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What do artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other new media arts have to teach us about the teaching and learning of religious worldviews, imagination, and symbols? To find this out, a small group of scholars in religion and theology, funded by a Wabash Center Grant, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in the spring of 2022. They met with Professor Rosalind W. Picard, the founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at MIT’s Media Lab to learn about her latest work. The design and organization of the Media Lab offers insights into the habitus of learning and innovation. The glass building is futuristic looking, spacious, airy, and full of light. It contrasts with the nineteenth-century and more traditional architectural designs of some theological schools. On the first floor is a display of the history of landmark scientific discoveries and advances relevant to the work of the Media Lab. Throughout the building, there are posters providing information and celebrating the research done in the various labs. Researchers are welcome to join a tradition of discovery, innovation, and exploring the future. The Media Lab facilitates the cross-fertilization of ideas by housing in one building labs that conduct research of different kinds: bioengineering, machine learning, sensors, cognition, environment, space, and computer science, etc. With glass partitions, researchers can see what is going on in other labs. They can visit other labs to consult their colleagues and learn about the latest developments in other fields.   To recruit the brightest and most talented students, MIT raises funds to provide scholarships for its graduate students. We saw students and researchers of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds working at the Media Lab. The physical environment and habitus are important for teaching and learning. In Educational Imagination, Elliot W. Eisner differentiates between the explicit and implicit curriculum. The explicit curriculum is the actual contents taught in the classrooms and labs. The implicit curriculum is the environment and ethos that includes the ways the teachers teach and interact with the students.  It is obvious that the building and design of the MIT Media Lab, i.e. its implicit curriculum, tangibly embodies its educational commitment to collaboration and transparency. It generates curiosity and new imaginations that lead to collaborative possibilities. It also encourages members to embrace a culture of transparency and communal thriving rather than competency and secrecy. When the explicit and implicit curricula of an institution and its teachers are in sync, it is easier to generate a positive learning atmosphere that benefits the students. Dr. Picard’s work on affective computing trains computers to recognize various human emotions. Picard’s team worked extensively with diverse people, including people with disabilities, to categorize human emotions in detailed and nuanced ways. Through this process, they have discovered how critical emotion is in the learning process. Positive affect such as awe, satisfaction, and curiosity contribute to constructive learning, while negative affect such as frustration, disappointment, and misconception lead to un-learning. Theological educators have much to consider about the affect we create in students. In After Whiteness, Willie James Jennings criticizes the plantation style of educational institutions. The plantation style is hierarchical and is run by the racial paterfamilias. It requires teachers and students to enter into the affective reality of white, Western institutional life. The educational space is a space of thinking, but not feeling. Students learn different disciplines but are not given the opportunities to build with the institutions. Racial minorities and people with marginalized identities often find it hard to inhabit such learning spaces. In a traditional classroom, the tables and chairs are arranged for students to listen to the professor’s lectures. Today, many professors incorporate the use of PowerPoint in their teaching. But students are still treated as passive spectators. Some professors rearrange the furniture of the room to facilitate small group discussions and interactions. What more can we do to encourage creative collaboration and co-learning? Education is about the whole person. Thomas Groome, a prominent Christian religious education scholar, calls this an ontological activity as it involves people’s ontos, their very being. Christian education includes knowing Jesus in a personal relationship through faith, but it accentuates this relationship with the pursuit of justice; that is, how one practices justice, mercy, and love. Through informative, formative, and transformative activities, education seeks to complement people’s whole way of being in the world, including questions about who they are and how they live. If we take this aspect of education seriously, our understanding of the curriculum, including its scope and context, will need to be broadened. MIT’s Media Lab stimulates us to think about an embodied model of learning in theology and religion.

