A few years ago, Dr. Bob McKelvain spoke at either Faculty Pre-Session or the College of Arts and Sciences faculty meeting in August. His specific topic was course evaluations, their pitfalls, and how they could be improved, but his remarks really focused on the nature of the relationship between professor and student in the classroom. He talked about the need to remove the adversarial feeling, the need to resist the idea that professors impart and students receive, that they perform and we judge. Instead, teaching—and course evaluations—work better when we try to make our classrooms into spaces for cooperation and collaboration, when professors are active co-learners with the students.

I found Bob’s remarks really striking because they seemed to resonate with some of the limitations I felt I was experiencing in my own teaching. Because I was very young (26) as a new professor and because mentors had led me to expect challenges from some students on account of my being female as well as young, I think I felt an increased and probably somewhat unnecessary pressure to prove myself as a tough classroom teacher as I began my career at ACU. I didn’t want to put up with any kind of nonsense, and I didn’t want to offer extra credit or second chances, because I feared that a too-relaxed classroom or too much grace would hurt my ability to command students’ attention and respect. I also came out of graduate school, after teaching enormous sections of history surveys at a large state university, with the distinct impression that college is not for everyone, that some people go to college who really ought to be in vocational school, and that it was part of my job to weed those people out. In the same vein, I found it very difficult and uncomfortable to ever admit in class that I didn’t know something. I felt that I had to be the one with the knowledge and the control at all times, or I would risk losing my authority in the room. Basically, I held a set of attitudes that ultimately promoted that adversarial sense between professor and student that Bob McKelvain was talking about. Instead of viewing teaching as a collaborative, cooperative, mentoring effort that could teach me something as well as the student, I saw it as a one-way street. And if the student wasn’t successful because he wasn’t prepared, that didn’t have anything to do with me.

To a certain extent, I still hold some of the attitudes that shaped my teaching in my first couple of years at ACU. I still firmly believe that college students are adults who must bear final responsibility for their own academic success or failure, and I still occasionally come across a student who might be better off pursuing a career path that does not include a liberal arts degree. However, my interactions over the last five years with students and professors here, as well as certain experiences in my own life, have significantly modified my approach to teaching, and how I understand my role in the relationship between student and professor.

Connected to this has been a shift in how I feel I should convey material that may be challenging to the worldviews of many ACU students. In several of my courses, especially Core 210, Civilizations I, Renaissance and Reformation, and Mongols, Poppies, and Satyagraha, some of the texts we read and ideas we encounter in the class are unfamiliar and even uncomfortable for students. The Epic of Gilgamesh, read in the context of lecture and discussion about ancient Mesopotamia and the way early humanity understood cosmology and human nature, can lead students to question what they have been taught about the Biblical text and to think about why religion exists and how it is formed.  Selections from the Quran, which I assign in both Core 210 and Civ I, surprise and discomfit many of our students who think they already know what Islam is about. They do not expect to find familiar stories about Noah and Jesus, or to read that Christians and Jews are people of the book, or to hear that the God of Abraham is also the God of Muhammad. The Analects of Confucius, selections from the Dao te Jing, and the Hindu dharma shastras similarly prove to contain much that sounds familiar and good—Confucius stated a version of Christ’s golden rule long before Jesus lived, for example. The moments when we engage such material in courses are often those moments on which the rest of the course hinges. If I push the students too hard, or if I come across as too adversarial and challenging, I lose them. They decide I am a bad Christian role model or that I have a political agenda, and they tune me out. Several experiences have helped me fine tune the way I carry these difficult conversations in the classroom. Here are some of the things I have learned about teaching in the last five years at ACU:

