The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

Classroom lessons cannot be reduced to benign, disembodied facts. Teaching must acknowledge cultural complexity, the lack of truth telling and embrace the trouble likely to be stirred up in and beyond the classroom. Teach to stretch our own imaginations. Inclusion must include change, shifts in power and new methods of teaching.

Teaching can be a profound act of power. So then, teaching with an ethic of love, care, compassion, and kindness is paramount, especially during the viral and racial pandemics. What if academic rigor is not compromised in generous classrooms, but enhanced when we shift what counts as knowledge? The discussion lingers over teacher-burnout and knowing when it is time to leave the vocation and the classroom. 

Learner based pedagogies must constantly ask the question - “who is our learner?” Answering this question brings the startling realization that first career, entering students do not know classrooms without the internet. Unlike the teacher, those learners do not know a world other than the current age. Their cultural formation is drastically different from that of the faculty. Their reality is a different reality. What does it mean to teach adults who were formed exclusively in the digital world? What are the challenges of teaching students born in 2000? 

The complexity of this era requires leadership who are passionately willing to live in the ambiguity, uncertainty, and still make progress. Institutions must find ways to enable, empower, and inspire leaders for work in the middle of the muddle.

Recreating education during the prolonged pandemic takes more than the choice between face-to-face or online courses. Issues such as public health concerns, diversity-equity-inclusion, digital mindsets, and the downward spiral of denominational structures requires educational leaders to employ design theory, skills, and practices. How do we create optimal learning environments, right now and into the future?  

Imagine classroom laboratories that move from the presumptive geo-physical context and digitally connect students located across more than fifteen time zones. Imagine hard conversations across mutual registers that nurture the ability to interrogate local, national, and international reality as the cornerstone of theological education. The digital interface created by global networks of online learners is reshaping, reforming, and enlivening theological education.

Convening colleagues for regular conversation to dream, think, confess, learn and celebrate teaching and the teaching life can improve individual efforts and strengthen the overall teaching community. Nurturing the curiosity for such questions as: who is the self who teaches?; what does it mean to teach in Covid?; what can we learn from folks like bell hooks? – can provide excellent formation for faculty. Mutual discussions helps teachers feel less alone and more connected.

Teaching the Hebrew Bible as a source of hope and strength is complex and necessary during the pandemics.  What does it mean to use BLM as a hermeneutical lens? In what ways can students be helped with bringing new understandings to the local church?  Nancy Lynne Westfields hosts Dr. Wil Gafney (Brite Divinity School at TCU). 

Fundamental influences upon theological education are the shape of higher education, the cultural pulse of society, and the religious practices of the people whose leadership is seminary trained. How might consideration of these variables assist with reimaging theological education? What if diversity is the bedrock of the future of theological education? 

Conversations on Teaching and Spirituality
Series One: Exploring Thurman's The Sound of the Genuine

Series One: Episode 2 of 3: Expressions of the Genuine
What if hearing the genuine inside yourself requires a quest, a leaving home, or an exploration of the unfamiliar? If you leave home, can you find a home again? Does the genuine come from within you or does it come through you from somewhere else? What does it mean to offer the genuine as you teach? 

Dr. Amy G. Oden
Adjunct Professor of Early Church History and Spirituality
Independent Scholar

Rev. Dr. Shively T. J. Smith
Assistant Professor of New Testament
Boston University School of Theology