked about her responsibilities as a docent and docent trainer. She said she liked her job and that she had started as a volunteer, and now she was on staff. She said that during the quarantine the museum, like all others, had gone dormant, but now, with a mask requirement, they were open for business and had a regular schedule of visitors. The first-grade class arrived. My colleagues and I stood to the side as approximately 25 African American children, age 6 & 7, along with about 8 chaperones (likely parents and aids) quietly filled the museum lobby. The group entered the museum like people would a library or church – with a kind of quietness of spirit and anticipation.  Ann Marie instructed the group to take a seat on the floor. I watched as the children, under the guidance of their chaperones, made three orderly rows. The children were talking quietly and waiting for the tour to begin.   As I watched the children interact, I had pangs of remembering field trips from my elementary school days. Those memories reminded me why I loved learning and why I have wanted to be a teacher since childhood. The chaperones, standing, placed themselves at the edge of the group and kept a watchful eye. I noticed a young white woman sitting on the floor in the third row. She sat with the children, relaxed and talked calmly with the children seated around her. She was the only white person in the group of children and chaperones. As I observed, I thought this likely the first museum many of the children had visited. I was glad these children had the opportunity to leave the classroom for learning in the wider-world. I felt my heart open. Ann Marie approached the seated children and began her presentation. Her welcoming and cheerful manner quickly devolved into what sounded like a canned speech, withering into a series of questions meant to prompt specific responses from the children. The children were instructed to raise their hands and wait to be called upon to answer the questions. With each question from Ann Marie, multiple children raised a hand to participate. Once Ann Marie finished with the question-and-answer portion of her presentation, she informed the children she had instructions for how the group should navigate the exhibits. Ann Marie said in a dry and disciplining tone to the children, Please do not run. Please do not touch any art work. Please do not talk when I am talking. Do not walk on the stairs without holding onto the handrail. Do not leave the group. Do not wonder. Do not call out to speak. Do not ……. With each “Do Not ….” command spoken by Ann Marie my heart sank. I cringed. The experience of wonder, art, creativity and interpretation was becoming an exercise in compliance, obedience, right-doing, and rule following. At the end of the long list of rules, the children were still quite attentive, Ann Marie took a long, dramatic pause. I suspect she was trying to reinforce the point that these rules were important. During the pause, the white woman sitting on the floor in the third row raised her hand. When she got Ann Marie’s attention she stood up. The young white woman stepped out from amongst the children so all could see and hear her. In this moment I realized she was the teacher. Teacher said in a firm tone, Class, I want you to remember what we talked about while we prepared to come to the museum. Remember? We talked about all the kinds of things you CAN DO. Who remembers what we CAN DO? Teacher paused for the children to think and respond. Several first graders raised their hands to signal they had answers. Taking turns as they responded, the children answered saying: We can look with our eyes. We can enjoy what we see. We can ask questions. We can appreciate the colors. We can talk about what we see. We can see the pictures. We can say what we think about the pictures. We can see what artists drew and painted. We can say if we like it or if we do not like it … or both. We can look at all the different kinds of art. Teacher responded, Yes, to all of those. Very well done! Teacher looked at Ann Marie and said, We are as interested in what we can do as what we cannot do. I was relieved that Teacher had spoken. I was grateful that Teacher advocated for her students. Teacher had a clear vision of the kind of learning experience she wanted for her students and she spoke-up for that experience to happen. Learners, children and adults, are formed by the theories, concepts, and lessons of the classroom. They are equally formed by the ecologies, experiences, relationships and rules which frame the learning. We learn as much from how we are treated by the people and by the institution as we do from the curriculum materials. The brilliance of Teacher, in advocating for the learning of her students, was that her advocacy was not meant to provoke a confrontation. Teacher’s advocacy did not hinge upon telling the docent that her methods were unwarranted or even biased. Teacher had prepared her students for an experience of curiosity, wonder, exploration and discovery. When the docent tried to diminish that experience to an experience of NO, CANNOT, MUST NOT, SHOULD NOT, DO NOT, Teacher intervened by making use of her authority and voice.  Teacher had authority because she was the teacher. Teacher simply, elegantly, and forthrightly used her voice to reframe the rules and signal to the class that they were free to learn, expected to explore, and be free. On behalf of your learners, Teacher, I thank you.

