Resources

Sometimes students just need a change of pace. Sometimes their professor needs a break. It’s nice when those two moments coincide. [For more on the power of surprises in the classroom, see Dr. Lynne Westfield’s February blog post]. The rhythm of class, even when it’s an active classroom, becomes routine. Mostly that’s a good thing because students know what to expect, which reduces anxiety and increases openness to learning. But routines can allow sleepiness to creep in, too. What was stability and structure can become a lull as students get too comfortable and start to become passive about their learning. This might be even more the case when the semester speeds up and students have an overwhelming amount of work. They begin to do without thinking and reflecting, or begin not to do at all. On the professor’s side, the structure can be freedom. Limits engender creativity, and having a structure in place to fill in with lively activities and discussions feels like having a place to start. It puts me in a good rhythm with students when we’re all on the same page. But, like the students, the rhythm can become routine. In my case, it’s not a lull as much as a slog. I just keep doing the same thing day after day, week after week, semester after semester. Then the more the students fall into passivity, unwilling to do the work of learning, the more it feels like a slog for me, trying to rouse them to participate in their own lives again. And so I find myself in need of a break. Just a little one, maybe, but something. Enter outdoor assignments. Recently I needed to create a lesson that did not need me to facilitate in person, and it went so well that it’s inspired further creativity in imagining where my classroom can be. Wanting to do more than just “work on your presentations” time or another online read-and-write exercise, I paired a hike assignment with our content on the desert saints. The graduate students in this class had read sections of the Life of Antony and the Life of Syncletica as well as a collection of sayings of the desert saints, and they had written summaries and basic analyses of the sources as part of their online work before coming to campus for this in-person weekend. I sent them off to take a hike for an hour, find a space to read some of the sayings until one captured their attention, then ponder it awhile. Then, still outside, they were to complete a reflection on the state of their soul inspired by the work and words of the desert saints. When they were done, they were to write a page about the experience to turn in to me. It turned out to be a colder-than-average day, so I told them they were welcome to sit by a window and look at creation if they were not up for an actual hike. This is also a way to make the assignment accessible for most abilities. When I received their reflections, students spoke of the gift of space to be quiet and still, to absorb rather than figure out the right answer. They mentioned how much more real the desert saints, their lives, and the logic of their teaching became to them. What began as an attempt for my own survival became a rich and meaningful assignment. My students not only got the fundamental information about the historic desert saints but engaged the material deeply, with layers of comprehension, and further questioned how this material might affect their own lives. I’m thinking more and more about where I can place an occasional assignment that gets students out of the classroom and learning without my direct intervention on their own or in groups, that is not simply another online assignment. Can they interact with the world and each other? Can they find deeper ways into the material, even ways that resonate somewhere in their core? I send them on a scavenger hunt around campus to find the art of biblical scenes and think about art as interpretation. In classes on monasticism I ask them to go to a cemetery and ponder their mortality as monks do, an idea I stole from my own preaching professor who sent us to a cemetery to begin sermon prep sitting among headstones. I tell them to take a hike. With good instructions and a thoughtful “product” of some kind, students will learn a great deal (stay tuned for another post about assessing such assignments). In fact, because of the disruption to their routine, students might even learn more as they find energy they’ve been lacking. Bonus: the professor gets an occasional break, too!

The COVID-19 pandemic has had untold impacts on our shared work of teaching and formation. For those whose institutions have continued in-person instruction, no matter the degree of precaution taken, the risks of transmission have added fear, stress, and uncertainty to teaching contexts that already include significant challenges (which I need not enumerate here). Our challenging circumstances have also provided unique opportunities, though. And many have responded with admirable flexibility and resiliency. I have heard inspiring stories from friends and colleagues who have been able to facilitate safe learning and are sometimes even thriving, within the constraints and possibilities of our specific situations. I always have butterflies when a new school year begins, but in August of 2020 I felt paralyzed. How could I ensure that I was doing everything I could to keep my students safe while also facilitating the possibility of learning and growth within the unique stressors of the moment? I decided that, as long as I could ensure accessibility, all of my classes would meet outside, weather-permitting, as often as possible. In this first blog (of three), I will introduce the practice of outdoor teaching and reflect on its significance for theological education in our current circumstances. Two subsequent blogs will explore significant experiences and takeaways from my own outdoor instruction since August of 2020.[1] As I noted above, my fundamental motivation for outdoor teaching was to ensure a safe learning space. To be sure, walls and a ceiling offer safety and protection from the elements. When indoor spaces become places of more significant risk, though, we can experience what is normally protective as oppressive. The masks and distancing required for safety in enclosed spaces also raised literal barriers to communication and to nurturing the sense of community which I strive to facilitate for my students. Meeting outdoors allowed us all to breathe more freely, and in turn, to communicate and cultivate community more intentionally and with greater effect than would have been possible behind masks, socially distanced, and wary of the threat of a pathogen spread much more easily in enclosed spaces. Outdoor education has a long and storied history. While it has not always been adequately inclusive in western contexts, indigenous peoples have long emphasized the importance of learning within, and from, places of inhabitance. Our current climate crises demand that educators in theology and religious studies intentionally practice and foster connections with our more-than-human natural world for the sake of its well-being and for the sake of our own survival. Such intentionality is a matter of spiritual, religious, and moral concern for me as a Christian theologian. Though I have yet to teach a course directly on issues of creation care, teaching outside has already provided me with countless opportunities to connect my students to the natural world. Aside from providing an occasion to help meet the exigencies of responsible stewardship and living justly in creation, I have found that outdoor teaching is profoundly humane. Our built environments have the potential to make us forgetful of our dependence, contingency, and even capacities for embodied learning. However, as Jennifer Ayres writes, “When learners are invited outside the four-walled classroom, . . . their sensory experience of nature, particularly when paired with caring mentors who can accompany the learners as they make sense of their experience, can be transformative.”[2] When we resumed face-to-face instruction in the fall of 2020, I told my students that I suspected that our shared work together during the 2020-2021 school year would likely make for the most challenging and most poignant year of their educational journey. It was certainly the most difficult and most transformative school year yet for me. Teaching outdoors has provided me countless opportunities to reassess and improve my abilities to empower and instruct my students, to discover and promote cross-curricular and intellectual, moral, and practical connections, to appreciate the privilege of the work that I am able to do, and to marvel at and encourage the courage, attentiveness, resiliency, and creativity of my students. Though the uncertainty of the pandemic continues—I write these words just days after the discovery of the Omicron variant—because of the countless benefits both I and my students have experienced in classrooms without walls, I cannot imagine going back inside again full-time. I will be relieved if and when we are all able to breathe, speak, and listen more freely indoors, but all of my future teaching will include the fresh air of my classroom without walls. [1] I am grateful for the opportunity to share what I have learned in the hopes that others might benefit. That said, I must acknowledge that the privileges of my embodiment (as a cisgender white male) and my institutional circumstances (a campus with infrastructure amenable to outdoor instruction) mean that what I have been able to do may not be possible for others. Even so, the experience of meeting outside has reminded me of things I had forgotten and taught me new things about pedagogy that are worthy of consideration, even for those unable to teach outside. [2] Jennifer R. Ayres, Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 76.