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Several years ago, I was expecting a guest speaker in one of my courses. To prepare for the colleague’s visit, I asked my students what questions they had for the person.  Silence. And not a quizzical silence, just a dead silence. I tried to prime the pump by repeating the guest’s research agenda as well as the topics of our course’s conversation. The response by students was underwhelming – the not so faint sound of crickets could be heard. I signaled my dismay by using a displeased tone of voice and reminded the students that they must have questions. In distress, a woman blurted out, “I don’t have any questions!” I realized she meant that she did not have any deficits.  She thought questions only signaled what she was supposed to know, but did not.  Questions, for her, were a confession of inadequacy, unpreparedness, and ignorance. I had failed to teach that questions were tools of curiosity and a method of inquiry to interact with the guest lecturer. Since that moment, I have been trying to cultivate and nurture student curiosity.  In this journey, I have learned that what I am curious about is not necessarily what my students are curious about. I have learned that some students have no curiosity for classroom learning because their energies are tied up in modes of survival, credential earning, and the distractions of family and wage earning. These students are difficult to gather-in. I have learned that students have been told that their genuine curiosity is without merit, so they have learned not to voice their real questions or pursue their authentic passions. I have learned that some deep, marvelous curiosity is voiced in a language/vocabulary that is academically unsophisticated and I have worked to train my ear to hear these curiosities. I have challenged myself to “think like my students” and try to anticipate the kinds of questions and inquiry they will levy toward a reading or learning activity. I want to align with them and use their inquiries as starting points.  I’ve had some success with this tactic – but it’s not easy.  Mostly I’ve learned that students are so eager-to-please that when I tell them they are to formulate their own genuine curiosity about a topic – they do.  Last semester I had two kinds of assignments in my seminar. First, the students were to consider the assigned readings, then like jazz musicians, riff off of the author’s argument. I called them Riff Reports. The instructions were to bring to the class a report about what the reading sparked in their thinking and imagination. I challenged them, “Bring your own insights, curiosity – do not repeat the reading, do not report the reading.  Consider your own passion, interests, situations, then build, expand, add your voice, perspective, and idiosyncrasies to the conversation.” At the beginning of the semester, I modeled in class sessions what I meant by Riff Reports by doing my own version of riffing off of the readings. In my three-hour session, I would do a one-hour riff, then two students, each taking 30 minutes, would riff off of the same reading. This would give the class three riffs from one reading – a cornucopia of meaning and wonder! Second, by the end of the semester, the students completed a Curiosity Report, building off of the reading, their Riff-Reports, my Riff-Reports, and the conversations we had in class sessions. The Curiosity Report could culminate in a critical reflection essay or it could be a creative portrayal. Regardless of its final embodiment (the student’s choice), the report had to include a method of inquiry which addressed the student’s own curiosity. Students were invited to explain why this curiosity was important to them and their people. They had to sit with the librarian to create a bibliography, interview experts, and go on field trips to visit the locales needed to satisfy their inquiries. By mid-semester, students gave oral reports about their topics, questions, and inquiry methodology. By the end of the semester, students gave an expanded presentation and then handed in a written form.  Watching and helping students formulate their own curiosity was a very different way to teach than telling them what was important, critical, or required in the disciplinary canon.  Helping them develop, unearth, and investigate their own agendas was not the same as performing my passions, thoughts, and ideas for them at the front of the class.  Witnessing their process of being inspired by our reading, then taking a kernel of their own idea and working it up into a full project, was very meaningful to me. This witnessing gave me a real sense of reverence for their ability to think, create, and hope – I felt as if I was witnessing beauty.  In every case, students selected topics that were personally relevant, intimately related to their life circumstances, and in some cases, life-giving. Our librarian called me to comment on the breadth and uniqueness of their topics and how interested he was to help students who were interested in inquiry. In two instances, I sent students to talk with faculty colleagues whose research interest matched the students. In both instances, the conversations were generative for both student and colleague. Finding like-minded thinkers feels like water in the desert.  At the risk of romanticizing the experience, I did have one student who, in my opinion, got lost in the process. The student preferred being told what to do and how to do it.  When that was not the task, the effort needed for discovery and self-motivation was too much. The student was able to articulate a fascinating question of inquiry, but could not follow through on investigation and creative research methodology. Pursuing curiosity requires time for introspection, consideration of on-going context and conversation, and the where-with-all to investigate.  Structuring classrooms for student curiosity seems like a no-brainer, but it has taken me many years to get here.

