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“I’m just so sick of feeling awkward,” I told my spouse the night before the first day of classes this semester. After having taught for eight years in another school across the country, I was about to begin teaching at a new institution. I was bemoaning the fact that everything was different at my new job, and I felt like a fish-out-of-water most of the time. My new colleagues were extremely warm, welcoming, and supportive. But I was still learning the ropes at my new institution. I had to ask questions about nearly everything: how to use the copy machine, if I could use the coffee maker at the end of the hall, how to navigate the learning management system, and who to go to on campus for what. I was also feeling unsure about the new age range of students I’d be teaching. I had been at a small graduate school, comprised of adult students (generally ages 40-70), and I was now at a medium-sized liberal arts institution, teaching mostly undergraduate students (typically 18-21 years old). I hadn’t taught undergraduate students since I had completed my PhD, over 9 years ago. When I was chatting about my nervousness with a friend, she consoled me by saying, “You’ll be fine. Just don’t dress frumpy!” So, when I was getting ready for work on the first day of classes, I went to my closet in search of my least frumpy ensemble. I donned a brightly colored geometric-print skirt and a pair of 3-inch heeled sandals in hopes that my students, over twenty years younger than me, might approve. My first two classes that day went well. I introduced them to the syllabus and assignments, but also sprinkled in some course content. I also tried to introduce them to my teaching style, by using music, 1-min journal writes, and a think-pair-share exercise. By the third class of the day, I was getting into the groove and feeling more confident, which means I began to walk around in the classroom. Then, right in the middle of class, when I was near the front of the room, I stumbled. I lost balance on my right foot—remember: I was wearing 3-inch sandals—and then tried to regain balance by putting all of my weight on my left foot. The next thing I knew, I was tripping around the front of the class and flailing my arms in big circular motions until I went crashing into the whiteboard behind me. The only saving grace was that my skirt remained in place. When I regained my composure and looked up, the 24 students in the room (nearly all of whom were first-years) were staring at me wide-eyed, their mouths gaping. One cried out, “Are you okay?!?!?” I managed to mumble a joke about them not expecting an acrobatics performance in a theology class, but it had no effect. No one laughed. They were, I’m guessing, still in shock. I had to keep talking and teaching, because what else could I do? After class (thankfully my last class for the day), I headed back to my office. I passed my new colleagues in the hall, and did what any self-respecting introvert would do: When they asked me how my first day went, I smiled and said, “Fine!” Then, I went into my office, closed the door, and posted about it on Facebook. The next day, I could laugh about it (and could also tell my new colleagues about it). I laughed about it with my students, which gave them permission to laugh about it too. And now that we are almost at the mid-term mark in the semester, I realize, like most awkward and humbling experiences, there’s a teaching and learning moment in this one too. Here’s what I learned: 1) Embrace the awkward; it may help in relating to students. Even before I fell, I was feeling awkward, but I’m guessing that many of my students were too. As first-year students, it was also their first day of class in a new institution too. Some students had to present me with sheets verifying their learning accommodation needs, which, based on societal stigmas, they might not have preferred to do. Others, I later learned, were first-generation college students and were wondering if they belonged on campus. And a few were single mothers, trying to balance a full course load with parenting and part-time jobs. When I stopped worrying about how I looked and felt, I could be more in tune with their needs. 2) Think about how to help first-year students succeed in a new learning environment. I had been learning the ropes in a new school, but so had they. Many had left home, family, friends, and partners, and they were living away from all of their most stable relationships. They were also learning to manage their time and new freedom. Realizing this, I decided I could do more than simply list on my syllabi the contact information for the Student Success Center. I set some time aside in the course schedule for supportive activities. For example, I had a representative from the Student Success Center come into class and talk about the services they offer; I asked a librarian to demonstrate the research database to them; I led workshops on how to avoid plagiarism, how to read critically, and how to write a theology paper. I also passed around informal evaluations after the first few weeks of class, and I learned that students were feeling nervous about disagreeing (even respectfully) with other students in small groups. So, I led another workshop on respectful, critical dialogue. 3) Be comfortable. I’m back to wearing flats and 1” heels, even if they are frumpy. But it’s not just my shoes that have to feel comfortable, I have learned. So does my teaching style. When I over-plan or am too calculated about what I want to do in any given class session, the delivery usually falls flat (pun fully intended). When I relax, loosen my grip on the lesson place, and let the feel of the room and the students’ questions and concerns guide the way I present the material, it usually works much better. The students are more engaged and take on a more active role in their learning. Have any of you had big embarrassments in the classroom? If so, I’d love to hear about them—not just to stroke my bruised ego, but to hear what you’ve learned from them too! Please comment below.

