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Our seminary recently hosted a symposium on beauty. For the occasion, I performed a musical interpretation of a digital art piece entitled “By night and by day,” part of a larger composite of cloud themes depicting God’s presence with his people by artist Sarah Bernhardt. I explored a range of sonorities on the double bass to tell the Exodus story, to depict God’s leading of Israel out of Egypt by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. To guide me in my portrayal of the theme of divine presence, I composed a musical setting based on a melody from a Latin American song entitled El Señor es mi luz (The Lord is My Light) based on Psalm 27. The psalm speaks of Israel’s trust in the Lord’s protection from adversaries who assail her during her earthly pilgrimage. The psalmist also sings of Israel’s eschatological hope to dwell in the house of the Lord forever and behold his beauty in his temple. In my composition I employed word painting, a technique used in sixteenth century music to match a concept in a written text with a corresponding musical effect. The following description of the flow of the piece explains how I used the range of the double bass to communicate various aspects of the biblical story. High pitch harmonics placing fingers over strings      The piece begins with a variation of the psalm melody using high pitch harmonics, which are achieved by touching the strings without pressing them. This technique communicates a sense of God’s presence on high as Israel prepares to cross the sea. It is a calming presence; God is in control. Energetic tremolos with the bow      The harmonics are followed by energetic tremolos made with rapid bow movements to the chorus of the hymn. This technique expresses the tumultuous movement of God’s people away from their enemies, with the pillars of fire and cloud ahead of them as they rapidly (and perhaps a bit anxiously) make their way through the great waters. Hitting strings with the bow’s wood (col legno) to introduce the theme (chorus)      To express Israel’s proximity to the waters of salvation, I play the psalm melody with the back of the wooden bow (col legno technique), evoking images of drops of water falling on or sprinkling faces and bodies as people prepare to cross the sea. Flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow (verse, stanza)      Then I play a flowing lyrical version of the theme with the bow, depicting Israel’s safe arrival to the Promised land, which anticipates the final beatific vision of God’s people in his presence. Festive plucking to a Cuban guaracha       Plucking the strings (pizzicato), I play a Cuban guaracha (salsa) rhythm based on the song’s chord progression to express the mood of eschatological fiesta after the people’s safe passage through turbulent waters into the Promised Land. Playing a Panamanian tamborito rhythm percussively on the wood of the bass…      Finally, I sing the hymn’s chorus in Spanish while tapping the top wooden shoulders of the instrument to a tamborito Panamanian rhythmic pattern, using the bass in a percussive way. So, what makes the piece a Latin American interpretation? The most obvious element is the use of a psalm in the Spanish language. But the more interesting ones are the plucking of strings to a Cuban Guaracha (salsa) and the drumming of the wood on the shoulder of the bass to a Panamanian tamborito. But why infuse the text with a Latin American spin? Here the context of the performance matters. I have performed this piece in three settings with similar audiences—predominantly White, monolingual (English), mid-Western church audiences in the United States. By incorporating these elements in the performance, I am inviting the audience to imagine a world in which the biblical story is told, heard, and sung through Latino/a eyes. I am using music as a gentle challenge to see the biblical story in the context of the catholicity or universality of the church, which is a church of people from many ethnicities, languages, and nations. I am also raising awareness about the presence of forgotten Latino/a neighbors whose voices are often not heard, who crave for belonging, justice, and the psalmist’s hope in God’s deliverance. By foregrounding these elements into the piece, my double bass functions as an extension of the Latino teacher-performer’s own identity as a proclaimer of God’s story, a bearer of an inclusive catholicity, and a herald of hospitality, justice, and hope.

