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Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion over them. Presumably, he had Genesis 1.26 in mind, but none of the course readings mentioned Genesis—or God.People in the social media group had lots of suggestions on how to respond:Tell him that religion has no place in the classroom.Tell him that there should be no theist or atheist premises in academic writing.Just write “Irrelevant” in the margin!That last comment got a lot of likes, hopefully because people found it funny and not because they considered it good advice.The consensus was clear: Tell the student that appeals to scripture are inappropriate in college papers.I don’t think that’s good advice.My colleagues were ignoring something crucial. In this sort of situation, we can do deep damage to our relationship with our student and to the student’s relationship with higher education if we don’t tread carefully. Presumably the student who wrote this paper believes in God and the Bible. His religion will be part of his ethical decision-making going forward, and the Bible will influence his thinking and his actions.Bearing this in mind, let’s not tell this student that his thinking about right and wrong in class must be utterly divorced from his thinking about it outside the classroom.My advice would be: Before writing any comments, identify your larger goals. Here are mine:I want our class discussions to help inform my students’ thinking and actions about ethical issues, and in particular about whether it’s OK to do “whatever you want” with animals.I want students to listen when I try to teach them more things after this and I want other professors to be able to teach them even more things. If I reinforce a student’s likely skepticism about professors and religion, I make that harder.I don’t want my actions to increase the chances that my students go out in the world thinking of higher education as an enemy to religion and God.These goals suggest a different approach. Start by taking the paper seriously:Do you think that’s what the Bible means by ‘dominion’? Some people think so, but I've always thought it meant something more like ‘stewardship.’ I mean, God is the Father, right? So, I think of it like if your parents go out and put you in charge of the family dogs. If they come home and discover that you haven’t fed them or given them water, they’ll be mad at you.What do you think someone who doesn’t believe in God and the Bible would make of your argument? How would you persuade them? For instance, imagine that you’re talking to the author of our second reading or to the other kids in the class.I would count this encounter as a success if the student feels like I’m treating him and his religion with respect and if he realizes two things:“Dominion” could mean “stewardship” instead of “freedom to treat them any way I want,” and I need to think more about which one the Bible meant.I need to talk about this differently or I won’t be able to persuade people who don’t believe in the Bible.That’s a start. Much more has to happen before this student writes at college level. Later, I and his other professors will teach him more.It’s a very small step. Growth and intellectual development takes time. I probably won’t see the result of the learning process that I was part of. But occasionally I do.My greatest success story in this context is a student who came into my Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman, determined to prove that Christ rose from the dead. It was rough going, but by the end of the semester, his sources weren’t cringeworthy anymore, and he was presenting an actual argument. And he still trusted me. He majored in math but took Philosophy of Religion with me as a senior, and he explained that he wanted to continue developing his proof.I braced myself. But during the semester, the class discussed faith and reason extensively, and I was able to ask him (privately): Given that you think about faith as being the important thing, what makes it so important to you to prove that Christ rose? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided that he didn’t need to prove that Christ rose. Instead, he wrote a strong final paper in which he reflected on the meaning of faith, discussing his own experience and the course readings.I rarely get wins that size. But taking my students’ religious views seriously makes them possible.

