Resources

My last blog was about assessment in immersive classes and outdoor or wild learning. As much as assessment is about how I assess my students in those classes, assessment is also for me. How do I know if my outdoor classes and lessons are working?“Assessment” often feels like a dirty word. Generally, I dread it when I see the word in an email subject or agenda line. At the end of the semester, after I get my grades in, I still have one more set of forms to fill out to “assess” the effectiveness of my courses in order to appease the accrediting gods. I hate that paperwork. It is the opposite of everything wild I am trying to do. But the intent is not wrong. I ought to be assessing the effectiveness of my classes, my assignments, and my learning activities so that I know if they’re helping my students learn. Perhaps I need to make adjustments so students can thrive. The paperwork I fill out for assessment does not usually lead to this thoughtfulness, but it is important that I continually assess throughout the semester. What seems to be helping or hindering student learning?At this point I need to articulate to myself why I take students outdoors. Is it just because I prefer being outdoors, or is there a particular point of learning that is facilitated better outdoors? Just as I assess how well students are meeting the goals I have for them, I have to assess how well my activities and locations meet the goals I have for them. Then I can assess how successful the activity is. Even if the answer is simply, “It’s a beautiful day and I’d rather be outdoors than in a stuffy classroom,” I can assess whether students learn what I hope they will learn that day or if being outdoors hinders their learning in some way. For instance, Was I harder to hear? Do I need to stand closer to them or project better? Do I need to be clearer about what they should be taking notes on? And if I make those changes the next time, do they help, or do I need to take us back inside?In general, though, the question is what outdoor learning is about. As I’ve said before, I hope being outdoors makes students feel more playful and therefore more curious and open to learning. I want being outdoors to ground them more in the present, in their world, with each other. That is, I want being outdoors to make them more human in our AI world. I want it to make them more open to conversation with each other. I want them to feel less anxious because they feel the sun on their skin and the sun makes life feel more possible, especially after a long winter, and being less anxious helps them learn. Or I want them outdoors because a walking role-play is best done outdoors or an art scavenger hunt between multiple buildings. Could I do that lesson as effectively indoors? For my immersive courses, the goal is for students to be more present to one another with fewer distractions.As I consider these goals through a semester, I ask questions like, “Have I introduced or nourished any distractions I didn’t intend to?” “What did location add to the lesson and to their learning?” “Are students engaging with each other and material more or less than they would indoors?” One method to assess this is through my own observations, but answering my own questions, especially when I love being outside, is prone to biased answers. Observations in immersive classes are more reliable because of the sheer amount contact I have with students, but even then I am human and have blind spots.So I ask questions of students on mid-semester written evaluations. I listen when students are in my office hours talking about what’s hard for them. Sometimes when students come early to class I just ask them explicit questions about something I’m curious about: “Can you hear your classmates well enough outside?” “Do you have any suggestions to make this activity more engaging?” I ask colleagues to come observe me teach and give me feedback. And in the end, I look again at student work to see if they are learning what I hope they are learning. A final reflection assignment I give is especially helpful for understanding whether they are being drawn more into themselves, their community, and their world. In immersive classes this is especially true of their final reflection assignment as well as closing rituals for the community of the class.Are any of these assessments scientific? Not really. I’m looking at far too many variables at once. We always are. A classroom is a certain kind of laboratory, but not the kind where we can isolate a single variable to experiment on. So we do our best. We stay open to the wildness of our classroom in all its wild ways and hope to be attentive enough to keep our students learning wildly.

