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Multicultural school events have become a global phenomenon, offering schools a platform to showcase the diverse cultures and languages within their communities. These events typically feature ethnic food, performances, and presentations from various cultures, serving as important spaces for fostering intercultural understanding and celebrating diversity among students, teachers, and families.However, despite their widespread adoption, researchers have critically questioned the efficacy of these events. They argue that when reduced to one-off occasions, without integrating multicultural perspectives into everyday activities, they may inadvertently reinforce existing power dynamics and boundaries. By treating multicultural education as isolated events, schools risk overlooking power relations and hierarchies, potentially reinforcing the borders they intended to dissolve and negate.In her series of blog posts “What Ritual Does”, Itihari Y. Toure reminds us about how rituals may help people to respond to change, not by reinforcing the status quo but in ways that facilitate transformation. Rituals help us navigate uncertain times; they provide a means for individuals to manage overwhelming circumstances and regain a sense of control. As such, rituals can help us feel closer. They create community and help us build an inclusive culture of belonging. From this perspective, multicultural events look different.Toure’s reflections make us pay more attention to the consistent effort that teachers, school leaders, parents, and students put into these events. As a ritual, such events can be interpreted as a continuous resistance against the spread of xenophobic attitudes, prejudices, and behavior that characterizes political flows in many countries. The participants’ engagement in multicultural school events can be seen as a persistent contribution to reducing prejudice in school and cultivating greater tolerance of cultural, linguistic, and religious differences.Furthermore, interpreting multicultural school events as a ritual reminds us of the dynamic character of such events. In a classroom study I conducted in Norway, the school had organized a group of key teachers who were responsible for planning and evaluating the event every year. The group was strategically balanced with a wide representation of teachers who were collaborating closely with the parent board. In this way, the school had reached a level where most parents expressed a sense of ownership of the event. For the coordinators, the event was seen as a work in progress that had developed continuously throughout the years. Setting aside time for an open and self-critical discussion of the event had helped the group to develop the practice from a top-down organized event that started off with only enthusiasm, to build a broad basis of participation and involvement. Critical reflections also helped the organizers to avoid identifying students and families with a particular essentialized background. Instead, the event was created as a social space where marginalized voices became the center of attention, enhancing the participants’ awareness of what it means to be diverse school.As Toure emphasizes in her series of blog posts, every teaching moment offers an opportunity for transcendent learning. Viewing multicultural events as rituals, I believe, can help us recognize more of these opportunities. Instead of simply dismissing multicultural school events as exotic happenings, we are challenged to consider how they can foster meaningful connections and inclusive practices.

In her series of blog posts, “What Ritual Does,” Itihari Y. Toure elucidates the potential of ritual for teaching – reminding us of how ritual engenders “communal learning,” “extends the depth of our imagination,” brings us “into a divine dance,” and functions as a “restorying” activism. I am a witness: ritual does all that Toure says and more. I am a believer: ritual is an essential teacher. I can testify: ritual opens us to surprising learning possibilities – and Toure brought the pedagogical power of ritual to life in new ways during a Wabash workshop for faculty of African descent. Building on some of the ritual lessons we learned with Toure in the workshop, I have been exploring water as a ritual conductor. Toure writes: “We imagine a portal, a doorway in liminal spaces and to our delight, the ritual affords the opportunity to be in liminality and create.” Water becomes a tangible portal of the intangible: receiving our gifts, our gratitude, our hopes, our intentions, and our manifestations. Through water we feel matter, we sense touch, we know wetness, we acclimate ourselves with temperature. Water, for me, is a substance through which I can know that the personal is pedagogical – and how. Water with Colleagues. In our workshop we were reminded of how water receives the vibrational patterns of our hearts’ desires expressed as spoken word, and that in its evaporation what we have spoken can be manifested. Does water manifest the desired and spoken outcome? Perhaps the answer to this question matters less than the vulnerability of speaking into water – open to this possibility – and (working and) watching to see what follows. When we considered this ritual potential of water together in a community of colleagues, one of the most extraordinary gifts of this collective contemplation was the mutual sharing this engendered. We pour water. We speak into water. We wash with water. We rinse with water. We drink water. We share water. We create with water. We pass through water. We transition in water. We are born of water. We learn water. We teach water. We are water. Water at Home. Toure’s invitation to speak intentions into water was not the first such invitation I had received. However, during our workshop I accepted her invitation. There I found that when I carried a practice introduced in the classroom space into my living space, the tone, tenor, quality, and content of what proceeded from my heart through my mouth into the water was different. I spoke of learning intentions – but also of personal intentions and how the two of these related to one another. I was engaging the learning space of the classroom at home – in the ritual spaces of my home. Home – and, specifically, the ritual spaces of my home – found a constructive return route to the classroom learning space. Perhaps, we might call this (wait for it) . . . homework. However, it is not the traditional homework of written, submittable, graded assignments. It is a holistic, somatic agreement that I take home what I have learned in class and apply it to (i.e., allow it to touch) the innermost parts of my being and I am prepared, when I return to class, to bear witness to what happens when I open myself in this way. For what it’s worth: I responded to this ritual invitation long after the close of the workshop – and much of what I have spoken into water has manifested. Water in Pedagogical Relationship. But how do our relationships carry water? I explored this – and an extension of the speaking-into-water ritual – in a small grant project with a pedagogical resource partner. (Our water rituals were but a small part of the work.) To the speaking-into-water ritual, we added morning and evening written and spoken expressions of gratitude, intentions, and manifestations. Together, we contemplated our distinct senses of the cultural significance of leaving water uncovered or covered; we marinated sacred texts in waters we then used to wash (i.e., a common practice among Senegalese Muslims known as safara, a Mouride water ritual); we drank from, drew out of, spoke into, and rinsed with contained and natural glacial bodies of water; we spoke common and distinct words. We found that our gratitude multiplied, our intentions were realized, and (so far) that which we hoped to manifest is coming to pass. So, while the efficacy of articulating goals in spoken and written forms (without water) has been formally studied, my experience reconvinces me of the power of water as a ritual conductor, a teacher of ritual, and a learning tool. What if more classes began with the relational exchange and homework of speaking-into-water rituals – rituals that included the speaking of learners’ own interpreted and adopted learning intentions? And, what if more learners carried water in this way?