In graduate school, I spent a year teaching at San Quentin State Prison while writing my dissertation. I loved my Religion and English classes at the prison and frequently remarked to friends that teaching incarcerated men, many of them in their mid-thirties or beyond, was strikingly similar to teaching 18-22-year-old undergraduates at UC Berkeley. “They make the same excuses about why they couldn’t do the reading,” I loved to tell fellow graduate student instructors. The students, those on the inside and on the outside, also often struggled over the same points – how to write a persuasive thesis, how to conduct research, how to understand unfamiliar religious practices. Eventually, I found a job at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, and left both Berkeley and San Quentin behind. After several years at Rhodes, a colleague invited me to teach in another prison education program, this time a “great books” program at the West Tennessee Women’s Prison. I jumped at the chance and offered to cover the Hebrew Bible. Strategically, I decided to teach the two books I was already teaching to Rhodes undergraduates in my Feminist Biblical Interpretation class: Ruth and Esther. This suggested several advantages: I would already be prepared for what the students would have to say about the texts, what directions the conversation might take, and I thought women might be interested in reading texts where female relationships, like that between Ruth and Naomi, are foregrounded.   I entered the first class at WTWP confident in what would happen. I had just taught Ruth to my traditional undergraduates a week before and the Rhodes students had had excellent discussion, especially about Ruth and Naomi and their relationship (Ruth, you’ll recall, is urged by her mother-in-law Naomi to leave after her husband dies; Ruth replies with the famous words, “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried” [Ruth 1:16, NRSV]). My Rhodes students were open to the possibility of queer readings of Ruth and Naomi – generally, they were interested in finding and ferreting out pockets of homoeroticism in the text – though also critical of Naomi as “a whiner.” Ruth, meanwhile, seemed less a loyal friend or lover than a burden – “like someone else’s pet you have to take care of,” as one student put it. The women at WTWP were also very enthusiastic to talk about Ruth, but they had different understandings of the relationships in the text. They were, on the whole, far more sympathetic to Naomi and “what she’s been through.” They were mostly (though not entirely) reluctant to see the relationship between the two women as homoerotic, but they placed great value on reading it as a strong friendship. Ruth and Naomi had each been through a great deal. They needed each other. This experience of teaching the same text in two very different groups was a valuable pedagogical reminder to me about the dangers of making assumptions about students and how they will respond to the text. It was also useful in thinking about trauma. Many incarcerated women are survivors of trauma, especially violence and sexual violence. Incarceration challenges family bonds and strains relationships. All of this is well known. What I did not realize until teaching Ruth in prison, however,  was the unique hermeneutic perspective it gives students into the text. These women read the book with greater empathy, and with greater attention to the dynamics of its relationships. They understood why Ruth and Naomi needed each other. (Relatedly, when we read Esther the following week, they took a dim view of the men in the text, especially Ahasuerus for his sexual exploitation of women and Mordecai for his strategic exploitation of his niece Esther. These readers intuited what scholars such as Nicole Duran and Randall Bailey have argued, that the book of Esther is a work of male exploitation). The traditional undergraduates at Rhodes have their own traumas, and these too influenced their reading. College students are especially attuned to the fraught relationships between children and parents -- this came across in their reading of the book. Sexual exploration is also a cause of interest, as well as anxiety, in college -- these readers were more open to the possibility of queer romance in the text.  The traumas that shape our lives shape, as well, how we read texts. This is a simple lesson, but one that the students in my two Ruth classes helped me understand better.

The questions that inform my teaching and scholarship focus on representations of violence. This means I spend a good deal of time studying such representations. I learned several years ago that my capacity to answer relatively straight-forward questions like “But is that film really gory?” or “Will I find that book really disturbing?” has dwindled into non-existence. Turns out that when a significant portion of your media consumption is comprised of images of war, torture, sexualized degradation, and racialized brutality, your attunement to the average consumer’s tastes atrophies. From the outset, then, I acknowledge that I might not be the most reliable guide to help sort out how to teach traumatic materials. By the same token, I have taught, written about, and meditated on an array of traumatic materials—and my students, in the main, after initial phases of feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by the questions and contents that organize my courses, have reported finding something valuable in them. So, to open this blog series, I want to suggest that teaching traumatic materials may not be so different from teaching per se. First, I think we are sometimes overinvested in thinking about traumatic materials as a special case. When considering the events, texts, and ideas that comprise the religious studies curriculum, it’s tough to think about what remains after subtracting potentially traumatizing content. War, violence in various forms, imperialism and colonialism, degradation and humiliation, ethnocentricism and racism, sexism and heterosexism—examples of each abound in the language, imaginaries, and practices that we take as our object of study. Do we need additional pedagogical tools beyond the transparency, openness, and attentiveness that we should be using all the time to make sure that we are noticing, and making space for, our students’ varying levels of discomfort, resistance, confusion, and hostility? Given that traumatic materials constitute so much of what we teach when we teach religion, I would suggest that—insofar as we are teaching well—we already know how to teach such materials. Second, I think we overestimate our ability to predict which materials will traumatize. In a former life, when I was an adjunct teaching Constitutional Law, I made a remark about the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution’s solution to the practical problems presented by the Articles of Confederation. A young African-American woman, who had been quiet for the first few weeks of class, spoke up and eloquently explained that she found nothing to admire in a document that still countenanced the ownership of human beings. I carry her intervention with me every time I enter the classroom. My experience of the world shapes what I experience as injurious, as ugly, as painful, as disturbing. In the same vein, I remember distinctly how terrified and paralyzed I felt sitting amongst the enthusiastic cheers that greeted the final scene of Brett Ratner’s blockbuster film, X-Men: The Last Stand, as “good” mutants fought to destroy the “bad” mutants who refused to be “cured” of their otherness. Given that history and mainstream culture are made by and for those who hold power, even the most seemingly anodyne examples can be traumatizing for those who were never meant to survive.    Related to the question of predicting which materials might traumatize, I also wonder about our ability to read students’ reactions. When does silence evince reflection and when paralysis? When is speaking up fueled by enthusiasm and when by rage? Although my course evaluations tell me that my ability to read the energy of the room is far from perfect, I remain convinced that when we strive to remain present with our students in the unfolding of the event that is the class session, then the surprises that inevitably come will be much less likely to catch us off guard in destructive ways. Finally, I think we sometimes overvalue teaching traumatic materials—either by assuming that certain topics are beyond our pedagogical capacity—because they are too upsetting, too sensitive, too difficult—or by valorizing those who have the “courage” and the “finesse” to teach such challenging content. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because I find something important, something tantalizing, something worthwhile in the material. I teach what I teach—like most teachers—because it opens a particular perspective on the world for my students. And, like most teachers, I have good days and bad, days my students get it and days they don’t, days I’m fully engaged and days I’m distracted, days they resist what I’m trying to do and days they trust me enough to willingly come with me. The more we normalize the traumatic in our pedagogical imaginations, the more we’ll be able to help our students encounter the ubiquity of trauma that constitutes their world and their lives.