When my first-year students write bad papers, I assume they are bad writers. If they don’t revise, I assume they don’t want to do it. If they don’t pay attention, I assume they don’t care about my course. Again and again, I assume that my students’ actions are based on conscious decisions, that they flow from their characters, and that they express their values. I should know better, given what behavioral science has taught us about human decision making. People often don’t act rationally. We’re easily knocked off course. We fail to sign up for retirement plans even though they are great deals; we take the elevator instead of the stairs even when we’re trying to get in shape; and we eat junk food we don’t like that much just because it is there. Talking to my students gives me the distinct impression that they are typical human beings. They don’t decide to underperform in my class. Stuff gets in the way. Those bad papers were written in a rush at 3 a.m. the night before they were due. My students look uninterested not because they dislike my class but because they are freaking out about their financial accounting exam. Many of their actions aren’t based on conscious decisions, they don’t flow from their characters, and they don’t express their values. Things just sort of happen. So, can we make better things happen instead? Like, better papers? Sometimes. Many of the factors that influence our students’ performance are of course outside our control. I can’t stop COVID-19, I can’t fix my students’ mental health issues, and I can’t make all the scary political stuff go away. I can only be aware of how they affect our students (and me) and find ways to work with and around them. And I can tweak the situation in my class, nudging my students towards doing the right thing. Richard Thaler coined the term “nudge,” and he describes it as an intervention that “gently steers the individual towards the desired behavior.” The classical example is saving for retirement. Informed by behavioral science, many retirement plans now automatically sign people up unless they actively opt out. Nudges abound in our society. To encourage people to take the stairs, make them attractive and well-lit and place the elevator off to the side. To encourage us to watch several episodes of Bridgerton back-to-back, autoplay them. An effective nudge makes it easy for people to do what we want them to do. Nudges work. How can we use them in our classes? So far, I’ve used them mostly around writing. In despair over all those 3 a.m. papers, I have started requiring drafts in all my classes. They are due a few days before the actual paper, they count for almost nothing, and I don’t read them. I tell the students that I assign drafts to force them to start the papers earlier and explain why starting early is useful. They can opt out at minimum cost, but very few do. And the papers turn out better. Once I started requiring drafts, I also noticed that I encountered less plagiarism. I suspect it is because my students really aren’t bad people who think cheating is OK. When they plagiarize, it’s usually a last-minute decision, made in despair at 3 a.m. Eliminate that last minute panic, and students are less likely to plagiarize. I’ve also started using nudges to get weaker students to ask for help. Here’s a recent triumph: This spring, I had a student who kept doing poorly on his papers and didn’t seek out help. I sent him a brief email: Your writing needs work. Would you like some help figuring out how to do it? I’m happy to help; just email me back if you’re interested. I heard back within ten minutes, he got help, and his next paper was a C+ instead of a D. There was nothing magical about the words in my email. I had written the same thing on his graded papers, and I had said it to the whole class. The email was more effective nudge because it made it so easy to reach out for help: Just click reply and write “yes please.” I used to think that this type of approach was paternalistic and enabling. Students should choose to ask for help, they should plan their own time, and they should suffer the consequences when they don’t. And if they are the sort of people who cheat, let them—and then punish them harshly. I keep backsliding into that way of thinking, and I have to remind myself that I know better. People aren’t fully rational, and situations affect behavior. As Thaler points out, we and our students are being nudged all the time -- by advertisers, friends, and social forces. Many of these nudges are in directions that are bad for us. Given that, why not be intentional about using nudges in a way that might help students pass their courses? Using devices like nudges seems especially important since there is an equity issue at play here. Some students don’t need nudges and guidance as much because they feel at home in college. They find it easy to ask for help from the professor; they have been taught good study habits; they have had stellar writing instruction. But others don’t and haven’t. If I avoid nudging my students, I make it harder for those who desperately need guidance in order to succeed. I don’t want to do that. It’s hard enough for them already.     Sources: ·      John M. Burdick and Emily Peeler, “The Value of Effective Nudging During COVID,” Inside Higher Ed, February 23, 2021. ·      Dan Harris, interview with Richard H. Thaler, “How to work around your own irrationality,” 10% Happier podcast, episode 402, December 6, 2021.  ·      Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011). ·      Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2021). ·      Shankar Vedantam, “Think fast with Daniel Kahneman,” Hidden Brain podcast.