Many of us are familiar with the scripture from Jeremiah 1:5: “before you were formed in your mother’s womb, I knew you” (NIV). It reminds us of the immortal aspect of our human spirit.  In the context of West African cosmologies, it is our spiritual essence that is with the Creator before we become human. That is to say, the aspects of our personhood which are in alignment with the cosmic design for harmony, justice, reciprocity, and balance.  There are specific rituals that emphasize this immortal aspect of our being. Some of these rituals are commonplace in cultural expressions, like when we decide to name a child after a loved one who has passed away; remarking on that immortal aspect of that life that lives on and honors the family. So, we say to folks as ritual: “Say your name and say the names of the ones who named you!”  This is a ritual of introduction. We see it in the South African ritual of greeting, “Sawubona,” which means I see you. I see you, your spiritual essence and all those in your lineage who carry this same essence.  Libation is another ritual we find in the Bible and in multiple cultural traditions where the immortal aspect of our human spirit is recalled, elevated, and remembered as good for those who are in the present. In a libation, we invoke their name as a way of calling upon that immortal aspect of our being. We can construct rituals that remind us that we all come here with an immortal character.  A way of being that is not contingent upon where we live, our social or economic status, our physical abilities nor our ethnic or gender identity. Nothing about our social location was “known” by our Creator to determine our Divine Consecrated Identity. Surely, we can consider this when we think about the social location of Hagar or the young brother Joseph, Mary, or Paul. Our social location can affect our consecrated self, but it does not determine it. Ritual can remind us of who we are when our social location attempts to derail us. Ritual calls forth our consecrated identity, the divine self before we were in our mother’s womb. 

Part Four: Ritual is a Form of Activism Engaging ritual as an individual or as a collective act of embodiment challenges ideas about the source and nature of our intelligence and for some it challenges ideas about how we arrive at knowing. As a form of activism, ritual invites us into the process of restorying that counters colonizing stories which perpetuate cultural and gender hegemony. Rituals also take the diverse traditions of old narratives and gives them meaning for the present context or need. The restorying in ritual also centers diverse intelligences (bodily-kinesthetic, environmental, rhythmic, visual, auditory, social, etc.,) in a nonhierarchical manner. It affords us to remember our own story in relationship to the transcendent, to remember a people’s story in relationship to the unseen yet felt power of spirit. Our ritual restorying is another form of both our personal and collective agency. Ritual focuses on lived and innate capacities that are in operation to benefit us and community. Imagine that – using our intelligence for our personal and collective benefit, not for institutions or capitalizing agendas. We get to use our restorying in ritual to practice “being” while welcoming others into the same practice. This is primarily the role of community participation in ritual; to show our authentic selves. Whether it is the restorying of a grief ritual, the restorying of a ritual for renewal and rebirth, a ritual of covenant or a ritual of invocation; the community’s role is to authentically show up. Here is where ritual begins to counter models of acceptability, belonging, worthiness posited by dominant forces or groups that exclude, marginalize, and perpetuate othering. If the intent is transformation and ethical change, ritual can construct a valid and mutually beneficial pathway for creating community strong enough to hold one another’s truths. 

