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One of the realities that the pandemics of the past eighteen months have brought home is how the different life situations of students change the impact of collective trauma on their bandwidth for learning. For some of our students, when…
Continue readingI recently read Valarie Kaur’s remarkable book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. At one point in her story, she describes her struggle to find herself “inside the law” at Yale Law School as a Sikh…
Continue readingThe first time that I taught a graduate-level class where anti-oppression work was a primary component of the learning, I made a major blunder. I structured the class with materials and exercises assuming that students understood that racism, sexism, and…
Continue readingFor many years I have been involved with a team of instructors teaching a required first-year formation class at the Iliff School of Theology. Initially called “Identity, Power, and Difference,” we designed this class to invite students to reckon with…
Continue readingDiscussion forums in online classrooms are unfortunately named. The name evokes just talking about stuff. This can be a good use of the discussion forum; dialogue is an important part of higher education. The opportunity to test and develop ideas…
Continue readingWhen we first move into online classroom spaces, we often miss the dynamic energy of gathered bodies in a familiar location. We lose the immediate gratification of watching in real time as new knowledge “clicks” for students in discussions and…
Continue readingAs a teacher trained in textual analysis and the religious practices of living human communities, the language of images, videos, and recorded sound are not my mother tongue. Yet, I know that for my students, communicating in an era where…
Continue readingWhen I met with our first-year students during on-campus orientation five weeks into their program, a student complained to me about an assignment in my online class. I didn’t recognize what the student was describing, and after a few minutes…
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