We are early into this novel and challenging COVID semester and starting to get feedback on the (for many) new modes of teaching and learning—namely, online/virtual experiences. One message from students is that they are feeling overwhelmed with keeping up or “figuring out” the LMS or the online course. I’m sympathetic. . . somewhat. Student reports of feeling overwhelmed is not new; some may say it’s a defining characteristic of students. I remember the response from so many of my professors: “You think you’re busy now, wait till you start working in the real world.” Admittedly, they were right. I suspect part of the problem of students feeling overwhelmed is the result of online courses being too “packed” with activities, methods, unnecessary assignments, and anxious attempts by instructors to cover content. While those happen in traditional classroom courses, the liabilities are exacerbated in the online environment. The One Question to Ask Instructors and course designers can achieve greater effectiveness and elegance in their courses by asking one question before using a method or student learning activity. That question is: “What pedagogical function does this method or activity serve?” By that we mean, Will the activity help students achieve the learning outcome? Is the method worth the effort related to student learning outcomes? Is the method or learning activity directly aligned with a course learning outcome/objective? Pedagogical Functions The pedagogical functions of methods and student learning activities fall into four categories. If a method or activity does not clearly serve these functions, don’t use them. The four functional categories are: (1) orientation, (2) transition, (3) evaluation, and (4) application. Orientation. Orientation methods or learning activities are used to create motivation for learning. Creating “interest” is insufficient for meaningful learning. Motivation goes to meeting an unrealized need. An orientation activity may involve helping students become aware of or identifying why they need to learn what your course offers. Orientation methods can also provide a structure for interpreting or visualizing the course content. Finally, orientation methods help introduce the course or lesson learning outcomes. Transition. Methods that provide the function of transition are those that help students go from the known or previously covered material to the new, novel, or next content to be covered. They provide a bridge to help make connections for more efficient learning. These are methods or learning activities with which the student is familiar and often use examples and analogies. Evaluation. Evaluation methods or learning activities are used to help students, and you, the instructor, evaluate previously learned content before moving on to new material, or, prior to an application activity. These activities are more effective when they are student-centered or student-developed. They help students give evidence of understanding and help instructors uncover misunderstandings. One rule to remember: if you are not going to evaluate it, don’t teach it. Application. This one is self-evident. Application methods or student activities are those that provide students opportunity to actually apply what they have learned. Student attainment of learning should be “demonstrable.” Therefore, choose application methods that facilitate ways students can demonstrate their learning. Students demonstrate application by using what they have learned in new or novel ways and/or in real-world situations (and sometimes in simulated situations). Application methods should be directly aligned with the published course learning outcomes. Can you identify how your teaching/learning methods or student learning activities serve one of the four pedagogical functions? Here’s a challenge: to avoid overwhelming your students in your online course choose one method or learning activity for each of the four pedagogical functions. That can be sufficient to achieve your course’s learning intent without overwhelming your students.

One of the most unfortunate practices in instruction is a teacher trying to get “right answers” from students. This is not to say that getting your students to get it right is a bad thing–in fact, it’s very desirable. Usually what happens, however, is that the teacher is engaged in teaching a concept and then pauses to “test” to see if students are getting it. The teacher asks a question intended to solicit a right answer, then is satisfied when one or two students answer correctly. The trap is that in the mind of the teacher a right answer indicates that learning has taken place and the student understands the concept. The truth is that a “right answer” may merely indicate that the learner has learned to mimic the teacher’s explanation—or maybe the learner made a lucky guess! When I was in grade school, I was chosen to be the spokesperson for an exhibit at the annual science fair. My job was to stand in front of a large container of water upon which were two small model boats. One model was intact and floated on the surface, but the other model had a hole in it. When I placed the second model boat on the surface of the water it would soon take on water and sink. I remember that my job was to explain to people why a boat with a hole in its hull sinks. I was chosen for the job because apparently I gave the "right" explanation well. But I have to confess that I was well aware that I didn’t really understand what it was that I was explaining! Even as I was giving the explanation to enraptured groups of students and teachers, I was keenly aware that I didn’t comprehend what I was talking about. I’d learned to mimic my science teacher’s explanation, but I didn’t understand it. Even when a learner gives a right answer, the skilled teacher will use the opportunity to follow up on how the learner arrived at the correct answer. Effective teachers assess understanding of the concepts being learned, not just test for “right answers.” In other words, effective teachers do not just focus on what a student says in an answer, but also assesses how a student arrived at the answer. One way to help learners acquire deeper understanding is to be more intentional in your response to student answers. When responding to a learner’s correct answer, don’t just say, “Right!” or “That’s correct!” Respond in a way that will both enforce the correct answer and help teach the group about why an answer is correct and how to arrive at the right answer. Teacher responses that include information about why the learner’s answer is correct, such as rephrasing the response to emphasize factors that make the answer correct, or the steps or methods used to get the correct answer, are helpful to other learners who are in the process of learning the reasoning behind why something is so, or who are trying to figure out the steps for arriving at an accurate answer to the question being posed. You can help students move beyond mimicking a right answer and toward comprehension by: - Amplifying the student’s response - Restating, modifying, or rephrasing the learner’s response and redirect for further discussion - Asking the student to explain how he or she arrived at the answer - Asking the student to provide an example or a corollary - Probing for further discussion. By the way, can you explain why a boat sinks?