Part Three: Ritual Bring Us into a Divine Dance (the real-time, active participation in the transcendent, where the physical realm intercedes for the spiritual realm). A Divine Dance; ritual creates a divine dance between the guide and the participants, the teacher, and the learner. Ritual uses the spiritual nature of rhythm, coordinated actions and speech to invoke teaching and learning as a “divine dance.” A dance, between the life’s purpose and mission of both the teacher and the student is at the heart of the exchange. It goes beyond discrete knowledge or application of course content. Ritual, when it is intentional, steps into the spiritual realm to illuminate the lessons we came here to receive. Ritual recognizes that everyone of us comes into being to learn a set of lessons. The lessons that aid us in becoming (better) and in sharing our becoming with others so that we are all becoming (better) and belonging. Meaningfulness in learning is heightened when the learner can see and feel learning in alignment with purpose and the teacher sees and feels teaching as living-out purpose. Ritual not only pronounces this spirit work, but it also maintains this transcending dance while it seeks to intercede with earthly realities that would impede us from getting the lessons. Imagine this, a ritual lifting one’s life purpose and mission in ways that welcome, clarifiy, and situate the lessons as part of our Divine plan. Rituals create a Divine dance as expressions of wisdom and the gifts to be given as life’s mission are expressions of love. For both the student and the teacher, every teaching moment is an opportunity to learn a transcending lesson, or to give a gift.  What ritual does is enlist our active participation in the unseen as it negotiates what we can see, speak, feel, and touch.

Part Two: Ritual Extends the Depth of Our Imagination. Ritual takes the familiar and enlivens it with our imagination.  Consider it this way, you have a favorite dance or song or prayer. The reason we can dance it, sing it, pray it, again and again is that each time our ingenuity takes the work to another dimension. Each time we feel, express, and see something new that we did not experience before. It is this aspect of ritual that makes it meaningful and alive and different from a routine.  Each time we engage in ritual it comes alive with the genius of our imagination. Ritual can even begin in our imagination and blossom through its application. We imagine a portal, a doorway in liminal spaces and to our delight, the ritual affords the opportunity to be in liminality and create. So, during the ritual there may be revelation, illumination and even inspiration that touches our spirit so that it becomes real. The ritual has moved from a familiar intent, or action, to the manifestation of our imagining.  With practice, we become fluid in ritual making and always expect our imagination to do what it does. In this way, ritual maintains the integrity of being in the present while reaching into the unseen (imagination). Because we are intentional in ritual, it also creates a kind of authority to dreaming and imagining. Ritual helps to declare that what we dream, what we imagine, is as much a part of our collective covenant in Spirit as the faith we have in our Creator and Ancestors working on our behalf.  So, do ritual; do ritual to imagine deeply!

Part One: Ritual Is Communal Learning. We might agree that “community” is a dynamic, divine dance among individuals who, at any given moment, can structure and normalize what might have begun as a spontaneous, enlivening interaction. Community, in the context of our classrooms, can either be a routinized structure of interactions, focused on a set of pragmatics (time allotted, prescribed lessons/topics, inherited answers to repeated questions), or a generative experience, full of imagery and ideas that are liberative to the spirit. In other words, we can create community to fulfill a set of accepted structures about learning, or we can create a space that courageously “touches the spirit.” This is the point of ritual, to touch the spirit, and it involves everyone in the space together experiencing the divine dance. Rituals, when seeking to connect meaningfully to the essence of our being, becomes a point of teaching and learning within the moment. I believe that there are such experiences of ritual in every culture because even as we are human, we are divine. Both aspects of our being desire existence. For those of us in theological education, we have the privilege to focus on both the human and the divine as a responsibility of teaching those called to do spirit work. Ritual invites the community of bearers and seekers to experience this transcendent work together and receive the benefits of communal learning to touch the divine within us together. Part of our challenge is operating in an ecosystem that pays more attention to rules and structures than the divine dance, trusting in our own aptitude and the genius of the spirit to decentralize oppressive rules and structures. My communities called me forth to be a keeper of the ritual. It was not until they gave voice to my “medicine” that I accepted it and began to develop it. Rituals became the first task when I settled myself into class preparation. I would find spaces to just listen. The listening would take even longer when I saw names of learners that I had in a previous class. It was much later that I realized that this listening was paying attention to ancestral voices whose “sight became my vanguard voice.” Ritual not only enlivened the purpose of the course beyond the accumulation of information, but it also afforded each one of us to sit with our individual social location in ritual as an opportunity for personal value in the communal space. With the ritual, we were measuring our worth based upon course content in relation to our lived experiences. We were adding value to the community by our existence and the value of being connected to one another. As I think about the adults who entered those classroom spaces and the complexity of their lives, the ritual space also became a moment of releasing and accepting without having to speak to the specifics of what was/would be going on. This is the healing aspect of ritual. Rituals create space for communal recovery and discovery. Rituals create space for rest. Do I require everyone in attendance to engage the ritual? I do not. Even for those who, in their own way, do not participate in the class rituals, they bear witness to it. And what we do know, is that you cannot unsee what you see, and you cannot unhear what you have heard. This is also the reason why ritual work is a deeply intentional and serious work. It is not an icebreaker or a gesture of novelty. This is an assurance: the presence of a person at the ritual affords them a chance to speak to the spirit.