There is nothing simple about creating attendance policies. Instructors, rightly, find themselves all over a spectrum of expectations and philosophies, informed by their own experiences as students, their departmental standards, their student population, and their own interest in monitoring learners. I myself have ranged from no attendance policy whatsoever, to point loss for absences, all the way to my current policy, which I’ll discuss below. Regardless, I would suggest that teachers think about two major questions when they have the freedom to craft their own attendance standards. 1. What is the likelihood that an invested student will have to miss class at least once or twice during the semester?This involves analyzing factors like the prevalence of communicable illness (do most of your students live in residence halls where norovirus could sweep through hundreds of them within a month?), the socioeconomic realities (do many students balance school with jobs they need for living expenses? Do they have access to reliable public transit, and if not, how does the need for carpools/rides or the reliability of their personal vehicles factor in?), and family obligations (are many learners parents who would be required to stay home with their sick children?). There’s no simple calculus here, but in general, if it’s likely that even the most earnest students will have to miss class sometimes, one’s attendance policy might need to be more generous. 2. How have I constructed the course and assessments?For courses where each day of class depends heavily on comprehending the materials of the previous day, attendance policies may be a way to incentivize that necessary regular attendance. For courses that circle more than build, an occasional absence may not significantly impact a learner’s ability to meet the larger course goals, and a looser attendance policy might give students a “release valve” to take care of their larger needs every now and then. One semester I found myself stuck after my loosey-goosey attendance policy meant that I regularly had half-full classrooms. I knew something had to change, so I reflected.First, in my context at a small women’s college where we focus on first-generation students, single moms, and undocumented students, I knew that missing class was part of life for my learners. Sick kiddos, broken-down cars, and demanding jobs – some of them full-time – meant that perfect attendance would be rare. It also seemed that my students, who have the incredibly high stress levels that come with all those considerations, get sick more often and more severely. I didn’t want a policy that added more strain on them.Second, my courses are designed to be spirals rather than building blocks; we come back to the same major themes frequently throughout the term, each time from a new angle. I don’t need my students to fully comprehend a concept before we can move on because I know it will come back around and they might latch on better then. This means I can afford some leniency because a student can still perform very well on assessments even if they miss a day here or there.All of this meant that my first instinct wasn’t too far off – a gentler attendance policy works with my content and for my students. But how could I avoid those half-empty rooms? In the end, I did something radical – I asked my students what they thought I should do. I told them that I wanted to incentivize being in class, because a robust learning community makes the content more interesting and memorable, but that I couldn’t countenance a policy that would punish someone for being seriously ill or dealing with a major life event. Within the space of ten minutes, we had come up with a policy that made sense to them and me, and which I currently use. At the start of the term, each student gets a set number of attendance points. If they miss, I take away points… until they prove to me that they’ve caught up on the material. (I record all my classes, so my students watch the video and then show me their notes to get their points back). It’s easier for students to just show up than it is to do the makeup work, but no one’s grade is ever permanently impacted if they have to miss classes. It might not work for everyone, but it makes sense for my courses and context.How have you crafted your attendance policies?

Funie Hsu’s “How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots” hit my classroom like a bombshell. We had studied Hindu and Buddhist teachings in my sophomore-level philosophy class, and we were ending the semester by discussing the mindfulness movement. I had introduced Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and we had watched a video where Jon Kabat-Zinn demonstrated the program in action. The students were deeply moved by how he helped people with severe chronic pain in the video, and they loved his caring and gentle teaching persona.Funie Hsu was less impressed, pointing out that white people like Jon Kabat-Zinn appropriate Buddhism without acknowledging Asian American Buddhists and their contributions. They talk about going to Asia as part of the counter-culture movement, learning meditation and mindfulness from Buddhist teachers in Asia, and then bringing it all back to the United States. But Buddhism didn’t come to America in the 1960s. It was brought to the United States by Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the 1800s.My students already looked nervous, and it got worse. Hsu explained that those immigrants and their religion were met with suspicion, racism, and discrimination. But many of their leaders still opened their temples to curious white visitors, and some became mentors to them. Their work has remained largely invisible in the white community, even though many of the famous white teachers were taught by Asian-American Buddhists. And that seems kind of … racist. Hsu writes,Though Kabat-Zinn has practiced with Buddhist teachers himself … his strategic erasure of Buddhism reinforces racial and religious stereotypes in order to appease a white-dominant social structure. (“How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots,” The Progressive, February 12, 2022)All this seemed … very bad indeed.My classroom was almost all white (except for a Muslim student from Pakistan), and that was suddenly painfully visible to all of us. The students were in shock. They were also guilt-ridden and defensive. Several argued that Jon Kabat-Zinn was a bad man, and other students nodded. They concluded that Buddhism should be left to Asians and Asian Americans, white people shouldn’t explore Buddhism, and they certainly shouldn’t adopt and modify any of its practices in the ways that Kabat-Zinn had. Two guys in the back of my classroom timidly suggested that Kabat-Zinn should get credit for helping people with severe