The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching

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 chal...

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 tea...

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 fo...

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, ins...

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 sen...

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 justi...

Decolonizing teaching is an experiment in synergism. In developing new pedagogies, we can only guarantee crisis – crisis to reconstruct identities of the teacher and the learner, alike. What would it be to teach in a way that taboos, barriers and boundaries become meeting places? How will we learn to collaborate, build coalitions, and create partnerships for new epistemologies? 

During the extended pandemic students are voicing discontent with courses which inadequately relate to minoritized views. Students are impatient when classrooms, yet and still, do not take seriously the complexity of all students’ experience. This is a moment, if we can seize it, to learn to open classrooms  to practices of collaboration, partnership and coalition building to teach with our studen...

Academic fields change when the teachers are people who have not previously taught in that field and when we resist the colonial presumptions built into the field. What does it mean to re-train, re-learn, re-educate ourselves to teach toward a decolonized mindset? In what ways might intersectionality be embodied in our teaching? What are pedagogies by emerging scholars and how are they grappling w...

Too often the work of those who create, compose, build, or choreograph are not supported by our academic institutions. Many scholars pursuit their artistic passions in their “spare time” leaving their teaching and institutional life unfulfilled. Burn out is common. Narrowly defined, legitimacy of scholarship is strangling possibility and new vision.  What would it mean to incorporate the tools of...

At a time when theological educational institutions are struggling, the mainline church is floundering, and we are still disoriented by the racial pandemic, the viral pandemic, and afraid of the near future, what is flourishing? How would we teach differently if theological education was seen as a critical enterprise for creating a better world during this time of crisis?

Writing is part of the scholarly teaching life yet few of us have been trained to write well. Many of us have published articles and books without benefit of reflection upon our writing identities and our writing voices. It takes time to embrace the genuine writing voices and courage to write for resistance, liberation, and incarnation. What does it take to write as if your voice matters? What doe...

Who do we want our students to become, what do we want them to build, and how do our classrooms form them for these tasks? Are we willing to relate to our students as co-knowers, co-producers of knowledge, equal partners in the quest of learning? What kind of trust is needed for students to bring the wisdom and knowledges of their communities to bear in the classroom?   How do the commitments, obl...

We are tasked with teaching while being under siege. We are teaching persons who are living under siege. This inspirational conversation frames the need for teachers to learn communal strategies of survival which may have been previously abandoned or never learned. Learning to leap away from conformity might require teaching as the act of dreamers, conjurers, time travelers, and pilgrims. What if...

This conversation, dappled with Dr. Jennings’ readings of original poetry and prose, examines the destitution of faculty when the only legitimate expression of scholarship is to perform the values of being a white, self-sufficient, and male. Individualism, competition, and arcane merit standards have fundamentally distorted theological education. Jennings asserts that the generative aim of educati...

Learning to listen to, attend to, and care for your body strengthens our ability to cope with stress, anxiety, and trauma. In this moment of pandemics when something has happened to every-body, regularly checking-in with your body can inform if professional help is needed.  

Dialogue about these questions: How can we teach better during COVID? What does it mean to be mindful of our students’ burdens, aware of the trauma our students are carrying - so that their trouble does not impede their learning? What approaches and practices of teaching might lower student anxieties so that they might learn? What assignments can we design that will have a generative impact upon t...

Given the continued effects of the viral pandemic, compounded by weather disasters, world news of crisis and devastation, rising incidents of racism, plus any troubles unique to your own family, etc. – THIS IS A COMMUNAL MOMENT OF LONG-TERM STRESS. Teachers must ask, in the midst, how are we showing up? We know everyone is not equally affected by this moment, everyone is not participating in the s...

The barage of sustained crisis is weighing heavily.   Even while enduring crisis, moments of clarity about issues of vocation, identity, and spiritual awareness are possible. What are questions of discernment which comfort, guide, and stabilize us during this time of flux.  Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Su Yon Pak, Senior Director and Associate Professor of Integrative & Field Based Educ...

The initial shock of the pandemic crisis is over - the prolonged crisis keeps unfolding. Our up-ended lives are riddled with fear, grief and uncertainty. What does it mean to cope with the experience of “working twice as hard to get half as much done?”  This is a conversation with Mindy McGarrah Sharp (Columbia Theological Seminary) about coping in these moments.

What kinds of preparedness is there for events like mass shooting or a devastating storm? What does it mean to teach immediately after these events? What happens when these events occur in your school or immediate community or in your classroom? How does one teach when there is a national interruption? What is a trauma informed classroom? 

What is trauma and how does trauma affect body, mind, and spirit? Are there different kinds of trauma? Since classrooms are spaces of human interactions, understanding how fear and woundedness affects the teacher and the learner is critical to effective teaching. What classroom practices might lessen the experience of fear, helplessness, voicelessness, and being overwhelmed?