Mr. Sosnow, my fourth-grade teacher, interrupted the class as we copied our homework assignments into our black-and-white marble composition books from the chalkboard. With a sly look in his eye, Mr. Sosnow informed the class that he had a special homework assignment for us.  He instructed us that by tomorrow, we were to find out how air is made. I ran home, burst through the front door and blurted out the question as soon as I saw my mother: “Mom! Where does air come from?” She looked puzzled. She said, “You mean the air we breathe?” “Yes!,” I replied impatiently, “It’s our homework assignment.” Mom explained that the air we breathe is made by plants. I stopped in my tracks. “Made by plants?????,” I asked. She said that it is called photosynthesis. I thought for sure this was one of those rare times when my mother was mistaken. I thought for sure this could not be correct because we had lots of plants in our house and in our yard and I never once saw a plant make any oxygen. She saw my doubt, my disbelief, and my suspicion. She said, “If you don’t believe me – look it up.” In our house “look it up” meant the Oxford dictionary or our beloved set of World Book Encyclopedias. I ran to the bookshelves and returned to the dining room table with the “E-F” book of the encyclopedia – to look up fotosinthesis. My mother informed me I needed the “P” book. I thought if I needed the “P,” then surely she did not know what she was talking about. I would likely, I told myself, have to wait until my dad got home from work - he would know about oxygen since my mom was, clearly, uninformed. My mom sat at the table with me and helped me find photosynthesis in the “P” volume of the encyclopedia. I was amazed!  Oxygen comes from plants – it was in the book!  I wrote up the findings from my investigation. When my dad got home, I regaled him with my vast knowledge of the way green leaves take carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight and turn them into oxygen.  The next morning Mr. Sosnow created a panel of students to present their findings. Each child, in turn, offered his/her explanation of the production of oxygen. I heard several creative, and one outlandish, notions. I was the final student to speak. I explained photosynthesis and showed a concept map my mom helped me copy from the encyclopedia. At the end of the panel presentations, each student in the class cast a vote for the best explanation of the origin of oxygen. Photosynthesis and I won in a landslide.   The beauty of this fourth-grade learning exercise was that Mr. Sosnow knew his students did not know about photosynthesis. The aim of the assignment was discovery. So often in adult classrooms, teachers pose questions, create learning assignments, and craft assignments for grading which presuppose that our students possess certain kinds of knowledge. But what are adult students supposed to know?  And if it is so clear, why do so many learners not know? So much of the ecology of higher education communicates that learning is for adults who already know. My fear is that students spend more time pretending to know than they do in discovery, investigation, encounter, and wonder. Our adult students have learned to create strategies against being blamed, punished, embarrassed, and shamed for not knowing what they are supposed to already know. Their charade comes in many forms: asking shallow questions at the beginning of the class to get air time, belligerent silence during classroom discussions, physically hiding behind computers or, to my personal annoyance, talking over people to prove they know what they do not know. Students will also filibuster or attempt to derail the conversation for a conversation set by their own agenda to exhaust the time of the session. All of these behaviors are defensive tactics to survive classrooms where the supposed-to-know knowledge is simply not known.  The intense pressure to perform knowing often stifles inquiry. What knowledge should teachers of adults be able to expect? I can honestly say I do not know. It is the same “I do not know” when asked what kinds of jobs adult learners will have in a society in such flux that current jobs are folding and new jobs are not yet conceived. Education cannot meet the needs of a world that is changing at breakneck speed. The enterprise of education does not know what it is supposed to know – just like our students. I confess, when I think of what my students do not know, I am, more often than not, judging persons as remedial, mis-educated, and under-prepared.  If I/we shed our arcane notions of stagnate cognitive standards which are already out-of-step with the world, focus upon the learner’s curiosity, and aim at giving the needed tools for investigation, discovery, and inquiry, perhaps we would, together, create more meaningful learning. Adults who make it into a classroom in higher education know a lot, they know enough. How much trust would it take to work with a student to find out what he/she does not know so learning would be more meaningful? How many discovery assignments are needed to support students who do not know? In the fourth-grade exercise, I experienced amazement because what I did not know was not held against me. Instead, what I did not know was my point of inquiry and consequently amazement. My successful inquiry convinced me that the world was a mysterious place and a place where the mystery could be interrogated and understood – at least a little bit.  I want my adult learners to be amazed as they learn new ideas, as they encounter new perspectives, as they discover the new complexities of old thoughts, beliefs, and traditions – even if the discovery is about what I think is basic.