chronic pain cope without opioids, but they were quickly shamed into silence.I wasn’t quite shamed into silence myself, but I might as well have been since my talking had no effect. It wasn’t my finest hour. I paid for it by reading a lot of preachy and one-sided final papers.So how should non-Asian Americans handle Buddhism and mindfulness in our classrooms and our lives? Were my students right that we should just stay away?No, I don’t think so. I may have been more successful in getting students to reconsider if I had asked them to reread Hsu. She writes,Buddhism belongs to all sentient beings. Even so, Asians and Asian Americans have a rightful, distinct historical claim to Buddhism…. It is because of our physical, emotional, and spiritual labor, our diligent cultivation of the practice through time and through histories of oppression, that Buddhism has persisted to the current time period and can be shared with non-Asian practitioners.In order to alleviate the suffering caused by cultural appropriation, we can refrain from asserting ownership of a free teaching that belongs all. We can refrain from asserting false authority and superiority over those who have diligently maintained the practice to share freely with others. And we can actively work to give dana [generosity] by expressing gratitude for the Asian and Asian American Buddhists who have shared their indigenous ways of being as integral expressions of their practice. (“We’ve Been Here All Along,” Lion’s Roar)Buddhism does belong to all sentient beings. But with that ownership comes responsibility. We need to learn the history. We need to seek out and listen carefully to Asian American voices whenever we can. We need to learn from those whose connections to the tradition are deeper than our own, and we need to acknowledge our debts to them.So how might I teach a class that would do all that better?Here’s what I’m trying this semester.We start with mindfulness and MBSR, reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn.We then critically examine the mindfulness movement. We read Funie Hsu, learning how Buddhism was brought to the United States by Asians and how it has been received. We read narratives of young Asian American Buddhists (courtesy of Chenxing Han’s work) and notice the wide variety of practices and views. We read Donald Lopez, learning that the mindfulness movement adapts Buddhism in a selective and limited way. We think through the thorny issues of cultural appropriation, and we discuss ways in which we may be able to engage Buddhist people, ideas, and practices in a more respectful way.Only after all that, several weeks into the semester, do we turn to Buddhist teachings.I like how the class is going so far (we’re starting Buddhist teachings), and I just won a big victory. A student from the first class I discussed is also in this one. She was loudly unflinching in her condemnation of Jon Kabat-Zinn last time. I was not happy about having her in this class: I worried that she would make it impossible for the other students to think through the issues. But she is two years older now, and she’s better at nuance. In her midterm paper, she is planning on critiquing her final paper on Jon Kabat-Zinn from two years ago. When I spoke with her yesterday, she was still objecting to Kabat-Zinn’s work, but she had just reread her old paper and found it embarrassing – “it is so all or nothing, so very simplistic.”I look forward to reading what she comes up with. Clearly, I’m not the only one who has learned something since last time.Notes & Bibliography Han, Chenxing, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021).Hsu, Funie, “How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots,” The Progressive, February 12, 2022.Hsu, Funie, “We’ve Been Here All Along,” Lion’s Roar.Lopez, Donald, “The Scientific Buddha,” Tricycle, Winter 2012.Moyers, Bill, “Healing and the Mind,” Moyers, February 23, 1993, 1:25:30.

Imagine quickly stepping out for a coffee break between classes. It sounds simple enough: latte or mocha? But for international students, especially those with F-1 visas, that seemingly easy choice turns into a mental checklist: Am I carrying my passport? My I-20 form? Do I have a valid driver’s license—if that’s even permitted? Could today be the day I’m stopped and questioned?As theological education shifts into virtual and hybrid formats, many international students remain physically tied to campus to meet strict visa requirements. Dorms and seminary apartments become their main living spaces—where they eat, sleep, and study. Yet in a climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and possible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) visits, the usual rule—carry your identification at all times—can feel like a heavy emotional burden.When domestic students pick up their backpacks, they carry laptops, books, and perhaps a snack. International students carry something extra: proof that they belong here, documents that validate their right to study and exist in this country. A simple stroll to the campus café can trigger anxieties like: What if someone demands my papers? Do I have everything in order? Behind these immediate concerns lurks a deeper, more painful fear—do I truly belong in a place intended to nurture my spiritual and intellectual growth?Of course, it’s not only about paperwork. The possibility of being asked for legal documents at any time creates an ongoing stress that many domestic students may never feel. It can negatively impact their class interactions, making them cautious about speaking up or standing out. It’s hard to fully focus when part of you is always on alert.Additionally, international students often encounter explicit and implicit biases—messages implying they’re outsiders, job-stealers, or perpetual foreigners. I’ve spoken with students who describe exhaustion from continually navigating these prejudices, worrying about complicated reentry processes if they travel home, or feeling anxious about political shifts that could abruptly alter their visa status or employment prospects. While their peers confidently pursue internships and research opportunities, international students wrestle daily with layers of uncertainty.As graduation nears, the pressure piles on. Optional Practical Training (OPT) and finding a visa-sponsoring employer can feel like uphill battles in an already competitive job market. Whenever I talk with students about their futures, I sense the stress they carry around from potential bias or outright hostility—an unfair burden during what should be an exciting time.For those of us who teach or mentor—whether or not we’ve ever navigated immigration rules ourselves—that small question, Do I need to carry my F-1 visa papers at all times on campus? opens a window into their day-to-day experiences. It’s