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.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to cherish the opportunity to observe others teach. Teaching my own courses, I don’t get the chance to do this as much as I would like, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the profession. I love a good lesson plan. I appreciate the confidence carried by teachers who know where they want to take a class. A detailed outline plotting the way one intends to lead students impresses me. I am that guy . . . the one that will start the slow-clap after witnessing an instructor’s smooth execution. Although these are the moments that make the highlight reel of best pedagogical practices, my sense is that effective teaching is truly on display when the plan falls short. It’s when the setting—whether a classroom, conference, presentation, or one-on-one discussion—presents detractions and the teacher must deal with them on the fly. When a traumatic event factors into the syllabus, we should take extra care to distinguish between distractions and detractions. Trauma can leave students raw, and we would be callous to begrudge the wandering or even hardening of the mind. Distraction can be a way of dealing with the circumstances. To me, detraction is a different story. It involves the active placement of obstacles to impede the learning agenda. This is when someone comes to loggerheads with the teacher and the lesson being taught. Detractions have to be dealt with or the class, and those on board with it, will flounder. Detractions also differ from disagreement. The contextual experience of trauma makes consensus near impossible. Although life would be easier were we all to agree, consensus is a bonus, not a condition. The problems that disagreements bring pale in the face of those caused by detractors who use disagreement to threaten the educational agency of those in the room. The HigherEd journalism beat and the academic blogosphere have chronicled the reasons why faculty might steer clear of engaging traumatic events in the classroom. There’s no reason to rehash those here. Nor will I repeat the ways this isn’t a choice in the same way for all people. But as the semester wraps up, and teachers get reflective (after recovering, of course), I thought I might share a few of the more subtle ways I’ve seen teachers deal with detraction on the fly. The moves were improvised, but my sense is that the tactics can be practiced. Put Out the Fire  If you teach long enough, you are bound to get someone intent on harming the people interested engaging your lesson. This sort of detractor is a flamethrower, using every chance to burn your lesson plan into cinders. Some do this for sport. Others have a bone to pick. You’ll never really know in the moment. Nor will they. Some teachers shut this down with decisive quickness, but if this isn’t a play available to you, then you need to keep in mind the physics of the situation. As much as we’re supposed to “reach one, each one,” the job is to teach those in the room. Obstacles to that teaching must be navigated, even when that obstacle is a student’s behavior. Left to their own devices, flamethrowers will combust, so how might you starve the fire? Don’t give the flamethrower the air of your attention. Choose to engage other people in the class by inviting only those who have not spoken with a chance to share. Or find one neutral-to-productive element in the flamethrower’s statement, interrupt with a restatement of the point, and redirect toward someone else. Ultimately your job is to win the room, not to throw flames with the heckler. If you get them on your side, you’ll have contained the flamethrower until it burns out. Disrupt the Momentum Detractors remind us just how much teaching relies on momentum. When everyone is agreeable and goes with the flow, teaching feels easy, or at least easier. At the same time though, we know that learning involves stress, pressure, and tension at the intersection of preconceived notions and the challenge of new information. Detractors keep us honest about this process, even though they’re not helping us bring the class to the desired educational destination. We can repurpose disruption, the detractor’s favorite tool, for the purpose of teaching. If you can tell that something has happened to stoke the detractor’s fire, call a class time out. You can hold a few moments of silence from the front of the room until you’re ready for class to resume. You can take a five-minute break, let people stretch, use the restroom, and leave the class for a moment. Some have implemented the latter to great avail. Putting the brakes on a class is a good way to marshal the favor of the group and disrupt the detractor’s plan. Take Notes  I began this post professing my love of the lesson plan. My affection has many facets. The written lesson plan gives the teacher a tangible record of intention. It is proof of what you wanted to happen and an explanation of what you were willing to do to manifest that wish. In these times a paper trail is never a bad idea. Lesson plans are living documents. Some people like to take notes on them after a class (and even during if they’re feeling dexterous) to note the changes as they come. I like having a record from which I can make sense of what occurred. It can help the next time one runs in a detractor. And in case the situation doesn’t go away, you have documentation to show how invested you were in making the class work. Detractors rarely can do the same. “Know when to Hold ‘em…Know when to fold ‘em.”  Finally, and this cannot be stressed enough, you might need to call it a day.  Excellent teaching doesn’t have a time quota. One certainly should not exceed an agreed upon time, but we so easily forget that there may be a virtue to ending a class early. Some teachers can gracefully introduce a prompt that class time is better spent leaving students to reflect on their own. When detractors are involved, participant energy can be depleted in an unusual manner. If there’s no more good to come from being together, then don’t stay together. Bring the class to a coda and resume at another time. These are just a few tactics worth keeping in your back pocket for the next time you encounter a detractor. If you have some to share, please do so in the comments section or on social media. The more, the merrier.

