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The day before we were told to go online, rumors that we would transition were flying think and fast. It was a Tuesday. I was supposed to head to Vanderbilt that evening to give a talk on Wednesday, but the night before, it had been canceled. Given this, I suspected that we (CU Boulder) would be going online soon. Earlier in the day when I met with my seminar (a class that, despite being label a seminar, had over 30 people), I told them that I thought online was coming. The entire room burst into conversation, much of it unease, some of it amusement, most of it because they knew I was barely managing our minimalist Canvas site. We had already experienced some small adaptations together. A week or two before, a student who was experiencing back spasms asked if she could lie on the floor during the class. I said yes, and she participated while lying flat on her back. Prior to our last in-person session, a student had emailed me to say that he thought he had Covid-19 and asked if he could attend via FaceTime, on a classmate’s computer. I said yes, and he participated from his screen. Using that flexibility as our foundation, we spent 30 minutes planning our online transition together. In the end, I am responsible for the decisions that were made, but I am very glad that my students and I worked through the plans together. We discussed the possibility of meeting over Zoom. While people really liked our classroom community, we had concerns about trying to have a 34-person conversation over the computer. (At this time, I had never used Zoom and did not realize that I could break the class into small groups with the push of a button.) In addition to questions about the feasibility of the Zoom platform, students were anxious about internet access, changing work schedules, and responsibility for younger siblings. So, we decided that we would have discussion boards. I asked them if they thought that it would be fair to have everyone post one initial thought and two comments on existing posts per day. We agreed, as a group, that one comment could be part of an ongoing conversation on your own post, but that the other comment had to be on someone else’s. We discussed what they wanted and needed in order to make this plan work. Deadlines. They wanted clear deadlines and they wanted me to promise that I would not move things around on them. As the semester would wear on, one by one, they would repeatedly thank me for never moving anything around. We agreed that the initial post needed to be up by the start of class time, and that they had 25 hours to post responses. I talked about what I wanted in the discussion boards: for them to try not to repeat each other, and to make sure that someone commented on almost everyone’s post. When I brought up that second concern, one student nodded. I knew she would monitor our inclusivity. I was delighted, and feel that I can take very little credit, for what happened on our discussion boards over the following weeks. I posted questions to get them going; one of which was always, “Share a quote that struck you as interesting and tell us why you were intrigued by it.” They answered. They picked quotes they liked, they picked quotes that they did not understand, they picked quotes for which they needed more context. They brought their confusion to each other. Frequently, I would log in to discover that a question posed late at night, and probably aimed at me, had been answered by a student before I woke up. But maybe more impressive than their willingness to share their vulnerability, to share their “I do not knows,” they were willing, firmly and politely, to disagree with each other. They challenged each other repeatedly. They debated interpretations of texts, but they also called each other on more charged issues, like failures to see structural racism. Each time, I was struck by the fact that they did so without pointing fingers or descending into accusation. They remained firmly in intellectual community with each other. To be clear, some of these things had been happening in the classroom all along, but most were not, or at least included only the most talkative of the class. These discussion boards were very surprising to me, and upon reflection, I think this kind of connection occurred because I let them choose a format. I did not let them chose the format because I knew that it would lead to these conversations—I did it because I have never taught online, did not know what to do, and wanted to get buy-in for my plan. Wonderfully, my students responded by taking ownership of the space. They had been asked what they wanted to do, and with that freedom they went ahead and did it.

One of the tools I find essential for teaching is journaling. I recently wrote about how I journal for my own research, and I have incorporated the same practice in my teaching. When I teach introductory religious studies classes, for example, the course objective I focus most on is helping students learn how to read and interpret religious texts. In the end, whether the students retain what they’ve learned about—for example—early church heresies and the Christian understanding of the Trinity, the skill of being able to read a religious text and understand the author’s ideas about God can be more broadly applicable. Journaling assignments are an effective way to get students to actively think about their reading and class content instead of just glossing over it as they prepare for class or trying to passively retain it. As I note in my assignment guidelines, journals are powerful tools of reflection, that is, “the process whereby we reconstruct and make meaning of our experience.”[1] Journaling also helps students become better writers, both by providing the space to think through ideas informally and by helping build writing motivation and fluency. I use journals in undergraduate and graduate classes, but in what follows I will provide practical guidelines based on how I’ve used journals in introductory courses. For more examples and ideas, I highly recommend the book Journal Keeping by Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper that I quoted above. In my introductory religious studies course, “The Christian Tradition,” I have students write reading response journals using the journal feature on Blackboard, a practice I began during the pandemic. The accompanying image is a screenshot of the instructions for the journal that students see on Blackboard. For this, students free write their responses to the reading assignments before class. The class meets twice a week, but I only require the journal entry to be done once a week unless students are absent, in which case they must do their journal entry for the class they missed. I emphasize that I am not looking for students to be “right” or “wrong” about their interpretation, but to engage with and respond to what the text says from their perspective. I ask them to complete this before the class to prepare them for our discussion. One change I implemented this past semester was to delay this at-home journaling until the fourth week. Instead, we did journal entries in class after the discussion, and I provided written feedback to help the students learn this skill. After we did this in class, I could use the Blackboard rubric to give minimal feedback on their online journal entries. Because students in this class only write one entry a week, I read and grade every single entry they complete. In contrast, in an interdisciplinary general education course that I teach titled “Discovering the Self in the Universe,” I ask students to use a physical journal just for that class. They write responses to the reading assignments, but they also use the journal for in-class reflection. This class is writing intensive, so students do much more journaling than I require in “The Christian Tradition.” Because the students are writing more, I do not read every entry in this case. For grading, I collect the journals three times during the semester and check for completeness (50 percent of the grade), then read five entries which I grade for quality (50 percent of the grade), having provided them with a simple rubric at the beginning of the semester. Students generally respond positively to the journal. In last semester’s final course evaluations, in response to the question on what was most effective about the class, several students mentioned journaling. Students noted that this assignment “helped me examined [sic] the text more closely” and “really helped me express my opinion and also remember what we did in earlier sessions.” I was teaching “Discovering the Self in the Universe” for the first time, and in that class one of my students, Sebastian Derflinger (name used with permission), chose to do his final presentation—about what was most beneficial for them in the course—on the practice of journaling. Derflinger is from Austria, so he noted that the ability to write freely in English without worrying about mistakes was a particular benefit for him. He also noted the importance of building the habit of journaling to improve how he expresses his thoughts, record important ideas, and go deeper into the course content. He said that journaling in my class led him to start a private journal about his goals, experiences, and thoughts. These are just a few examples of student responses, but they give a sense of the positive responses I receive about this. I am thus a huge proponent of journaling, both for myself and for my students. [1] Dannelle D. Stevens and Joanne E. Cooper, Journal Keeping: How to Use Reflective Writing for Learning, Teaching, Professional Insight, and Positive Change (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2009) 3.