Over the past several years, there have been any number of events that have prompted professors to abandon their syllabi and lesson plans and create space for addressing events unfolding outside the walls of the classroom. This in-breaking of the contemporary, this pressure of the immediate, is often traumatic in nature. It frequently relates to histories of racism, nationalism, imperialism, xenophobia, misogyny, or homophobia. It may stem from global, national, community, or even campus contexts. Not all professors and students will feel the force of the blow in the same way. Addressing the affective, psychic, cognitive, and physical after-effects of our “shared” reality transpiring alongside course content poses any number of significant pedagogical challenges. As much as current events may require a certain agility, presence, nimbleness, and attentiveness, I want to think instead about the pedagogical challenges of teaching course material that demand similar skills. What happens when one is teaching a topic that is still unfolding? In some ways, virtually anything taught in the religious studies classroom is still “live” in important ways: this, in fact, might be something that we are trying to get our students to understand. If I am teaching Hebrew Bible, I will have to grapple with the ways that Christian students read those texts because of what they’ve heard in church or Sunday school. If I am teaching about material religion, I will have to grapple with disputes around Confederate memorials, insofar as they are sites of sacred meaning—left or right—for many people. And, of course, if I am teaching about Islam or new religious movements, I will have to negotiate the complex and disparate motivations and (mis)understandings that prompt students to enroll in my classes. But some topics, of course, are more alive than others. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this series, I recently taught a course on the Catholic sex abuse crisis and am scheduled to teach it again in the coming academic year. Although Church officials and apologists are invested in characterizing the crisis as something that is finished, resolved, and in the past, this is a polemical position, not one grounded in the evidence. New allegations of abuse surface on a weekly—if not daily—basis. New information about what bishops, cardinals, Vatican officials, including the Pope, knew, did, and failed to do surface with as much frequency. We continue to gain greater insight into the global scope of the scandal—both historically and contemporaneously. With every positive step forward—in terms of policy changes or the rhetoric of pronouncements—there are just as frequently significant strides backward. There are stories about study commissions, and institutional apologies, and advocacy groups, and the vagaries of each that continue to shape the crisis and its meanings. And, then, of course, there are the parallel stories of sexual abuse and misconduct as it has been practiced and ignored by a range of other institutions. When I was last teaching the course, I would always make sure and spend an hour prior to going to class to see whether some big story had broken since we last met that I needed to address in class. Sadly, the Internet in all its glory never failed to provide. Although this ever-moving target of what I need to include in my course is anxiety provoking, there’s also a calming freedom in these circumstances. I don’t need to try and master the material because I can’t. This inability, on my and my students’ part, creates a very different classroom dynamic. I never had to come up with strategies and practices to encourage collaborative learning; I only had to pay attention to what we were trying to understand. We necessarily had to cooperate, to pool information, to treat each other as equal partners in our common endeavor. I was able to drop the weight of the fantasy of “coverage,” which let both me and my students slow down, breath a little, and reflect on the material in front of us more thoughtfully. And, of course, the attempt to understand—rather than the accomplished feat—is always at the forefront of everyone’s minds, underscoring the invaluable lesson that learning is a process and not an achievement. While the Catholic sex abuse crisis—and some other topics—are obviously and keenly living animals that demand this kind of pedagogical attention, we can learn something from such material about how we might want to teach generally. What do you teach your students about that continues to grow and change, to influence and shape the contemporary moment? How can you attend to those features and dimensions to create a different experience of learning, conversation, and inquiry?