Is my teaching good enough? Is your teaching good enough? I believe that good enough teaching and learning are practices of radical hospitality that are needed more than ever today in a political climate of American exceptionalism, increasingly divisive civil discourse, and passionate if conflicting longings to be “great.” While I hope to promote excellence in my work, I don’t ask students for greatness over and above their peers in my classroom; rather, I aim for a learning environment in which every student believes they are good enough to be there. I believe that learning in a group is more possible and probable when the learner experiences themselves not as necessarily better or less than other learners, but rather as good enough, believing that they belong and therefore can participate in learning. However, many students and teachers do not believe they are good enough – a fear that has been communicated through previous learning experiences from pre-school to Ph.D. processes. Believing oneself to be good enough – a requirement for teaching and learning in my opinion – functions like other privileges, available to some more than others and laced with relative power and opportunity. Good Enough? What exactly is good enough? With multiple connotations, this phrase “good enough” is easily misunderstood. In my field of pastoral theology, good enough is a practice of radical hospitality that opens participants to relationships of appropriate support and challenge. D.W. Winnicott, a leading thinker in object-relations psychological theory, imagined good enough practice as responsible and responsive, neither rigidly perfectionistic not negligently unmotivated. Here’s how I explain the concept in my pastoral theology syllabus: “Pastoral theology continues to view the modern psychologies as offering tools for understanding care. One of the most helpful metaphors that pastoral theology has adopted is that of the good enough participant in caregiving. This is not to say that care involves minimal effort. Rather, pastoral theologians have recognized that it is more helpful to aspire to be a good enough pastoral caregiver than a perfect one. This stance requires more effort, attention, and courageous habits of self and communal reflection.” Good enough is also a helpful concept for pedagogical reflection beyond my academic discipline. By good enough, I mean to indicate a deep sense of value, a seat at the table, a voice considered a worthy conversation partner, a belief in oneself as belonging. Is this possible in classrooms today? For students who do not experience believing themselves to be good enough, both perfectionism and apathy are rational responses. However, neither of these responses is healthy for the learning environment not to mention for the learner. Bracketing admissions, financial aid, curricula, hiring policies, tension between institutional traditions and commitments, and more for the moment, when I focus on the students eligible to enroll in my class, if I am committed to good enough teaching, I need to ask how hospitable my teaching is to different learners—especially in this politically divisive moment. Have I designed a class in which students are able to believe they belong? Can each willing participant be good enough? What are some challenges to this kind of radical hospitality in theological education? Which boundaries are required for this kind of radical hospitality and which boundaries must be released? Three Challenges of Radical Hospitality in Theological Education: Room, Representation, and Respect In my teaching, I am confronting challenges to radical hospitality whether newly awakened in this political era, as is the case for many of my white colleagues and students in theological education, or held as longstanding concerns, as is the case for colleagues and students who represent and/or are committed to be in relationship with communities with histories of exclusion from theological education. Specific practices of radical hospitality, such as room, representation, and respect, can dismantle good enough as a privilege in order to invite all students to believe in themselves as good enough participants in learning. I think of these practices as disciplines of inquiry and courageous self and communal reflection. Room: Where is the breathing room in my course design? Is there room in my syllabus for multiple avenues of earning a course grade? Do students have an opportunity to learn how to succeed in the class through assignments that build over the semester? Have I woven enough practice into course time? Is there room in assignments for students to make connections between the course content and what matters deeply to them? Representation: What voices and epistemologies are represented in the course texts and in what order? How might different students feel invited into a conversation (imagined or real) with the authors of these texts? Will all students have to stretch in relation to some readings and feel more at home with other readings? How do I represent, include, and compensate epistemologies, voices, and communities deeply relevant to the course of study but that don’t have access to academic publishing? Respect: Does my syllabus avoid unintentional dehumanization? Do I account for the word “we” and define my authoritative access to speak for groups of people from seminary students to human beings to women? Do I coach students in accounting for their use of pronouns? What structures of accountability have I included in the planning, unfolding, and debriefing of my teaching? Now What? I need to wrestle with the limits of belonging in my pedagogy to consider how to move more deeply into good enough teaching and learning. I do not think that good enough teaching and learning ought to be a privilege restricted to a small group of learners, professors, and learning environments. Good enough teaching and learning are practices of radical hospitality that swing open wide the opportunities of learning. If I want to embrace a good enough pedagogy, I will need to become more aware of and willing to address the challenges of radical hospitality in theological education, especially in my classrooms. I believe theological educators can begin to cultivate pedagogies where all learners have access to being good enough by first recognizing challenges to radical hospitality in theological education. In my next blog, I wonder about dreams, commitments, and strategic practices that invite all learners to believe in themselves as good enough. How have you tried to embody and inspire good enough teaching and learning?