First, a good professor always presents herself as a seeker of knowledge, not as someone who has everything figured out. It is honest in me, and it is helpful to the students, to hear me say things like, “this idea/event that happened/text makes me uncomfortable.” “I don’t know the answer.” “How should we respond to this with intellectual honesty and faith?” Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Learning to Walk in the Dark and the talk she gave at Summit in September 2014 helped me significantly here. I’ve come to realize that it can be spiritually dangerous to refuse to admit that we don’t understand something, or to insist that something is knowable and easy when it isn’t. Questions and tensions and doubts can be good. In fact, God often acts most powerfully in the dark, in the places where humans can see nothing. In the last couple of years, I’ve thought a lot more about how to model that kind of faith life and intellectual behavior for my students, and to engage in that kind of seeking in the classroom. To put this in more concrete terms, when I last taught about Islam and guided my Core 210 students through selections from the Quran, I talked explicitly with the students about why we assign texts that we know present some level of challenge to their faith and worldview.  The reason, I told them, is not just because Islam is an important global historical phenomenon that any liberal arts education should explore. It’s important to study Islam (or any other worldview that is often set up as the opposite of one’s own) because finding something familiar and good in the tradition of someone who is different from us promotes peace and understanding, and it also forces us to acknowledge that what we think we know is not necessarily the entire truth.

Second, it is okay and sometimes very effective in teaching to allow myself to be somewhat vulnerable in front of my students. I’ll never forget a moment in the first semester I taught Core 120, with Professors Greg Straughn and Susan Lewis. It was the spring of 2011, the first year of the Core curriculum, and student hostility towards Core and Core faculty was at its peak. That particular group of students (over 100 of them) was quite diverse for an ACU class; and the students tended to divide themselves by race when they chose seats in the room. At this point in the semester, we were sometimes having trouble even getting the students to listen and pay attention in class. On this particular day, we had been talking about caste and inequality in Hinduism, and Greg and Susan and I decided to try to make the material more relevant by comparing ancient Indian inequalities to differences of class and race in our own society. We put up charts and graphs comparing the likelihood of being incarcerated by race, and we showed captioned photographs of black and white people after Hurricane Katrina, the former “looting” and the latter “finding food.”

As I talked through this material with that divided group of students, many of whom openly loathed the class and saw no reason to pay attention to us, my frustration with the feeling of working hard but getting nowhere, my concern about these students, and my passion about the topic we were discussing all boiled over, and as I spoke to them about race and injustice and our role as Christians in engaging with the problems in our society, I became pretty emotional. I never lost control, but my voice shook. And for the first time that semester, the classroom went utterly silent. The students listened. And I think many of them saw me for the first time not as an adversary or an authority figure but as a person like them. After that day, though Core 120 of Spring ‘11 never became an easy class to teach, I felt from the students a greater willingness to hear, an acknowledgment that we might be teaching this material because we actually care about it and them, and not because we just wanted to torture them. I certainly don’t make it a policy to get weepy in class on a regular basis, but this experience did teach me that displaying some vulnerability and humanity can make it easier for students to connect with me and to become willing to share in their turn.

Third, teaching and mentoring are acts of hospitality, sometimes literally. Nothing promotes classroom community like pouring tea, bringing homemade bread and jelly to class, or cooking students breakfast in my home. Lauren Lemley and I grilled 70 hotdogs at the baseball stadium one day for Core 120. The students lay in the grass and ate hotdogs and we talked about stereotypes in American culture. It was fun and relaxing, and the students really remembered the material we had covered that day when it came time for exams. I always try to have my smaller majors courses end with a meal at my house. Enrollments in those courses are small enough that we can all sit around the table together and laugh and eat and share life. And in spring 2015, now in our new house that can hold a crowd, my husband/colleague Jeremy and I began what I hope will be an annual tradition of hosting end-of-the-year department gatherings at our place in the country. We had forty or so History and Global Studies Students for a cookout, games, a senior blessing, and a walk over the acreage on Saturday, and then held the annual reading of the student literary magazine The Shinnery Review with Jeremy’s Department of Language and Literature on the following Thursday. In a week otherwise fraught by difficult personal and medical news, it was incredibly life-giving to have our home full of students and colleagues eating and sharing their work and making music.