As an anthropologist of religion, I have advocated that the skills one develops in an ethnographic setting are necessarily translated to the classroom. I’m a proponent of creating a space for students to serve as experts and to speak to their own experiences—especially when addressing contemporary political movements and events. Active listening and collaborative learning with our students are key means through which we, as James Bielo notes, are able to be “ethnographers in, of, and for all the courses we teach.”[1] I like to joke with other anthropologists that we were the children who didn’t fit in; we sat on the sidelines watching the more popular children play, drawing rudimentary theories about their social dynamics and interactions. One of the first things one learns in the field is to drop all assumptions. We learn to ask questions to which we think we already know the answer and, more often than not, we uncover something altogether unexpected. This is my approach in my course on Religion and Society – a course that looks at the manifestations of religion in the contemporary world read through a lens and a critique of the social forces that dominate modern Western democracies. As has become almost canon among RS professors, I use the example of the American flag to illustrate Durkheim’s discussion of the totem and the distinctions between sacred and profane. As a Canadian living in the United States, I have the added benefit that I am able to feign ignorance. Holding a paper version of the American flag, I ask my students to reflect on what it stands for. “I didn’t grow up here,” I tell my students. “I don’t know what any of this means. Tell me abo-out it” (all semester long, I put the extended emphasis on my ‘u’s in preparation for this performance of difference). I pretend to be confused as they explain, yes, it’s a piece of paper, but really it means more: freedom, justice, liberty, etc. It’s a great conversation – one that is not original to me – and makes for a strong teaching exercise in an introductory religion class. Not only does it illustrate Durkheim’s theory of the totem, collective effervescence, and American civil religion, but it is also an excellent vehicle to get students comfortable with debate and disagreement in the classroom. Usually, the students respond well. They are acquainted with controversies surrounding the American flag; they quickly draw connections to such social issues as debates over the Confederate flag and Colin Kaepernick. In my experience, it is a topic that matters to them and they are already familiar with both sides of the argument and have already drawn their own conclusions. Because they are more or less set in their opinions, it serves as a good topic to practice respectful listening. Sometimes it is easier to listen openly to an opposing argument when you know that you’re not going to change your perspective.[2] And at an early stage in both the semester and in their college careers, learning to listen and practicing disagreement are key. I am unable to stop at this point. The exercise helps students learn to disagree from a shared starting point (American identity) but leaves me dissatisfied because it doesn’t attend to the experiences of dual nationalism of myself and many of my immigrant students. Canadians hold a form of national pride invested in our self-perception as the underdog. The first time I taught this lesson in the United States I followed the American flag with the Canadian one. I don’t know what I thought my students would say when asked about the national qualities and values associated with The Maple Leaf. But the responses of “hockey, Justin Bieber, bacon, and polar bears” were strikingly in contrast to the discussion of the core values signified by the American flag, for which many claimed they would willingly sacrifice their lives. I now take seriously collaborative learning experiences where some students’ lack of expertise might be highlighted. It is one that purposely redefines who counts as an expert and displaces my American-born students. A clarification about context is necessary. Middle Tennessee State University is the largest public institution in the state. It caters mostly to students from the Middle Tennessee area, many of whom are first-generation college students. Because of the wide availability of manufacturing jobs, low cost of living, and its identification by the American government as a refugee resettlement region, Middle Tennessee is more international than one might expect for a region that regularly boasts to be the ‘Buckle of the Bible Belt.’ In addition to significant Hispanic and Southeast Asian immigrant communities, the region has the largest Kurdish population in North America, a significant Laotian community who have been in the region for several decades, and a recent increase in immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Eretria, and Bhutan.[3] On the first day of every semester, I have students fill out an information form that—along with relevant questions asking about students’ majors/minors, preferred gender pronouns, previous courses in religious studies, etc.