More important than any topic I teach is teaching my students how to learn. Facts can change. The percentage of Christians in the United States that I teach first-year students today may be different by the time they graduate. The anti-racism landscape in this particular moment is different from the one laid out the 2014 Religion and Popular Culture textbook I use. What will the situation in Myanmar be like in a few years? Such facts, on their own, aren’t worth much beyond the grade they might get a student if she successfully memorizes and regurgitates them on a test. But skills—in question asking, in studying, in note taking, in writing, in critiquing, in empathy, in appreciating differences, in recognizing our own limitations, in knowing what motivates us and why we (do or should) care—are what will stay with students, long after they leave my class and go out into the world. Many faculty grumble these days about lowering admissions standards and how students are so much less prepared now than they were back in the “good old days.” Part of it, of course, is a pandemic. Sophomores at my university missed the end of their senior year of high school (with its important rites of passage, like prom and graduation) and they had a totally online first year in college, with its isolation, Zoom fatigue, and poor pedagogy (not exactly ideal). None of us are at our best. Part of it, too, is shifts in K-12 education, the pressures of standardized testing, the diversification and democratization of higher education, and the rise of a new generation, with all of its own quirks. But, like many other educators before me, I’m persuaded that we need to meet students where they are. We need to teach the students we have. If a skill is necessary for success in my class, then it is something I teach. If I want students to write essays, for example, I can’t assume they will even know what I’m asking for (since professors in other disciplines, even in my own department, may not mean the same thing by that word—one of Dan Melzer’s very interesting findings from Assignments Across the Curriculum), let alone how to write an “essay” well. Without such explicit instruction, I’m simply rewarding the students who came into my class already knowing how to do the thing, which basically just rewards students of certain demographics who are already advantaged anyway. Not good. Usually college campuses have a lot of great resources to support students “learning how to learn” (sometimes used interchangeably with the concept of “meta-cognition,” which simply means thinking about how you think). We have a Learning Center here, with support for writing, presentations, and more, as well as a Learning Strategies Center that I always recommend to students for just these purposes. And there are a few books I regularly turn to for inspiration, including Saundra Yancy McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn (and its companion, Teach Yourself How to Learn, for students). But I include various opportunities in my classes too, since research into how we learn demonstrates how effective it is to teach with meta-cognition in mind. Here is a sampling of what I’ve tried: I ask students what the purpose of studying religion even is, assign them the task of looking around online for justifications, and then have them write what the point of studying one of their other subjects is. Why bother? Who cares? Let’s figure out why this is worth our time. We talk about the origins of the study of religion, as well as concerns/critiques of the term and its associated field, and I encourage them to investigate the history of their other disciplines. I assign Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” (from her book Bird by Bird) and I ask students what they learned about the writing process from the piece, as well as which strategies they’d like to try. I show them some peer-review comments on an article of my own (and point out how much meaner scholars are to one another than I am to them!), but only after I show them the fancy-looking published piece. They need to understand that what’s final and polished is only a very small part of a long, arduous, and usually invisible process, which even experts undergo. I ask students how they might be able to use persuasive writing in other contexts. When you apply for a job, what are you doing in your cover letter? You are trying to make a persuasive argument (hire me!) and support it with reasoning and evidence (here’s my past work experience, here are my relevant skills). Practice this skill in my class; apply it for the rest of your lives. I convey that something like writing (or math, as Carol Dweck originally studied) is a skill and can be learned with practice, over time, vs. something fixed and static. I share examples from my own life (along with embarrassments and failures) of learning, such as my bike-riding journey. I ask students to share their annotation strategies after doing a reading and show a projection of some of the notes I’ve taken on the same piece (highlighting what I made notes on, as well as how and why); I ask them to write down new note-taking strategies they’d like to try. I put students in groups or assign reading responses and ask them to figure out what the main argument in a scholarly article is, how that author supports the argument (i.e., with reasoning and evidence), and what their confusions and critiques are. I explain this is the same process I use, as laid out on the rubric, for reading and evaluating their own papers. I ask students to put the scholars’ ideas or claims into their own words, in class and on exams. I try to make exams, which are online and not timed, uncheatable (inspired by the work of James Lang), by asking students to apply what they’ve learned to novel and often current contexts (e.g., which definition of “pop culture” does this tweet from the Dalai Lama exemplify and why?) I have students fill out “exam wrappers,” in which after a test they reflect on their preparation and study strategies, what seemed to work well and what didn’t, what kinds of questions they missed (and what happened), and how they will adjust their approach for future tests. We generate a list of self-care strategies that can help students de-stress, especially around midterms. We do breathing exercises and body scans in class to help relax them for the day. I tell them about relevant research into how students (really, all people) learn: for instance, if they don’t take notes in class, and review those same notes, they basically won’t remember anything later on; if they cram right before a test, they might do okay, grade-wise, but they won’t retain anything for the next (cumulative) one. I tell students that we all learn better when we care about something, when we can discover the relevance to our own lives. I have them write weekly reflections that ask for a connection between what they learned in class and their lives outside of the classroom. I ask them, in small groups in class, to generate real examples of what we’re discussing that day (e.g., how have you noticed religion creating community in the world around you?) I tell them about various phenomena, like the Dunning-Kruger effect or confirmation bias, so they can be more aware of their own tendencies and correct for them. I ask them to share examples. In class, I read the children’s book They All Saw a Cat, which emphasizes differences in perceptions and how even our own views of ourselves are inevitably only partial, limited. I am experimenting with “ungrading” to put more of the responsibility and reflection into their own hands. On the final exam, I ask students what the most important thing they learned in the class was. (They rarely list some fact; instead, many of them write: “I learned how to think. Thank you.”)