The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

Why don’t white people know the tenets, behaviors, patterns, and core values of racism? What’s at stake for not knowing? What practices, rules, and policies might a faculty agree upon to combat white surprise? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield will host Dr. Melanie Harris (Texas Christian University) and Dr. Jennifer Harvey (Drake University).

Welcome to Conversations on Teaching and Spirituality.    
Series One is entitled Exploring Thurman’s “The Sound of the Genuine”.
The featured speakers of this video series are Dr. Nancy Westfield, Dr. Amy G. Oden and Dr. Shively T.J. Smith.

Using Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman’s baccalaureate address at Spelman College (May 4, 1980), entitled “The Sound of the Genuine,” these colleagues discuss the challenges of teachers attempting to bring their whole-selves to teaching. Each episode includes a spiritual practice, as well as excerpts from Thurman’s article.

In what forms does racism show itself in faculty cultures? What does it take to identify the performance of racism before it happens and while it happens? What can be done to combat the visible and invisible practices of racism in a faculty? The conversation with Dr. Melanie Harris and Dr. Jennifer Harvey will be hosted by Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield.

It takes time to unfurl from the processes of a doctoral program and lower the anxieties created in a job search. Now that you are an early career colleague, in what ways might you recompress and create strategies for bringing your genuine voice into your classroom? What does it take to shed the impulse of conformity and work toward your own distinctive generativity? In aspiring for a lifelong teaching career, who might be your mentors, conversation partners, and guides? Rather than reduce teaching to perfunctory tasks, what does it mean to develop the artistry of teaching? As an early career scholar, what does it mean to live into your own imagination, creativity, and courage for teaching? 

A critical challenge during the first years of teaching is defining, forming, and living into a scholarly identity which is healthy, has integrity and is generative for your own scholarly project. This conversation discloses some of the pitfalls and risks when institutions provide little to no mentoring. What does it take to have a common sense and reasonable perspective for being a scholar and for doing scholarship ... over the long haul? What practices might support habits of self-care, creativity, and imagination for sound teaching, scholarship, and service? What is "good" citizenship while on a faculty? 

Seasons of a Teaching Career

Series One is entitled Exploring Early Career Issues. The featured speakers of this video series are Leah Payne (Portland Seminary, George Fox University), Roger Nam (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) and Nancy Lynne Westfield (The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion).

Common sense conversations meant to provide perspective, inspire, and encourage colleagues who are new to the academic enterprise. The discussions are frank, heartfelt and oftentimes personally reflective about the challenges, obstacles, pitfalls and joys of a life of teaching while early in the career.

This podcast episode is taken from a video series, Seasons of a Teaching Career. 
Series One is entitled Exploring Early Career Issues. 

The featured speakers of this episode are Leah Payne (Portland Seminary, George Fox University), Roger Nam (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) and Nancy Lynne Westfield (The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion). 

Common sense conversations meant to provide perspective, inspire, and encourage colleagues who are new to the academic enterprise. The discussions are frank, heartfelt and oftentimes personally reflective about the challenges, obstacles, pitfalls and joys of a life of teaching while early in the career.

Rather than repeating sounds made long ago by those who mastered academic fields, what must we now do to produce new knowledges? From where will our confidence and agency come to create ways of knowing fashioned for the complexity of pluralism? What new stories will we metabolize for the better formation and preparation of students? How do we teach differently than we were taught?

Being a critical reflective teacher means grappling with our own miseducation. Colleagues who have been proactive about the necessity of aligning teaching content, institutional mission and values with teaching approaches and methods share their strategies. If teaching is not politically neutral, then what practices can we employ to lessen the oppression and violence in our classrooms?

Personal reflection on issues of prejudice, bias, and cultural insensitivity is key to improving teaching. At any season of the teaching career new considerations for equity is possible. This conversation with the author of White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America challenges our vocational, curricular, and personal conventions and suggests resources for social justice standards in teaching.