Learning Involves Moving and Being Moved—Part 1: Hinge Moments

Can you identify the hinge moments that moved you into a vocation of theological education?  Did these moments involve a teacher, a passage, or an unsettling experience?

I can identify hinge moments that moved me.  I recall distinct teachers from childhood to college who drew out and expected my best work.

A midrash that I read in a post-Shoah ethics course moved me into a vocation of questioning theological responses to past and present intertwined instances and institutions of human suffering.

I also remember the day volunteering in the hospital labor and delivery unit (filing charts, or helping wobbly support partners to a chair) when I noticed flower delivery hospital staff knocking on doors of rooms where a stillbirth had occurred.  I have found that like many theologians and ministers, I moved from focusing on science into a life of theology.

My hinge moments are often places where anguish and pain and beauty interrupted the rhythms of an otherwise ordinary day.  What are your hinge moments?

Mapping Dislocations

Hinge moments often evoke dislocation, opening certainties and unfolding more multidimensional possibilities to what appeared to be smoothed out maps.  For theological educators trained to map a place in a field, carve out a scholarship domain, advance a particular line of thought, maps and  map-making are key vocational tools to meet the dislocations that new questions of hinge moments propose.

A text, a question, a teacher, an experience of suffering, recognition of an exceptional beauty that is moving is also dislocating.  How do teachers and students map these dislocations in order to chart them or make way for new paths diverting from the familiar?

Before cell phones, I loved to unfold and fold paper maps of various scales. Once unfolded, used paper maps never quite fold back into an original neat and tidy form.  I have a box of paper maps and can easily tell which maps have been used by the bulkiness of the refolding.  Like a spiritual practice of labyrinth walking, every turn is important, every dislocation worth noting.

How do theological educators support students’ dislocations when students are moved by a text, a question, a teacher, an experience of suffering that demands an uncharted response?

Free to Travel?

Do the map-making tools we teach students allow for the time and space to move where learning is leading?  “Feel free to travel to where your work is taking you,” writes Laraine Herring in Writing Begins with Breath. Academia is moving.  Even while pushing boundaries within some parameters, whatever is new, deeper, exciting, and innovative drives publishing, teaching, and scholarship.

Learning moves, at its best, through enlightening and challenging conversations that advance discourses through time in relation to ever-unfolding perspectives on texts, histories, theologies, geographies, and practices that matter enough to drive sustained study.  This holds for scholars and students.

Are you are a learner who is free to travel where your work is taking you?  Theological educators must examine our power to host the kind of moving experiences that drive learning.  Famed psychologist Carl Rogers noted in the mid-twentieth century that the best way to support a person is to support her or his becoming.  We theological educators must consider how assignments, texts, and classrooms are set up to assist students in moving through learning in their unique ways of becoming.

Womanist theologians are particularly important guides in seeking responsible recognition and use of power in teaching—from Dr. Monica Coleman’s Making a Way out of No Way to Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon’s recognition of the vulnerability of theorizing from the mouth of a lion to significant concerns around power outlined by women academics in Presumed Incompetent.  Educators and students have to travel carefully through hinge moments, dislocations, and vocation’s deepest callings for movement.

Lost in Wonder

Facilitating learning as a moving experience requires accompanying students and teachers through the loss of previous understandings opened by wonder.   Well noted in pastoral care, grief studies, psychological study of defenses, and even creativity research, meaningful learning often comes with loss.

At its best, learning involves moving and being moved.  In the arc of a course within a curriculum’s rhythm, embodied learning is invigorating because it welcomes wonder around the yet unknown.   This work requires focused effort and can become draining.  Moving is both taken for granted as in the case of everyday practices, and beckons extension of new muscle connections after exerting energy in new or long forgotten ways.  In sum, learning as moving is both poetics and politics of moving into wonder.  Learning happens in the confines of teaching practices and institutions when getting lost is bearable and creative for both teachers and students.  How do you support yourself and your students through the moving experiences of learning?

Photo Credit: “Irish United Nations Veterans Association house and memorial garden (Arbour Hill)” by William Murphy – CC by 2.0

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