a reminder that institutions meant to nurture faith and scholarship can sometimes feel more like guarded checkpoints.Belonging isn’t cultivated by a single individual’s effort; it flourishes within communal care. If we pause to recognize the emotional toll our students carry, we can more intentionally practice radical hospitality. Instead of leaving international students to shoulder their anxieties alone, our campuses could provide accessible legal support and staff trained specifically to handle immigration-related encounters. In our classrooms, we can intentionally create opportunities for students to share global perspectives, fostering empathy and breaking down harmful stereotypes.Institutionally, we might consider advocating for clear campus-wide policies protecting students from sudden ICE interventions and providing ongoing training to equip faculty and staff with a deeper understanding of immigration complexities. Many schools already work hard to support international learners, yet it’s always helpful to ask: What does genuine safety look like here? How do we ensure no one feels compelled to carry the weight of constant legal anxiety?When we truly listen to the question—Do I need to carry my F-1 visa papers at all times on campus?—we’re challenged to see the campus through international students' eyes—a place where daily life in a place they call home can still feel uncertain. It invites us to imagine, create, and nurture educational spaces where every student can learn, engage, and thrive without having to endlessly prove they belong.Thus, this question is not just about legal documentation. It's about belonging, empathy, and our shared responsibility as theological educators to build communities where no student must carry the weight of constant vigilance alone.

As I head out to teach my off-campus Jan term class, Backpacking with the Saints, I look at my syllabus again and think about how I assess learning in an immersive experience. That is, how can I give a grade for things like hiking and praying and journaling? Am I grading how much the students were transformed? “You experienced a 100 percent transformation on this trip, so you get an A. But you only experienced a 75 percent transformation, so C.” We know that’s not right. So, what is it I’m doing? And how can we think about assessment in any of our immersive experiences, in any outdoor learning?This may also be a question for people who read Dr. Westfield’s recent blog about “running wild” in the classroom. When we make students the primary agents in their learning and get creative in the classroom, letting them “run wild” and have discussions or play as the means of their learning, how do we assess their learning? That is, how do we assess wild learning?First I think about what I want students to learn. What are my objectives? What are the things I want students to walk away with? Any particular content? Particular skills? If I’ve designed a good class, this was the first thing around which I built the structures of my class. If I don’t decide this first, then I can’t create a class with a direction. Each of the readings supports students reaching those objectives. Each assignment needs to be a learning exercise focused on those objectives. Each lesson and classroom or out-of-classroom activity is aimed at ushering students further into their understanding of the target ideas and skills.If I’ve done that well, then the assessment questions are simply, “How well did a student understand that idea?” and “How well does a student demonstrate that skill?” If one of my objectives for Backpacking with the Saints is that students understand the peculiarities of the desert saints and their reasons for searching for God in the desert, and my assignment is a presentation about a particular desert saint’s life and theology, I can assess how well they grasp that group of ideas. I can also assess that from the conversations we’re having. What are students bringing up in “official” discussions and in casual conversations over meals and while hiking?Another objective for Backpacking with the Saints is that students reflect on their own spiritual practices and formation. Will I assess that they have reached a certain level of sanctification? No. But I can assess how thoughtful they are being, how well they are engaging the conversations we have, how willing they are to be self-reflective. Moreover, self-reflection is a skill. I can teach students to be better at it, so I can assess how well they do it now and give good feedback to help them learn the skill.And that, really, is the purpose of assessment for students: Feedback that continues their learning. On my immersive trips I have the space and the luxury (and students who self-selected) to offer them lots of oral and written feedback about their learning without attaching a letter grade. Immersive classes are excellent for moving students away from focus on grades and toward focus on learning. Even indoors in a classroom where students are “running wild,” we can think of assessment as feedback (which sometimes is a grade telling a student, “You understand about 85 percent of this concept”).On the question of hiking, journaling, and praying, of course I am not assessing whether their prayers are “good enough” or whether they are the best hiker. I am giving them feedback about what makes a good hiker or pray-er as understood by various traditions and providing space for them to decide what kind of hiker and pray-er they want to be. For some, the best hiker is the fastest one. I offer that good hiking is about attention to the world and to others, which means that speed is not usually a great metric for assessment. I can assess how much they engage with the ideas. How much do they play with the ideas, even if they land where they were before, versus how much they resist incorporating anything new and think they know the answers already.In the end, the answer to “How will we assess?” is “Like we always do.” We are assessing student learning while they’re having discussion in class to see if we need to redirect and fill in gaps. We are teachers. We can tell when students understand and when they do not. Yes, it’s easier to assess whether they know how to put up a tent (it’s either keeping them dry or it’s not) than whether they can connect wilderness metaphors for spirituality with wilderness traditions, but we do know. The bonus is that when I focus on feedback over grades and force students to focus on it too, they actually tend to learn more. The more they run wild – whether in a classroom or in a canyon – the more they will learn because of the process, because of the structures I’ve set up for them, because of the space and attention and the people they’re with. Perhaps we simply need to think more wildly about assessment.