When you teach online, you get accustomed to classroom teachers telling you they can’t imagine not being in the same place at the same time as their students. Usually what they dwell on is not being in the same place. They profess difficulty imagining being geographically distant from their students. They question how it’s possible to teach without the body language, visual cues, tone of voice, and the like, that the physical proximity of being together in a classroom affords. Perhaps because I came to online teaching from a background in field education where, by definition, my students left campus to go somewhere else to learn, and in denominational leadership, where leading phone conferences with participants scattered across the country was the norm, I was not overly daunted by the prospect of communicating with people in other places. What I knew would be challenging is the lag in time. I had always relied on the immediacy of classroom teaching. There are some people whose thoughts come out of their mouths perfectly formed into sentences whose meaning is crystal clear. I am not one of them. I tend to economize too much with my words, or make leaps of logic in my head, or have to backtrack to fill in context. When people are taking in what I’m saying at the same time as I’m saying it, however, I can compensate. I am pretty good at quickly sensing what I need to clarify. I am most comfortable when teaching is like a dance and I can use my partner’s responses in real time to make it work. When you teach online, the song can be over by the time you realize that your students never got into the rhythm and have danced a different dance. The hallmark of asynchronous online education is that students are working at different times throughout the week, entering and exiting the class at their own pace and paying you attention on their own time. Their engagement with you and with the material may be just as high as in a classroom, but its timing will be unpredictable. You simply cannot know when a comment or explanation from you will finally reach them. And students experience the same thing, of course, from you. Unless you are willing to log in to the course every hour of every day, their question or confusion might not get addressed right away. Sometimes what happens while you are gone, therefore, is that a misguided thread of discussion can take on a life of its own, a set of odd assumptions can be built up about the reading, or simple errors in the assignment compounded. What I have learned about communication in online teaching—to switch to a different metaphor—is that it bears similarity to letter writing. You write down your thoughts, hit Send and put them into cyberspace, and hope they reach your reader in good time.  Then you wait to know whether your words made enough sense and what your correspondent thinks of them. If the correspondence is important, sometimes you find yourself anxiously going to your mailbox over and over again to see whether anything has been delivered back to you yet in the post. The comparison between online education and letter writing is ironic to say the least.  Usually we think that technology serves to speed everything up in our lives. But it is instructive as well. In the old days of letter writing, we used to take care with what we wrote, and there were conventions that helped us convey meaning. Usually we started with a few references to our correspondent’s most recent missive to us, commenting on their news. Then we would hit the highlights of our own, sharing some content and then reflecting on it. We often concluded with questions for the other to answer the next time they wrote, in part to encourage a swift reply. In online teaching I have learned to take almost excruciating care to frontload what I am trying to teach and to explain ideas and instructions in detail. I try to learn who is in class before it starts so that I can scaffold my teaching upon their experience. I communicate the most important ideas of the course as clearly as I can and follow with some pointed questions to invite them into the discourse. And then I wait and let time do its work.

Belonging is a yearning of the soul. Our life’s quest is often about finding the place, purpose or persons to which or to whom we belong. We need to feel at home; we yearn to feel accepted, swaddled by our relationships. We want to experience being part of something bigger than our finite, individual, selves. The experience of belonging makes us keenly aware of the connectional-joy of humanness. Equally, the experience of alienation, of having no place to call home, of being deemed inferior, is a profound experience of dehumanization and is soul dampening.  Twenty-first century racism would have minoritized people believe that we are “welcome,” only then to be immersed in experiences of disrespect, disregard and hatred.  At best, this creates a psychic quandary for us. At worst, this harm is debilitating to our ability to teach and to learn.  The magnitude of the need to belong necessitates a pedagogical priority, especially in those white schools with minoritized persons on faculty, on staff and in the student body.   The seminary where I am on faculty is located in a very affluent New Jersey suburb. The town is a bedroom community for executives and corporate giants of Manhattan. Consequently, we enjoy clean streets, splendid restaurants, a preponderance of shopping, great theatre, and a world-class jazz club.  Also, consequently, is the existence of a clear two-tier caste society: those who live here and those who come to work as cashiers, waitresses, nannies, elder care worker, gardeners and secretaries. I, due to faculty housing, live in this town. Typically, the workers who come to town are African-American and Latinx.  The residents are typically white.  I am routinely treated by fellow residents, as well as by commuter workers, as if I do not belong here.  I am African-American living in this affluent county – an embodied oxymoron, at best. I pay taxes here, vote here, work here, but, from the gaze of the racist eyeball, I do not belong here…. I’ve lived here for twenty years. Recently, I was having breakfast at the local diner with our dean, Javier Viera. Dean Viera, born in Puerto Rico, is fluent in Spanish. When the waitress came to our table to take our order, she was, as she always is, pleasant, and, in retrospect, sad. I did not notice her sadness until it morphed into a smile. What made her smile was when Javier greeted her in Spanish and ordered his breakfast in Spanish. When Dean Viera spoke to her in Spanish it both surprised and delighted her.  Her face lit up like a Christmas tree.  At his speaking, she went from an almost invisible presence to a woman of dignity. This drastic shift happened when she was spoken to in a language which signaled her belonging – or more accurately, her shift happened when she received the signal that she was not alone, not alien.  The Dean could have ordered in English. I did. Instead, in that moment he chose a language which invited the waitress to know a little bit of who his people are, what his allegiances are, and the kind of man he is.  In this moment of belonging, he code-switched. A few years ago, I drove into the school parking lot and whipped into a space designated for faculty.  I literally parked in front of the sign that read “Reserved for Faculty.”  Distracted by my own thoughts, I got out of my car, opened the back door to get my briefcase and bags, then shut both car doors.  Still distracted as I walked, I headed up the path to the seminary building, intending to go straight to class.  Joe (not his name) was a facilities staff person whose job it was to place temporary signs around campus for upcoming events. Joe had worked at the school longer than I had and by that time I had been there for more than ten years. Joe, seeing me park in faculty parking, stopped hammering a signpost near the space where I parked. He shouted over to me, “You can’t park there.” In Black woman fashion, I decided I did not want to be bothered, this day, with this kind of #$%@##.  