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(Content Warning : mentions of vulnerability, death, and excrement)One cool, wet, overcast February morning we were leisurely circling a small retention pond, our pace mirroring the unhurried arrival of spring. The students were examining some Green Frog tadpoles (Lithobates clamitans), and an unidentified corixid (an aquatic insect with oar-like back legs) we’d temporarily detained when I found and netted a Six-Spotted Fishing Spider (Dolomedes triton) and brought it over. In the excitement and commotion at meeting this new neighbor, one student slipped down the embankment towards the muck. “Oh sh*t!” she exclaimed. Her right foot found solid ground just before water’s edge, her left knee firmly planted in the mud upslope. After confirming she was uninjured and helping her to both feet, we continued our work. It was a profound moment of vulnerability. Sh*t happens! Excrement is unavoidable in Creaturely Theology.[i] Suffering and death are too. Just a half an hour before that encounter by the pond, we’d discovered the carcass of a White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus), a doe, tragically caught on a rusted, derelict barbed-wire fence in a thicket of non-native honeysuckle and privet. Even if she’d made it over, though, she would have still had to risk crossing the road. We don’t cross roads or barbed-wire fences. The most dangerous thing we do—at least statistically—is traveling by van for field trips. I always take every precaution to ensure the welfare and safety of all my students. No one is permitted to touch any animals or plants or fungi we cannot identify—or any medically-significant ones we can! Weather-and terrain-appropriate footwear and clothing are required in the field. We always move at a calm, careful pace—we’d miss out on so much if we rushed, after all. But risk and danger are inevitable. They are unavoidable in human life. Such realities play an important role in all human growth and education. In the Christian theological tradition, the fear of God, and our smallness in relation to God’s other creatures, are both instructive. The kinds of encounters we can have with the divine Other, and creaturely others, teach us our vulnerability and interdependence (see Job 38–41). In facing risks and dangers we can learn resilience, and we grow.  Spiders, centipedes, and snakes always elicit the most excitement from my students. On our first day outside in spring of 2025 I was privileged to introduce this year’s cohort to an impressive female Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans). I gently excavated her from her tangled web with a long twig and coaxed her onto a small piece of white paper. Her jet-black body and legs gleamed in the sunlight, contrasting sharply with the brilliant red hourglass on her abdomen, a striking sign of her formidable venom. She barely moved as we admired her. I returned her to her rock lair, and we parted ways. Later the same day an Eastern Red Centipede (Scolopocryptops sexspinosus) danced excitedly from one end of a longer stick to the other as I steadily alternated hands, taking care to avoid the wiggling antennae on his bitey end. While I have never found a venomous snake on campus, we regularly encounter about a dozen harmless species.[ii] As long as a snake is calm—it is easy to tell whether any individual is overly stressed or not—I allow everyone a chance to touch or handle it.[iii] Such encounters have a transformative effect. As one of my students put it, “there is something so peaceful about holding a calm wild snake.” Far from increasing our fear, or even terror, such experiences of risk and vulnerability help to further ground us in this place, and in our vulnerable selves. Coming to know “the peace of the[se] wild things,” allows us, in Wendell Berry’s words, “to rest in the grace of the world, and [be] free.”[iv]             Notes & Bibliography: [i] For powerful and moving reflections on the relevance of scatological reflection for Christian faith and religious practice, I recommend Ragan Sutterfield’s excellent book, The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024). For more basic, introductory texts see Taro Gomi’s classic Everyone Poops, trans. Amanda Mayer Sinchecum (Brooklyn: Kane/Miller, 1993) and Steve Kemp and Robert Rath, Who Pooped in the Park? Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Scat and Tracks for Kids (Helena, MT: Farcountry Press, 2005).    [ii] I am very confident that neither of east Tennessee’s native venomous serpents, Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) nor Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) live on Johnson University’s campus; I know that is profound comfort to most of my colleagues and students, but I have to admit that I find it at least a little disappointing! Even if we found one, though, here or on a field trip—I have seen both in the smokies where we have our retreat—we would admire such a neighbor respectfully from a distance. I am not the kind of Appalachian Christian minister who handles venomous snakes (except with proper tools and for good reason).[iii] Certain species like Racers (Coluber constrictor) and Watersnakes (Nerodia sipedon) are more pugnacious by disposition and are unreluctant to bite in defense. What they don’t tell you about harmless snakes, though, is that the bitey end is not the only end, or even the worst end, you have to worry about! Most snakes excrete a foul musk and feces or urates on their captors as a defense mechanism. [iv] Wendell Berry, The Peace of the Wild Things and Other Poems (New York: Penguin, 2018), 25. 

Perhaps, selfishly, my journey away from authoritarian teaching came from confronting bad teaching evaluations in my first two years of teaching. While my early education was decidedly not authoritarian – I was homeschooled by a mother inspired by unschooling, Waldorf, and Montessori – I often fell into the trap of confusing being rigorous with being an authoritarian. My first few years of teaching, I threw my hands up in frustration, wondering why my students didn’t take pleasure in learning. My thinking remained unproductive until I began to reflect on a difficult question: what energy was I bringing to the classroom? The conclusions weren’t pleasant: I thought that to earn respect, I had to be tough. Being tough meant being inflexible with deadlines (what am I, a pushover?), having an intense, aloof demeanor in the classroom (how else would they take things seriously?), and having rigorous, high standards for grading that were given in an unfeeling manner (no A for effort, kids). As a young woman, I felt like I had a lot to prove and it showed. My teaching evaluations were abysmal. And while yes, there is a lot to be said for gender (and, though it does not negatively impact my evaluations personally, racial) biases in evaluations, I do think that students were picking up on my general insecurity and responding to their own feelings of powerlessness. Put more simply, it is hard to be invested in a class in which you feel you have no control over, and it is easy to assume that everything you don’t like is the fault of your professor. At first, my move into more student involvement was rooted almost solely in improving my evaluations. But after major shifts in teaching practice, I’ve noticed that the more I’ve levelled my authority and engaged in more collaborative teaching with my students, not only do my students enjoy my classes more, but they also learn a lot more too. They also seem to feel much more invested in the material and take ownership of their work and role in shaping the classroom environment. As a professor in a required first-year seminar program, I teach St. Augustine’s Confessionsoften. I am always struck by Augustine’s reflections on the distinct experiences of learning from authoritarian teachers at school. Discussing learning Greek, he writes that “the threat of savage, terrifying punishments was used to make me learn.” He contrasts this to the ease with which he learned Latin, under the gentle tutelage of his childhood caretakers, “without any fear or pain at all.” Augustine concludes that “It is evident that the free play of curiosity is a more powerful spur to learning these things than is fear-ridden coercion.”[i] Inspired by Augustine (along with feminist thinkers such as bell hooks and anti-carceral pedagogy inspired by Mariame Kaba and others), I have sought to create an environment of genuine freedom and joy to explore ideas and improve my students’ critical abilities.In the next entries in this blog series, I will share some of the specific practices I use to create a more collaborative learning environment (such as students creating discussion expectations, collaborating on course policies, changes in how I offer grading feedback, and more). I will also discuss how I maintain rigor in such a classroom. For now, I invite readers to consider a series of questions: am I unwilling to be more collaborative out of fear that I won’t be taken seriously? How can my vulnerability inspire the same in students? How can this shared learning space enrich all who enter it? Notes & Bibliography[i] Augustine, Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1997), I.14,23.

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