Seabury-Western Theological Seminary : 2000 Seminar

We recognized that an important feature of this curriculum would be engagement with questions of contextualization and diversity. The Episcopal Church, historically comprising predominantly upper and middle-class white members, has been grappling with institutional racism for several decades.^[2] Seabury has made several attempts to address its institutional racism, particularly during the 1990s. The Meeker Fellowship was established in 1995 to be awarded annually to a student of color in the ordination process in the Episcopal Church; in spite of this fellowship, Seabury has found it difficult to recruit of people of color, in part due to a very small pool of applicants throughout the Episcopal Church. In 1999 the first people of color were appointed to Seabury’s faculty: an African American man and an Asian American man.^[3]

In Fall 1997, thanks to vigorous recruitment efforts, the entering class for the first time ever had a substantial percentage of students of color.^[4] To prepare for this change in the student body, faculty spent a portion of its fall retreat in a training session on diversity in the classroom, including practice in the method of mutual invitation developed by Eric Law.^[5] Despite the faculty’s efforts, many of the students of color found Seabury a difficult place in which to learn. They responded by forming a support group facilitated by a local priest, an African American who graduated from Seabury in 1991.

For the first time in its history, Seabury had a “critical mass” of students of color, a reality which has gradually enabled students to name more directly their experience of institutional racism. One such incident became the case study that the Seabury faculty brought to the Lexington Seminar. In February 1999, the Seabury community celebrated the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord with a festive Eucharist planned by a team of students guided by a faculty member. In preaching class the next day, a black student expressed his hurt and anger that everyone who was vested and had a prominent leadership role in the worship was white. In the small Seabury community, where worship is central to our daily experience, this student’s comments became the topic of anguished community conversation for several weeks.

When the faculty agreed to use this incident as our case study, we saw within the case an opportunity to focus on issues of racism and diversity in the context of curriculum development. But among the faculty there were different understandings of the emphasis of our work: some gave more weight to racism, while others were principally concerned with curriculum. The team’s work in Maine in June 2000, including interaction with consultants and colleagues from other institutions, directed our attention to racism. When the team reported back to the faculty at our fall conference, some faculty were dismayed that race had become the topic of emphasis rather than curriculum development.

As the faculty developed its project proposal, curriculum revision continued, the goal being to implement a new curriculum with the entering M.Div. class in Fall 2001. To hold together curriculum development with concerns about racism and diversity, we framed the issue as “how to prepare leaders for a Church that must attend to the changing American context of God’s mission and to the changing racial and ethnic demographics of North America.”^[6] The statement reflects the full faculty’s commitment to dismantling racism and to providing an academically rigorous curriculum relevant to the current needs of the Church. Despite this statement of consensus, our different perspectives and approaches would continue to challenge us throughout the project.

2.                  Project Design

Seabury’s project has focused on the development and teaching of a new two-quarter course entitled “Gospel Mission,” a hallmark of the new curriculum. Taught by the entire faculty, the course is intended to introduce students to questions of mission and diversity that permeate the entire curriculum. Our initial goals for the project included:

·                    Faculty will deepen their understanding of diversity, racism and cultural context and will become more effective leaders on these issues.

·                    Entering students will begin to develop the ability to understand the diverse cultural milieux and context in which the Episcopal Church will be carrying out God’s mission.

·                    Entering students will begin to understand the nature and power of racism both in America and in the Episcopal Church.

The design of the project was simple. Half of the funds would be used for a consultant who would work with the faculty on issues of diversity and race in the context of the Gospel Mission course. The consultant would be present at a faculty conference twice a year, for three academic years, to help in the development and assessment of the course. The remaining funds would support the hiring of adjunct faculty, to enable regular faculty to give more focused attention to planning and teaching this new course. Implementation proved far more challenging.

