Learning Involves Moving and Being Moved—Part 2: Six Strategies of an Invitational Pedagogy

In a previous post, I considered how theological education requires both teachers and students (and administrators) to recognize hinge moments, map dislocations, acknowledge losses, and wrestle with inherent power dynamics involved in the poetics and politics of learning.  The following pedagogical and strategic invitations support becoming a moving classroom:

1.      Invite Movement

Talk about and start moving.  In first day introductions, I invite students to share the kinds of physical movement required to arrive at class.  Some students work, others drive from near and far, others have another class just before mine.  The learning community can honor each other’s movements when they learn this from each other.  Find ways to talk about types of movement and obstacles involved.

Move students physically by grouping and re-grouping.  Moving supports deeper conversations while thickening a learning process.  Whether in a traditional semester long on-campus course or in an online course, lecture, whole group discussion, small group discussion, partner exercises, and individual reflection moves learning through various voices in a particular class.[1]  Students learn course content even better and are moved by each other when peer partnering is woven into pedagogy.

2.      Invite Mapping

The Course Syllabus maps a course’s planned movements.  The Wabash syllabus project in connection with AAR/SBL provides a wealth of examples for using the syllabus to map both dislocations and locations prompted by moving in and out of readings and course sub-themes.

In my first semester teaching, I realized that students needed help moving in and out of course readings.   I created a “rule for life-giving learning” to support practices of reading, writing, course participation, and editing.  I now use this document across my classes and add to it nearly every semester I have also found that re-reading the syllabus and rule for life-giving learning with students throughout the semester opens these documents to greater depth of engagement.

3.      Invite Emotional Complexity

When teachers and students are moved by learning in the classroom, it can be difficult to stop and recognize the accompanying emotions.  I have used two strategies to invite emotional complexity into a learning process.

I regularly use variations of Stephen Brookfield’s “critical incidence questionnaire” that draws on a spiritual discipline of the examen to invite anonymous feedback around what is most engaging, least engaging, most surprising, most affirming, and more for a particular course day or segment.  Students appreciate being asked for feedback on pedagogy.  Student feedback can thus motivate small shifts within the arc of a course that can build trust.

After a particularly difficult concept, discussion, or case study, I often pause to solicit emotions.  I ask each student to name at least one emotion while I write what I hear on the physical or online discussion board.  I usually include the phrase “unnamed emotions” on the list.  I include my emotional responses.

Inviting students to name emotions marks the learning community as living, breathing, moving, feeling, becoming.  Rather than simply agreement or disagreement, students share a complex mix of frustration, gratitude, sorrow, hope, lament, joy, and other emotions evoked in learning.

4.      Invite Grief

Learning nearly always involves loss.   In a recent class session, students reported the loss that they will not be able to unlearn what they now know.  Especially at the end of a semester, but also along the way, I try to name and invite space to discuss students’ grieving connected to their learning.

Students yearn for more time to grieve and heal together before going their separate ways after graduation.  No one class should hold the weight of formation within theological education.  Where are the multiple moments in your course and curriculum that make room for the grief and healing of learning?

5.      Invite Course, Curricular, and Public Connections

Learning moves through connections between course content, theological curriculum, and public discourses.  Find ways to name and share what moves you in teaching a particular course.  Also find ways to ask students to name and share what moves them.

For example, near the end of the semester, I divide assigned reading from the entire semester among the students.  I ask students to select one passage from their designated reading that they found particularly moving.  On the last day of class, I reserve some time for students to voice these passages.  Samples from all of the course readings in the students’ own voices fill the room.  Both students and I find this to be a moving exercise.

Connections can also reach across the curriculum and into public spaces of conversation.  Theological education increasingly invites interdisciplinary connections.  I join many colleagues in experimenting through co-taught courses, designing assignments and that invite connections with other course content, and organizing “collaborative moments” across two or more classes.

Students can also be encouraged to bring course content into conversation with public discourse.  For example, increasing cries for justice around “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and the many other sisters and brothers around the world – close to and far from public eyes – in the Fall 2014 and mounting international protests pose challenges to each and every seminary course to find a way to move public discourse around race and violence from “out there” into theological education.

6.      Invite an Open Future

Phenomenologists and narrative theorists note the importance of a horizon to learning – a not yet that beckons engaged, creative, responsible movement.  Self-psychologist Heinz Kohut insists on “postponing closures” when interpreting any life experience, one’s own or on behalf of another person.

Learning has more room to move and breathe when a learning process yields to an open future, leaving room to move discourses, interpretations, theological claims, and processes of becoming into a life’s vocation.  Gifted assessment leaders note that measuring learning involves not only this semester’s assignments, but also how this semester is lived over time.

Imagine future courses, pause to reflect mid-stream, and look back over past courses.  Look for ways to invite open-ended moments in student learning and your own.  Embrace moving into an open future of learning.

Photo Credit: “horizon (2)” by bill lapp – CC by 2.0

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