Without replying or acknowledging him in any way (ignoring is a Black woman survival strategy), I kept walking. Joe raised his volume and shouted in my direction, “That’s for faculty.  YOU can’t park there.” As I entered the building I looked over my shoulder to see that the sign-man had left his assigned task, walked over to my car and was inspecting the parking tag in my car window. I suspect Sign-man was surprised when my tag read “Faculty.”  Even when I “belong,” Sign-man, on the lowest tier of the hierarchy, believes he can police me and tell me that I do not belong.  WTH! $%##*! Though my enthusiasm at the start of any fall semester wanes, my clarity of purpose sharpens.  At the end of the orientation worship service I position myself in the hallway.  As the new students leave the chapel, I ferret-out the new African American and African students, shake their hands, read their name tags aloud.  I ask in which degree program they are enrolled and inquire about their fall course selection. While doing this, I keep an eye on the stairway. If it looks like a student who I have not spoken with is going down the stairs, I, in true old-Black-church-woman style, snap my fingers to get his/her attention, then wave them over to me. As I corral each student, I use Black church gestures and tones telling them, don’t wait for trouble, then decide to come find me; come sit in my office soon and we will get acquainted. I tell them to email me and we will have coffee or lunch - soon. I want them from their first day to know, at least a little bit, that they are not alone in this place. I tell them that the protocols and practices of respect, decency, and regard of Black church culture are, with their presence, operative and that I am a representative of our shared culture. I want them to know that this school has something of merit to offer them if they can just figure out how to extract the best and leave the rest. I want my gesture to signal to them my availability to help with this leg of their holy journey. I tell them, I, like the other old women of our church tradition, in any given moment, can reach in and down to my DD-located-coin-purse for a piece of money, a freshly pressed handkerchief, a peppermint candy or a straight edge.  For me, the importance of this gesture is like what our dean did for the waitress. Or, more importantly, an antidote for when, not if, the sign-man speaks to them on our campus. I am trying to communicate, in the midst of all the hollow rhetoric of “welcome,” that they belong in our school because our people have fought and won the right for us to be in this place. I code-switch. I code-switch in ear-shot of the public to signal to the African and African-American students, at least a little bit, that their racial/cultural identity is part of this place and that their/our expressions of religion, faith, values and community are here, at least a little bit.  It does not take Jim/Jane Crow era signs reading “Whites Only” at the water fountains and bathrooms to make people of color feel unwelcomed. Strategies of hatred and alienation are maintained in the DNA of the institution as well as by the sign-posters on payroll. By now, I have been at my desk long enough to have a modicum of authority, some institutional voice, and can exercise some mother’s-milk-given moxie.  At this stage, I possess less fear of reprisal or sabotage and more orneriness. My orneriness is one of the gifts of having survived into crone-hood; it is a gift from the ancestors, a pay-off of having earned the distinction of full professorship and being near retirement. As a person who has earned influence and power in this profession, I feel it my obligation to use this cachet to tell Black students that they belong and then to work until it happens.  This year, after my practice of greeting all the students of the African diaspora, I made my way to the foyer for the buffet lunch.  I was joined in the que by a tenure-track faculty colleague who is Korean. A new student came up to my colleague and, in greeting each other, they spoke in Korean.  After the brief exchange, my colleague introduced me to the student in English.  I was glad my colleague also understands the necessity of code-switching to assist Korean students in feeling that they belong, at least a little bit. Later that week, the same colleague and I went to dinner. We chose a sushi restaurant.  The maître d’ greeted us at the restaurant entrance, then sat us at a table.  He took my friend’s drink order in Korean and mine in English. Once the man left the table side – I playfully feinted insult and asked my friend why the maître d’ had not spoken to me in Korean. My friend tipped his head forward and, looking at me over his glasses, smiled. The truth telling of his culturally familiar gesture made me laugh out loud.   

Theological education centers on attention. Attending to another person’s thoughts, their arguments, their conceptions – studying, parsing, comparing, etc. This is not a novel claim. The Jewish philosopher Simone Weil, however, claims that there is more going on as we work out a geometry problem, tussle over a difficult argument, or wade through a difficult theological text. Attention in academic studies, she argues, trains us for prayer and for loving our neighbors (“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God, 57-66). Weil implies that attention is like a muscle. Giving attention to academic studies trains that muscle so it can be flexed by attending to God in prayer and attending to our others in love. Prayer first. Contemplation consists of attention: “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” Studies train that muscle. More is therefore happening when we carefully attend to the thoughts of others in the theological classroom. Even a geometry problem can accomplish this. If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary, it is almost an advantage. … Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention is wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind. If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer. What is Weil doing? She is shifting the telos of study according to her religious imagination. “Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes.” Rather, “applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer . . . To make this the sole and exclusive purpose of our studies is the first condition to be observed if we are to put them to the right use.” The telos of study—good marks or the aptitude for prayer—orients the student’s motivation and intention. Now love for others. Love for our neighbors is also served through academic studies. Weil’s argument tracks along the same lines as before. Love requires attention. Thus, by training our attention-muscles through academic studies, we are better able to flex those muscles toward our neighbors. She explains:  Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. . . . Only he who is capable of attention can do this. So it comes about that paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need. If Weil is right (I believe she is) then we could say something bold like this: careful, patient, and deliberate attention to the thoughts, arguments, and conceptions of others can serve not only the cultivation of one’s abilities as a theologian, but also one’s capacity for loving attention to God and others. We are bombarded today with distraction and constantly lured with promises of entertainment, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if theological education were forming persons fit for contemplation? Today, partisanship and fear so quickly divides us, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if theological education were forming citizens capable of compassion? What if – dare we dream – that through attention, theological education could train us for love?