Many of us have probably been following the Hamline University controversy. I first came across it in InsideHigherEd and the New York Times, whose links I sent to my colleagues with a “Yikes!” attached. In case you haven’t been following it, it’s good to know about. It concerns all of us. To briefly recap, at Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, an adjunct instructor teaching a global art history class showed a famous painting of the prophet Muhammad in class, after warning students on her syllabus and then reminding them of her intentions that day. A student complained afterward; the complaint was that showing images of the prophet is “forbidden” in “Islam” (I can’t help but add these scare-quotes) and thus sacrilegious. The administration concluded the incident was Islamophobic and declined to rehire the instructor for the next semester. Attempts by experts in art history as well as religion to explain the value of showing such images (and to counter the claim of Islamophobia) had no effect. There are many important layers here, including students’ very real experiences of racism and Islamophobia on the small campus, how instructors contribute to students feeling like they belong (or not) in the classroom and on campus, what counts as “Islamophobia,” academic freedom, the control that faculty should or do have over curriculum, the role of expertise, the invisibility of religion in DEI, the increasingly popular model of a modern American university that seems more like a business or a corporation than an institution of inquiry and higher learning, the reminder that universities are inequitable places of labor, the power that students do hold over us (and not just the other way around), and more. I was bothered by the student(s) ignoring the instructor’s multiple “trigger warnings,” the complaint quickly making its way to administration (vs. being further addressed with the instructor directly), and, of course, the administration reacting in the way that it did. Lots of mishandling, it seems to me, by multiple people at multiple levels. Given that I’m going back into the classroom this week, I was also thinking about my own pedagogy, our disciplinary tenets and values, and the whole point of learning. I’m not a specialist in Islam, but, like many of us, I am responsible for covering Islam when I teach my introductory World Religions course. I am less concerned, even at the intro level, in teaching students about facts, which can and do change over time, and more about concepts, questions, debates, and approaches in the study of religion. I find inspiration in the four principles of religious literacy from Harvard, one of which is that “religions are internally diverse.” This particular point is so important to me that I include it in my classes as a learning objective. In past iterations of this course, I have even addressed the very issue causing all the controversy at Hamline, by assigning pieces like Omid Safi’s brief “Why Islam Does (Not) Ban Images of the Prophet.” (Omid, an instructor of mine in college, was interviewed for the NYT piece, to share his perspective as a Muslim and a specialist in the area.) As the NYT piece notes, “Most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed…. There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.” In a forum after the incident, a professor of religion tried to raise the question with which we are all, in the discipline, familiar: “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue?” The same could be asked of any religion. Students, in a time of their lives where they tend to default to or prefer black-and-white dualistic thinking, often assume religions are monoliths—static entities with clear-cut boundaries and universally shared beliefs and practices. It’s comforting to feel certain about who’s in and who’s out, what’s acceptable and what’s not. We tend to put people into categories. We love to think we know. And it’s not just students. A book I use in one of my classes makes frequent claims about the beliefs and practices of “all Muslims…,” despite there being 1.9 billion worldwide. Of course, assumptions, generalizations, and stereotypes exist for all religions (e.g., Buddhist societies are peaceful, despite evidence otherwise), but Islam has some of the most persistent and pernicious in our country, sometimes with deadly real-world repercussions (like the murder of the Sikh man after 9/11 because he was presumed to be a Muslim). Such assumptions cause me special concern, perhaps, because my daughter is half-Afghan. I take it as my professional, and personal, duty to ensure that students who finish my courses are disabused of notions of reductive homogeneity and dangerous stereotypes. (Even seemingly positive stereotypes, like the “model minority” stereotype, can be harmful, research has shown). In recent years, I have struggled with the Islam unit in my intro course. I like to organize the different units around big questions related to the study of religion, not just the individual religions themselves (eg., the question “is Buddhism a religion?” allows us to get into the definition of religion and the history of the field, as well as gives us a lens to sort through the specifics about Buddhism from the textbook chapter). I wanted an Islam unit that left room for the basics, that confronted and corrected misinformation, that tackled urgent and big-picture questions, that didn’t harm any Muslim students in the class, and that seemed relevant to students’ lives by tapping into, for instance, current events. A tall order. This Hamline controversy has provided the perfect material for me this semester. This spring, my Islam unit will be focused on: What happens when religious people disagree? (I’m sure I’ll finetune this question, and the unit’s assignments, in the future.) In addition to a chapter on Islam from the textbook I use, I am going to ask students to read some of the news articles reporting on Hamline, as well as other relevant material (like Christiane Gruber on images of the prophet), outside of class. I will likely alert them to the fact that these articles depict images of Muhammad, so they can take proper precautions and prepare for self-care. (I admit here to having an ambivalent stance toward “trigger warnings,” as I believe, fundamentally, that learning is an often-uncomfortable enterprise; that higher education’s purpose is to expose students to content that they may disagree with; and that it is necessary, in order to be a citizen of a democracy, to be able to engage with people, perspectives, and material