Continuing on themes from the last blog in this series, another antiracism pro-tip for classroom teaching comes both from a story an early-career mentor of mine told me, and then directly from the mouths of my own students: for the love of God, always assign groups in class! If you want students to talk to anyone else in class, tell them precisely who they’re talking to and give them a specific question or two to work on together. Why is this an antiracist practice? In short, students have a strong tendency (sometimes conscious, sometimes not) to self-segregate in classes. Assigning groups disrupts this tendency.For this wisdom, I was allowed to stand on the shoulders of another teacher rather than waiting until I screwed things up profoundly enough that I actually noticed it. In one of my first years of teaching, a mentor in our new faculty circle talked about her past practice of telling students to just “pair up!” to discuss class material. She saw no issues with this practice, apart from a few quiet students, until one day when she was teaching a course with two Black male students among a much whiter cohort. These students didn’t sit near each other, or seem to know each other; but when she instructed everyone to find a partner, neither of them even bothered to look up to their nearest neighbors. Instead, a beat after everyone else had started chattering, the young man in the front row slowly lifted his head and made eye contact with the young man seated in the back. Both had assumed, rightly, that they would not be tapped by their white classmates to be partners; both knew that whether or not they were friends, they were “other” in this classroom, and that made them de facto partners.The obvious shame that my mentor felt in articulating this story stuck with me, and so assigning groups has consistently been part of my practice. However, I didn’t realize that I was doing something particularly different until I held an Antiracism Learn-Along event for students at my school where I opened space for them to discuss experiences around race and belonging at our college. Many of them immediately agreed that the school can quickly become “cliquey” and that racial groups tend to stick together unless prompted to do otherwise. Some students of color reported getting “dirty looks” when trying to join into a pre-existing group of white women, but even more said that they simply wouldn’t bother trying – they’d been burned before, often in high school, when attempting to be friendly to white people. They weren’t going to risk the same rejection here if they had the option of staying with people who looked more like themselves.Despite these experiences, the students said that professors requiring a mix-up of the room really did help over the long term, both in making friendly connections and being able to learn from other perspectives. I have endless ways of sorting students: making them “speed-date” in pairs that only have to converse for one minute, grouping them based on where they sit, grouping them by order on the roster, grouping them by alliterative first names (one of the unique joys of teaching at a women’s college in 2024 is being able to call out “Kiley, Kya, Kayleigh, and Caitlin” followed by “Haley, Hailey, Bailey, and Kayley” in rapid succession. I’m not even making these examples up). Sometimes I craft groups before class, and other times I sort it out when I see who came for the day. Some days I let students stay with their friends, and other days I make them talk to someone who sits across the room. I put my most boisterous people together and my shyest people together to see what happens, then try to balance the talkers and listeners on another day. Because my students are so used to being mixed up, they don’t even notice that some days I ensure that no student of color is alone in a group of white learners, or that some days I put all my Latina students together when discussing something relevant to Latinx culture, so that they don’t have to re-explain their heritage to others. Usually within four to six weeks in the term, students are comfortable enough with this apparent unpredictability that discussion starts flowing easily regardless of what group they’re in.Students may not notice how this practice can serve an antiracist commitment right away, if ever—it’s not as obvious as visually diverse representation on slides, or including authorial racial identities on an LMS—but assigning groups every time can very quickly disrupt the usual patterns of self-segregation in a classroom, and contribute to a more effective learning environment overall.