A major task that our students will have to undertake is to create a sustainable way of life. To do so, they need to be able to understand how to analyze themselves, especially how their behaviors and worldviews are connected with social and environmental effects. To our misfortune, this is also the living generation with perhaps the least ability to self-analyze, to patiently plot out long-term goals, and to withstand the psychological pains of self-transformation. To meet the demands on this generation for sustainability, I made metacognitive tasks central to an introductory course on world religions, with a personal emphasis on sustainability. I was surprised at the degree of resistance and struggle at metacognitive tasks, and I have recommendations to improve success. Context and Problem I teach at a racially diverse R1 state university with some unique courses on world religions. Namely, we teach an introductory course that is offered statewide and that is reciprocally accepted at colleges across the state. In addition, there is a general course with more students and fewer credit hours, a traditions course for humanity students and religious studies majors, and a graduate-level course that examines the concept of “world religions.” For the introductory course, faculty are free to take their own approach that would appeal to humanities and non-humanities majors alike. I chose to reorganize my version around sustainability. I am in some ways following the lead of scholars like Mary Evelyn Tucker who advocate that we integrate environmental concerns into our classrooms and scholarship. But, more fundamentally, I am expanding my work on racial minority communities—Asian American, African American, and Native American—who are increasingly concerned with the coupling of social justice and environmental racism. Thus, my goal of centering a world religions course sustainability has foundations in the pressing issues of social and environmental degradation that my racially diverse student body are confronting in their communities. Since students are, or will soon be, facing these great problems, I thought that they would be willing to take on relatively simple challenges of self-evaluation. I was both right and wrong. I created course assignments that required students to analyze themselves and the natural world around them utilizing metacognition. Metacognition—in its simplified definition of reflection and “thinking about thinking”—is natural for the religious studies classroom because it undergirds common practices in religion. However, its formal definition in cognitive science and pedagogy has not been commonly applied in our field. As psychologist Anastasia Efklides articulates, “metacognition is a representation of cognition that provides awareness of cognition” (138). Largely in pedagogy, this image of cognition provides students the ability to see why they should know information and how they will be tested. When students become conscious of where information sits in this “image,” they can adjust study habits to be more efficient test-takers and with practice become proactive learners who “seek solutions to any problems they may encounter” (McGuire, 16). Skill in metacognition can be incorporated into lecture, class activities, exam preparation, and post-exam assessment. Tests can focus on one’s skill in knowing where information sits. Additionally, as my Georgia State colleague Molly Bassett has done, metacognition can be incorporated into multiple-choice exams in religious studies (Bassett). In these ways, the practice of representing cognition can be incorporated to nearly any class, and can help students develop more control over course content and help provide instructors a better sense of how their students are learning. Upper-division courses can utilize metacognitive tasks to reexamine the same topic or idea at multiple points in the semester, thus allowing the class to see how they are applying different processes of interpreting the same thing and deriving different results. Introductory courses do not have this luxury of focus. Instead, I had students examine the only consistent object through the semester: the students’ selves. I broke the self into two sides—how one sees oneself and how one sees the world—and detailed religious conceptions of the self and worldviews. I accordingly created two assignments and a final paper to bring these two tasks together. The first metacognitive assignment is called the Creature Journal. It is an observation journal, like scientists, observe plots of land over time, but modified for the religious studies classroom. Based on research supported by Wabash, I found an expansive definition of “person” in indigenous cultures that includes animals, plants, and natural features like mountains and lakes (Norton-Smith). Students may choose any “person” (which I replace with “creature”) as long as they can observe it throughout the semester. For each journal entry, they take on the worldview of a different religion and write down their observations. The trick is that even though they are observing something else, they are really discovering their selves because they get to vicariously be someone else for the period of the assignment. For example, in one memorable creature journal, a student observed a tree with the lens of Hindu karma and reincarnation, and saw that the tree swayed like a person in the breeze. In fact, a common comment from students is that they have never taken the time to see a nonhuman as a living thing and have never observed the lack of care it receives. Thus, by looking outward they learned to form an image of their interconnection or lack-thereof to other “creatures”; this practice also conforms to the more formal definition of metacognition. The second assignment is called Reflections. To help students form an image of their selves to reflect upon, I created a diagram of the construction of worldviews and a model of a cycle of learning and transformation. With these two images, students are asked to reflect upon worldviews and how they transformed. To simplify the assignment, each part of the assignment takes one step in the cycle and students choose one aspect of their worldview to analyze. The aspects are drawn from the diagram of worldviews, which depicts major categories, like values, beliefs, experiences, and senses, that undergird worldviews. The aspect of the worldview is any part of any category, like the belief that “everything happens for a reason.” In the Reflections students consider where the aspect came from, what it means for them today, and how it might transform in the future. The trick for the Reflections is that the even though they are analyzing their selves, they are really discovering how they see the world. For example, one student discussed how charity became central to her core values. When the student was in middle school, her family became involved in a charity that distributed clothes to the homeless, and now in college, she cannot see her life without a significant dedication to charity. In this way, through the assignment, she practiced analyzing her self and formed an image of the self that is connected to values, a habit of giving, people in general, and her family. In the final paper, which brings together the two metacognitive assignments, this student was able to compare her own history and conception of charity to the worldviews of other religions. Thinking-about-thinking thus enabled the student to understand that traditions shape religious worldviews and individual experiences reinforce particular aspects of religious worldviews. The final paper also asks students to consider how an aspect of their worldview assists or deteriorates sustainability. In this example, the practice of charity towards the homeless aids social sustainability, since it upholds the stability of society, and environmental sustainability, since it reuses clothing and household items that otherwise would go directly to landfill. Consequently, the student was able to connect her practices to society, the environment, and religious worldviews. In such ways, metacognition