Over the past few months, the entries in this blog series have attempted to provide guidance and insight related to the pedagogical challenges of teaching traumatic materials. The series was initiated to provide a sense of reassurance about facing these challenges. By discussing the range of challenges, the variety of approaches, the multiple potential topics, and the significant questions, it may, of course, have had the opposite effect. Readers of the series may be even less confident that they can engage such topics in their classrooms. In my final entry, then, let me try and make the case for why—pedagogically—traumatic materials belong in our classrooms.  First and foremost, and this is consistent with everything I’ve said in my contributions, as teachers of religion, we don’t decide to introduce traumatic materials into our classrooms; they are already the warp and woof of our subject matter and of our students’ lives.  We can make decisions to avoid such materials and topics or to try and ignore their affective charge, but we can’t avoid them if we are treating our subject well.         Since we have to engage traumatic materials, we should be mindful of what they can do in our classrooms, to our teaching, and for our students. Traumatic materials are, for all kinds of complicated, and unpredictable, reasons, interesting. They have a charge that engages and enlivens students. They demand a response. Traumatic materials are complex. They require a wide range of approaches—both disciplinary and interpretive. To treat traumatic materials well, students will have to think like historians, like textualists, like rhetoricians, like sociologists, like psychologists, like ethicists, like political theorists. They will have to think about questions of nation, identity, power, race, sex, class, and cultural difference. Traumatic materials cannot be mastered. They cannot be mastered by teacher or student. This means they necessarily create a collaborative learning environment in which everyone has a chance to shine and everyone has a chance to listen. They require patience, and attention, and stillness, and reflection. But because they are so complex, when we begin to understand them, there is a genuine feeling of accomplishment that not only vivifies the learning environment but also gives students (and teachers) a sense of capacity and competence.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, traumatic materials are difficult. Not just difficult to comprehend and interpret, but emotionally, affectively, psychically difficult.  They demand something of us. They demand something more from some of us than others. But this means that teaching traumatic materials generates a situation that calls for a certain ethical attentiveness. Students and teachers are required to listen to each other more carefully, to respond to each other more thoughtfully, to sit with each other more patiently. We must learn how to recover from slips, and mistakes, and hurts. In his Netflix special, “Thank God for Jokes,” comedian Mike Birbiglia notes that jokes are sites of offense, insult, and even danger because jokes are always about someone.  (He references as an extreme case of this problem—the Charlie Hebdo shootings—a traumatic event that brings together jokes, violence, and religion.) Similarly, traumas always impact someone. But Birbiglia goes on to observe that because jokes are always about someone, they create an invitation to attend to each other with great care and sensitivity, to make sure that we are not rushing to judgment, or taking each other’s words out of context, or quickly ascribing ill motives. The attention that Birbiglia claims jokes can foster in us sounds a great deal like the habits of scholarly attention that we want our students to develop. Let me be clear: we should not use traumatic events and materials instrumentally to build skills in our students. The last thing we need is to establish some new pedagogical trend that posits trauma as the new tool for engaged student learning! At the same time, we should not be afraid of the challenges posed by traumatic materials because, as I’ve said in my contributions to this series, the challenges are not so different than the challenges posed by teaching generally. And, as I am suggesting here when there are sound reasons for considering and investigating traumatic events, the rewards of engaging them with our students are quite rich and profound.