that you find objectionable, unsettling, or even “offensive.” Moreover, there is evidence that trigger warnings don’t really work.) Framing the unit in this way will also help to connect back to earlier conversations we’ll have in class about insider vs. outsider approaches to religion, another important aspect of religious literacy. Some instructors may now choose simply not to touch the topic with a 10-foot pole. Why bother courting controversy with a discussion about or an analysis of images of the prophet? I get it. I’m not tenured, so I have to think carefully about the kinds of risks I take in the classroom. But allowing the perspectives of a few or even a majority to dictate the terms under which we view or can talk about an entire group is a bad idea—and I believe we have a disciplinary responsibility to confront these instances when they occur. Religions, like any groups (racial, political, national, you name it), are quite diverse things. Catholics for Choice! Jews for Jesus! This diversity is not only something to clarify in our courses, but something to center and celebrate.

I’ve been doing some nonfiction creative writing recently (you can see my latest piece here, if you’d like). And it’s been an interesting exercise in curation, a term most closely associated with the world of art history, but now used all over the place. When writing about a real life, you have so many precious details, nuances, characters, memories—and you have to carefully select, and then organize, which of those are most important, which will then be preserved in the (perhaps someday published) story you aim to tell. Of course, we curate all the time, not just in art galleries or storytelling. What do we take care of? What do we retain or prioritize or foreground? What do we exclude? What are we missing? When someone asks us how we are doing, so often we simply default to saying, “Great, and you?” regardless of whether this is actually how we feel. We curate what news we consume, what friends we spend time with, what food we put in our bodies. We curate in partnerships and parenting. We curate at work. And we curate in our teaching. Think about which parts of yourself you disclose to your students. Think about what activities and assignments you make space for on the schedule and which you don’t. Think about what concepts or skills you think the students can handle, or need, to learn at any given moment in a course, and which will have to be saved for another time. This is all a form of curation, I would argue. I often say that a syllabus is more about what doesn’t make it in than what does. Especially in introductory religion courses—we have to leave out so much! (And, of course, with the material that does make the cut, like a curator at a museum, we have to think how to structure that material into the “narrative arc” of a course—a concept I, as a writer, love.) We only have so much time and energy. We can’t do it all, folks. There are all sorts of criteria for curation in the classroom—our areas of expertise, our personal interests, the course’s learning objectives, the level of the students, the institutional mission—but those aren’t my focus here. What I want to muse on is the dark side of curation, which I think social media aptly represents. (This is one of the main reasons I stopped using social media over a decade ago.) Curated content can give a false, and unattainable, impression of perfection. (How often do we feel badly about our own lives when we see the seemingly flawless lives depicted on others’ Facebook or Instagram accounts?) Curation can elide or obscure process. (How many photos did it actually take to capture that one where the whole family was smiling?) Curation can seem to emphasize singularity or definitiveness, over nuance, messiness, options, multiplicity. Curation can make matters appear finished or settled or completed. Curation can feel closed. I imagine these impressions can have some negative effects on students. Perhaps, when we cut out debate or history or context—that is, the messiness, the details—students are left with problematic notions about the study of religion (e.g., that there is a singular definition of the term) or specific religions (e.g., that Hinduism is all about karma and dharma). Perhaps students wind up not understanding the extensive, nonlinear, trial-and-error process that’s required to acquire important knowledge or skills in our field. Perhaps they feel ashamed if they don’t understand the reading for the week or if they bomb the only test. Perhaps they look at the example essay and think, “Maybe this whole college thing isn’t for me.” Curation is necessary, common, and often beautiful—but it can carry some risks. How might we dodge these downsides in our teaching? Here are some strategies I’ve tried, to pull back the curtain a bit for students, while accepting that I must inevitably curate the learning environment and experience to some extent. For starters, I sometimes talk about how I went about creating the syllabus and how (and why) I decided what to include and what to leave off. Or I mention what I’ve done in past courses and why I’ve changed my approach. I point out mistakes or typos in the printed works we read. I show students drafts of my own articles and (often quite critical) peer-review comments, as I’ve mentioned in this blog before. When I want to provide a model for a particular assignment, I try to give multiple examples (rather than one, which they may then feel pressured to simply emulate) and/or annotate the example(s) with both strengths as well as areas of improvement. I assign authors or speakers with different, sometimes totally oppositional, viewpoints, so students understand that there isn’t a single correct view to hold on any given topic. I provide examples of the differences between the aspirational, ideal, “authoritative,” or textbook version of a religion and the various ways that real people are going about, living their lives, around the globe and at different times. If we don’t have time to get into the depth or nuance of a particular topic, I still make a point to underscore, repeatedly, the complexity. I admit to some of my own struggles with the readings or tough topics. I tell them about my own undergrad experiences. I say when I don’t know. We talk about what’s happening around campus, in town, or around the world, and how appearances can differ from reality. How do you experience the concept of curation in your own teaching? And what are some ways you can retain the benefits and beauty of curation, while also avoiding its pitfalls?