can be an important vehicle for developing systemic, multileveled thinking that is essential for reforming one’s relationships in order to create a sustainable world. Struggles and Advice While a few students leave with dramatic transformations in understanding their selves and worldviews, along with an experience connecting complex current issues to the study of religion, a significant portion of the students resisted metacognitive activities and assignments. I anticipated a little resistance because metacognition is unusual for courses, but I hoped that the desire to work on a significant issue of their day and Millennials’ narcissistic tendencies would make up the difference. This generation—the Millennials—are notoriously narcissistic (Hoover; Howe & Strauss), so I hoped that spending the semester focused on themselves would be natural and productive. The problem is that narcissism also entails fragility, and self-analysis threatens the stability of the self (which is an important step of self-analysis). As a result, students consistently asked why they needed to think about themselves, and I developed a few ways to mitigate these issues. Pointing externally, students complained that course information was not being provided. To counter this, I consistently provided study guides at the start of each unit of the course. I also utilized concepts in class lectures, discussions, and activities, and the assignments required the use of course concepts. One student objected that the course focused too much on my own interests and not enough on religion. To meet this issue, I explained thoroughly several times throughout the semester that according to department practice each professor teaches this course by centering their own expertise and using it as a glue to introduce religions to students with diverse academic interests. Moreover, every reading and lecture was on religion. I also anticipated the concern over focusing on a theme that may seem too based in my own politics. To mitigate this concern, I emphasized the ethical and moral argument that environmental and social degradation is a problem for all the world’s peoples and that religions’ collective wisdom can alleviate the impact of our collective follies. The study guides, assignments using course concepts, clear goals for the course, and ethical call for self-evaluation all helped to address student anxiety with metacognition and self-analysis. Overall, I found that, in addition to the practical adjustments just outlined, there is a need to consistently and frequently encourage and relieve students as they take on metacognitive tasks. I keep assignments open to different levels of self-analysis and self-disclosure, so students can choose the level of sensitivity or superficiality with which they are comfortable. I model self-analysis by alternating humor and seriousness, light self-deprecation and deep self-critique, personal stories and scientific data on the impact of my own choices. With student preapproval, I also highlight interesting and solid work done by the students. I found this multilevel honesty and support brings students to feel strong, especially those who want to become responsible citizens of the world as well as those who had already taken on responsibilities in their lives, such as students with considerable family commitments, dedications to communities, and who have taken on military service. Given the pushback by anxious Millennials, the conscious and consistent efforts to alleviate anxieties, and the potential benefits of incremental self-transformation and sustainability, I feel it is worth it to tackle metacognition and sustainability in the religious studies classroom. My numerical validations have so far taken a hit, but the qualitative value of self-confident and self-evaluating students self-sacrificing for the good of the world outweighs the costs, in my opinion. References and Other Sources Bassett, Molly H. “Teaching Critical Thinking without (Much) Writing: Multiple-Choice and Metacognition.” Teaching Theology & Religion 19, no. 1 (January 2016): 20-40. Efklides, Anastasia. “The New Look in Metacognition: From Individual to Social, From Cognitive to Affective.” In Metacognition: New Research Developments, ed. Clayton B. Larson, 137-51. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2009. Hoover, J. Duane. “Complexity Avoidance, Narcissism and Experiential Learning.” Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, 38 (2011): 255-60. Howe, Neil and William Strauss. Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

How do theological educators help students face the constant reality of failure? Picture this scenario: a second career divinity student suffers health and financial troubles that impede her studies. The impact of these issues revives past psychological wounds. Enduring this morass of difficulties leads to the student’s failure in several class assignments. Further, the weight of the unresolved emotional burdens, partly resurrected through themes in classwork, results in crippling pessimism, angst, and depression. The student begins to conclude that dropping out of school is the only solution despite the negative ramifications this decision will have on her career goals. What are the pedagogical possibilities for instructors and students with regard to issues of failure both in and out of the classroom? In addition to keeping students aware of campus and local health resources that accommodate various needs (including psychological and counseling services, for instance) instructors can develop a helpful methodological ethos around success and failure in the classroom. As the prophet Jeremiah testified, “You shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord: When people fall, do they not get up again? If they go astray, do they not turn back?’” (Jer. 8. 4) Pedagogical strategies for encouraging students to confront and overcome failure begin with instructors modeling a lack of fear in this regard. Teachers are not perfect. Nor are lectures, teaching plans, or classroom activities executed perfectly at all times. Responding to hiccups in real time classroom settings indicates there is a way back from past failures as well as traumas that may be at the root of student underperformance. This models effective coping strategies for students. Further, it is helpful to assist students to find ways of processing how the legacy of trauma, both collective and personal, affects learning. Part of the impact of trauma is the defensive posturing in individuals and societies that tends to obscure the origins or initial events that contributed to experiences of upheaval. Theological education, which assists in the dissemination of epistemologies based in critical inquiry, enables students to interrogate traditional and received interpretations, even if, in some cases, only to validate them. Just as the use of critical inquiry in coursework can provide opportunities for facing themes and opening pathways related to trauma in social experience, so can pedagogical strategies, structured in this framework, hone methodological skills of survival and success for students. Developing opportunities for students to enact these strategies also enables instructors to assess the usefulness of particular methods and modes of presentation. The familiar mantra, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” was originally written to encourage students in the educational process. Indeed, teachers can develop specific strategies to help students face problems in classroom performance. These include not only acknowledging difficulties when they arise but also incorporating tactics that analyze obstacles in classroom exercises. For example, tracing patterns or connections, dissecting complications, wrestling with incongruities, working through potential solutions, and testing their implications in classroom exercises model the confrontation skills necessary for overcoming failure. Built on the paradigm of evaluation, critique, and re-evaluation, such teaching methods can help develop the kinds of students who encounter defeat, yet refuse to fail.