—asks what their hometown is. With this information in hand, I bring images of the national flags of their countries of origins and ask them to speak to their conceptions of their own flag.[4] Sometimes this exercise works and sometimes it falls flat. For the most part, my students who were born in another country immigrated to the United States with their families as children and have become naturalized citizens. Unlike myself, they have a sense of themselves as Americans. “What about this flag? What does it signify?” I wait patiently for Farrah, who immigrated to the United States as a child fourteen years ago to look up. Farrah looks up and laughs. “That’s the Egyptian flag,” she says excitedly. She begins to explain the symbolism of the colors and their revolutionary importance. She speaks proudly about the struggle to overcome oppression and how the white band symbolizes a peaceful exchange of power. “But it’s more than that,” she continues. “Egypt is the cradle of culture, the oldest continuing civilization. You wouldn’t have the developments in Europe or America if it hadn’t been for us. Or at least that’s what we learn in school. We’re taught that we are history.” At this point, I usually attempt to pick up a common theme between their form of nationalism and my own. With Farrah, it was easy to draw connections between the emphasis placed on a perceived bloodless transition of power in the national myths of Canada and Egypt. It doesn’t always work well. Farrah’s family moved to the US fifteen years ago, but they return regularly to Cairo to spend time with family. They are proud of their Egyptian roots. Often my Egyptian students, particularly those who are Coptic, are more critical of the national mythos. This past semester a student from Monaco rejected my attempts at a shared identity and instead placed me with the Americans observing, “Europeans just don’t care about these symbols the way you North Americans do.” I like this exercise because it displaces the students in a way for which they are not prepared. Their rehearsed points about the flag, which are perceptive and important, are all of a sudden lost in the context of a different national mythos. They are smart enough to know that the Justin Bieber jokes don’t cut it, and as Farrah lays claim to her country as the origins of history, she discursively moves the American-born students to the margins. If anyone understands displacement, it’s immigrants—from lines in airports and government forms to media rhetoric and misplaced cultural cues, feeling out of place is par for the course. It is my hope that this exercise serves as a place to begin larger conversations about religion, politics, and social issues and realigns our assumptions about who counts as an insider and who counts as an outsider. These are conversations that many of us are having both inside and outside of the classroom in consideration of gender, sex, abilities, race, ethnicity, and, of course, religion. But I’ve found the rhetoric about immigration, citizenship and nationality lacking. I am hesitant about language that in a spirit of inclusivity too quickly overlooks the lived experiences of our dual-national students. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I’d like to use this blog as a forum to think publically about it. I hope that you will join me in this conversation regardless of your nationality. [1] Bielo, James S. 2012. “Religion Matters: Reflections from an AAA Teaching Workshop.” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 3: 203–208. [2] A recent New Yorker article argues that changing one’s mind is even more difficult than we think:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds. [3] http://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2015/05/17/nashville-welcoming-immigrants/27479183/ [4] At the beginning of every semester, I have every student enrolled in this introductory course meet with me for a short one-on-one interview to get to know them, to talk about any early concerns they might have, and to emphasize my expectations about their responsibilities as students. I ask my immigrant students during this interview if they are comfortable speaking in class about their experience growing up in or coming from another country. Especially, given recent political developments, it would be inappropriate to ‘out’ them without permission.

Allow me to be honest. There are few things in my job that I dislike more than having a conversation with someone who is feigning objectivity or neutrality. I call it academic pretense. I cherish conversations when people speak from their hearts, even if I disagree with them. This holds true as well in my collaborative learning gatherings (aka co-learning gatherings, aka the classroom). Over the years, I have learned to face a reality in my own life, namely, there are few areas in which I have no opinions or, at least, have no leanings. If you tell me you are different, no offense, but if you are a fully engaged person I probably won’t believe you. Try as we may to be neutral, as engaged educators who regularly integrate our subjects of expertise with everything occurring around us, we all have leanings and