Vocation as Pilgrimage

by Michael Sepidoza Campos, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies

"I am slowly learning that vocation is intimately woven within the posture of listening. The “big questions” cannot be removed from the minutiae of class preparations, student-teacher engagement and syllabus formulation. There is much to be done at maintaining vigilance before systems that silence; at fostering spaces of honest engagement rather than suffocating 'formation models' that prescribe uniformity."

In the first quarter of the Teagle Seminar for Future Faculty, “vocation” occupied a pivotal space in our discussions concerning pedagogy, method and professional accountability. It was a familiar conversation that I initially shared with Benedictine monks who likened “vocation” to a posture of listening, an engagement where God is found most profoundly in the ordinariness of quotidian relationships. While I was content among these brothers, I sensed a perennial ambivalence within the community’s commitment to stability. An elder monk reassured me that this ambivalence stood at the heart of monastic life: stability assumes that one must remain a pilgrim. Thus, vocation evokes not a definitive response to static questions, but a deeper commitment to seeking.

In reflecting upon the “big questions” among the Teagle-Wabash Fellows, I was pushed to ask: For whom do I speak? And more importantly, from where do I seek? The rhetoric of social location—and the accompanying implications of social accountability—resonates deeply with Benedict’s counsel to listen with the ear of our hearts. This is a highly politicized space where the implicit narratives of race, class, gender and power differentials must be confronted and named for the doors that they both open and shut. My access to university in the United States was mitigated largely through affirmative action. While I remain critical of a system that, at its worst, reverses dynamics of discrimination, it remains the very location that opened access to conversations that problematized ethnicity, neocolonialism, gender and class. It gave structure and language to issues that were apprehended viscerally within my community. Learning to negotiate around systems serves as much an act of listening and as it is a tactic of survival.

If the “big questions”---as tied to vocation---were configured within the political, higher education must be willing to challenge prevailing canons that privilege one perspective at the expense of another. For bell hooks, an “engaged pedagogy” does not avoid complexity through the easy prescription of universal solutions. What girds life-giving curiosity arises from encounters with difference, disjuncture and conflict. This emerges poignantly in my context as GTU grapples with its own response to diversity. For learning to be transformative, one must engage diversity as a complex body of relationships, not merely a “category of difference” to which all ethnic, class, gender and intellectual “minorities” are pigeonholed to challenge power. Learning and committed pedagogy must begin in places where incomprehensibility opens forth avenues for creative translation; where the longing for wisdom is spurred by the confusion of difference.

There is a theological underpinning to yoking one’s professional obligation to the vocational imperative behind the “big questions.” The correspondence of “calling” and “response” is itself an encounter with difference, mystery—God. It is a place of tension where theoretical engagement is embodied within:

• An institution’s commitment to financially support students from underrepresented communities;
• The encouragement of alternative assessments that honor diverse learning styles; and
• The re-imagination of a liberal arts curriculum that transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines.

Creative pedagogies at the GTU take place among students who critique from places of interdisciplinarity, from the margins of ethnic, gender, class and religious categories; at centers like the PANA Institute where proactive outreach to underrepresented communities enliven the configuration of popular education; and within conversations that “queer” theological language and trite assumptions of multi-culturality. At spaces both within and in between conventional academic study, the GTU attempts to engender creative pedagogies that pique my deepest longing for meaning. This is the posture of listening that frames my vocational commitment. There is life here, but like all efforts at transformation, there remains much more that needs to be done.

I am slowly learning that vocation is intimately woven within the posture of listening. The “big questions” cannot be removed from the minutiae of class preparations, student-teacher engagement and syllabus formulation. There is much to be done at maintaining vigilance before systems that silence; at fostering spaces of honest engagement rather than suffocating “formation models” that prescribe uniformity. I suspect that answers, really, are not what I seek. Thoughtful students ask provocative questions. Responding to one’s vocation is thus less about finding stability as it is about falling intentionally into the quagmires of our curiosity.

In this vein, the vocation of a teacher stands squarely alongside that of the monastic pilgrim who seeks.

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: What do students, teaching us about digital media, teach us about teaching?

by Steven C. Bauman, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Religion and Psychology

Today’s child is bewildered when he [sic] enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.
– Marshall McLuhan, 1967

So begins Michael Wesch's newest video on digital pedagogy.

If you’ve been living under a rock (or working on your comprehensive exams), you might not recognize Professor Wesch's name but at the time of this posting his "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" was viewed just over 3.6 million times, making it the number one video on YouTube this year.

Wesch is a cultural anthropologist by training, and his current research explores the reciprocally deterministic relationship between digital media and human functioning. As a requirement in his introductory survey classes at Kansas State University, Wesch has students apply ethnographic research methods in digital fieldwork settings such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

Not only do Wesch's students engage the course material (on a level far beyond what many of us might expect from our own students) and demonstrate learning through creative and successful application of disciplinary methods, his students' final video projects are extraordinarily remarkable. In addition, Wesch succeeds at sustaining student interest, not just throughout the course, but also beyond the semester with many joining his co-curricular Digital Ethnography Working Group.