The call for educational practitioners to be critically self-reflective is fairly common today. This is in large part due to the work of pedagogical theorists, such as Stephen Brookfield, who have challenged educators to routinely assess and hone our teaching practices. Indeed, since the beginning of my teaching career, I have been encouraged by mentors to reflect critically on my teaching through the four lenses Brookfield identifies: (1) students' eyes, (2) colleagues' perceptions, (3) personal experience, and (4) theory.[1] Recently, however, I have noticed a pattern in my critical reflection: it becomes all-encompassing and far-reaching during the aftermath of national traumas. For example, in these few weeks following the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I have been thinking, “What are we doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? What else should I be doing?” The sickening coincidence that the shooting occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent according to the Christian liturgical calendar that I observe, added an unavoidable urgency to my usual Lenten critical reflection. Because the main area of my social engagement is through my teaching and writing, the tragedy of yet another mass shooting prompted me to reconsider everything I have ever done in the classroom. Similar moments of wholescale critical reflection were stirred within me after other tragic events over the past few years. For example, I vividly remember this process of questioning all of my pedagogical assumptions and practices after the presidential election of 2016 and the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.  In the genre of educational theory, I believe Jack Mezirow would define each of these events as a “disorienting dilemma.”[2] He has poignantly described how traumatic events can often lead us to scrutinize previously unquestioned assumptions and to identify how our assumptions have limited our thought-processes and actions up to the point they occurred. For me, each of these national tragedies has led me to uncover my previous assumption that “I need to be an expert in what I teach.” Based on this assumption, I had believed that my expertise in the area of “systematic theology” did not qualify me to teach about civic action or politics at all. So, if I wanted to teach about anything that engaged in social or racial justice (which I desperately did), I would need to go back and get another Ph.D. in critical race theory. However, through my critical reflection, particularly through Brookfield’s fourth lens of theory, I have come to understand the inaccuracy of my previous viewpoint and have begun to embrace a much more accurate alternative: all teaching in higher education must entail “ideology critique.” Indeed, I have taken a tip from Brookfield’s own theory. As he defines it, “Ideology critique is part learning process, part civic action.” It “focuses on helping people come to an awareness of how capitalism, White Supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heterosexism and other ideologies shape beliefs and practices that justify and maintain economic and political inequity.”[3] I now understand ideology critique as a necessary and central component to critical reflection. National traumas led me to intuit this assumption, and Brookfield’s theory led me to embrace it. Moreover, through my critical reflection--specifically through Brookfield’s first lens, that of my students’ eyes--I know that it is not just me that is questioning everything I have been doing (cognitively and behaviorally) after a national tragedy, but my students are too. I have found that leading them through a critical reflection, which entails ideology critique, is helpful for them as well. The three core assumptions Brookfield identifies as comprising ideology critique are helpful for framing such discussions about the unjust ways the world is organized: “(1) that apparently open, Western democracies are actually highly unequal societies in which economic inequity, racism and class discrimination are empirical realties; (2) that the way this state of affairs is reproduced as seeming to be normal, natural and inevitable (thereby heading off potential challenges to the system) is through the dissemination of dominant ideology; and (3) that critical theory attempts to understand this state of affairs as a prelude to changing it.”[4] Of course, this activity of leading students in a reflection on these assumptions is not the primary focus of my lesson plan in every class. After all, I am responsible for teaching them theological methods and theories—that is, the areas in which I have been trained. But what I know now for sure is that I can and necessarily must lead them in a critical reflection concerning dominant ideology, especially in the aftermath of national tragedies and traumas. I am curious to know how and to what extent others engage in ideology critique in the classroom: In what ways and in which theory do you frame your discussion? How do you balance the demands of the course content for which you are responsible and the demands of the students and contemporary society begging for ideology critique? [1] Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (San-Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995). [2] Jack Mezirow, Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000). [3] Stephen Brookfield, “The Concept of Critical Reflection: Promises and Contradictions,” European Journal of Social Work, 12.3 (September 2009): 298-299. [4] Ibid., 298.