My most recent post for “Teaching Islam” deals with some of the stakes in teaching and studying religion at a Catholic college. My colleagues Shabana Mir and Sherali Tareen have also provocatively and sharply addressed related topics of “confessional” and “secular” curricular methodologies, so I’d like to continue the thread by focusing on student experience in the great debate on distinctions between religious studies and theology. I touch on the fluid boundaries of allegedly dispassionate approaches to the study of religion in my article “Normative Readings of the Qur’an,” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as part of a roundtable, “Normativity in Islamic Studies.” This roundtable focuses on scholarship; I would like to focus on teaching in this essay. Distinctions Aren’t Always Clear Notably, my own Department of Religious Studies at my Jesuit Catholic institution, Le Moyne College, offers courses in religious studies as well as theology. According to institutional parameters, theology courses differ from religious studies courses insofar as the former must give significant attention to Catholicism, either on its own or in relation to other traditions. Among the professors who teach theology courses at Le Moyne, some are Catholic and some aren’t. So what does it mean to engage (in) Catholic theology when it’s not limited to Catholics? I think this is at once a relevant field-wide query and also departmentally specific. However one answers the question, though, if a Catholic school is paying non-Catholics to teach Catholic theology—and my Catholic institution isn’t the only one doing this—in a religious studies department, then at the very least the distinctions between religious studies and theology aren’t black and white. As for student engagement with such matters, I find that students aren’t so interested in abstract theoretical distinctions between religious studies and theology, but are quite interested in making sense of such contours on the ground. In my first couple of years of full-time teaching, I attempted to formally introduce students to distinctions between religious studies and theology in the first days of class, but as the years go by, I find a better approach is to largely leave the debate in the background and to teach through examples instead, e.g., encouraging reflection on field trips to mosques or on challenges of teaching religion at a public high school full of disgruntled parents who think Islam is a devil religion. Teaching Students New Vocabulary As an undergraduate religious studies major myself, I was excited to learn about epoché (suspension, bracketing), both as a concept and as a disciplinary key term. Thanks to my colleague Darryl Caterine’s suggestion, I have begun making sure that students know the word epoché in the first week of classes, and without doubt, students find this helpful. What’s more, introducing students to the term gives them implicit permission to decide which approaches to studying religion ignite their interests most. To this extent, in a student-centered classroom—which in my case involves a lot of in-class discussion, often led by students themselves—it’s counterproductive to police the boundaries of conversation too much. If students want to talk about what a “true Christian” is, for example—based on their subjective, even myopic view of Christianity—that’s fine. Although the students shouldn’t expect me to chime in with my own partisan position, or corroborate theirs for that matter. Experimenting with Theological Inquiry One of my favorite writing assignments in recent years was in my course “Islamic Mysticism.” I posed in a prompt: Are Islam and mysticism inherently connected or could one reasonably separate the two? This prompt takes place in a context where we read, for example, William James’ categories of mysticism, while also giving attention to Muhammad’s role as a medium for divine Revelation, in addition to a variety of films, texts, and art that point toward the significance of first-hand numinous experiences. The prompt invites synthesis and reflection on course material, but is it an academic question or a theological question? I think it’s both. It’s academic because it requires students to synthesize evidence based on a careful examination of course material. But it’s theological, too, I think, because there is no single correct answer to the question and the stakes are significant in terms of how one’s answer might provide commentary on course material. How might student responses to the question incite them to go beyond epoché and perform their own creative process, or poeisis, with course material? In many ways students answer the question depending on personal sensibilities toward categories they understand as “Islam” and “mysticism.” The essay prompt, moreover, produced some really thoughtful essays, many of which included disclosures on how the students struggled with the question and changed their minds as they wrote; some students even referenced the question weeks later in the course. My sense is that giving students formal opportunities to personalize course material, while engaging in relatively free reflection, helps them perform better on a variety of levels. Conclusions: How Much Should Students Care? When speaking with colleagues across the country—with a particular Facebook thread in mind, I will admit—I sometimes get the impression that some of us don’t always want students to indulge their deepest interests in religion, at least not in our religious studies courses. This is understandable to the extent that many of us, including me, don’t want to put ourselves in positions of evaluating the veracity of a theological claim or spiritual experience. But I think one can largely assuage this concern by relying on low stakes assignments (e.g., short writing assignments, journal entries, in-class activities) that allow students to mine their own theological, spiritual, or metaphysical curiosities. Without this freedom, I think we risk signaling to students that they can’t learn as holistic beings. Ironically, many institutions require religious studies courses precisely so that students learn about the world beyond their classes in engineering, biology, business, or what have you. Perhaps as instructors we would do well to more carefully bracket our own disciplinary dogmas when they might impede the creativity, imagination, and even effort from our students. How do you navigate the boundaries between religious studies and theology in your pedagogical practices?