assumptions concerning a wide-range of topics. Professing to be neutral, when in fact, we are not, endangers us by moving difficult conversations to the abstract and impersonal world of the ethereal, often leading to conversations that lack personal investment. How well can we learn if we are not invested in an honest process? I have found that most learning experiences “stick” best when we bring not just knowledge, but our own truth and experience to the conversation. The type of conversation I am suggesting is risky business in the sense that when we put ourselves “out on a limb,” mistakes will be made, feelings can be hurt, and positions may inevitably need to be re-directed and corrected--even if that corrective trajectory reaches farther in the future than we envision. Dangerous, yes. But, I think opportunities for real education are worth the risks. How did I come to a place of partiality for “risky conversations?” My own rough, street-wise childhood taught me to observe everything around me carefully; to assess present threats/concerns and size-up what is really happening underneath the surface of any given conversation. Where I grew up, the dangers of not trusting my own instincts could have grave, unforgiving and intractable consequences. But, as much as I trust my gut instinct, life has also taught me that I can be wrong. Having begun my teaching career later in life, I often found myself asking, “How do I use these skills in an organic discussion setting that will benefit the whole academic learning process?” And, more importantly, how will this discussion make us all better human beings? Early on in my teaching career, I had to re-teach myself to trust my instincts. What I discovered was that those life skills learned on the streets and in the course of my life can work for me in the classroom. Why? Allowing myself to move freely with what I see happening around me organically shifts the classroom zeitgeist from a theoretical, abstract reality to a more organically-real, shared reality--achieving a deeper level of honesty. Contributive-learners (aka co-learners, aka students) respect and even desire the level of honesty I am suggesting. Even when discussions don’t work out as planned, co-learners respect my honest regrets and my apologies. In the meantime, whether the discussion was a “once-in-a-lifetime” hit or a “write-off,” I am still modeling a paradigm that is teaching them to trust their instincts and go with the organic, sacred moment. Hopefully, I am also modeling humility. I realize there is a great deal of valid concern over co-learning gathering safeness. Perhaps I view it differently than some of my colleagues. In my experience, safeness has nothing to do with the subject matter at hand. But rather, safeness is primarily about our respect for the sacredness of how we handle the conversation. With social norms changing at a rapid pace, especially in the current political climate, I am discovering that people are afraid to talk honestly with one another, although many, including myself at times, are willing to talk at one another. This type of climate only promotes isolationism, binary position taking, and we/they attitudes. Education is about people learning from each other. How can we learn if we cannot talk with one another honestly? Obviously, we can’t. But, back to the danger.  What if it goes too far? More than once in our discussions, co-learners have taken their polemic too far and hurt another person’s feelings. At that point, if another co-learner does not stop the process, I stop the conversation and I do a check. Together as a group, we take two deep breaths and have a moment of silence. I then ask if we are still committed to the values of truth-seeking, mutual respect and the sacredness of the moment we are in?* Invariably, the person who crossed the line apologizes for their inability to express their thoughts without getting personal. Also, and this always surprises me, the offended person sometimes apologizes for taking it too personally. I encourage the group to share any thoughts about the process and then ask if we are ready to go further in the conversation or come back at another time? In many of our Native American traditions, we have a prayer that goes something like, “have pity/understanding on me Creator and remember I am just a human being.” The idea behind this prayer is that perfection is the enemy of attainment. We are all simply human beings, imperfect, but learning from our mistakes. Those mistakes make us human. And, being human, by “climbing out on a limb” in order to reach others, is the most spiritual state of being in which we may find ourselves. I wish I could say I have these sacred moments in every co-learning gathering, I do not. But, I do encourage those moments through risky honest conversations. And when those special moments come, the whole room feels like we have experienced something together that is truly sacred. Perhaps promoting knowledge among my co-learners in an atmosphere of sacred space, is the most important role I have as a scholar and a spiritual leader. *This exercise requires pre-teaching and mutual commitment to the process.