Classroom discussions are never to be used as therapy – by student or by teacher. While I believe teaching and learning has the capacity to summon the elements of healing, I do not subscribe to asking teacher or learner to participate in classroom sessions structured for therapy in any respect. The doing of therapy must be left to the psychological professionals. No assignment or classroom discussion should invite students into a therapeutic contract. I make this declaration because personal disclosures are often part of the teacher/learner relationship. Choosing authentic and healthy ways of revealing one’s self to students is a part of teaching, and it requires reflection, intention, planning, and great care. Parker Palmer has taught us, “we teach who we are,” so it behooves us to take great care that in sharing ourselves we do not share our craziness, our brokenness, our hot-mess-selves. We should resist any temptation or impulse to disclose personal, raw stories of pain, trauma, and personal wounding under the guise of providing conceptual examples or building trust with our students. Students do not deserve to be burdened by our emotional or psychological fragilities. Equally, we must take care not to coax students into personal disclosures that continue, or compound, their wounding. In other words, too much shared personal information is never a way to strengthen the dynamics of a classroom discussion, lesson plan, or teaching relationship. I have a colleague who does not subscribe to Palmer’s line of thinking about the teaching of one’s self. Instead, he subscribes to the notion that we teach through a series of personas that can be created, crafted, and honed. Then, over the years, by cultivating these personas, we can convey, portray, perform the self who is needed to be a good teaching presence in the classroom. This perspective reminds me of the poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The first stanza reads: We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. While I don’t think this is what my colleague intends, I suspect our adult learners are savvy enough that they recognize a good persona or a flimsy persona for just what it is - a persona. The irony is that even your choice of persona reveals a bit about who you are. Regardless of your philosophy of self-disclosure, the key is not to over-share. Only a few of us are reckless and blindly cross boundaries or wantonly choose to participate in inappropriate disclosures that lead to inappropriate behaviors. Most of us are not in danger of harming students. Most of us simply want to find ways of portraying our healthiest selves for the good of the learning ecology. The month when my mother was dying (2010), I was teaching as best I could - that is, only just barely. I thought I was doing an adequate job. One day during class my teaching assistant, Amy, pulled me aside and told me I had assigned the same small group exercise the week before. She looked at me with eyes afraid she had told me the wrong thing. I thanked her for her feedback. When I gathered the students back from the small groups, my first impulse was to explain myself, which would have meant telling the class I was distracted because my mother was dying. I recoiled from this disclosure feeling that it was too intimate, too raw, too much sharing. My next impulse was to continue with the planned discussion and end class a few minutes early. I went with my second impulse. Being authentic in classrooms does not mean telling all your business. Students are not in our classrooms to take care of us. Similar practices and sensitivities are needed for student disclosures. I have had moments when adult learners launch into telling very personal, sometimes painful stories, about family situations. In these moments I ask them to “STOP!” I try to be light-hearted in my command to cease, but I ask that traumatic experiences not be told, then I ask the student to tell us the point of the story, rather than the detailed story itself. If needed, I talk with the student after class in an effort to refer him/her to counseling. Referral is a needed skill in teaching. Additionally, I ask that in written assignments, care be taken not to disclose anything to me that they would not disclose to the entire class. Reading the stories of pain and trauma in assignment form can be worse than hearing the stories told in the classroom setting. I have a friend, brilliant scholar, who has chosen only to lecture in classroom sessions. Occasionally, she will turn to questions about the lecture in the last few minutes of the session. She has intentionally decided never to allow for student discussions. This strategy was deployed because she was weary of the personal stories of students that were nearly impossible to redirect toward the course agenda. She was unnerved by the disclosures of gossip which were used to thicken the discussion and entertain. She found it a waste of time to listen to students who had not done the readings and instead chose to filibuster by over-sharing. While I do not applaud her decision, I understand her decision. The best strategies I know for helping students and myself not to lapse into disconnected, personal storytelling is to be clear about my aims, objectives, and goals for each course, each session, each learning activity and then to keep those goals central to all discussions. It takes a precision of discipline to stay on-target with the aims and to train students to respect these parameters of disclosure and discussion. It takes a strong, even hand to set and maintain a climate that encourages strong discourse (even personal stories which are applicable to the conversation) and discourages over-sharing. I start the first day of the class with this kind of climate setting in mind. I tell students that we do NOT have a contract of confidentiality in our discussions and to consider anything said in this space as shareable with the world. I tell them that if they need to speak confidentially, then please see their therapist, spiritual director, or counselor, as I will be doing the same thing. I have gotten considerable feedback from students that they appreciate not to be asked to over-share in classrooms.

Is there a pedagogical responsibility to traumatize our students? I’m not thinking of some unbridled notion of “tough love” in grading, or an exaggerated insistence that actions have consequences, or even routine attempts to challenge assumptions and perspectives. Rather, is there a pedagogical responsibility to make students feel less safe, less secure, less stable, to insist that the world is more sinister, more dangerous, more potentially harmful than they might at first suspect or admit?  I grapple with this question in many of my courses. For example, I teach a course focused on cinematic representations of Jesus that strives to enable students to read such films rhetorically, in conversation with their own historical and cultural moment as well as the current one. To do this well, we have to tease out the ways in which the films support (and resist) anti-Semitism, nationalism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, erotophobia, and Christian imperialism.  In a general education course that explores American histories of race, gender and sexuality through horror films, we grapple with very similar issues. Students resist ideological critiques of these films claiming that such analyses read too much into them or make too much out of minor details or simply exaggerate the importance of “mere entertainment.” Students also emphasize their historical distance from these films—racist and sexist imaginaries may have infected the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies . . . even the early aughts, but those problems have been resolved, and we occupy a more enlightened moment. Part of my work in these courses is to push back, gently but persistently, against these defenses and resistances and force an encounter with ugly, painful, dehumanizing energies. Part of my work is to help students see what they might be unwilling to see about the ways various cultural representations try to prevent them from seeing.  Questions about confronting students with potentially traumatizing material are often resolved by appealing to students’ identities. In a recent Facebook conversation, a group of colleagues discussed whether it would be appropriate to screen video of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in class. There was a concern about protecting students of color and a desire to confront white students. While these priorities made—and make—sense to me, they aren’t fully consonant with my experience as a teacher. I have had female students challenge claims that an argument or analysis is sexist, had queer-identified students champion fairly optimistic assessments of the presence of religious homophobia, and had students of color contest of racism in representations.  By no means am I suggesting that my assessment of the cultural, political, and ethical dynamics of materials is always correct—and I certainly try to create classroom spaces where students can respectfully challenge interpretations offered by course materials, their classmates, and me—but it seems important to note that it may very well be those students who are most likely to be targeted by certain systems of unjust and injurious power—i.e., those students who we worry most about (re-)traumatizing—who may be least willing to acknowledge their vast reach. These challenges were most pronounced in a course I co-taught a couple of years ago entitled “The Violence of Hope.” This course interrogated the ways in which discourses of progress, restoration, healing, and redemption—in politics, ethics, and religion—disguised, perpetuated, or intensified violence. The course pressed the notion that we are all inevitably and inextricably implicated in and complicit with systems of violence and that our attempts at amelioration are often mechanisms of acceleration.  Many of our students had deep activist commitments. Most of our students confessed feelings of hopelessness and frustration as the course progressed. Ultimately, what I think made the course work—what I think makes my film courses work, my Queer Theory coursework, my courses focused on sexuality and religion work—is that there was an acknowledgment of the enormity and seriousness of the questions raised by the materials under consideration and a genuine, patient attempt to grapple with them. In my teaching, I heed the call to traumatize my students. I work to make them more paranoid—or paranoid in new keys. But this is never the goal of my courses. By the same token, it is never my goal to solve the problems I raise, answer the questions I pose—or even offer palliative care for the injuries I may inflict. Instead, I seek to help students develop the skills, the habits, and the dexterity to negotiate the fraught, uncertain, and ever-shifting terrain that comprises their world. Consistent with my sense of responsibility, the only way to develop such capacities is to enter hostile territory.

