The Wabash Center's Dialogue On Teaching The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion

Sarah Farmer is Associate Director of the Wabash Center. 

A conversation on Dr. Farmer's latest book pointing toward the ways hope is life giving. Hope is not sanitized - not a luxury. Hope is about possibility, survival, creativity and resilience. Learning from and with incarcerated women is life changing.

Emily O. Gravett is the Assistant Director of the Teaching Area in the Center for Faculty Innovation and Associate Professor of Religion at James Madison University. 

The power dynamics of classrooms are as varied as the teachers and the learners. Building classroom communities means being attentive to and curious about students, while allowing students the space to be eager, afraid, anxious, disagreeable, and sometimes, tired. Approaching students as real, whole people, who themselves possess considerable classroom power, must be considered and critically reflected upon. 

Rev. Dr. Aizaiah G. Yong  is Assistant Professor of Spirituality at Claremont School of Theology. 

What does it take to create a classroom experience where the relational ethos among diverse learners is that we belong to one another? Learner-centered pedagogies become especially complex when learners are from a wide range of backgrounds, theologies, communities, and also possess a wide variety of aspirations and intents. What does it mean to take seriously the ways diversity of learners challenges, enriches, and creates risk in a classroom? What if teaching in diversity means humility is a primary pedagogical practice? What is the finitude of our teaching and what are our personal limits while teaching in all-kinds diversity?

The Rev. Dr. Luke Powery is Dean of Duke University Chapel and Professor of Homiletics and African and African American Studies at Duke Divinity School. 

In this conversation, hear stories of what happened when teaching spirituals in a federal prison, and the ways prisoners became teachers and "outside" teachers and students became learners. Hear how the Spirit can move in a classroom and make such spaces sites of Divine Encounter. What if the remedy for oppression is unleashing the power of teaching as theopathy in classrooms? 

Dr. Kenneth Ngwa is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew University Theological School.

Dreams are states of the awake and the asleep. Dreaming is a pedagogical space for vibrancy, nurturing, healing, new knowledges, creativity, and protection and should be centered inside the development of new pedagogies. Pedagogical austerity and bankruptcy can be helped with pedagogies that heal and repair through dreaming. Dreams help humanity understand existence, reality, and freedom. Such notions as the necessity of co-dreamers, risk-sharing, and reigniting a sense of mystery are explored. 

Dr. Ted A. Smith is Associate Dean of Faculty and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Divinity.

What could happen if several scholars, writing in community, grappled with the shifting of theological education then made their learnings accessible? The book series Theological Education Between the Times, is just that. Hear one of the series' editors discuss the generative, challenging, and joyful process of writing in community.  He also discusses his own book and his hope for the future of theological education.