In a previous blog post, I sounded an optimistic note about the believing educational community that engages profoundly with various streams of the religious tradition – in my case, the Muslim tradition. As I contemplate a valuable piece by SherAli Tareen on the potential issues with which we regard as critical secular pedagogy, I anticipate some of the pedagogical decisions I will make this semester. I teach at the American Islamic College, one of only two Islamic liberal arts colleges in the United States. This generates a unique and continuing set of pedagogical and disciplinary questions for me - questions that I do not usually find reflected in my colleagues’ pedagogical concerns regarding the teaching of Islam in the academy.   My feelings of - shall we say, comfort – in teaching Islam to mostly Muslim students are tempered by practical pedagogical concerns as I am a Muslim, female professor who teaches gender at a Muslim college in the United States. Apart from the study of religion, classroom spaces in general can be battlegrounds for identities. A dash of critical distance can be a useful addition to the red-hot dynamics in classroom discussions. I nervously anticipate certain pedagogical situations in Muslim-majority learning settings as my own, as well as in mainstream academia, where critical distance is my go-to approach. Most of my Muslim students are eager to understand diverse perspectives on religious issues, and have been astoundingly eager to broaden their horizons, even to the point of intellectual discomfort. Still, I have learned to expect the Guerilla Student. He (usually) does not form a majority in my classes. But when he makes an appearance, he steps into the academic fray, brandishing a Qur'anic verse, intent upon shutting down any "wayward" discourse. As the class community contemplates various religious perspectives on Muslim politics, this student brings in And be not disunited (Qur’an 3:103). The discussion quickly falls flat, everyone hangs their heads piously, as if to contemplate the frivolity of human words before the Word, and that is that. Or the Guerilla Student lobs a Prophet tradition into the controversy, and the hadith instantly establishes a literalistic, atomistic framework over the intellectual community - a framework that allows for a singular one-dimensional view of religion, and therefore, shuts down discussion as unnecessary or even reprehensible. A young fervent woman might react negatively to the complexification of a religious problem, demanding a simple response to her “Well, should I do it or not?” The impact of such guerrilla warfare is to silence, at least temporarily, the majority of students who are interested in investigating the sociological implications of religious norms, who wish to explore the contextual deployment of religious sources, and who are interested in a religious world where people disagree. In other words, says the Guerilla Student, let's just shut our books and our mouths, and retire to our corners and recite Qur'an. Not that I haven't frequently been tempted to do the same, because ambiguity isn't exactly soothing. In anticipation of the Guerrilla Student, I set up a classroom community where, most importantly, students must engage with the required readings in all discussions. No one can simply show up without doing any of the work and, swaggering, simply toss the grenades of Scriptural texts amidst the group. Anyone who hasn’t done the reading will be reminded that entrance to discussion is guarded by the test of academic work. I explicitly state in my syllabus: "You must develop the analytic habit of considering various perspectives, including opposing ones." This is troubling to the student who regards feminist interrogations of the Qur’an as disrespectful and impious. To some, these readings are not worshipful. For students who study Islam to seek piety rather than profound understanding, this is a distraction. For some Muslim students, a Gender course would be better served by Maudoodi’s Purdah and the Status of Women in Islam rather than Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics in Islam. I add, in my syllabus, "In this academic setting, all claims and opinions must be supported by scholarly evidence and reasoning." In these words, I establish that the setting was an academic one, and not a religious one. To some students, this is disappointing. To me, as a religious Muslim academic, it’s not entirely truthful. I do regard academic Islam as worship. Moreover, the evidence expected is human scholarship. This establishes the importance of interpretation. To the believer who sees his or her interpretations as self-evidently true, this is blasphemous.   When I classify my classroom as an academic one, I clarify that no one may come in with their credentials as local imam and become the lecturer here. In terms of my role as facilitator and my authority as course instructor, a religious educational setting is dangerously democratic. A religious classroom demands clerical or seminary/madrasa credentials; with my Ph.D., I am not appropriately appareled. Any public preachers, study-circle leaders or madrasa-trained males could always turn up their noses at my Western academic credentials.  And then there is patriarchy. As a woman - of color (and of short stature) - my pedagogic authority is always at risk in all classrooms. Most of my Muslim students bring a deeply Islamic affectionate respect to my teaching. In fact, my Muslim students at AIC humanize and respect me in a way that, in my previous teaching experience, many of my White students never did. I cannot express how deeply refreshing this teacher-student relationship is, in contrast to the experiences I had before. But there has been the occasional male student - especially when I taught Islam & Gender - who finds the dynamic in my class intolerable. At times, such a student drops the class, but not before lobbing the Scriptural grenades and disrupting the analytic discussion. If he simply evades the readings, he succeeds in getting by in a disturbingly water-off-a-duck’s-back manner. A student committed to patriarchy could not stomach the idea of a female professor who taught Amina Wadud and Leila Ahmed - or a female professor who gave out C's.  When Islam is used as a patriarchal stick to establish the authority of literalism, or Islamism, or Traditionalism, or sexism, critical distance in pedagogy can be a handy shield. When the literalistic, patriarchal, hegemonic interpretations are brandished in my classroom, I do sometimes brandish certain critical secular tools. "We cannot throw out ayaat or ahadith as responses to a question. You can bring your readings of those sources to the discussion, but they are readings. You cannot use the Qur'an to shut everyone up.” "But," sputters a certain kind of student, “It should shut everyone up.” This critical distance and interpretive freedom is widely regarded as critical secular pedagogy. But it is not just that. To me, as a Muslim professor, it is also an internal Muslim tool to safeguard the right to ikhtilaf (difference of opinion). But when I embrace this tool of critical distance as an Islamic one, there is always the danger that we commence the battle of my-source-trumps-yours. Appeals to religious authority in religious settings can close debate. I respect and value the sources, but there is a danger in how they are deployed by my interlocutors. The problem isn’t the Qur’anic verse being lobbed by the student. In such pedagogical encounters, I’m at the mercy of the Guerilla Students. I’m hostage to the personality of the discussant at risk, to his conception of adab (etiquette) in Islamic education. Any pedagogical approach must necessarily be multi-faceted and respectful of its context. As a Muslim professor of Islamic Studies, I combine a believer's loving commitment with an explorer's dedication to the journey. I ask my students to bring the same intrepid commitment to this path. No woman or man will be allowed to blow up the trail. I'll deploy any tools necessary to protect the trail. Critical distance is one of those tools. Critical distance is frequently used in secular settings to shut down Muslim critiques of dogmatic secularity. But my critical distance is different. It is a protective distance of love.