The consultation process began as scheduled in May 2001, with a consultant present for one day to assist the faculty in preparing for the course, to be taught for the first time in Fall 2001. Unfortunately, the Seabury faculty did not prepare the consultant adequately for our needs and expectations. Independent of one another, the committee planning the course and the Academic Dean sent to the consultant a copy of the draft syllabus, but none of the faculty involved had any substantial conversation with the consultant prior to the conference.

The day began with faculty responding to the draft syllabus, after which our consultant, an Asian American, offered observations on our group process and invited us to adopt a set of norms for communication. The norms generated heated debate. Although the faculty eventually agreed to the norms, little time remained for the consultant to work with us on the course design or broader questions of cultural diversity. When he did turn to cultural diversity and the Gospel Mission course, some faculty found that the material was irrelevant to or not rigorous enough for our academic context. By the end of the day our relationship with the consultant was sufficiently damaged that we realized we could not continue with this consultant as planned.

While the faculty was unable to develop an ongoing working relationship with this consultant, the day was not a total loss. At one point in the conversation that day, the consultant asked whether we as faculty had anything to learn from our students. Not all the faculty responded affirmatively. However, the possibility that faculty might be learners as well as teachers has proved to be significant in developing our pedagogy for the Gospel Mission course. The consultant also recommended that each class session begin with a short Bible reflection. Implementing this was effective: in the first year the course was taught, Bible reflection provided a scriptural touchstone for each day’s study, and students found that it encouraged them to bring their experiences, questions, and opinions into the conversation.^[7]

Because the faculty was not successful in developing a working relationship with our first consultant, during Fall 2001 we evaluated and revised our project goals and design. Our new goals reflected our initial experience with the project and the course that is its focus:

·                    Faculty will develop their pedagogical abilities as teachers and learners, creating a classroom environment where people with diverse voices and experiences participate in a learning community. [An explicit focus on pedagogy is now articulated, and we acknowledge that faculty are both teachers and learners.]

·                    Entering students will begin to develop the ability to understand the diverse cultural milieux and contexts in which the Episcopal Church will be carrying out God’s mission. [no change]

·                    Entering students will begin to develop skills for conversation with people from diverse backgrounds. [This is a new goal, identified through our experience with students in the Gospel Mission course.]

·                    Entering students will begin to understand the nature and power of racism in America, the Episcopal Church, and Seabury-Western. [We added an acknowledgment of racism at Seabury.]

To accomplish these goals, we decided to look to resources within as well as beyond our institution.

Wanting to understand the experience of students of color, we invited several recent graduates to meet with us to share their experiences at Seabury. Alumni/ae and faculty met separately in the morning to prepare for the conversation. The alumni/ae group was facilitated by the same African American priest who had been their facilitator for the students-of-color group, while the faculty met with an anti-racism trainer, an African American woman, to reflect on institutional racism. In the afternoon, the alumni/ae were invited to speak, while faculty listened, to three questions:

·                    What helped you in your academic studies at Seabury?

·                    What hindered your learning, particularly as a person of color?

·                    What might the faculty do differently, so that we might better teach and learn with people of color?

Learning from our mistakes with the last consultant, two representatives of the faculty met with the facilitators prior to the conference to clarify goals and expectations for the day.

This meeting with our graduates was a painful experience for many of the faculty. When faculty met the next morning to reflect on their experiences, several expressed a sense of betrayal. Individuals with whom they felt they had developed positive relationships had criticized the classroom environment and seminary life more generally. Faculty believed they had made significant efforts to create a classroom environment hospitable to students of color and to provide course content that attended to diversity and racism, but our graduates had not acknowledged these. Moreover, our two faculty of color had been invited to have dinner with the alumni/ae after the meeting, and in that conversation more pointed criticism had emerged.