A while back I read an interesting, if not somewhat problematic, book called Hunt, Gather, Parent. The author, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, went all around the world, along with her young daughter, trying to learn how people parent. She noticed that, in many other places, children seem to be calm, motivated, flexible, responsible, helpful, confident, cooperative contributors, unlike the tantrum-prone toddler she had in tow. These families functioned more like teams, with both parents and kids playing important and integrated roles. Doucleff offers the apt acronym TEAM to convey what these parents do differently: Togetherness, Encouragement, Autonomy, and Minimal Interference. Dishes need to be washed? TEAM effort. Tortillas need to be made? TEAM effort. Other kids need corralling? TEAM effort. I got to thinking, as I do, about teams (and even toddler-like behavior) in another context: the college classroom. There is no shortage of information about group learning, cooperative learning, and team-based learning, such as Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching (2004), available in the teaching literature. Fields like business and engineering have done a particularly good job of helping educators understand how to compose teams, how to create projects that actually require team effort (vs. a divide-and-conquer approach), how to grade group work, and how to teach students the skills needed to collaborate, such as establishing norms or navigating conflict. Journals devoted to the teaching of these disciplines are well worth the read (e.g., Journal of Education for Business and Journal of Engineering Education), even for those of us in the humanities. Such skills are, I believe, important for life, since working successfully as part of a team is something we’ll all have to do at some point, no matter what type of job we end up in. Even religion professors, lone wolves many of us, still have to serve on committees or attend department meetings with… other humans. But this kind of team isn’t what I’m talking about here—and not just because I always did hate group work. When we talk about teams in the classroom, what we usually mean are teams of students. Teach them how to work well together, teach them how to take personal accountability, teach them how to resist “social loafing.” But what about us? Why is there always a distance, a separation, a distinction, between us and them? Could we, instead, think of our classes as opportunities for TEAMwork, similar to what Doucleff found in functional families across the world? Could we, instead, conceive of ourselves as being on the same team as our students? Athletic analogies, like teachers as coaches, abound in educational writings, so this idea isn’t exactly far-fetched, though there are a lot of people who don’t love these metaphors. And, of course, there are some real differences between professors and students, including differences in power (which can go both ways: we can give them bad grades, sure, but students can also give us poor evaluations, for instance), that we must keep in mind when considering a team approach. But let’s give it a try. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how I spend time in class co-creating community norms with my students. I realized, after reading Hunt, Gather, Parent, that part of what I am doing in this activity is positioning all of us on the same team, responsible for one another and working toward common goals. Another example, one focusing on the T-for-togetherness part of Doucleff’s TEAM, is that we might start taking a closer look at our own role when students’ performance goes awry. On a team, everyone is responsible for everyone else as well as the success of the team; nobody is exempt. When mistakes or failures happen, we support one another and we try to do better, next time, together. So students bomb the midterm. Okay, well, maybe they studied poorly or not at all. Maybe they didn’t take proper notes in class. Maybe they stayed up too late, cramming or partying, the night before. This happens. But could it also not be that the test was poorly designed, that it didn’t align with what was taught in class? Could it also not be that we didn’t teach students how to study, so the midterm was actually testing not what they had learned in the course so far, but rather their test-taking skills? So students turn in sub-par final papers. Okay, well, maybe they came to college unprepared. Maybe they procrastinated and started writing too late. Maybe they have an overinflated sense of their own writing skills. Yes, of course. But could it also not be that we didn’t provide them proper instruction about how to write this kind of paper, in this class, in this discipline, in the first place, or didn’t give them a rubric or set of criteria to lay bare our expectations? Could it also not be that we didn’t scaffold the assignment into manageable chunks with ample opportunity for feedback and improvement? So students cheat, lie. Okay, well, maybe they’re just entitled, lazy, looking for any opportunity to cut corners. Sure. But could it also not be that our learning environments and assignments incentivize dishonesty? Could it also not be that there are too few and too high-of-stakes assignments that their entire grade is riding on? Could it also not be that we haven’t conveyed why this subject is important for them to know? Could it also not be that we’ve made ourselves so intimidating and unapproachable that they can’t come to us when they’re struggling and simply tell the truth? I’m not saying that we need to use the idea of a team to start blaming ourselves for every bad behavior on the students’ parts. This would be a mistake. Students are adults and, ultimately, responsible for their own learning. (And this is an important life lesson they need to learn, too.) But thinking of ourselves as on or as part of their team, rather than something separate, opens up new ways of thinking about common and perennially frustrating teaching problems. What are some possibilities that the idea of teaching as teamwork opens up for you?