I don’t recall ever meeting anyone who sought out their own trauma. Those most prepared for the causal event were still caught unawares. As I’ve said before, trauma insists on passivity. That’s why I am a bit weary of valorizing people who did the so-called right thing in the face of trauma. Should we honor the person’s resilient responses? Absolutely. Can we do so without reducing their story to a marketable remedy or idol for veneration? If we don’t, then we may end up down a slippery slope of objectification. We would do well to learn from people without making them an object lesson or essentializing an ability. It takes commitment to refrain from tokenizing those dealing with trauma. I see the struggle play out around the water cooler. Faculty are shooting the breeze in between classes. Small talk turns to a hot-button issue ripped from the headlines or the grapevine. Someone presses the point that the weighty issue should be brought up in the classroom. “But how?” another asks; the quickest solution, leave it to the most affected colleague to lead the way or do it all. They’re a natural fit, right? Crisis averted. Here’s the thing—no one’s a natural fit for dealing with trauma. The experience of trauma isn’t a virtue. It’s a burden. And when we add to it, we not only bring insult to injury but also a stumbling block to those committed to addressing it. I know. I know. In my last post, I emphasized how dealing with trauma isn’t always your problem. But struggling to face it isn’t a sign that it’s not your problem. Dealing with trauma in your classroom is hard. And no taught subject is a natural fit for addressing trauma because it stymies the active participation that learning requires. I think honoring this is worth a moment of reflection. Once you embrace that dealing with trauma isn’t a natural fit, what might you do when trauma finds its way into your class? I’ve found comparison to be a useful too. Comparison thrives in the reality that classification is where humans dwell. When you realize that nothing you do is going to ever solve the thing, you can begin to acknowledge the freedom at your disposal. Put differently, you can talk about the thing without talking about the thing. Here’s what I mean. First, name the trauma in a way appropriate to your learning setting. “Do no harm” is a good tact here. Surface the trauma to acknowledge the situation but do so without violating the trust, privacy, or boundaries that bind your learning community. For example, when a “bias-related incident” or climate-changing event happens on your campus, actually acknowledge that it happened. Second, name your desire for the teaching moment. Given the difficulty of this teaching task, I like to lower the bar . . . and then lower it again. I teach on religion and the politics of social difference. I’m not out here trying to bring world peace or end racism. I’m upfront with students that I intend to facilitate a substantive 15-week conversation without a body count. The same expectation holds true for even a single class session. Other than that, if students leave the session asking better questions, seeking sharper answers, or are more skillful in pursuing either given the topic, that is well. Maybe this philosophy won’t win you “Teacher of the Year,” but I do find that it helps me be present in the moment. Third, present something besides the trauma to discuss. This can be something you find relatively pertinent. It can be a historical example from your domain of expertise. It can be a piece of art or news story that keeps popping into your head. I don’t want to put limitations on this because nothing naturally fits. Just make sure that it meets the criteria of steps one and two. For me, I find it least helpful to compare similar type of incidents (e.g. blatant discrimination, sudden death of a community member, a major institutional change). Comparisons that are similar limit the potential of the activity because the similarities immediately standout as co-incidents. Instead, I might set up a comparison based upon what I see as similar power relationships (e.g. feeling of a lack of agency), eerily similar diction across vastly different contexts (e.g, Where else have people expressed an inability to breathe?), or in the case of images, artistic motifs. On this last, I used Romance paintings to help students process the arrest of artist-activist Bree Newsome after she pulled down a Confederate Flag from the South Carolina State House. Fourth, invite your students to reflect on the thing on paper. You can be so blunt as to ask, “Why am I showing you this?” I like to have students freely associate and hypothesize the comparison for themselves. I think this extends a grace in which students can relish in the messiness of the learning process without pretense or fear of reprisal. Fifth, share the grounds upon which you found your “something” comparable to the named trauma. Why is it that your selection is worth discussing? How do you see its relevance? Is it because of the subject matter or a social dynamic you recognize? Is there a historical connection? Retrace how you connected the dots. One connection will give you plenty to discuss. Sixth, give students an opportunity to reflect about the trauma on paper. You can see that we are now going through the steps backward. Seventh, ask what needs further reflection given the lessons learned from the comparison. Encourage these to be described openly—perhaps with one word. These can be shared aloud and recorded on the board. To maintain the “do no harm” ethos, remind them of your desire for this moment. Lastly, let the students go free to name the trauma (or not) as they choose. Also, give a sense of what comes next in the course schedule. This helps to situate the day’s class session within the rhythm of the course, inviting them to make further connections on their own. For all the steps listed here, this exercise appears more complicated than it is in execution. Take it as an attempt to strip down teaching-learning to the basics so that those involved can recall that there can be possibilities, connections, and community in the face of trauma.

