Race Matters in the Classroom
Wabash Center Blog Series: "Race Matters in the Classroom"
Posts from 2014 to 2017
This blog was started in response to the need for a forum on race and teaching theology and religion in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests and police response in Ferguson, Missouri. We have purposively framed the blog more broadly than this single incident.
Teaching for racial and social justice, dismantling the structures of white privilege in academia, and diversifying the faculty, the students, and the canon, are abiding concerns of the Wabash Center and many of our colleagues in the WabashNation.
See as well: "Race Matters Teaching Tactics" -- Published by ARTS Online
Nine contributors to the Wabash Center's “Race Matters” blog contribute short teaching tactics they have used to help students engage difference in meaningful ways.
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Posts
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Unsettled: Recognizing My Whiteness in Educational Practice
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
October 30, 2014
Tags: anti-racism | teaching contexts | critical thinking | white privilege
The faculty at Western Theological Seminary (WTS) in Holland, MI recently invested itself in Willie James Jennings’ book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). Three faculty members were invited to take up Jennings' claim and call, and to generate a conversation in terms of ...
Race--Not Just a Hot Topic
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
October 27, 2014
Tags: racism | anti-racism | student learning
Why does an African American woman--a Womanist black liberationist religious ethicist-- in her right mind teach for twenty-three years in a historically white seminary in the South? I have asked myself this question many, many times, and most of those times in prayer on my knees to a God that ...
The Classroom and Beyond: Race Matters and Institutional Change
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
October 23, 2014
Tags: justice | racism | engaged teaching | anti-racism
Recent spates of lethal violence against people of color—and black men and women in particular— are devastating reminders of the high cost of unaddressed oppression. The race- and class-based killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; John Crawford in Beavercreek, Ohio; Eric Gardner in Staten Island, New York; and ...
The Proclamation of Mike Brown
Blog Series: Race Matters in the Classroom
October 20, 2014
Tags: racism | anti-racism | teaching homiletics
I teach preaching at Drew Theological School. Two sets of questions guide my pedagogy. One involves hermeneutics: I compel my students to ask, ‘How does “preaching” manifest beyond our words and in the larger world?’ and ‘Why should we pay attention to what others have to say?’ The other set ...
My friend Chuck Melchert took a significant risk once when we were playing a round of golf together. Chuck retired after serving as Dean of the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, and he knows more about teaching than just about anybody I know. He also sits in on my classes ...