Resources

We know that students are most motivated to learn when they’re genuinely excited and curious about the material, when they can connect the material to their personal interests, and when they can perceive the relevance between course content and their own lives, both current and future. (This is one way of establishing “value”—a primary driver of student motivation.)I have tried to motivate my students this way for many years, convinced by the goodness of the approach. In class discussions, I frequently ask students to think of examples from their own lives to illustrate course concepts: “What is a time in your own life where you felt misunderstood based on an identity that you held?” or “If you were a Hindu, which god would you worship and why?” I frequently teach skills and orientations that I explicitly state can be used outside of my course: “I suggest this note-taking strategy for all of your classes” or “I encourage you to ask ‘why’ about everything you do.” On weekly quizzes, I prompt students: “Describe a connection between something from our course this week and your life outside of class.” For their final projects, I allow students to choose their own topics; my instructions read, “Ideally, I’d like for you to pick a topic that is relevant or applicable to your own life, something that interests or excites you.”I DO think this attunement to relevance and connection helps students to learn. They do seem excited by the material; they do seem to understand difficult concepts better with personalization; they do seem to realize and appreciate the applicability of course material more than if I simply lectured at them about course content only. It’s been rewarding to witness.AND I am becoming worried about this approach.In both public and private spheres, I am perceiving the (increasing?) pervasiveness of:Disinterest (or worse) in people who are “not like us” (out-group bias);“Cancel culture” and going “No Contact” from those (even parents) who may hold opinions, values, or beliefs different than our own; Villainization and pathologization of people who we reduce to just one thing (an identity, a behavior, a religion); Psychological labels such as “toxic,” “narcissistic,” or “triggering” applied to those individuals whose behavior we don’t like (a great book on why this is a problem); Compulsory “pick-a-side”-ism (this video even contains a warning!); Refusal to admit—or even to consider—the inevitable limitations of one’s own position;Valorization and unqualified support for any “one of us” (even in the face of obvious concerns or problems); And more.I am bothered by this all.When I insist on relevance as a guiding principle in my presentation of course content, am I implying to students that anything that doesn’t personally interest or benefit them is not worth their time? Am I positioning whatever is outside of their (very very limited) spheres as inherently insignificant and irrelevant? Am I encouraging an individualism (that often lapses into self-centeredness) that Americans are already known for? Am I fostering growth, exploration, discomfort—or am I basically fitting the horses I lead with better and better blinders?My daughter loves reading graphic novels. (I get that any reading is still reading, but some of these books are terrible.) And they’re mostly representative of the life that she leads. The protagonists are all young characters whose lives are consumed by crushes and drama and makeup and annoying teachers. Yes, it’s all very familiar. But the best literature can transport us to different worlds. It exposes us to experiences and situations that we may never encounter. We get to inhabit characters who may be unlike us in every way possible—and grow to care about them deeply. (I cried over a gorilla in The One and Only Bob.) This is how literature builds empathy; this is what “Theory of Mind” is all about. So, once in a while, I force my kid to read old books, books from my childhood, books where the characters don’t talk like her or act like her or have the same stuff as her. She doesn’t like it one bit.I think we could all do with getting out of our comfort zones a bit more. I think we could all do with a bit more exposure to ideas, people, and worlds that are disconnected from our own. Otherwise, we’re all just operating in our own little insular echo chambers. How else will we discover new interests? How else will we change our minds? How else will we build empathy? Lots of things are going to be irrelevant or foreign for students AND still be important for them to learn. In fact, maybe these are the most important things to learn? So the question I’m trying to mull over now is: How can we motivate students while also de-centering them and pushing them to engage with difference, strangeness, otherness, irrelevance—learning for the mere sake of learning?