Before you dismiss YouTube final exams as a clever pedagogical manoeuvre for pandering to undergraduates, consider this: Where many of us fail in our classrooms to bring students into the discussion, Wesch succeeds by taking the conversation to where his students are “already invested.”*

But perhaps the bigger picture is to be found in what happens to us when we step away from the white/chalk board or out from behind our lecterns. Wesch persuades us to do without our props and crutches and walk among our students to “pursue with great passion the questions that are meaningful and relevant to their own lives.”*

Wesch’s latest project, “A Vision of Students Today,” gives us a picture of what this might look like. His (or rather, Their) “Vision” puts us in an introductory survey classroom with 200 undergraduates, and for five minutes, we’re shown what’s going on behind the vacant stares and laptop typing. It is perhaps, more than we may comfortably want to know about out students.

While retreating into lecture material is obviously not an option, neither is “going native” with undergraduates. Surely, better, relevant pedagogy isn’t just about updating our technology and building more “smart” classrooms. Wesch’s latest video shows us that our students have plenty to say about what is happening in the classroom.

The question is; are we listening?


"A Vision of Students Today" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Michael Wesch – Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm

"Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

This blog entry was inspired by an October 25, 2007 segment on NPR “Future Tense.” http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/

Confessions of an Art Historian in the Field of Art and Religion

By Jenny Patten Gargiulo, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Art and Religion

"I realize now that I am hearing yet another call layered over the initial call to teach. This new call tells me that it is also my task to help artists see the tremendous gift of their creations, and help others see the spiritual value of all works of art. "

One of the first subjects that we covered this summer in the Teaching and Learning Academy was “Intercultural Teaching and Learning” led by Professor Faustino Cruz from the Franciscan School of Theology. I must admit, I didn’t expect much from the presentation as I had been to some pretty mediocre seminars on this subject in the past. I expected to come away from his presentation with the typical array of material: some new statistics about the diversity of learners and perhaps some new considerations for creating a more intercultural classroom. Professor Cruz’ presentation was anything but typical. I found that I was quite shaken up by some of his powerful and probing questions, specifically those relating to vocation, although there are certainly are some intercultural issues operating at the core!

Here are two questions that had the biggest impact on me: Whose lives are at stake by your work (teaching and research)? Who is your audience of accountability?

These questions caused something of a crisis within me. The internal dialog went something like this: “What does he mean by whose lives are at stake by my work? I’m not a paramedic, I’m a professor, and I teach art history (albeit art history with theological sophistication). Nobody’s lives are at stake by my work!”

My reaction to his question has deep roots. Ever since I declared art history as my major in undergrad (some 13 years ago) I had often been posed a different question (one that admittedly was much easier than that of Professor Cruz): “You’re majoring in art history? What are you going to do with that when you graduate?” I eventually figured out the answer to that question: “I’m going to teach art history.” But all of a sudden, that answer doesn’t seem to be cutting the mustard anymore. I wondered if my colleagues with more theological specializations are struggling with this question, or is it just me, the one specializing in what often seems to be an expendable field?

And just who is my audience of accountability, anyway? Would that be the names on my class rosters, the faces I see looking back at me when I gaze out into the classroom? Or perhaps it is my colleagues in the art department at Sonoma State University? Maybe I answer to the CAA (College Art Association – something like the AAR for the field of art history)? If not the CAA, then perhaps it is the AAR (American Academy of Religion – something like the CAA for the field of theology)? Maybe my audience is my fellow hybrid art and religion colleagues here at the GTU?

And then come more unsettling questions and considerations: What in my life is impeding me to accept the role of an academician in society? Sometimes life isn’t just about not saying something that could hurt somebody, but thinking about who could be hurt by my not saying something.

Personally, all of these questions and issues came at a crucial moment for me. I had just returned from Italy where I left my husband to care for his dying mother. I offered to give up everything I had going for me academically and professionally to be with him through this terribly difficult time. My husband encouraged me to stay the course and take advantage of enriching opportunities like the Teagle Wabash Fellowship. Thinking back on this moment, I realize I was largely motivated by my selfless love for him and empathy for the difficult months that awaited him. On the other hand, I must have seen my vocation as something rather disposable in order to consider leaving it all behind so easily. Only a week after this conversation, there I was back in Berkeley, at the beginning of the Teaching and Learning Academy, being asked to talk about great issues of meaning and value within the context of my vocation.

I wanted to know the answers to Professor Cruz’ questions, and finding the answers required a great deal of soul searching. I kept coming back to certain thoughts and images that seemed to be answering the questions for me. I saw snowflake-like Hawaiian quilt patterns (kapa) and I thought about my theological aesthetics research on the subject. I saw the faces of Hawaiian “aunties” and tutus (grandmothers and elders) and I remembered them beaming with joy when they learned that I shared their deeply theological art form with audiences at the GTU, Saint Mary’s and even the AAR, for I helped give a meaningful voice and create genuine artistic appreciation for their otherwise silenced “craft.”

I began to realize that my audience of accountability isn’t just my students, my peers and the academies; I am responsible to the artists, as well. I realize now that I am hearing yet another call layered over the initial call to teach. This new call tells me that it is also my task to help artists see the tremendous gift of their creations, and help others see the spiritual value of all works of art. Theologically some really powerful things can happen when we look at art as expressions and experiences of spirit, faith and religion. This has some big connotations for "folk art," which is often the art of marginalized people, and also for the art and material culture of popular religion, which is often not taken seriously or valued by the academy. Now I have found a new significance to my work, one that was there all along, but ironically not given voice.
Jule Kamakana's Hawaiian quilt (kapa) pattern: Hala'ai (Pineapple)