Resources

Usually, I do this activity the first day of my Introduction to Christian Theology class. We arrange all the desks in a circle. I then ask my students to get a piece of paper and write for a few minutes about one concrete experience they’ve had with Christianity that still impacts their view today. I ask them to write legibly, hinting that these will be read by someone else. Then, I ask them to crumple the page into a ball and throw their experience into the middle of the classroom.At this point, I usually get some confused looks on people's faces: You want me to throw stuff the first day of class? What's going to happen to what I just wrote? I count to three quickly, and just like that: we have a pile of crumpled pieces of paper, filled with stories that say a lot about the assumptions people carry as they enter into a THEO 100 classroom.We go around the room, with each student picking up someone else's experience and reading it out loud. These are completely anonymous contributions, but the energy in the room is heightened: people are waiting to hear their own experience read aloud, or they may be nervous to read the story on the spot. Sometimes it is difficult to read someone's handwriting. Sometimes, the experience is very emotional, and the reader feels nervous about representing someone else's life story with the respect it deserves. Other times, the experience describes a boredom so thorough with this religious tradition that they barely thought when they scribbled down a response.This activity is useful because it gives a safe space for people to express concerns about taking this class, either because of their lack of experience with Christianity or religion, or a painful experience of religious abuse or trauma. Sometimes, people share ecstatic moments of communion with the Divine, miracles, moments where they found their faith in a new light. Grandmothers, parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings join us momentarily in the circle as people share stories of those who have inspired, or stunted, their understanding of faith. The room gets filled with whatever experiential knowledge that students already have entering the theological classroom.I do this activity, and I share this exercise here, because it is a concrete classroom experience that actively demonstrates my own assumptions about transformative education and the sacred, expansive possibilities of a theological classroom. At its best, I believe the theological classroom can be a space of self-exploration. It should be a place of recovery from religious education that dismissed or even discouraged questioning. I tell students that this classroom can be a place to ask your biggest questions and think critically. We might not end up with clear-cut answers; I can almost guarantee we will end up with more questions. But this ability to go deep also makes the theological classroom a site of emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual growth.Deeply influenced by popular educators like bell hooks and dian marino, I believe that in a liberatory education, students and professors are both learners and teachers to every single person in the class. This is not to erase the power dynamic: I am still the one in charge of managing group dynamics, giving grades, and choosing the content to discuss. But it is an attempt to highlight how egalitarian classroom learning like this can honor the students and the professor as complex humans with meaningful experiential insights to share.This activity can be adapted for any topic when you want an in-the-moment survey of what assumptions and perspectives students are bringing with them at the start of the semester. You will notice that having a metadiscussion about what students felt, heard, and observed leads nicely into making classroom agreements. These were shared anonymously, but what guidelines would need to be in place for you to share your experiences?I have also adapted the activity for online courses. When sending out pre-course surveys, I have added this question about one experience that shapes your view of Christianity today. Then, I compile the answers without any names attached to them into an Excel spreadsheet, and we can analyze this data as a class, either synchronously by reading it out loud and then discussing, or asynchronously, as described below.This activity reminds each one of us that we are here to learn about ourselves and each other. Each one of us enters the classroom with valuable knowledge that is derived from our different life experiences. Assigned readings will present us with a variety of perspectives, but our task as co-learners is to explore how these topics show up in our lives and our classmates’ lives in different ways. Sharing our perspectives and hearing our classmates’ perspectives gives a more complex and nuanced understanding of religion and the world that we collectively inhabit. My hope is that we leave the classroom with a stronger sense of our responsibility to work to make life more livable, more just for each other—even if we don’t always agree with each other, we can understand why someone might think the way they do given their life experiences.Activity Description:Ask students to write about one concrete experience that still shapes their view of your class topic (Christianity, social justice, religion, death and dying, etc.) to this day. Ask them to try and describe just one instance, with specific details, rather than a broader summary. They may have multiple experiences, or very few experiences. Tell the students that it is okay—however partial or seemingly small it may be, for today, just focus on one.If it is in person, ask the student to crumple their response and throw it in the center of the classroom. If it is digital, make a format where students can anonymously view each other’s responses.Read aloud the anonymous Christian experiences with intention. If it is a classroom setting, make sure each student reads one. If it is digital, let students read them on their own. Encourage them to pause and digest the stories that their classmates are telling. Invite them to notice where their own story falls into this compilation. Celebrate the fact that we have a group of beautiful, complex, intriguing human beings gathered for this course!After hearing these stories/reading through this document, ask students to reflect on these questions and share in class/post their responses on the forum. Invite the students to pay attention to their classmates’ responses—they may be referencing their experiences in their own theological learning process already...Possible Discussion Questions:What did it feel like reading through this list? What was it like to read other people's stories? What was it like to hear/see your own experience in class/within the document?Which stories did you relate to the most? Why? Which stories were different from yours but made you want to learn more? Why?Which patterns, if any, did you notice in the responses? How might this impact the way our discussions happen throughout the semester?What did you learn by doing this activity? Why do you think we did this as our first activity for this class?These experiences were anonymous. What guidelines would need to be in place for you to feel comfortable sharing some of your life experiences in class? 