The shift in the pattern is subtle, and I might be hypersensitive given the national spectacle of alternative facts and fake news, but I think conversations riddled with non-sequitur speech are on the Lynn Westfieldrise. Here is an example: Recently, as a consultant for a weekend gig, I was checking into a hotel in Chicago. The desk clerk, a young woman, asked me for identification and my credit card. Reaching into my purse, I handed her my documents. When I noticed that she was swiping my credit card, I told her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party, and she need not swipe my credit card. She said she had to swipe everybody’s card. Again, I informed her that my incidental expenses were being covered by a third party and that their card was on file for all my expenses. The manager, overhearing our conversation, came to the desk. He told the clerk that I was correct and that my card need not be swiped. Two days later at checkout, mindful that my card had been swiped, I wanted to be sure no costs had been charged to my card. I handed the young woman at the hotel desk (different woman than at check-in) my room keys and asked to which card the expenses were charged. She told me, without looking at the paperwork, that the charges would go to the card I gave at check-in. I told her my expenses were being paid by a third party and asked which card was being charged. She looked irritated and called for the manager to help her (or me). When the manager appeared at the desk (same manager from check-in), I asked to which credit card the expenses were being charged. He replied that the charges were going to the card given by my client, but he did not tell me the number on the paperwork. I reminded him that my personal credit card had been swiped at check-in. Shaking his head no, he said that my card had not been swiped. I frowned at him. The manager responded begrudgingly, “Yes, but she made a mistake.” His response was confusing to me. His statement inferred that if a mistake had been made and subsequently rectified, then no mistake was ever made. Therefore, I should not be questioning the process. I asked again, “To which credit card will my expenses be charged?” Finally, looking at the paperwork, he read aloud the number on the bill, and indeed, it was the card of the client. I thanked them both. As I walked out of the hotel, I made a mental note to check my monthly credit card bill because it is likely my card will be charged. The feeling of suspicion and fuzziness I felt while walking out of the hotel is similar to how I feel while watching TV political interviews. Non-sequitur speech is seeping into public discourse at an alarming rate. Political pundits on news shows routinely, regardless of the posed question, give a scripted reply that ignores the question at-hand but instead polishes the political brand or repeats a generic political message. The confusing response to the question is often such a non-sequitur that the interviewer, even when poker-faced, looks confused and gropes for ways to bring some semblance of cohesion to the TV viewer. Regrettably, my hunch is that this strange and strained conversation pattern (which is not dialogue) is creeping into the classroom. It is as problematic in classrooms as it is in politics. The up-tick of non-sequitur speech by my students in the classroom is troubling. I do not want the deliberations in my classrooms to devolve into pseudo-conversations that have little to do with reality or where bold-faced lies are touted as truth. I do not want my students to mimic the patterns of communication from politics believing that specious comments make for genuine dialogue. If teachers are not vigilant in our classrooms to create space for healthy, open dialogue and the free exchange of ideas, then conversation patterns of alternative facts and non-sequitur speech will quickly seize our classroom discourse, rendering us a less able, more oppressed people. It seems, given the state of authoritarian governmental leadership and the shrinking respect for a voiced constituency, that it is imperative that practices of dialogue are reinforced and extensively utilized in our courses. We who teach must provide antidotes for the poisons of alternative facts and mean-spirited clamor that masquerades as dialogue. The truth, as well as the ability to speak it, in empirical facts or in the nuances of multi-faceted poetry, is to be guarded and nourished in our classrooms. Teaching students the power of dialogue, at this moment, is an act of resistance that will reach far beyond the classroom. Nurturing moral imagination, honing skills of courage and thoughtful activism, analyzing and reinforcing our bedrock values of equity, justice, and human dignity are pedagogical imperatives for all topics and all classrooms. Our classroom spaces must become cauldrons of resistance by the dialogues we share. As I plan my fall courses, I will increase the time for student dialogue in learning activities and assignments. I will intentionally discourage non-sequitur speech and encourage their critical wisdom. For the sake of our constitutional values we must equip our students with dialogue as a tool of resistance.