In a previous blog, I detailed some of the ways in which white students’ practices of coloniality are manifested in the classroom through co-optation, silence, and resignation. Such praxes—often unconscious and subtle—must be unmasked, especially for those who consider themselves to be allies for justice with communities of color. Such learning is not limited to white students, however, as students of color witness how instructors address dynamics of privilege and oppression in their courses and, as a result, learn who can (or cannot) be trusted to sojourn with them through their educational experiences and beyond. But how do instructors unmask such subtle, ingrained responses (also known as embedded resistances)? Wisdom gathered from decolonial scholars and teachers within theological education, engagement with materials on decolonial pedagogy, and attempts to incorporate specific practices within my courses have led me to some core insights. I offer these not as a step-by-step “how to,” but with the hopes that they might inspire others to praxis unmasking coloniality and invite colleagues and students alike to share in this work. Give more attention and intention to the processes by which learners engage with one another in the course than to the content of the course itself. I realize that this might be blasphemous to some, so try to give equal attention and intention to both the what of course materials and the how of individuals’ relations across identity, power, and difference. A few questions to think through include: What values are you explicitly and implicitly privileging in your courses? For example, if academic rigor is a central value, what standards and signals do you incorporate to exemplify rigor and how might eurowestern colonial norms be privileged within these standards? How do students come to know and experience these values and how might white students experience them differently than students of color? How might you create a space that does not privilege the voices, perspectives, and participation of those for whom the academy was designed—namely, white (and male, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied) students? What commitments and modes of relating are you incorporating into the course design? What role do learners have in shaping these ways of relating, and what else is needed by you as the instructor to mitigate co-optation, silence, and resignation from white students? When you encounter particular actions or patterns by white students that are likely replicating or reinforcing colonial dynamics, consider the following: Ask neutral questions—ones that do not have opinions embedded—that invite individuals to dig deeper into their own stories, assumptions, and experiences.[1] This should be done with care and the intention to assist in students’ learning, but also with a genuine desire for the instructor to learn more about what lies underneath said actions or articulations (because our own assumptions are equally worthy of investigation). Questions can also be accompanied by, or followed up with, personal observations. It has been helpful for me to use “I” statements that reference my own observations or feelings in terms of the impact of particular noticings. In these cases, I tread a careful line as someone with positional power in the pedagogical relationship but who is also a person of color impacted by colonial dynamics. At times, I name and reflect upon my own complicity and unexamined colonial actions as a woman whose ancestry includes white colonizers and who continues to benefit from a system that privileges lighter skin. If students are able to acknowledge colonial underpinnings within their own embedded resistances, invite and/or offer alternatives to such resistances in order to decolonially reframe and re-praxis. For example, with white students who rely upon silence to avoid saying “the wrong thing,” I have asked them—along with others in the space—to imagine ways of participation beyond silence that encourage vulnerability and trust. In a virtual space, this has included the use of various art forms and nonverbal visual or auditory affirmations, as well as the usual verbal contributions to synchronous discussions. It helps if values of imperfection and leaning into tensions have been privileged in the course already to encourage actions beyond silence, as well as acknowledging that silence is necessary at times. These insights reside at the water’s edge of an ocean of practiced wisdom from educators who have been attentive to decolonial pedagogies for decades. As someone who is at the beginning of that journey, I know such learnings will only be shaped and tested with more time and experience and are subject to shifts based on context, timing, and a variety of other unique forces shaping each relational moment. Depending upon what visual representation is conjured by the imagination when one thinks of unmasking, the act itself might be quite simple, a bit uncomfortable, or downright painful (especially if one is a fan of horror films like me). Unmasking assumes that there are layers hidden beneath the mask that must be revealed in order for truth or healing to ensue. If we as teachers remain at the surface of course preparation and design by focusing on the attainment of intellectual knowledge, our students fail to encounter the depths of what they both desire and deserve as divinely breathed beings. Such failure clearly is not theirs; it is ours. White students, especially those with longings to cultivate communities of justice and equity in solidarity with their colleagues of color, deserve our reflective questions, our noticings, our own acknowledgments of complicity, and our personal discomforts with tension as co-learners. The irony of unmasking colonial practices in the classroom while teaching about decoloniality is not lost on me; but the truth of the matter is that colonial practices should be unmasked in all educational spaces and places.[2]   [1] Liz Lerman and John Bortsel, Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022). [2] I am grateful to the following teachers and scholars who shared with generosity their wisdom, experiences, and best practices related to decolonial pedagogies: Cristian De La Rosa, Christine J. Hong, Willie James Jennings, HyeRan Kim-Cragg, and Melinda McGarrah Sharp.