Recently, I discovered “tea mindfulness,” the term I use for turning the time used in making and drinking tea into moments of meditation. While I have enjoyed tea mindfulness as a means of intentionally thinking and reflecting, I wanted to move beyond the personal practice and engage others in mindful conversation. I started imagining what tea mindfulness might look like in community. Making and sharing tea is an act of hospitality. I thought intently on how to be mindful, intentional, and hospitable while incorporating the practice of drinking tea with my students and colleagues. I considered my Human Diversity course where we encounter, engage, and explore difficult topics which sometimes lead to cognitive dissonance. In a nutshell, Human Diversity builds cultural competence by increasing student’s self-awareness and cross-cultural awareness. Modifying a tea mindfulness practice in the classroom by focusing on mindful conversation and group engagement seemed like a winning strategy for cultivating cultural competence. It would give us the opportunity to engage meaningfully while nurturing appreciation for each other. Thus, the beginning of “Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation.”As students entered the classroom, they would encounter a tea station with hot water, an assortment of teas, sweeteners, creamers, lemon wedges, and snacks. At each student’s seat I placed a menu highlighting the variety of teas available, along with an index card. Students moved toward their seats, wondering what was going to happen next. Once everyone had arrived and was seated, I welcomed them to participate in Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation, offered directions, and facilitated the process for each student to prepare their tea of choice. One by one they approached the tea station, requested their tea bag, doctored their drink, and engaged in small talk before returning to their seats. After everyone was served, the connections began. Present were: Daniel and DeAndre, twin brothers and basketball players from Metro-Detroit; Josephina, a business major from Grand Rapids; Carl, a thirty-five-year-old non-traditional student who serves as a resident assistant on campus; Abbie, a homeschooled freshman in her second semester; Aisha, an exceptional athlete, who is making her mark on the women’s basketball team; and Eli, a student from a homogenous rural community in Northern Michigan.[i] These are a few of my Human Diversity students whose differences brought them together at Kuyper College. My intention for Tea, Connections, and Necessary Conversation was to provide an opportunity for the students to link up, interface, and join together in dialogue to learn more than surface-level information through engaging, exploring, and experiencing an interchange of thoughts about their similarities, differences, and even points of cognitive dissonance.As students paired up I simulated a “speed dating” activity. I asked a series of questions, where students could enter into short conversations to compare and contrast their interests, insights, perspectives, and experiences. Following two to three minutes of interaction, students would find a new partner and begin a new conversation. The classroom buzzed with excitement, motivating the shyest students to share and dialogue in genuine ways. Questions/prompts included:Tell me about some traditions or rituals your family participates in? Are there new traditions or rituals you would like to introduce to your family?Identify three things you and your conversation partner have in common. Although you share these commonalities, how do you express them differently?What is one word in the English language that irritates you when you hear it? What is another word you could use to replace it?With each question, communication grew deeper, mutual respect increased, and opportunities for connection beyond the classroom became a possibility. The start of necessary conversations began with tea and connection and continued throughout the semester.Human Diversity is a challenging course; it encourages reflection on the difficult truth that we harbor bias and prejudice, engage in racist thinking, and use microaggressions in our daily lives. We spend time confronting these fallen parts of ourselves and identify ways to become our best selves with the Holy Spirit’s advocacy. By engaging and exploring the seven dimensions of diversity (gender, age, ability, religion, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class) and the oppression associated with each one, we covenant to love God, others, and ourselves, and seek liberation. This is not an easy task, but Marianne Williamson encourages us by saying – “As we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others” (A Return to Love [HarperCollins, 1996]).Necessary conversations are those dialogues that are initiated after the introduction of stories of hard history, culture, and personal experiences. Asking questions, actively listening, and sometimes agreeing to disagree, we grow in self-awareness and cross-cultural awareness and build our cultural competence. Tea, Conversation and Necessary Conversations intentionally provided opportunities for some students to speak to each other for the first time, hear each other’s stories, gain an understanding of one another, and have fun. In one student’s words, “While drinking Jasmine Green tea, relationships became deeper, joy came forth, friends were made.” Notes & Bibliography[i] Names of students changed to protect privacy. 

