embodied teaching

Many of us are familiar with the scripture from Jeremiah 1:5: “before you were formed in your mother’s womb, I knew you” (NIV). It reminds us of the immortal aspect of our human spirit.  In the context of West African cosmologies, it is our spiritual essence that is with the ...

The conversation goes like this: “I saw you having class outside today.” “Yep! Great day!” “Don’t students get distracted outside?” Or … “I would do that, but I have PowerPoints.” Or… “I would, but I have 35 students.” Or… “What do you do with students who don’t want to?” I ...

To My Beloveds, What they don’t tell you about being neither-this-nor-that is that it’s problematic. You are always living in the in-betweenness of things. That means you’re suspect, you’re shifty, you can’t be trusted. People want you to pick one thing, to be one thing, ...

I think every theological educator asks themselves some form of the following question: What is the raison d’être for my teaching? Sometimes this reflection manifests in a functional way amid the immediacy of constructing a syllabus as we interrogate our learning objectives. But there are also moments where we ...

My first year at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaching Introduction to Black Theology, I failed myself and my students. I opened the class with a twenty-one minute clip of the most brutal scene  from the television mini-series Roots, which aired in January of 1977. The clip showed Kunta Kinte, brutally beaten with ...