Archives for December 2020

COVID-19 forced a long-overdue reckoning with various problematic aspects of the academy. Ranging from creating equitable classrooms and workspaces to securing meaningful job placements for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx faculty, the issues that we are now dealing with “out loud” are ones that many of us have been contending with ...

How can theological education help students deepen their empathy for people who lack permanent homes even while a pandemic makes face-to-face conversations on streets and in shelters unsafe? Dr. Mitzi J. Smith of Columbia Theological Seminary and I have reflected on that question together with Drs. Marcia Riggs and Mary ...

There’s a case to be made for rigor in teaching, which is a practice grounded in both art and science. Rigor in instructional design is particularly necessary for online instruction. The more we learn about the cognition of learning, most notably from the neurosciences, the more we appreciate that ...

Listen to Dr. Westfield read this blog post in her "I'm Just Saying" audio blog series “Will somebody please Hold My Mule,” might sound like an urgent plea for animal restraint. Spoken in the African American vernacular tradition, it is a warning of a pending ecstatic release. But, here, context ...

As the fall semester draws to a close, I reflect on how our classrooms continue to absorb the dense impact of exhaustion, grief, and so many unknowns. The isolation and physical distancing brought by COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 have remained a reality for much longer than any of ...