Hospitality as an attitude to teaching can apply in a more formal educational setting, as well. My demeanor in the classroom—whether I listen and respond carefully and with genuineness to what students say—demonstrates hospitality. I think it’s even more important to cultivate a hospitable attitude by promoting regular person-to-person and smaller group interactions among students and between students and myself. I’ve found through trial and error that, in an upper-level course where I have assigned a major research project, the quality of research and writing and the depth and significance of classroom community and long-term mentoring increase significantly if I intentionally schedule research tutorials. In these settings, students meet with me individually to discuss the sources they’ve found, their research questions, and difficulties in writing and editing, but they also see and hear me demonstrating to them that I value them as individuals, that I am interested in their work, and that I encourage them to be better. (Sometimes these meetings involve me giving a low-performing student a metaphorical kick in the pants, too, but even those conversations convey that I care about what they’re doing.) One-on-one conversations like these begin with research questions and source discussion, but frequently they also lead to discussion of future plans for career or graduate school or queries about how to handle a difficult situation with a roommate or another professor. Basically, if I practice compassionate hospitality with my students, they are more likely to give me an opportunity to help them in a meaningful way, or, reciprocally, for me to learn something from them.

Though I expect that my experiences will continue to influence my views, this is my modified philosophy of teaching:

As a professor, I have daily opportunities to engage in meaningful, authentic discussions with students about events and ideas that matter. To teach well, I must:

• maintain a passionate and current interest in the subjects I teach and in how contemporary culture reflects and engages with those subjects. If I can’t show that the course material is relevant, why should they care?
• convey ideas and information to students with enthusiasm and with a posture of open-mindedness and interest in their perspective
• ask questions without clear answers, and be willing to say “I don’t know”
• give careful attention to the voices of students, their subject positions, and their attitudes towards other students and towards myself
• listen compassionately
• be honest and vulnerable about my own position as a learner and a Christ-follower who engages with difficult topics, both in history and in contemporary life

My attempt to cultivate these habits in teaching is an attempt to love my students with Christ’s love, or at the very least to treat my students as I hope one day college professors will treat my child. This doesn’t mean that I am an easy teacher or a pushover. Sometimes it even means that I am more stern than I would otherwise be, because I care when a student with ability and talent is wasting that talent. I try to approach every interaction with students with thoughtful preparation, energy, compassion, and respect. When I am somewhat successful at this, I often find that ACU students become some of my very favorite people—surprising, funny, honest, and doing great things in the world.  They’re the biggest reason why I love this job.

Philosophy of History Teaching

Because I’m not sure that it is relevant and I don’t wish to take up the committee members’ time unnecessarily, I’m not going to discuss my philosophy of history here.  But I would like to briefly explain some ideas that influence how I teach in my discipline specifically.

My philosophy of history teaching flows from my desire to model for students a life of historical curiosity and scholarly engagement in which one constantly seeks to make connections between past and present in the light of our understanding of God and God’s redemptive work in the world.  This does not mean that I teach a providential view of history–in fact, I caution students against facile statements about God’s role in, say, the success of the United States in the twentieth century.  Rather, I try to help students ask incisive, intelligent questions that are informed both by accurate historical knowledge and by Christian love and humility.  The summer of 2015 debate about the appropriate place of the Confederate Battle Flag in the wake of the racially-motivated murder of nine worshippers at a Charleston AME church is a perfect example of why it’s crucial to teach students to examine current events and debates through the dual lenses of historical context and Jesus’s upside-down kingdom.  Showing students how to think with both of those things is mind is probably the most important thing I do.

In more concrete terms, I have designed courses here with an eye to preparing students adequately for jobs or graduate work in museums and archives, public or state research and service, or as professors or teachers.  In pitching my classes, I try to aim at a level that challenges the brightest students without leaving less prepared individuals behind.  I also consider those things that I appreciated, and those things that were lacking, in my own education.  I try to include instruction in skills that I wished I had when I got to graduate school.  So, for example, I teach the Historical Methods students how to write a precis and a formal book review–both things I had to muddle through on my own as a new graduate student.  I painstakingly explain the processes of finding, evaluating, and incorporating source material, because I know that this information will be invaluable to the students as they continue on in their college careers.  Finally, I attempt to challenge assumptions–religious, political, philosophical–that need stretching.  Hence our discussions of the Quran in Civ I, of what was lost in the Protestant Reformation, of the origins of twentieth-century governmental legislation related to the reproductive capacities of citizens.  I hope that I am never communicating a specific political view; instead, I want to make sure that students’ opinions are well-considered and informed by historical understanding.  I teach this kind of thinking by modeling it as I portray sensitive topics, moderate discussion among students, and choose reading materials, artifacts, and activities that challenge all of us.

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