I spent my first week as an assistant professor contending with what I have deemed the “Dropocalypse.” My Introduction to Judaism class was full before the ink on my contract was even dry, and I was eager to teach students at a new institution. I posted the course website several days before classes began. As I checked the roster the morning of my first class, I was disconcerted to note that four students had dropped. Had my course site frightened them? Was my workload unreasonable? I shoved these questions aside as I walked nervously to the classroom, putting on my friendliest face. After what I thought was a good class, I vowed not to check the roster until the add-drop period had concluded. My next course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had similar positive energy on the first day.Despite my resolution, I checked the roster that evening. Two more students had dropped my Introduction to Judaism class, and one had dropped the other class. By the end of the week, ten of the thirty initially-enrolled students had dropped my Intro to Judaism class, whereas only two had dropped my other one. No other teacher in my department had more than three students drop.When I saw my chair in the hallway on Friday, I nervously confessed that a troubling number of students had dropped my class. Was I in danger, he asked, of falling below the minimum number of students? Thankfully, I was not. He tried to comfort me, reiterating that students drop classes for countless reasons and that it wasn’t a reflection on me as a teacher.As I spent the weekend refreshing the enrollment page, scared that if I averted my gaze for too long more students would escape, I replayed the classes in meticulous detail. What had I done, I wondered, to alienate students? What could I have done differently that would have kept them enrolled? The colleagues I asked for advice, sensing my rising panic, reiterated my chair’s perspective: students drop for inscrutable reasons that are not a reflection on the instructor.Despite these kind words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the preponderance of drops was my fault. If I gained a reputation of alienating students, I wouldn’t last long at my institution. The fact that I had so many drops in one class but only a few in the other class helped me to pull back from the despair of the Dropocalypse. It was clear that many students who enrolled in Introduction to Judaism claimed Jewish heritage and, consequently, might believe that they would have a head start in the course. If that expectation was shattered, perhaps they would leave? In contrast, students who enrolled in a course on Abrahamic religions might have less of an expectation that the course would be easy for them. Or, it could have been that the Judaism class was at 10 a.m. whereas the Abrahamic class began at noon.Whatever the answers, a fundamental question remained: Did my actions, while preparing the course or during the class, alienate them? If so, how could I improve? This gave rise to another question: Is it a bad thing for students to drop my class during the first week? I had assumed that it was, feeling the institutional pressure for high enrollments. But if students would have a bad experience, it was better for them and for me for them to find a more suitable class.I weathered my first semester and, despite the turmoil of the first week, received generally positive student evaluations. In subsequent semesters, I continued to try to make the first week of class fun and intriguing, hoping to show students that the academic study of religion was worth their time and effort.This experience showed me that checking the enrollment vicissitudes would be deleterious for me. At best, I would feel the relief if no students had dropped. At worst, I would feel creeping panic if students had dropped. The difficult truth is that I’ll never know why those ten students dropped my course and why future students will, inevitably, switch out of my classes.As instructors, we need to balance the ability to be self-critical while not letting perceived concerns about student satisfaction guide our practices. No matter how many students drop, my job is to teach the students who stay in my class; worrying about the ghosts of students who dropped does a disservice to them.