My grandmother used to speak in adages, parables, metaphors, similes and symbols. Now I call her proclivity for language, literature, and meaning-making “wisdom-speak.” Then, I thought she was being corny. She knew her wisdom-speak was meant to teach me enough until I am ready to know more. Her adages came from bible verses, poetry lines, and quotes from novels, cultural remembrances and living life as an African American woman in the USA, born in 1887. Folks like Langston Hughes, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, Pearl Bailey, Jesus, and Sarah Vaughn were regularly invoked. Wisdom-speak is colorful, witty language - easy to recall and recite, with a depth of multiple meanings. Wisdom-speak is part of everyday conversation. It is a pithy quote or well-placed refrain woven into a conversation like salt on fried fish. It is accompanied by a hmmm or tongue click, a foot pat, a shoulder shrug or an eye roll. Wisdom-speak is a body, mind and spirit lesson. Grandmother Vyola would say, “All that is is not visible.” As a child, I thought she meant that there is more to creation than what can be witnessed with the naked eye. If knowing is only about what is directly in front of us – then we miss so very much of all that is. Learning to see the invisible is the task of knowing. Learning the ways of the wind and the saints, angels, ancestors, cherubim and seraphim; the dream world and the day dreaming world; the ways of prayer and meditation are the learning of the invisible. Then as a young adult, I decided she was talking about identity politics and the politics of domination. The genderless politics of patriarchy, with its racist undertones and dictates, considers much of “all that is” to be too much for women, many children, and most men. The truncation of imagination engineered by systems of domination and control renders the capacity of many people as inferior thus negating all that is. Poverty drastically limits opportunities for in-depth exploration – so when we meet persons who have carved out an education in the wake of social depravity we should be in awe.   As a young adult, I came to understand good teaching meant finding ways of seeing the manifestations of oppression in my own classrooms, church, society, and world. And I encountered Alice Walker and figured Grandmother Vyloa was talking about what Dr. Walker was talking about. Grandmother Vyola is resonant with novelist, poet Alice Walker’s four-part definition of a “Womanist” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1983. The first part of the definition reads in part: “….Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one.” It seems as though Vyola and Alice were cut from the same cloth. In the last few days, I have turned my attention exclusively toward preparation for school. I have my head down as I put finishing touches on my syllabi, design learning activities, schedule guest colleagues, locate films, and order art supplies. My mode is one of efficiency and my mood is closed off. I am, in my planning, working from an attitude of indubitability. I have a clarity about what I will teach, how I will teach and what my students will learn. While immersed in my preparations, grandmother whispered in my ear. Grandmother Vyola says that patent planning is not good for me or my students. She advises that the better way is to be more opened ended – like Jesus’ parables. Allow the students’ voice to affect most aspects of the course design, not just the convenient parts. Consider that you cannot see all there is to see so leave room for your own learning while you teach. Most of all, the plan that that which is revealed will be marvelous and know it is unplannable, but can be readied for – Get Ready! I have learned to pause when grandmother speaks. I take a second look at my plans and see that I have relied, a bit, on stale redundancy and a few too many current conventions. I recognize that when I start telling myself I know what will happen, what can happen in my own classroom – I am in danger of not allowing for surprise, the unexpected, or the un-expectable activity of Spirit. My grandmothers Vyola and Alice remind me that my certainty is likely a trap. If I plan for only what I know, only what I can see, only for what I can do – then I am not being womanish, not acknowledging all that is in the world. With this wisdom, I have begun to incorporate more ways of acknowledging the hegemonic forces which hide in our midst. I have adjusted and added ways which invoke the freedoms of learning for my students – freedoms like their own questioning, curiosity, and concerns being integrated into the full length of the course.   School starts the week before Labor Day --- I am less certain of my plans and better for it.

As we go back to the classroom (and shake off the dust of summer), we all have mixed feelings and expectations. While some of us will just go back to the normal, others will be anxious and perhaps fearful about a new semester. The beginning of a semester can carry a feeling of being displaced, a sense that we don’t know what is coming our way and what is next. In one word: the lack of control. That is why we occupied so much of our syllabi in order to gain immediate control of that space we actually cannot control, and in fact never have controlled. What will my class be made of? How many students and who are they? Will we be able to control everything? Be fair with everybody? Be attentive to our own tasks, juggling the school’s demands and all that the teacher hopes for? The specific details of the practical aspects of our syllabus, the division of tasks, the proper tools to be used, the connections to be made, the boundaries to be established. In truth these are questions that