Recently, I finished a book called Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work (Hurney et al. 2021). It’s about a program on college campuses in which faculty members invite a colleague to come to their class at the mid-semester point to find out how the course is going from the students’ perspectives. This is a program offered at my institution, and many others, usually through a professional development or teaching and learning center. The book, and such programs, got me thinking about soliciting feedback from students, beyond simply what most of us are required to do in the form of final course evaluations. Think about it: course evaluations, if we even read them (and so many of my friends don’t, because it’s such a stressful experience), only let us know how the course was, how we did, what a group of students that is no longer enrolled with us thought about our teaching and their learning. Notice the past tense. Certainly this information can be useful for future courses (I am—usually—the same person teaching Religions of the World this time as I will be next time, after all), but it doesn’t exactly help those particular students in that particular course. (And I won’t even dive into the controversy around the utility and validity of student course evaluations here; suffice it to say, those evaluations are one of the only times that we actually ask students, the primary recipients of our teaching efforts, what they think about those efforts.) The point of a program like the one profiled in the book is that we can ask for feedback from students before the end of the semester, before the experience is over, when there is actually time to make changes or reroute. The small group instructional diagnoses occur at the mid-semester point. (You can check out the book to learn more about the process; it’s pretty cool!) Typical questions asked of students are: “What has helped your learning in this course so far? What has hindered your learning in this course so far?” and “What suggestions do you have for improvement?” The focus is on learning, not what they like/dislike or the instructors’ performance. At JMU a few years back, we also added companion questions focused on the students’ own behaviors, for example, “What are YOU doing that has helped your learning in this course so far?” as a way of conveying that they are also, and I would argue, ultimately, responsible for their own learning.) Then, with this information, instructors can decide what, if any, changes or clarifications they’d like to make during a follow-up conversation with the students and for the rest of the semester. In the absence of such a program, or colleague support, you can always ask these questions yourself (e.g., through anonymous paper forms in class, an anonymous ungraded survey on your LMS, etc.). But there are lots of other ways to check in with students and get actionable, important feedback. You might have students fill out a weekly online “how’s my driving?” Google form, as one of my friends does, or you might lead an in-class discussion every so often about how everyone is doing, or you might ask students to fill out a word cloud of how they’re feeling at the beginning of class on a particular day. There are lots of things we can ask about: students’ moods, feelings, and stress level; whether they understood a particular concept, lesson, or reading; how that recent test or lecture went; what study strategies seem to be working well for them; and so on. I use a variety of ways to check in with my own students and get their feedback in all of my courses. Last semester, for example, I had experimented with a great deal of flexibility around the exams (e.g., they were take-home and not timed), to try to ease the anxiety and overwhelm that I knew students were experiencing, and I wanted to know how this approach was working for them. I spent time in class after the midterm on a debrief. It turned out that many students were taking hours to complete their work, even though I had intended the whole thing to be over in 75 minutes. This was stressing them out more—the opposite of the effect I was trying to achieve! I took their feedback, which I would have never realized if I hadn’t simply asked, and made some changes to the final exam (e.g., reduced the number of questions). Students noted in my course evaluations (as they do every semester) that they appreciated how I asked them for feedback and how I adjusted parts of the course as a result. Indeed, research on mid-semester feedback programs demonstrates that students appreciate being asked. And, of course, this kind of feedback process can benefit us too, as we open up lines of communication with students, convey care, and possibly learn which adjustments to the course will better facilitate their learning. After all, who wants to be teaching a course that’s not going well? Who wants to dread going to class every day? Who wants to be giving failing grades on projects? Who wants to be meeting resistance, but not knowing why? It often doesn’t occur to us to just ask students when we want to know more. But we can. What do you want to ask?

Earlier this year, the song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” from the animated film, Encanto¸ emerged as a viral sensation. The film’s protagonist, Mirabel, is seeking counsel from her reclusive uncle, the aforenamed Bruno, who is difficult to find because their family has ostracized him for his propensity to speak uncomfortable truths. Both of my children, one in middle school and the other in elementary school, reported that nearly everyone was singing this track. My eldest child even offered to show me some of the countless covers of the song on TikTok and YouTube.        In my experience teaching at a freestanding seminary, I have observed that there are also students that theological educators don’t talk about, or talk less about, whether within our own institutions or across guild contexts, such as the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature. Our conversations often focus upon two kinds of students: the ones who inspire us and the ones who terrorize us. Amid what almost always feels like a demanding academic semester, it is easy to talk about the students who are enlivening our classrooms and motivating us to sharpen our pedagogical skills. And we rightly seek collegial support concerning those students who abuse, antagonize, and aggravate us for a myriad of reasons, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, ability, nationality, and sexuality.   I can think of two kinds of students that we don’t talk about as much as the terrific and the terrible. The first is the tired student. I teach at a denominational seminary with increasing ecumenical, ethnic, and racial diversity within our student population. The Master of Divinity degree is required for ministerial ordination in the denomination to which my seminary belongs, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Therefore, our Presbyterian students are generally not full-time pastors during their studies with us. More of our students from different ecclesial traditions are already full-time pastors and seeking further education to augment their capacities for ministry. Some are bi-vocational pastors leading congregations and balancing multiple responsibilities. In addition to working at least two jobs, they are also primary caregivers for young children, aging parents, and other family members. The tired student I am describing is also exceedingly thankful. During the nationwide racial reckoning in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd two years ago, my seminary implemented a broad and comprehensive plan for Black reparations, which included new scholarships that cover the full cost of tuition and fees for every admitted African American student. In addition, my seminary offers generous scholarships that support the entire cost of tuition for every other non-Black student in a first-level master’s degree program. For some of the students in my classroom, these scholarships have made it possible for them to pursue a theological education. But because all these scholarships require full-time enrollment, I encounter the tired student who is juggling my syllabus along with other family, ministry, and work commitments. One pastor who I admire shares this wise counsel utilizing the metaphor of juggling: One must discern which balls are made of rubber and which are made of glass when prioritizing one’s schedule. The “glass” tasks must not be dropped because they will shatter whereas the tasks that are made of rubber can fall to the ground. For the tired student, I am aware that my assignments and class sessions are more like rubber than glass, especially in comparison to their other responsibilities. The tired student is sometimes unable to show up or perform well on an assignment. Or the cost of showing up and performing well requires a herculean effort with substantial costs in terms of the tired student’s mental, physical, and psychological health. The second kind of student we don’t talk about is the triumphalist student. It is more precise to