Twelve weeks ago, there was a class, who took on an enormous task, of studying the present and the past, Israel and Palestine. Dr. Breed taught them the history, so that it wouldn’t be a mystery, when they set out on their journey, to explore a land where two people are entwined.    All was going great, as the students began to articulate the past, present and current state, of historical sites and holy places, Then October 7th came, the bombing by Hamas was to blame, all our plans had to change, no longer could we enter these sacred spaces. . . So began a reflection by Columbia Theological Seminary student A’Keti Mayweather, at the end of a January 2024 trip that was originally planned as a travel seminar in Israel and Palestine. My colleague Brennan Breed and I were scheduled to take a group of students to that land for two weeks, and he was teaching a fall class in preparation for the trip. Everything changed on October 7. As A’Keti put it, Drs. Breed and Moore-Keish developed a plan, to help us learn from our fellow man, in two of our nation’s greatest domestic lands, New York and Washington D.C. . . . We were concerned about how to do this well; after all, protests were roiling university campuses, colleagues and administrators were being publicly criticized for what they said and did not say about the conflict, and people were being threatened and losing their jobs. All this while real human beings are fighting and dying in Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. Quickly, we put together a trip that enabled us to meet with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in these two U.S. cities, to seek understanding of Israeli and Palestinian peoples amid the unfolding conflict. With help from colleagues at the American Jewish Committee, the United Nations, the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Public Witness, and others, we attended worship services in synagogues and masjids, shared meals with rabbis and pastors, talked with imams, activists, and aid workers, scholars and students, United Nations representatives and staff at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. As our student Jordan put it, As we visited more places, it became clear that many of the stories I had heard were true about Palestinian and Jewish suffering. Talking to [our Jewish and Palestinian partners] it was clear that many people were hurt and afraid. That there was much destruction. As we went on, we heard more and more of these stories and each time it seemed as though it got worse as the casualties grew, more disagreement presented itself, hope seemed to dwindle, and the status quo seemed to prevail. The challenges in this class were real: suddenly planning a new trip on short notice; addressing our shared disappointment at the change; seeking engagement with multiple communities who were themselves in the midst of trauma; trying to cultivate compassion without becoming overwhelmed by the complexity and scale of the suffering. How and what did we learn? How did we seek new understanding amid cognitive dissonance, hearing multiple stories of existential threat to both Jewish and Palestinian peoplehood? How did we keep from losing ourselves in cynicism and despair? Through many encounters, we learned that we could not reduce any side of this conflict to a caricature. Palestinian Christians and Muslims, Israeli Jews, U.S. Muslims, U.S. Jews—all are real, vulnerable human beings with stories we needed to hear. And each person we spoke with was longing for justice and for peace. As another student, Susan, said, Every day on our journey, our heads would be swimming and our hearts broken wide open as we heard more and more perspectives, all powerful, all convincing, all urgent. Every person that we heard from needed us to see their perspective and their story. Every person that took the time to sit with us, share food with us, open their homes to us, open their houses of worship to us, was seeking us out. Every person that we met—Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and so much more—felt strongly about their vision of justice. And yet despite the differences, one thing was clearly pulsing through each conversation and that was this palpable sense of urgency and belief in peace across any lines you might imagine. Even with their clashing perspectives on the conflict, we did not meet any demons—only humans longing to be seen and heard. And so we practiced seeing and hearing stories, again and again and again. Worshiping with a variety of religious communities also helped us to learn about Israeli and Palestinian people, through embodied singing and praying, sitting and standing, and through being guests in the sacred space of another community. Our student Tony reported: It was my first time attending Shabbat Services. It was also my first time attending Muslim Jumu’ah Services. Both were enthralling, but for very different reasons. With my Jewish siblings, I was so captivated by experiencing the foundation of my Christian faith. I enjoyed the prayers and songs in the Shabbat services, but what mesmerized me the most was the opening of the “ark” that housed the Torah. . . . Seeing the magnificent image of the ark, and the care and reverence with which they handled the scroll, was absolutely beautiful. Also, seeing the congregants proactively move to touch the Torah with the prayer books, and then kiss the prayer books, was a vivid reminder of how holy and sacred God’s word is. One delightful interfaith twist occurred when we were welcomed as guests to Jumu’ah prayers at Masjid Muhammad in Washington DC. That community currently worships in the basement of Holy Redeemer Catholic church, while their own historic mosque is undergoing renovation. As a result, when we thanked the community leaders for their hospitality in welcoming us, they responded by seeing us as part of the host community, since we were also Christian. We were part of the wider Christian family that was making them welcome while they were temporarily displaced from their own home. As our own self-understanding pivoted from guest to host and back again, we recognized once more that the best kind of learning takes place through building relationships across lines of difference, undoing harmful assumptions, and recognizing our mutual human vulnerabilities. “This wasn’t the trip that any of us planned for and yet I believe that it was exactly the trip we were supposed to take.” So concluded Susan in her reflections. And another student, Andrew, reflecting on the challenges of learning about Israel and Palestine in this time said: “When we experience seemingly impossible tasks, we should take small, but measurable steps, to promote change. Education is our tool for making a real and sustainable difference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—by transforming one heart at a time, one person at a time.”