only end when classes are over after a whole semester. Besides, after being away from the classroom for a while we may feel a little out of joint, as if the classroom is again a foreign/home space, until the map we draw (our syllabus) will help us travel through this newly foreign terrain. In our classrooms we are both professors and educators. Rubem Alves makes a distinction of these two roles. He says: “A professor is an employee of institutions that manage lagoons and puddles, specialist in reproduction, an instrument of the social apparel of the state. As the educator, on the contrary, [the professor] is a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.” [1] As we go back I wonder how our duties as professors will cast a shadow over the role of the educator. Will our pedagogies be more faithful to the management of forms of reproductions or attentive to the ways our students can become more expanded, more fully human beings? Will we dare to be a “mediator of hopes,” or a “pastor of projects?” If we only trust the readings of our classes we are more professors than educators. If we believe that the evaluation can only take a form of a formal final paper we will not tap into the rich resources of our students. If we make classrooms be a “one fit for all” place, we will make our educator side slip into the perfectly devilish/delightful combination of institutional bureaucracy and personal fears. A combination where students pay the price of teachers whose hope is confounded by fear. In classrooms we are educators! That is why we gather together: to share knowledge as we share tastes, to share complexities and differences as we share life together. But in order to get there, we must be awakened! That is what Alves says of how to prepare the educator: “is necessary to wake her/him up… its enough that we call them from their sleep, by an act of love and courage. And when awakened, they will repeat the miracle of the instauration of new worlds.”[2] I think we are very good at managing lagoons and puddles. However, our task as we begin our semester is to be awakened into the educators that live inside of us and be(come) a co-founder of worlds in our students, a stretcher of horizons, jokers of our common worlds and satirists of our own stupidity, doing what we do with a sense of praxis that will be able to transform actions, gestures, movements, feelings and create possibilities. In a word: dreamers of new realities! Paulo Freire talks about this dreamer in a more academic language. Forgive the sexist language: “Because he admires the world and therefore objectifies it, because he grasps and comprehends reality and transforms it in his action-reflection, man is a being of praxis. Even more so, man in praxis… His ontological vocation, which he ought to existentiate, is that of a subject who operates on and transforms the world. Subjugated to concrete conditions that transform him into an object, man will be sacrificing his fundamental vocation… Nobody is if he prevents others from being.”[3] Every dreamer must start in reality, it the midst of contrasts, racial divides, economic disparities, political dualisms, violent neighborhoods, dialectical complexities and all kinds of conflicts. We must make unhidden the social processes of reality that prevent change and transformation especially for minorities and oppressed people. Educators can (be)come the very material they use in the classroom, the texts they read, the dialogues they have, the educational tools they use, the theories they choose and the very awareness of what kind of pedagogy that they foster. We are caught into this action-reflection that stirs up, criticizes and amplifies theories and praxis. We are not detached from the world, but rather we are the result and consequence of the world we create. Our pedagogies are not meant to keep the status quo but to transform things and people, even if we know that what we do will not transform anything or anybody. More than anything we must keep our fundamental vocation as teachers, whatever that might be, so we will not prevent students from being the fullest they can be, in the owning of their bodies, their feelings, their thoughts and their capacity to reach out, to expand, and to listen to their own selves. As we go back to the classroom, let us awaken ourselves into the praxis of being educators! Dreaming dreams of new worlds and human beings fully stretched, while hoping for a good semester with all the rights and wrongs we will certainly make if we dare to be “a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.”   [1] Rubem Alves, Conversas com quem gosta de ensinar. (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 1980), 27. [2] Ibid. [3] Paulo Freire, La Concepción problematizadora de la educación y la homanización.” Cristianismo y Sociedad. Montevideo, 1968, 18. Freire... quoted by Carlos Alberto Torres, "Dialetics, Conflict, and Dialogue," in Moacir Gadotti,  Pedagogy of Praxis: A Dialectical Philosophy of Education (New York: Suny Press, 1996).

Youshaa Patel Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Lafayette College These days, Islam is no stranger to controversy. Although we may deplore the mainstream media’s deliberate sensationalization of Muslim conflicts, as professors we can also exploit conflict in the classroom to help our students achieve their learning objectives. Many of my.

Martin Nguyen Associate Professor, Faculty Chair for Diversity Fairfield University In the teaching of Islam, there are many ways through which we can engage our students in the classroom. My intention here is to share one assignment that I have developed over the years that has proven to be incredibly.

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