describe this student as one who comes from a more theologically conservative ecclesial context in comparison to my seminary. Some of my students are unfamiliar with historical-critical methods of biblical interpretation, postcolonial theology, and progressive Christianity. They have not heard of scholars such as Katie Geneva Cannon, Walter Brueggemann, and Kwok Pui-lan. They are unaccustomed to theological inquiry that identifies and criticizes some Christian doctrines and practices. Their conceptions of church history revolve around a search for examples of Christians enacting courageous witness and exemplifying the triumph of God’s goodness over evil. Yet renowned church historian Justo González observes the story of Christianity, when told fully and honestly, includes beautiful moments of awe-inspiring faith and ugly episodes where it is difficult to discern the divine presence. As an historian of Christianity in the United States, the only way that I can teach a full and honest history is to confront the active participation and complicity of Christians who committed and perpetuated the sins of settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, nativism, and other oppressive injustices. And my lessons do not always have heartwarming endings that uplift the soul. There are certainly moments of reflection and application, but some chapters of Christian history are sinful and irredeemable.      There is diversity with the “triumphalist student” I am describing such that I do not want to present this kind of student as a monolith. Some students experience our seminary classrooms as liberative spaces where they can expand their ways of thinking theologically about themselves, God, and Christian ministry. Other students undergo a complex process of educational formation with stages of disorientation and deconstruction preceding reorientation and reconstruction. And a few students remain resistant to our methods of pedagogy. We talk some about the “triumphalist student” who testifies to a metanoia from our curriculum, but we need to talk more about how these students return to congregations that are unprepared to receive their transformed approaches to ministry and theology.          

There are two subjects about which I am passionate as a teacher and scholar: leadership formation and decolonial praxis. These areas may seem to be at odds with one another, at least in white western worldviews; but disrupting colonial frameworks and ways of being and doing leadership in ministry and theological education is a necessary endeavor for those of us who continue to long for worlds beyond death-dealing hegemony and homogeneity. As an early career Latina teacher and scholar, I feel this longing in my bones. Perhaps more importantly, I experience these longings from students both in my courses and in the wider institution. But what do you do when the very students who express such deep desires for change—even explicitly longing for a dismantling of western/white/colonial structures, processes, and epistemologies—function in ways that are wholly aligned with “possession, control, and mastery” as the ultimate display of white, self-sufficient masculinity, as Willie James Jennings articulates?[1] In other words, how does one teach decolonial praxis in a course about decolonial praxis, particularly with well-meaning and well-intentioned white students who praxis coloniality? The first time that I taught a course on ministry leadership and decolonial praxis, I was not prepared for the embedded resistances that I encountered from students, particularly socially and/or politically progressive white students, that sometimes contradicted the very praxes we were reflecting upon that same week. Of course, such actions were so subtle and automatic that the students themselves were unable to recognize them; but that’s how colonialism works its deadly charms—in the corners and cracks of the unconscious. As educators, our most important task is to unmask that which lies just underneath the surface of what students articulate in word, speech, and affect, as a learning for the whole, and with kindness, respect, and compassion. As bell hooks said, “We practice interrogating habits of being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community.”[2] After that first course, and like any good scholar, I researched what others had written about decolonial pedagogies in the classroom and white racial identity formation and resistances. I also engaged in wisdom-seeking conversations with trusted educators and scholars on their own practices for mitigating colonial praxes in their classrooms. Through this process, what began to appear were patterns of behavior for what I and others had experienced. In gaining clarity about the nature and origins of some of these movements on the part of white students, I was better able to respond in the moment and incorporate pedagogies and practices to mitigate these in my courses. Here are just a few of the subtle embedded resistances that were unmasked.[3] Co-optation. Whether it be in online or in-person discussions, many white students—unintentionally and without awareness—often take up time, space, and/or voice in class conversations and take over ideas, characteristics, and practices of nonwhite others, collapsing them into their own worldviews and subsuming them for their own purposes. For example, I noticed that a few white students in my class resonated with particular attributes or characteristics associated with some postcolonial and decolonial communities and leadership. Identifying that their own communities and/or leadership exemplified some of these attributes, they signified their ministries to be “decolonial” (yet remained situated contextually as majority white, middle-upper class congregations not necessarily allied with those most harmed by colonization and colonialism nor engaged in any kind of stated decolonial praxis). These attempts at possession and control also come in the form of collapsing decolonization into movements for gender, LGBTQ, or socioeconomic equity without acknowledging the racialized foundations and socio-historical trajectories of colonialism. Ultimately, students’ desires to not be seen as carriers of colonialism resulted in them perpetuating the very colonial characteristics they were attempting to deny. Silence. Several of the scholars with whom I spoke shared their experiences of white students maintaining silence in class in order to give space to students of color to speak or share or, more often than not, out of a fear of doing or saying “the wrong thing.” Unfortunately, this itself highlights the privilege one has to practice opacity as an exercise of power, leaving others to perform vulnerability for the benefit of white students’ learning. In my experience, white students—and even white colleagues—who say little to nothing in intercultural or interracial spaces often end up perpetuating the “white gaze” on students and colleagues of color as if they are being monitored or put upon to present in particular ways. Resignation. When the depths of our collective entanglements with colonialism are realized more fully, one of the most frequent responses from white students is to “burn it all down,” a form of resignation to the irreparability of religious and secular systems alike. It’s as if starting over completely, dismantling current structures, or working outside of institutional church spaces to create something new will rid us of our colonial ways of being and doing. Such a totalizing response arises from the privilege of being able to transcend or separate oneself from those very structures with little consequence or loss of power. Students of color in my courses have tended to not articulate such statements because the legacies and forces of colonization impact them more intensely and intimately than their white counterparts (though, of course, intersections exist). These students have not had the option or power to “burn it all down” and have learned to navigate within such systems for survival, with many finding spaces of joy and flourishing in spite of colonialism’s strongholds. Simply burning something down doesn’t make it disappear; it simply takes on another form. Unmasking such praxes in the classroom takes discernment, patience, and care on the part of the instructor. In the next blog post, I will share some of my pedagogical learnings around unmasking.   [1] Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020). [2] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43. [3] While postcolonialism and decoloniality are intersectional in nature—meaning that they also seek to dismantle imposing eurowestern constructions of gender, sexuality, class, caste, etc.—the construction of racial hierarchies and white supremacy in the subjugation of non-white “others” assumes, historically and presently, a foundational place in the colonial project. Furthermore, because I noticed this phenomenon taking place with white students (regardless of their gender, sexual identity, or class), the praxes named here necessitate a specific focus on race as a socially constructed phenomenon.

