The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

The courses and conversations needed to teach away from white supremacy and toward equity, freedom and humility require new conversation partners, creating new kinds of courses, and bravery. Such a conversation emerged when Dr. Smith (Columbia Theological Seminary) welcomed Dr. Ulrich (Bethany Theological Seminary & Earlham School of Religion) and students from their respective schools into a new course that she developed and taught on African American and Womanist hermeneutics and the Gospel of Luke. Smith and Ulrich will reflect on what they have learned through that experience, which has included consultations and writing supported by the Wabash Center. Learning in consultation throughout the project took imagination, patience, and vulnerability.

Nurturing sensibilities and sensitivities for the pluralism of identities is a challenge to teaching and learning, alike. Teaching what you know is only the starting point.

What does it mean to do race differently in classrooms? What risks can teachers take to better prepare learners for issues of injustice, oppression, and liberation?  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Elizabeth Bounds (Candler School of Theology - Emory University).

In this time of crisis, intergenerational connections make a difference in teaching and in being taught. Healthy community requires interdependence one to another across the generations. Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfields hosts Dr. Dwight Hopkins (University of Chicago Divinity School).

Getting through the pandemics will take all of us, plus the willingness to allow our imaginations to be chaotic and refuel the soul.  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Christine Hong (Columbia Theological Seminary). 

What does it mean to shape our curriculum into a story our students can tell?  What kind of pedagogical imagination is needed to shape old courses into new?  In what ways might lightheartedness bring soulful teaching alive?  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Carole Barnsley (Transylvania University).

Descriptions of mutuality between students and teacher; Suggestion that teaching is about translation – academy to town square, culture to culture, race to race.  Teacher as translator requires courage and a blending of worlds.  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Sarah Farmer (Indiana Wesleyan University). 

His mother said that he was “born to push a pencil and run his mouth.” And what world-shaping-words have come from her son, Princeton University Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.. “There’s a story of me going to a Pentecostal church for the first time,” narrates Glaude, “this woman gets the spirit right next to me and I had no language to understand it.” He describes the experience as, “wholly foreign but decidedly familiar.” But he “has a language for it now.” And this language serves as a way into and means to understand such religious expressions as “transformative experience[s] for those who occupy those spaces.” Here Prof. Glaude deploys the language of reflective teaching and learning in order to illumine the teaching life as it has shaped him and he in turn shapes his students. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where he is also the Chair of the Center for African American Studies and the Chair of the Department of African American Studies. 

Becoming a learner once a seasoned scholar is a task fraught with discomfort, identity challenges, and the gaining of new confidences. Dan Ulrich (Bethany Theological Seminary) reflects upon a shared project with womanist colleague Mitzi Smith (Columbia Theological Seminary) where they explored issues of intercultural knowledges and unlearning white supremacy.

The multiple pandemics have caused a rethinking of community, connection, the sacredness of the body, and what it means to depend upon creation. Teaching cannot ignore the politics of relationship between one another, the planet and God.  Teaching is justice work.  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan (Shaw University).