I received feedback on the manuscript of my textbook, Studying Religion and Disability. The two peer reviews were generally supportive and also offered important suggestions that will make the book better. I was grateful for their careful engagement. Reviewer 1 was also clearly aghast at my use of online sources, noting their “concern” with, in particular, my citing Reddit posts as evidence—as I do when I, for example, describe and quote how a disabled Sikh reached out in this online forum for support related to various difficulties with his disability. It made Reviewer 1 “a little nervous as a professor, who is always trying to get students to use credible scholarly sources.”I certainly understand the purposes behind “blind” (a bit of an odd word in this context) peer review—although it’s also a problematic practice—but boy do I wish I could have had the chance to talk to Reviewer 1. I would have loved to talk pedagogy. A blog post, where I talk to myself (ha!), will sadly have to do.This reviewer’s sentiment is one that other professors may share and, since it’s a textbook—which is intended to appeal to and be assigned by other professors—it was an important reservation to disclose. It may also reflect deep-seated differences among academics, which my book, or this blog post, won’t easily be able to resolve. But I want to say a few words about my use of *gasp* materials from the world wide web, including Reddit.First, I think it’s important to note that there are whole academic fields/areas of specialty that focus on various forms of communication and media. At my university, we offer a course on “Feminist Blogging” out of our School of Communication Studies, for example, and “Digital Storytelling” out of our Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program. These aren’t only topics that “they” teach “over there” in those “other” disciplines. At every SBL and AAR annual conference, there are sessions devoted to Religion, Media, and Culture and the Bible and Popular Culture. I’m personally sad to have missed the session on “From Tweets to Tiktoks: Reimagining Religious Influence through Women’s Social Media Use” in 2024.Especially now, I think it’s no longer fair to assume that legitimate information can only be found in OUP monographs or the JAAR (as much as I love both), that it cannot be found on the internet, or that online sources are inherently inferior or suspect. (To be a bit facetious, I read the New York Times exclusively online these days!) Educators are missing out if they aren’t looking in a wide variety of places for interesting ideas, primary sources, important debates, and provocative controversies to use in their classroom. Many of us incorporate blog posts, tweets (er, I mean posts on “X”), YouTube videos, and more into our classes, to encourage students to interact with “lived religion” and to motivate them to learn (motivation that we know depends on students perceiving value in our course content and being able to make connections between what they learn in school and the rest of their lives). The other day, I showed this tweet about “Islamophobia” in class. I don’t care who this guy is. His scholarly credentials—or lack thereof—don’t matter to me. What mattered is that this post, in popular and pithy form, conveyed an important, and common, critique about the concept that I wanted students to consider. It was an easy launching point for a rich in-class discussion.But fine, some of us don’t want to “give in” to these baser impulses or pressures; some of us don’t want to be “edutainers.” I have more serious concerns with this approach to teaching. Some religious traditions (mainly Christianity, which has whole universities and university presses, like Baylor, backing it in the U.S.) have yielded a lot of scholarship—in areas like disability, and more generally too. But some haven’t, at least in the English that I and my students all read. This is but one example of the Christian bias in the field I actually spend time describing in the textbook. I don’t think that I should be prevented from writing about other religions if/because they don't have (enough, any) “scholarly” sources. This would simply reproduce inequities that have for so long plagued the field. Certainly, scholars have much to contribute to knowledge production, but they do not have a corner on it, nor are their contributions… infallible. I note, for instance, the widespread replication crisis, journal retractions, shifts in paradigms, expert “blindspots” (another funny word here), or simply routine scholarly debates and disagreements.Relatedly, and crucially for my particular topic, not all people with disabilities can or do attain advanced degrees (in large part because higher education was built to exclude them), become scholars, and produce the sort of work that would appear in peer-reviewed journals or books published by reputable presses. Yet, I would strongly argue, these people still have important things to express about disability, including, of course, their own. I don’t believe we should be in the business of elitist gatekeeping—a common critique of the professorial ivory tower, actually, and one I think we would do well to avoid, especially in this political climate.Better would be to teach students what certain