Like most of my colleagues, I’ve noticed a sharp drop in my first-year students’ writing and reading skills during the pandemic. And they are unfocused. Forget herding cats—trying to keep a classroom of first years on topic now feels more like herding bumble bees. More of them skip classes or disappear altogether. And of course, they struggle with depression and anxiety. Mental health, focus, and academic performance are interconnected, and the problems feed each other in messy and complicated ways. But I suspect that increased cognitive load plays a key role. The pandemic increased the cognitive load for all of us in three significant ways: It disrupted our routines, forcing us think carefully about tasks that we otherwise do on autopilot. Fear and uncertainty increased our anxiety, and anxiety makes it harder for us to process information effectively. It added a number of new tasks and distractions. Students are dealing with that and more: Their job is learning, and to help them do that, they have several professors. But since their professors also suffer from cognitive overload, students are getting more confusing directions, less clear feedback, and more last-minute changes than they normally would. Since students are academic novices, they are less capable of putting the intellectual skills they are learning on autopilot. They have to think about each step. And let’s not forget the cognitively, socially, and emotionally demanding task of starting college. It’s too much at once. As long as excessive cognitive load operates as a confounding variable, we won’t know what’s causing our students’ problems. We need to help students bring their cognitive load down, both because it causes suffering and because bringing it down will help us identify and address the other significant problems. So how do we do that? Not by dumbing things down. But we often unintentionally create unnecessary cognitive load for our students. They end up working on unimportant things. And so, here’s my big teaching question for this summer: What unimportant things am I making my students think about, and how does that distract them from working on what matters? To address this, I’ll focus on three different areas: Reduce anxiety and uncertainty about my course and about grading. First-year students spend way too much energy trying to guess what we want, and they often guess wrong. And that makes them spend way too much time and energy on unimportant things. I’m going to revise the rules for my classes over the summer, making them as transparent as I can. In the fall, I’m going to explain them more clearly and more frequently. I like my students to get a headache from all the deep thinking they do in my class, not from worrying about how to format their bibliography or about whether a bad paper grade will mean that they fail the class (it won’t). Use lots of routine and repetition to let my students put as many basic tasks on autopilot as possible. I’ve been resisting too much routine and repetition because it seems boring, both for me and for them. But I think it will go a long way towards reducing anxiety and cognitive load, so I’m going to use more of it this fall with my first years: I’ll consider making all reading assignments due on Tuesdays and all writing assignments due on Thursdays. I’ll use a single simple set of instructions for all papers and one for all informal writing. I’ll ask the same three questions about each reading: What is the author saying? What do you think about it? How does it connect to our other readings and discussions? I’ll start each class in the same way: How are you doing, really? Put away electronics (unless you have special permission), you need your book, notebook, and pencil, here’s the plan for today. I’ll end each class the same way: Please write down a takeaway and a question from today; here’s the assignment for next class, come talk if you have questions. Include fewer details. Eliminating course content is painful. We love our disciplines, and we want to include key distinctions and nuances, those beautiful and intricate details. So we keep packing things in. But as much as it pains me to admit this, my first years don’t need to learn the correct way of citing Plato and Aristotle (Stephanus and Bekker pages be damned). They don’t even need to know what a Stephanus page is. They need to understand basic MLA and they need to know why one cites sources. Eliminating details in our instructions is difficult because students mess up in so many ways. It’s tempting to include all the ones we’ve come across so far. But detailed instructions are counterproductive because our students simply cannot process ten unfamiliar and challenging things at once. I’ll include two or three crucial ones. A friend just introduced me to Picasso’s animal drawings. Each captures an animal with a few simple lines. There is no background, no detail, no color, but they are crystal clear and impossible to misunderstand. I want to teach like one of those drawings. [caption id="attachment_251280" align="aligncenter" width="554"] Animal Drawings by Picasso[/caption]   Further resources Jarrett, Christian. 2020. Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus. BBC. (I draw on his analysis above.) Brief overview of the differences between novices and experts here. Picasso animal drawings here. Two of my blogs: How to provide feedback on papers and how to use nudges.