It’s no fun lecturing to blank stares. As a church historian in an undergraduate institution, I teach quite a few general education classes to students who come to me ready to “do their time.” Thankfully, I stumbled upon a unique learning aid that has helped me bring to life some previously disengaged students The Reacting to the Past (RTTP) historical role-playing games have been all the rage these last few years in higher-education and have helped radically increase student engagement in my own courses. There are a variety of games available, many of which are well-suited for religious studies and Christian higher education. While studies show increased overall student engagement, it’s the games’ effect on student leadership that caught my interest this semester.[1] With student permission granted to share this story, I’d like to talk about how playing the RTTP game helped “Sam” transition from passive to active learning through his leadership role in Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791.[2] Leadership Self-Assessment Let me start by saying that I was not expecting Sam to become our RTTP star player. While he made a few insightful comments during the class, he struggled with turning in work and general participation. I had quite a few blank stares from Sam from the back of the class. This semester I had my TA choose who would play what role in our RTTP game. Each student completed an online questionnaire that helped gauge their interest, experience, skills, and limitations. They had the opportunity to state if they would be open to a leadership role or had experience in a range of areas such as student debate, event planning, or gaming. This TA had no knowledge of the students in the class other than what she found on these sheets, which allowed her to make an unbiased choice of who would receive what role. The crowd leader in our game was the historical character “Danton,” a key role that needed a strong leader. Based solely on his self-assessment, my TA assigned Sam this part. It was a risk for me to let it stand—the game really needed this character to shine—but I trusted Sam’s self-assessment and I am so glad that I did!        It turns out that the blank stare from the back of the class was masking a passionate leader. My previous lectures elicited a few comments from him, but nothing substantial. Now, all of a sudden, I had an excited student—when he received his role, he literally bounced out of the classroom. Moving forward, he came to class prepared, rallied his faction, made strategic plans, and worked outside of the classroom to meet his faction goals. His speeches were passionate, logical, and contained the necessary primary source material. He brought his “A-game” and helped lift the rest of the class with him. At the end of the game, his classmates voted for him as the strongest player. Removing Teacher Bias There’s a lot that could be said about how this highlighted Sam’s natural leadership abilities and buoyed his self-esteem, but teacher-to-teacher, I want to share this: Sam was able to lead and shine because my own potential bias was removed. He said he was a leader, my TA believed him, and that was that. There was no checking of attendance or grades, no memory of how often he had engaged in classroom conversation. The whole class benefited when I trusted the student’s self-assessment. The heart of RTTP pedagogy is pulling the professor into the background and letting students take the lead. However, we still steer things from behind the scenes, perhaps most importantly in role selection. Some professors just pull names out of a hat, while others hand pick roles. For myself, it was through the adaptation of another professor’s student pre-game questionnaire that I was able to land somewhere between these two options. Previously, I had used the questionnaire and selected roles based on student responses and my own knowledge of them. This made for some active games; however, with my TA assigning roles based only on student self-assessment, it created our best game yet. Sam’s success has taught me to release my own hand even more from this aspect of the game and is pushing me to reevaluate all of my courses beyond the game. What can I do to offer students an opportunity for self-assessment of their own leadership abilities and then honor it in the classroom? By finding ways to further reduce my own potential bias, I hope to cultivate a greater diversity of student leaders in the classroom. [1] Julie C. Tatlock and Paula Reiter, “Conflict and Engagement in ‘Reacting to the Past’ Pedagogy,” Peace Review 30, no. 1 (2018) and Matthew C. Weidenfeld and Kenneth E. Fernandez, “Does Reacting to the Past Increase Student Engagement? An Empirical Evaluation of the Use of Historical Simulations in Teaching Political Theory,” Journal of Political Science Education 13, no. 1 (2017): 46–61. [2] Mark C. Carnes and Gary Kates, Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2013). “Sam” is an anonymous name given to my student and with his permission.