Recently, my burden, challenge, and task was to write my father’s obituary. Obituaries typically allow 800 to 1,200 words to depict and describe a person’s entire life. As a writer, this was a daunting task. As a daughter, it was impossible. How to proceed?  After reading the obituaries of other family and friends - noting their style and form - I decided my challenge was to cover my father’s 90 years on planet Earth by giving facts and data. I wrote and then checked the accuracy of dates and spelling. The draft read like a file for a candidate for the witness protection program. I scrapped that version and launched into version 2. I soon stopped myself. My flowery prose and long sentences sounded like a rejected Hallmark card. Finally, I sat and considered my father and those mourning him. In this time of homegoing and celebration of life, what did I want to assure my family and community about my father? I decided, with resolute conviction, that I would write Lloyd R. Westfield was a noble man – because he was. The final obituary emphasized his courage, strength, and fortitude of care and concern – all traits of nobility. I told people about his life-long journey as a musician, special education teacher, school psychologist, and churchman. Mostly, I wrote about his passion for his family and for our African American community, and the many ways this love was steadfast. I wrote a good obituary – one that described my daddy as a man who was earnest, dignified, generous, and loving. I knew I was writing a narrative that rarely appears in racist America about Black fathers, yet it is a story that was my every-day, family experience.  I wrote his obituary as a gesture of resistance against the distorted portrayals which slot all Black men into a few, flimsy, stereotypic categories assigned to them. Writing Daddy Lloyd’s obituary was an act of compassion for the un-named African American men whose stories of unwavering commitment to their families is un-appreciated, overlooked, or ignored. Writing dad’s obituary has made me consider how I write lectures. I do not often lecture in my courses, but when I do, how do I write what I write? Do I give the data and basic concepts, and then expect students to resonate with cold facts? Do I tell them “my version/my answer” to the question at hand without considering their perspectives, contexts, and situations? Do I spend time choosing vernacular which will invite them into deeper thought and heightened resonance, or simply rely upon the stilted, obsequious vocabulary of the religious academy? Do I lecture to my students the same way I would lecture to colleagues, and then wonder why students are lacking understanding when, in fact, it is my communication skills that are sub-par? Relying upon facts and data as lecture material is thwarted by the adage “Content is cheap.” In the digital age, students have as much or more access to data than the person who is lecturing. It is commonplace for Siri and Google to know more facts with greater accuracy than the person lecturing and for students to consult Siri and several search engines during the lecture. Learning to write lectures which resist multiple un-contextualized definitions, lists of statistics, and block quotes is a challenge worth attempting. The challenge is to design a lecture whose argument is not based upon a contrived or universalist understanding. We must lecture to demonstrate and expose our own modes of epistemological creativity and scholarly meanderings. In other words, lectures are more valuable to students if they are works of art rather than mundane spreadsheets set to words. Writing a good lecture takes time, as it is as much engineering and architecture as it is poetry and prose – a complex enterprise, indeed. My best lectures are those that have been given several times and have the benefit of re-consideration and rewriting after questions, answers, conversation with my students. Like my father’s obituary, any topic warranting the writing of a lecture will be much too large and expansive to be satisfied by one lecture. It behooves the writer to contemplate the needs of the students who will hear, witness, and glean from the lecture. Clarity about the viewpoint of the lecture is as important, or more important, than writing the thesis statement for the lecture. Students do not want the delusion of neutrality; they want to hear your opinion, consider your “take,” and then have the opportunity to resonate and align or disagree, question and debate.  Good lectures are evocative, provocative, and able to bring complexity to the learning journey without befuddling the learners. When I consider the better/best lectures I have heard, the lecturer has exposed, claimed, and shared their own thinking rather than hiding behind a mask of non-committal to the material at hand. The lecturer made their own social location clear in the stance they took, rather than claiming some kind of generic essentialism to the work. And the lecturer worked at the craft of words, which helped me know what they were saying while they were saying it. Dense materials can be lectured, but the words to convey the density must be carefully chosen so the listeners, the students, can hear and access the materials. This is not a dumbing-down of material. This is the craft of writing in such a way that there is flow, synergy, and wide thresholds of encounter and discovery. Listeners must be able to see the pieces as well as the whole of a lecture.  I suppose it is possible to elevate a poorly written lecture into a good lecture by the way it is performed; however, most of us cannot rely on our performance. Drawing the listener in, locating them in new worlds, challenging them to new perspectives, providing a previously unconsidered rationale – this is the “work” of a well-written lecture. We must not doubt that students are seeking disruption of, and a counter-narrative to, the hegemonic imagination that has been reveled as moral bankrupt at this moment in history. As I have learned from my beloved teacher, Katie Geneva Cannon, the best lectures seek to debunk, unmask, and disentangle so students might have the where-with-all to change the world toward justice.  Writing an obituary is not easy. Writing a lecture is not easy. Each, in its own way, asks that we not ignore the tender fragility of our souls, but speak our souls into the room. Each written piece is the work of healing – us and them. The writing is simultaneously truth-telling, soul-speaking, and hegemony-challenging. I exhort you not to write lectures or obituaries if your goals are any less. 