What is happening in the world is happening to each of us. On May 3, 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, released an advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection between people in our country. Disconnection fundamentally affects mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual health. Even before the COVID-19 quarantine, approximately half of the U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness and isolation. Since the quarantine, we can imagine the sharp increase in isolation and fear. We, students/faculty/administrators, are part of this affected demographic. Newspapers, in small towns and major cities, provided news that fed democracy and linked people overwhelmed by otherness and isolation. In the recent past, print, and digital news provided a “watchdog” service aimed at holding our civic institutions accountable. The newspaper industry has reported a period of immense disruption and financial distress leaving news deserts across the country. Public service journalism that spotlighted the major issues confronting communities has shrunk. This leaves residents without the information they need to discuss and to solve their problems.  Whether delivered over the internet, airwaves or in print, the lack of vitality in local news coverage exacerbates our feelings of isolation.   Our loneliness is further compounded by the dichotomized assumptions promoted through social media. People depend upon memes, soundbites, and social media threads for facts, storylines, and information on complicated issues. Students/faculty/administrators, like the public, are immersed in social media culture. The rhetoric of “us versus them” has saturated our thinking and has become a presumed framework of discourse. The barrage of loss, hatreds, separation, grief, and rhetoric of division is affecting us – all of us. We are living in an extended and deepening national moment of blaming, clinched fists, gritted teeth, and suspicion for people beyond our chosen tribes, beyond our chosen communities, beyond those people with whom we agree and have chosen political affinity. There is growing suspicion of difference. There is a feeling that “the other shoe is about to drop,” without knowing when or what the shoe will be.  Here is the strangeness. While the country becomes more polarized and less informed - our daily lives and routines are relatively unchanged. How can it be – business as usual? Our everydayness continues relatively unscathed. We shop in the same grocery store. Go to the same big box stores. Perform the activities of employment. Participate in the same schools, churches, and mosques. Use the same online streaming services. While we suffer from profound loneliness, our everydayness has not changed much. We are simultaneously uninterrupted and fractured.  Division and social upheaval are smoldering while we operate in the relative customary school year start. School has begun. Teachers/students/administrators are re-convening with the same rituals, rites, and routines as always. Syllabi have been distributed. Lessons have begun. Committee meetings are back in swing. At-a-glance, we look fine. Yet, fear and uncertainty are palpable. We must be aware that loneliness, fear, and isolation tend to manifest, not where it is easily seen in our daily activities, but in our interior spaces.  Our fears are performed in relationships. Our isolation becomes apparent when we are with one another. Our trouble, pain, and turmoil are witnessed when we are working together and with others. The start of school makes us vulnerable to seeing and being seen. We are, when we gather-back, reconstituting our relationships while we are knee deep in our loneliness. Our relationships expose our fears, isolation and mental unwellness. Conflicts will soon arise. My caution is that, given the effects of the wider political climate, the veneer of calm and routine will soon dissipate. Are your classrooms ready for conflict? The most vulnerable people are those who bring diversity and difference into the faculty/student body/administration. For those faculties and student bodies who have, recently or over a very long period, accepted the challenge of diversity – this is potentially a very troubled moment for teaching. Diversity (race, class, political, gender, nationality, creed) is precisely what is not tolerated in the growing USA climate and yet diversity is what is needed to move us away from isolation and toward conversation, toward peace, toward community. The lack of tangible conflict, or the absence of specific dispute, does not mean that institutional fissures are not forming along the lines of diversity. Unaltered routines, unexamined practices, and undiscerning leadership will miss the hushed emerging crisis in community. Do not wait until difference turns into intolerance, vindictiveness, expressions of hatred, and war to invite your school into meaningful conversations. There are no recipes, formulas, or roadmaps for this brittle moment. Your school must engage its own communities as they are unique in the world and as you live together in this uncharted malaise. Gladly, there are some big ideas to which we can attend to help us make sense of the places where you teach and learn. Now, during the beginning of the semester, find ways to collectively reflect upon these kinds of questions in anticipation of conflict: What are the consequences of difference? What are the effects of difference? What meaningful project can we work on together? What sustains us through conflict? What is a good conflict and how are disputes processed with fairness, justice, and for maturity of community? Consider facilitating these kinds of habits and practices in your school or in your classroom: acknowledge the diversity and celebrate it; make the community aware of the diversities which exist; demonstrate how diversity strengthens the mission of community; attend to creating cultures of respect and regard for difference; create conversation groups across diversity to listen to one another; construct institutional processes and protocols before there is conflict; create an ombuds position; message into the community that difference is a strength and not a weakness; design new rituals and rites that support and honor diversity; facilitate conversations on the nature of hatred and the detriment of animosity; create policies of zero tolerance for hate speech; work on practices of solidarity; make a communal project of peace, empathy, compassion and forgiveness; admire courage and bravery; award truth telling; create artwork and expressions which honor difference; complexify dichotomous thinking; find ways for people to work together against divisiveness, objectification, and authoritarian assumptions. When, not if, the ugly expressions of hatred and entitlement bubble up in your community – be ready. You will not have the luxury of feigning surprise. Conflicts, subtle or violent, will arise along identity fault lines and your institution must be ready so that those targeted by the dispute are not severely hurt, ostracized, or killed.