I took a deep breath and stepped out of my office dressed as the Greek goddess Athena. My historically inaccurate Amazon purchase had me in a “Roman Spartan Costume Helmet,” a “Roman Empress” costume over my clothes, holding a large plastic spear and a “Wonder Woman” shield. It was the best I could piece together online, and it would have to do—and this was for fun! In our Reacting to the Past (RTTP) game, The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C., the students had to self-start their first Athenian Assembly debate by reenacting a pig sacrifice (pig picture torn in half) while priestesses of Athena offered prayers. The president sat at his table, ready to start the proceedings. They were nervous. I was nervous for them.  So, in a flourish of polyester and plastic I stomped into the classroom. I banged my spear on my Wonder Woman shield and stood behind the shocked priestesses. I whispered, “Go for it!”  Student faces were a mix of shock and amusement; I was certainly not cool enough for a couple of them. But who cared? My priestesses pulled it off, the pig was sacrificed, and the president called the meeting to order. They debated and voted. The next week I gave extra credit for showing up in a toga, and about 20 percent of the class came wrapped in random bed sheets. In preparation for our five-session role playing game I told them repeatedly to “just have fun with it!” and fun was had! At the end of the game I had students fill out a “Win Sheet” where they discussed what they accomplished and reflected on their own game play. Paraphrases of some responses ranged from “I didn’t think that this would be fun, but it was,” and “I have never liked history before,” to “I normally don’t speak up in class, but this helped me overcome that” and “I met new people and made friends.” I took that for a win. For this church history professor assigned to teach Western Civilization, the RTTP role playing game provided a way to make a notoriously boring class engaging (for all of us). As it turns out, I had stumbled upon a “ludic pedagogy” or the “pedagogy of fun”: Sharon Lauricella and T. Keith Edmunds’ post, “A Serious Look at Fun in College Classrooms” discusses how the rigor of education is not lost in a fun environment, rather it lowers the cognitive load and increases intrinsic motivation and learning.  It is probably no surprise to you that studies show that by making learning fun, student stress decreases and learning increases. The bigger question most professors ask isn’t, “Should I try this?” but rather, “What would this look like in my classroom?”  Here are some ideas that I have tried: We reenact a house church with dollar store decor and food. During review week, students write either three church history characters or the attributes from them that they want to have in their own life on a dollar store Christmas ornament.  At the end of the class around a common question, “Why do we have so many denominations?” I have students create their own church with their denomination of choice, or none. They design a building, pick a symbol for the logo, choose the music, governance style, etc. They are creative, and they enjoy the in-class activity “for fun.”  When studying the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we learn to make prayer ropes from a YouTube video. The joy in this is that the knot is almost impossible to make, so we have a good laugh trying. Pre-pandemic, we went for pizza and then visited a Russian Orthodox Church together. A class did the Reacting to the Past’s “Trial of Anne Hutchinson.” (There was burning at the stake!) The Reacting to the Past “Council of Nicaea” role playing game is on my radar for the future. NOTE: These RTTP games are not intuitive to lead, you’ll need all summer to prepare. I highly recommend joining the association and the Facebook group for help. Plan on the game taking four to eight weeks of your semester.  Clearly this is not an exhaustive list and many of you have your own successes to add. If you could take a moment to write down some of those in the comments, this could make it a very helpful space for all of us searching for new ideas. 

Years ago I devised a classroom demonstration, to use early in a semester when trying to help students become more aware, first, of the multiple dimensions of religion and, more importantly, of the ways in which diverse analytical lens for comparing and contrasting religion in a “toolbox for critical thought” will bring different dimensions forward while leaving others in the shadows.  Conceptually this is not a groundbreaking theoretical intervention for a first week of class exercise, although it does imply some theoretical “chess moves” that I feel strongly about.  Its main value here is to hone an entertaining and effective way to dramatize my points with a set of children’s blocks—both old-school wooden blocks and a few legos—plus a few crowd-pleasing additions to spice up the demonstration. I wrote this up for Teaching Theology and Religion in 2009 and have used it “live” with reliable success many times since then. Since I recently have been experimenting with moving one of my classes online, I decided to make a video version for my voice-over-powerpoint lectures.  It seems potentially useful to share the video here.     