Trauma is like a mirror that we don’t want to look into. It captures us at our worst angles. It accentuates what we want minimized and overlooks what we wish to be prominent. In trauma, we see projected the unwanted aspects of our realities in such a startling way that we forget everything over which we might have control. Sometimes we don’t have control over a lot. And if we are lucky, we are graced with a reminder that less can be more. To be clear, I don’t mean to make asceticism a virtue. Rather, I want to honor the irrelevant revelation where many on the brink find humor and solace—the fleeting thought of how “it could be worse.” On the flip side of that sentiment is an appreciation for the chance to no longer take what one has for granted. It is this latter posture that I think we teachers should become more accustomed to inhabit. If you follow me on social media, then you know that half of my best pedagogy comes from lessons learned while parenting. As I write, my six-year-old is wrestling in his first tournament. Kid Newton loves the sport. I like that he loves it. But the anxiety in the gym is as airborne as the body odor. And as these children face off, I can read the look in their faces. They are not scared of each other. They are afraid of their own limitations. Throughout this tournament, I have seen a lot of different coaching styles. I don’t have the foggiest idea about wrestling technique, yet I do know enough about teaching-learning to see what isn’t working. And the number one way to fail seems to be throwing a lot of new information at a student/athlete in the midst of a stressful situation. This results in a lot of takedowns, tears, and tantrums. I’ve also picked up some practices that seem to work on the mat, if not in the classroom. When trauma finds your students, consider having them do the following: Breathe. At a Wabash consultation, my colleague Dr. Melanie Harris would frequently lead my cohort in a few moments of collective breathing before we dove into the topic of the day. This may have been the single greatest takeaway from these intensive professional development experiences. In just a few silent moments of respiration, I found assurance that I had survived the previous moment and could be present in the current one. My mind stopped wandering to the future. My thoughts stopped dwelling on the past. So when I sense that my students are stressed or at dis-ease, I push pause on whatever we are doing and have us breathe. When we reenter into the activity, we are so much more prepared for what may come. Have space to be heard, read, and seen. Just like athletes need to breathe, people in trauma need a moment to vent. This doesn’t necessarily involve conspicuous expression, but perhaps just a moment to acknowledge what one has observed can go a long way. If I have a sense that we are in the middle of a traumatic moment, I like to start punctually but give students a chance to release their thoughts within the formal classroom time. This gives them license to work through preoccupation rather than be consumed by the trauma occupying them. Sometimes I just quickly name the event and have students free-write individually as they see fit. Other times I announce that we’ll take three minutes to talk about (or not) whatever they think needs to be discussed. In this situation, I move to the side of the classroom so that students can relate to each other as peers instead of to me as their instructor. When we move to our next activity, students seem to be calmer and more collected. Relax in their strengths. The traumatic moment can be a teachable moment, but not for skill acquisition. This is not the time to trot out radically new content. Instead, consider how you can bring out the things students know. What are the things that have been practiced, drilled, and rehearsed? Giving students a chance to bring these out will orient them toward the “more” ahead. Leaving a little room for free association or creative application can even bring a little hope in the midst of despair. As students rise to the occasion of just one task, they can remember that they have risen before and will rise again. None of these activities are novel. In fact, if you incorporate them into your regular teaching practices, they’ll be that much more effective in moments of testing. At the end of the day, the challenge isn’t ending the trauma. It is dealing with it. Just remember that you, in fact, do have the tools to begin doing so.