For those of us who teach on Islam and Muslims, the teaching of the narrative of Joseph, or Yusūf in Arabic, is old hat. It has proven to be a useful pedagogical device for placing the Qur’an in conversation with the Hebrew Bible. The narrative is easy to set for side-by-side comparative readings (Qur’an 12:1-111 and Genesis 37:1-50:26), and this particular Qur’anic narrative of a prophet is self-contained making it especially accessible to students. In contrast, the Qur’anic treatment of other figures like Moses, Abraham, Jesus, and Mary is spread across many different places. Having students read the biblical and Qur’anic narratives of Joseph alongside one another, when framed carefully, can be an incredibly productive and engaging learning experience for students. It raises questions concerning intertextuality and compels students to ask questions concerning language, authorial intent, and reception. Nevertheless, as many of you may well know, the assignment does not always go well. It is not a “set it and forget it” kind of assignment. Over the years, how I have taught the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative has changed as I continually adapt the unit to the reactions and responses of my students. Unsurprisingly, they are not all approaching the texts with the same set of presuppositions and sensitivities. I see in some of the papers that my students submit a dismissal of the Qur’anic narrative as purely derivative of the biblical one. Others walk away perplexed by what they believe to be the overly elliptical or densely opaque language of the Qur’an. With both narratives emerging from historical contexts greatly removed from those of today, I also find students conflating the Sitz im Leben or social contexts of the biblical and Qur’anic accounts. All ancient societies in arid climates start blurring together for them. What I would like to share are some of the changes that I have made to improve how I frame the assignment and guide my students. 1) I encourage my students to consider reading the passage from the Qur’an first. Students want to begin with the biblical account either out of familiarity or a desire to read the material in historical order, but this can prime them to privilege the biblical account as the “authentic” or “original” one. By flipping the reading order, how they go about processing the two texts is substantially shifted. This is evident in our class discussions. Typically the students end up split in which they read first, but this difference itself has generated fascinating discussions about how each student perceives certain narrative elements as either missing, added, extraneous, abbreviated, or prolonged depending on which scripture is granted “priority.” 2) If time permits in a semester, I try to provide a broader introduction to the work being done by the authors of these scriptural texts. While this naturally takes place with the Qur’an, since it is the subject of my course, it takes more effort to carve time out to properly situate the Hebrew Bible. What seems to be the Hebrew Bible’s larger objective? Who is its audience(s)? What overarching story is it trying to tell with its many books? How does it tell that story? Who is emphasized and why? Of course, we entertain the same questions when it comes to the Qur’an. In sum, I am trying to get students to think, what sort of work is each of these narratives doing in their respective historical and cultural settings? Attention is also paid to language. I have my students reflect and discuss on why the Qur’an and Bible seem to speak in different ways. How does naming, or the lack thereof, figure into the telling of the story and what effect does it have for the reader? This is also an opportunity for students to do some translation comparisons, a tactic I discussed in an early post. The point of the narrative assignment, of course, is not only the content of the accounts themselves, but drawing attention to the ways that the stories are told. 3) I have also found it helpful to extend the Yūsuf/Joseph unit on occasion by moving beyond scripture and looking at how the narrative is received and reinterpreted by later historical communities. What life has the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative had? Obvious choices are the musical and film Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the array of religious art, both Christian and Islamic, that has been produced around the story. What I have found more compelling and useful, however, is the novel Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah which uses the Yūsuf/Joseph narrative to tell the history of East Africa during the period of European colonization. Both the setting and the characters of this book serve to further decenter our discussions from biblical normativities and the western cultural prism. We are dealing, after all, with Africans and Muslims under colonialism. Although the novel adheres relatively loosely to the scriptural accounts of Yūsuf/Joseph, it nonetheless allows us to revisit the narrative with a more contemporary lens as we explore questions of power, identity, and belonging. It is also a powerful reminder for my students of the ways that art and literature can intersect with religion and scripture. These narratives are not just old stories, but important ways of making meaning and shaping the present.

Every once in a while, integration becomes the golden fleece in curriculum design, teaching, and assessment. Deans can feel pressured to identify the way the curriculum, and the Faculty, integrates subjects and learning in the curriculum and its course of study. They may feel frustrated when called upon to find ways to demonstrate, through assessment, that integration is taking place: what it looks like, to what degree, for what outcome. This points to a fundamental challenge: in what ways and to what extent are the things learned in seminary transferable (applicable) to ministry contexts? Novice deans often wrestle with some basic questions. What are we trying to integrate--subjects, fields of study, concepts, skills----all of them? Who is supposed to do the integration--faculty? Students? How do we assess integration? What evidence do we look for? How do you grade it? What does it look like, anyway?! Attempts to engage the faculty in how to integrate the curriculum become frustrating and ultimately futile. If you are frustrated trying to integrate, maybe you're focusing on the wrong thing. Transference of learning. A more helpful framework to focus on may be transference of learning. Transference of learning is a powerful indicator of higher order learning. It denotes the ability of a student to take something learned in one context or a particular field of study, and apply it in a different context or field of study. Transference of learning provides evidence of higher order learning: synthesis, imagination, application, innovation, and creativity. Focusing on transference of learning keeps the focus where it belongs: the student's attainment and mastery of learning. One common attempt among faculty is to focus on integrating content learning---concepts from distinct and diverse fields of study. While that is possible, in reality, it rarely happens by intent or design, and more often than not by serendipity, if at all. Busy faculty members rarely spend enough time in conversation among themselves about their own scholarship, fields of expertise or even discuss their own teaching and courses to creatively design integration in a course of study. Focusing on transference of learning can be a more effective framework for faculty discussion about teaching and learning and its outcomes. Ask a professor "How do you strive to integrate what you teach in your course with what