sources of knowledge might be able to tell us and what they might not. Better would be to practice fact-checking and lateral reading. Better would be to make students aware that and how knowledge is produced, authenticated, and circulated (which I borrow from David Chidester’s Empire of Religion). Better would be to discuss that slash / in Foucault’s “power/knowledge” and how these two concepts are inextricably intertwined. Better would be to teach students about the biases that every person holds (including them, including us) and how to leverage their own meta-cognition to become aware of and adjust for those biases. Better is not to avoid, censor, or condescend, but to expose, as widely as possible, and to teach students how to navigate. This is what they will have to do for the rest of their lives, after all.The other day, I had students in my Race and Religion class read three sub-Reddit threads on caste, Hinduism, and India. (In response to this task, one student laughed and said, “I love this class.”) I also asked the group, with Reviewer 1 in mind, why reading Reddit might be a good idea. Students said it allows us access to real people, giving their unfiltered opinions, on topics that might not make it into scholarly sources. (Of course this also led us to talk about how some stuff written on Reddit—or, uh, elsewhere—can be exaggerated or even made up.) It can show us a range of perspectives, opinions, and experiences, which is a core principle of studying religion that I am constantly trying to convey.All sources are limited, biased, or irrelevant in some ways or in some contexts (even scholarship). If a point I want to demonstrate is that disabled people of a specific religion sometimes turn to and cry out for community in online forums, a polished chapter in an edited collection by a person with a PhD writing about the phenomenon—if I can even find such a thing—isn’t, in my opinion, as good of evidence as an actual post by a real disabled person in the throes of that experience. If I have to go online to find it, so be it.

As I said in my earlier blog in this series, it can be a relief for teachers to know that making a course more antiracist isn’t only about introducing fraught topics and crossing one’s fingers that students have the self-awareness to handle them; antiracism can be present structurally, in much the same way that racism can be present structurally. In this blog, I will explore two practices I use in my own teaching to help promote a more antiracist learning environment, neither of which involve staging contentious debates or calling out individuals to speak on their experiences. While neither practice can suddenly create a perfectly antiracist classroom, they can help move one’s overall teaching farther along that spectrum.The first place to start is examining imagery usage in one’s class. I personally came late to PowerPoints in my teaching (only really becoming proficient in slides during remote-synchronous learning in the pandemic when writing things on the board was no longer an option), so imagery for me was initially confined to my online course structure in my LMS. I dislike “plain” pages with nothing but text, so I was habitually using stock images on assignments and pages to offer some visual breaks – close-ups of water, forest photos, and so on. This continued until I was slotted to teach Women in the Bible and started exploring imagery for the Biblical figures I planned to focus on. Initial Google Image searching yielded everything from cartoons to Renaissance oil paintings and everything in between – but the enduring theme was that most representations depicted Bible characters as white, white, white!This was irritating on multiple levels. Historical accuracy was certainly a factor, but even if we could all agree that nobody really knows what Ruth and Naomi looked like, why do so many artists seem to assume they were pale-skinned and fair-haired? (The answer, in short, is white supremacy and Eurocentric Christian bias, but if you’re reading a blog like this one, you probably already knew that). I was saved in that course by discovering James C. Lewis’s Icons of the Bible artistic photography series, a project that depicts Bible figures more accurately with models who are exclusively people of color. Sweet relief!Once slide decks became a more typical staple of my teaching techniques, then, I already had some experience realizing that the way I depicted people and communities on these slides would affect my students’ imagination. I teach at a women’s college, so I started by ensuring that my stock images included far fewer men than women, and then aimed to depict a wide range of racial diversity in each slide series. In teaching my class on Bodies in Christian Theology, I also learned to emphasize size diversity, visible disability, and visible queerness to continually enforce the implicit curriculum that Theology is for everyone and is done by everyone. For those who mostly use slides for text, I encourage you to experiment with the color and liveliness that comes with human images – and to use two or three stock photos rather than just one at a time. PowerPoint’s Design function can help you work them in tidily, and you have another subtle antiracist practice in your toolkit.