As a teacher trained in textual analysis and the religious practices of living human communities, the language of images, videos, and recorded sound are not my mother tongue. Yet, I know that for my students, communicating in an era where these visual forms of communication are the lingua franca of the people they lead means that they must develop the capacity to deploy images and cinematic narrative styles to engage their leadership teams, parishioners, board members, students, or volunteers in not-for-profit organizations. So must I.  Given the powerful digital image-making and sharing tools that over 77% of the US population carries in their pockets, working in video and image while teaching is not a problem of a lack of technology. A lack of fluency keeps us from speaking these languages. However, like learning to communicate in a foreign language, the only way forward is to begin to speak. Many of us have had the experience of trying to hold a conversation in a language where we have novice level competency. We search for words, we stumble over the technicalities, we feel our intelligence level has been dropped by decades because we have only the most rudimentary vocabulary to express complex ideas.  Learning to work in the visual languages of digital media is no different. We may have fabulous pedagogical visions for what is possible, but our capacity to capture those ideas and craft them to our satisfaction feels elementary and gawky. We have all been trained by our daily exposure to visual culture to recognize good visual communication when we see it. As veteran radio producer Ira Glass once noted, when we start a new form of creative work, our taste often outdistances our ability and causes us to become discouraged in what we produce.  And as professors, we often do not want to appear a beginner, especially in something we are trying to teach our students. Rather than continuing to practice that new creative form, many of us, cowed by the challenge, stick with what we do best. We work primarily in text and demand that our students do so as well, whether or not this is to their detriment in the performance of their leadership when they leave our programs. After my first miserable quarter of teaching youth ministries online a decade ago, I realized that I was going to have to learn to play online if I was going to be able to teach online. The easy student interactions, the joy of conversation and dialogue, the embodied relationality of the physical classroom was gone, and I was either going to have to quit teaching or figure out how to do some of those things in a virtual environment.  That is what drove me to join Facebook, and I began to reconnect with family members and friends far distant in time and space, practicing the skills I needed to teach online. I re-discovered how to be playful, to delight in connection with other human beings, to share things that were important to me in online settings.  Practicing those skills in an environment where I was not the expert allowed me to develop them and deploy them in my teaching work. Likewise, I think faculty benefit from opportunities to play with new forms of visual communication outside of the classrooms in order to learn how to work with those languages. This could take many forms. My own faculty at Iliff brought in a photographer for a playful session during faculty retreat where we learned how to compose images and edit them with Snapseed. We wandered the retreat center, snapping photos and editing them digitally on our phones, then enjoyed a slide show at the end where we explored the resulting images. During the “Teaching with Digital Media” Workshop at the Wabash Center last summer, we sent faculty with disparate teaching contexts and fields of expertise off for an afternoon to create a “Teach Something in a Minute” video (a classroom exercise that Elizabeth Drescher had previously developed with her students at Santa Clara University). Participants decided on their topic, storyboarded videos, shot them around campus, edited them in free available software, and screened them that evening. We set minimal criteria (videos had to be one minute long; had to include titles, moving and still images; needed a soundtrack; all members of the three person team had to be involved in creating it), but otherwise allowed them to do what they could in the time allotted. We also invited the participants in the Wabash Programming Leadership Event into a similar activity to create short videos communicating the significance of various Wabash Center programs last October. The trajectory of these experiences for participants has been the same. Disbelief at the enormity of the task without adequate instruction in the technologies and techniques. Frustration at their lack of prior experience in filmmaking. Emerging eagerness to give it a try as they work together. Laughter and camaraderie as they shoot the material.  Frustration with learning editing techniques as they try to pull together the piece in limited time. Moderate satisfaction with a finished project. Pride in their team’s efforts and emerging confidence to try again another time. No faculty inservice on the importance of digital media or demonstration of someone else’s use of digital media in teaching would serve as well as playfully engaging in the task of speaking the new language together and using it to teach one another.