students are learning in a course in a different field of study?" and you'll likely succeed in merely stumping the teacher. Ask, however, "What are those things in your course you want to see your students use or apply in other courses as they continue their courses of study?" and you'll likely get a clear and confident response---and a hint about what to look for. While the concept of transfer of learning is easier to grasp than the vague "integration," it must nevertheless be applied with informed rigor in order to be effective as a framework for teaching and learning in the curriculum. Dale H. Schunk provides a list of types and characteristics of transfers of learning from the literature of educational research. The summary below can serve as a guide to develop program level goals, craft course learning outcomes to align with those goals, and point to evidence for assessment. Types and Characteristics of Transfer of Learning Overlap of learning between situations and contexts: the original and transfer contexts are similar ("near") What is learned in one context enhances learning in a different setting ("positive") Knowledge of a previous topic is essential to acquire new knowledge ("vertical") Knowledge of a previous concept is not essential but helpful to learn a new concept ("horizontal") Explicit new knowledge transfers to new task ("literal") Use some aspect of general knowledge to think or learn about a novel problem ("figural") Transfer of learning involves abstraction requiring conscious formulations of connections between contexts ("high road") Abstracting situations from one learning context to a potential transfer context ("forward reaching") Abstracting in the transfer context features of a previous situation where new skills and knowledge were learned ("backward reaching"). Engaging the Teaching Faculty in conversation about transfer of learning can re-shape its thinking about course methodology and learning outcomes. Using transfer of learning as a framework for assessment may make evaluation of "integration" a less stressful and more effective way to measure student learning. Starting Questions What evidence do you have that students use what they learn in one cognate field of study as applied in another? What evidence do you have that students are able to apply what they learn in academic courses in their ministry contexts? What evidence do you have that students are able to apply what they learn in core courses in their field-based studies and supervised ministry experiences? What transference of learning do you wish to see in what students are learning in basic Bible courses to homiletic courses? What transference of learning do you wish to see between acquired academic skills and ministry context competencies? SOURCE: Schunk, D. (2004). Learning theories: An educational perspective (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Pearson, p. 220.  

Have you ever thought you knew something, only to discover, with the passing of time and the acquisition of experience, that there was more depth, breath, and nuance to the idea or situation than you had previously thought?  Or, worse yet, have you ever found out that something you thought you knew was simply –  inaccurate, outmoded, or outdated?  Physicists are still working to understand the nature of light as well as the nature of gravity. Every 100 years or so there is a break-through which brings new clarity, more scientific accuracy, a better grasp of the basic concepts of light and gravity. Each time there is a new discovery, fellow scientists work to refute, amend and/or build upon the fresh claim.  The intricacies of the universe are still being uncovered, discovered, created.  I want my students to approach their work of ministry like these physicists.  I want them to work at contesting the current conventions of church/theology/faith as an obligation of discipleship.  I want them, as part of their role and responsibility of religious leadership, to work toward new approaches, perspectives, and worldviews which will evidence the profound complexity of praising God and serving neighbor for such a time as this.  Alas, too often my students simply want me to tell them what to think – “just tell us the truth/the recipe/the formula” …. as if truth and theology are static, or even knowable. I am trying to get my students “to think new thoughts about old ideas” (an Emilie Townes phrase). I am trying to get my students to think as if the context of the digital age has made us pioneers in a new social and religious experiment – because I actually think it has.  I want my students to yearn to know better.  Re-examining what we thought we knew, nurturing curiosities for what others say is important, realizing that multiple, even opposing perspectives are likely simultaneously “right” while other tried-and-true perspectives need to be abandoned often leaves students flustered – especially those who came looking for the one true truth and the one true religion to match their own one call to ministry.  Defending “one” in the age of multiplicity is like lashing yourself to the ship’s mast in a high-tide thunderstorm.  I am aware that my students quickly learn rote answers to deep questions.  They quickly read the culture and politics of the academy and substitute their churchified answers for answers provided by faculty.  This is not increasing their knowing better.  This is simply trading the milk cow for the bag of magic beans. Knowing better demands a suspicion that all there is to know has not yet been interrogated.  It leans heavily upon the notion that God is mystery and God reveals God’s self in God’s own pace and rhythm.  Students talk about God as if “he” is the uncle in the attic; as if all we need to know about God is known; as if the repertoire of God has been performed.  Save us oh God from our lack of curiosity about you and your ways. Knowing better is important to me, in part, because of my mentor Charles Foster.  I am a womanist, an outspoken, unorthodox, sometimes Christian scholar shaped and influenced by a reserved, white, man who passionately believes in the redemption of the world through the gospel of Jesus.  People who do not understand the racial identity politics of the USA or of the racist/sexist academy are surprised to know my beloved mentor is a white man.  My knowing better about speaking out against racism, sexism - the hegemonic forces of the US society is possible, in part, because of the loving and steadfast nurturing I received from Chuck. A man of his convictions, he believed the New Testament writers who envisioned the Kin-dom of God as something other than a land of patriarchy and white supremacy. Even though he is not a womanist, Chuck gave birth to a womanist.  The ways of God are remarkable – a holy mystery! During the first session of Introduction to Educational Ministries Chuck was on my mind.  I thought of this quote.  Charles Foster said, “…the most serious threat to any community’s future occurs when its education can no longer maintain its heritage into the present or renew its identity or vocation for its changing circumstances.” More than anything, I want my students to be able to maintain the changed and changing Christian heritage while finding new and needed ways to renew its identities and vocations all the while surviving in the unprecedented liminality of the 21stcentury.  If we are to be Christian in the future, we need to pay attention to Chuck’s wisdom in the present. I want my students to be more than lukewarm church bureaucrats whose primary question of ministry is “Do the people like me.”  Knowing better entails having an urgency about the relevance of a Christian vision for a pluralistic and technological global village – I learned this from Chuck.