Student course evaluations can be fraught. Many of my friends don’t even look at theirs, either because it’s so stressful/shameful or because they don’t think there’s anything to be learned in them. Course evaluations are, after all, only one (admittedly limited and often problematic) data point.I do look at course evals, and I tell students I look at them. I think it’s important to consider what the students—that is, the primary audience of and for our teaching—actually experience. That doesn’t mean students get the final say. That doesn’t mean we have to make every change they desire. But it does mean that I want to know how they experienced the course, and it’s a bit hard for me to know without checking.But it’s not often that anything surprises me. It’s usually the same old, same old. This class is a lot of work. Too hard for a required course. Picky grader. Great prof. Class is fun. She really cares. I love our community. I’ve read it all before.But, last semester, I received something new, from a student in my upper-level Religion and Disability class:Emily Gravett assigned course materials that allowed me to critically think about my views on religion and disability. However, as someone who is Catholic the way she explained course material did not align with what all people of that religion believe…. The way she portrayed religious people made it appear as if religious people had it out for people with disabilities. This takes away why people are a part of a religion…. By what I read about this class I thought we were going to go in further in depth about the beliefs of religions. Instead, we read content from opinion–based sources that bashed everything about the religion. I think the way the content was addressed was very inconsiderate for people that belong to a religious group. If the whole class is about accepting others and taking in other points of view, why is every positive view of religion being bashed? Overall more theology should be incorporated with the course instead of throwing opinions out in lecture. Now, this was just one comment. None of the other students said anything like it and I did have other religious (including Christian) students in that class, just like in any class I teach. Certainly, instructors shouldn’t focus overly much on the one-offs or outliers in our course evaluations, especially the more negative ones. Yet I felt this student was expressing something important, which I wanted to take seriously—something perhaps other students had felt, but had not dared to express.It’s certainly never been my intention to make anyone feel badly about their religious convictions. I don’t set out to dissuade anyone from their identities or commitments, just in the same way I wouldn’t proselytize. It should also go without saying that I certainly don’t represent religions as (very bad) monoliths—this is a key concept of the course, that religions are diverse—but clearly this student experienced the course as being very critical and negative toward religions, perhaps specifically her own. And, I have to admit, she may not be wrong. Religions (on the whole, and in the specific) haven’t been great on disability—and this was what the course reflected. The Bible often treats disability as something to be fixed/cured to demonstrate God’s great power. Disability is understood as the result of bad karma by many Hindus. The choreography of Muslim daily prayer is rough or even prohibitive for some bodies. In this class, we read a piece in which a well-known disability scholar critiqued the pope—the head of this particular student’s religion—for singling out a disabled man for a blessing. My guess is that this was the day I lost her.So, what responsibility do I have to how religions are represented or come across? Do I need to couple every negative portrayal, example, or opinion with a positive one? Do I need to make sure I am presenting rosy or complimentary views of religion, regardless of topic? Do I need to be very selective or cautious with the critical pieces I assign? I admit there’s a lot I don’t know what to do about this student’s concern. Here’s what I’ve tried to implement in my current Race and Religion course (which faces some similar issues, given the way that Christianity has influenced conceptions of race, in this country and globally):Added a statement to the syllabus, which I read aloud in class, that clarifies that I don’t agree with or endorse every single piece I assignForecast that there will be some critiques of religions in this class—and acknowledge this may be (understandably) unsettling or even upsetting if you are a part of that religionReminded students that learning can be uncomfortable and that exposure to ideas that you disagree with is an important (an essential??) part of development and lifeIntroduced the notion of meta-cognition and asked them to reflect on certain activities or materials in terms of what they were thinking and feeling during themContinued to reiterate that religions aren’t just one “thing” and that, of course, for all the bad, there’s also quite a bit of goodAssigned pieces on religion being both/neither good or bad, such as Appiah’s TED Talk as well as material demonstrating a range or diversity within traditionsClarified that much of what we discuss in terms of religious people’s behavior is also just human behavior—that is, that it’s applicable to everyone; religious people are usually not different or specialEmphasized to students that it’s okay to stick with values, beliefs, or groups, including the religious, that are imperfect/critiqued (because nothing is perfect)Continued to offer caveats when leading a session that was more based on criticism, such as “of course reasonable people will disagree” or “this may be interpreted differently within the community” or “obviously this doesn’t represent the whole”Assigned more companion (or both-side) pieces for every topic (e.g., “what is Critical Race Theory?” as well as a critique of Critical Race Theory)But I am still grappling with this issue. The reality is that religions aren’t all good (whatever we even mean by this). Robert Orsi, one of my favorite scholars, who grew up Catholic and has written extensively about the study of religion, has written powerfully on just how disgusted he is by the history of Catholicism, that “in the long perspective of human history, religion has done more harm than good and that the good it does is inextricable from the harm.” I think I would be doing students themselves a harm if I pretended otherwise.