Teaching-learning is often a perilous process. Occasionally, in the midst of delivering carefully structured lectures, facilitating balanced yet critically engaging discussions, or working with students one-on-one, life intervenes in a dramatic and direct fashion. Three years ago, I was teaching a summer course on Methodist church history for Master of Divinity students pursuing ordination at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Right after we began the section on Black Methodism, Dylann Roof walked into a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine people, including the pastor. The world was rife with shock and grief. We, ourselves church leaders, Bible study teachers, and ministerial workers, were actively engaged in crafting understandings of ecclesiastical history in order to refine vocational skills. Students (and instructor) processed painful emotions derived from a current event that hit close to home. Empathy with the victims and their families mingled with rage, disbelief, and ultimately, compassion for the tormented assailant.  Socrates reportedly once said, “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” For me, as instructor, a pedagogical opportunity had arisen. I found myself addressing a contemporary demonstration of the societal and cultural terror that necessitated the original founding of Black Methodism while teaching a section on Black Methodism in a Methodist history class.  In that moment, critical analysis of the broader sweep of church history and its convergence within the present was essential. It was important to help students utilize the historical information they were acquiring in light of current events. Balancing both sets of data, the historical record and the contemporary event, opened the way for collective inquiry, sharing, and judging right there in the classroom. This experience reveals a wider view of pedagogical method. By allowing students to ask and respond to critical questions, underlying assumptions are revealed. Students are then invited to further examine the nature of their assumptions. Have key events and concepts been adequately accessed? Does other relevant information exist that may shed light on these assessments? What are the logical implications of this view? Are there alternatives? If so, are they just as reasonable? Thus, one of the ways student-learners develop critical thinking skills is through the facilitation of teacher-learners who ask questions and respond to answers with more questions. While acknowledging the contributions of students equitably (and encouraging all to participate) facilitators move the discussion forward by engaging questions that maintain focus on the stated goals of the course. This includes summarizing the status of reflections, critical points, and remaining questions. However, it is also crucial to keep in mind that students may harbor feelings of trauma and stress sparked by the evaluation of historical knowledge and associated current events. Creating a classroom that nurtures the student voice through affirmation of shared experience fosters safe space. The use of critical thinking in analyzing history, which is oftentimes quite troubling, engenders the technique of practical engagement with personal and social traumas. And, sensitivity to cultural diversity, religious difference, and doctrinal belief is paramount in cultivating a healing environment. This includes the overt recognition and appreciation of differing and conflicting opinions. Paying attention to the energy of the class, body language of students, and other contextual signs will determine choice of direction that a teacher-learner may take, even while encouraging rational analysis of stated views. Taking a synergistic approach, that is, dialectical interaction among teacher-learners and student-learners, therefore allows room for reasoned critique of hypothetical assumptions as well as the emotional processing of potentially painful experiences. Effective execution requires heightened attention to the needs of students and patience with the flow of communication. This can be challenging, particularly when unexpected realities shatter benignly anticipated teaching moments carefully structured by course design. Instructors must, therefore, be gentle with themselves and practice flexibility in meeting the demands of challenging and/or controversial teaching moments. Although teaching does involve the transmission of knowledge, the ultimate goal of teaching lies in the cultivation of tools that allow students effective engagement in critical discernment of the world, leading to reasonably based decision making. In our Methodist History course, the shootings by a crazed supremacist at the historic Mother Emmanuel Church were a sobering occasion that offered the chance for systemic appraisal of institutional structures in church and society that continue to perpetuate racial violence. This unfortunate and deeply traumatic event provided context to evaluate broadly how various interlocking systems lead to experiential sufferings that are typically passed down generationally. As we grappled with the pain enkindled by this senseless act (which will reverberate in the annals of traumatic historical events) insightful theological and practical observations, deduced by critical analysis, were honed. Like the rest of the world, our class did not emerge emotionally unscathed by facing the horrors of history alive and well in today’s world that mournful day. We did, however, incorporate pedagogical tools, that, with repeated and improved use, are designed to foster growth and empowerment in teaching, learning, and living as responsible citizens.