Although the faculty responded with a sense of hurt and betrayal to our graduates’ descriptions of their experiences of institutional racism at Seabury, the fact that the conversation happened is itself significant. The graduates who were present recognized the faculty’s sincerity in inviting this conversation, and faculty had an opportunity to grapple with the difficult and painful challenge of dismantling institutional racism in the context of the seminary classroom. In the context of other ongoing efforts to confront racism at Seabury, the conversation can be viewed as an experience of “living the questions,” one step in a long journey whose motivating question is clear but whose path is arduous and not always easy to discern.

In addition to the conversation with our graduates, a member of the faculty agreed to lead the faculty in a discussion of Eric Law’s new book, Sacred Acts, Holy Change.^[8] Our hope is to deepen our ability to build a diverse learning community,

Recognizing that addressing institutional racism requires the commitment and intentional efforts of all segments of the seminary community, we also agreed to schedule a two-and-a-half-day anti-racism training for faculty, students, senior administration, and trustees. A few students and faculty had already completed a program available through the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, and others participated in a diocesan training in fall 2002. A training will take place at Seabury in January 2003 for members of the Seabury community.

Finally, we will invite another consultant to help faculty reflect on our teaching and learning in the Gospel Mission course and thus continue to develop our pedagogical abilities.

3.                  Resources Used in Developing and Implementing the Project

As it was initially conceived, our project focused on the design and teaching of a specific course. To assist the faculty in this work, our plan was to identify a single consultant who would work with us, in decreasing amounts of time, for the first three years of teaching this course. But as we lived the questions, we discovered our need for additional resources, and other resources presented themselves, sometimes in unexpected places.

Our first consultant, the author of several books, is a professional consultant who is not associated with an academic institution. His presentation was not specifically aimed at an academic audience. All the Seabury faculty value academic rigor, and for several the consultant’s presentation was too facile. While commitment to academic standards was the apparent focus of resistance to the consultant’s work, there may be other factors. The consultant presented a significant question about pedagogy – “Are faculty learners as well as teachers?” – a question which challenged some of the faculty. Moreover, the topic of diversity is fraught with emotion in most contemporary North American contexts, and a seminary faculty is not immune to such tensions, even though all the faculty are committed to dismantling racism.

Our experience was painful for the consultant as well as the faculty. Yet it is likely that resistance would have emerged in some manner, regardless of the consultant’s approach. Earlier in the year, faculty were not responsive to the Dean’s efforts to introduce norms for communication at faculty meetings and conferences, and the consultant’s insistence on similar guidelines for respectful communication touched a sensitive spot. Although the consultant became a lightening rod for existing faculty disagreements, his work was beneficial insofar as it challenged the faculty to consider its own communication style, raised questions about pedagogy, and recommended a model of biblical reflection that proved useful in the classroom. The unfortunate result was that the experience moved us away from building a long-term relationship with a consultant as we designed and implemented a new course involving all the faculty.

The faculty moved toward the fall term and the implementation of a new M.Div. curriculum, including the Gospel Mission course, without identifying a consultant to continue our project. But new insight came from a different direction. In September 2001, the faculties of all eleven Episcopal seminaries met for a three-day conference on teaching and learning. The facilitator discussed “the myth of objectivism” in education and offered an alternative model, the “community of truth.” In this model, rather than the expert teacher dispensing objective truth to an audience of amateurs, both “teacher” and “students” gather as “knowers” around a subject, and the teacher allows the subject to have its own voice. To teach is then “to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.”^[9]

All but one member of the faculty were able to attend the conference, and the model of the community of truth was exciting for several. On the first day of class in the Gospel Mission, an adaptation of the model was presented. The subject was identified as the Wisdom of God, Jesus Christ, the Truth and the Way, and those who gather around the subject are learners in an interactive community formed by a common desire for God. Throughout the two quarters of Gospel Mission, faculty endeavored to implement this model.

Another benefit came indirectly from the all-seminaries faculties conference. A pre-conference questionnaire asked whether the faculty had access to a teaching and learning center. The question as well as conversation during the conference highlighted the significance of such a resource. Coincidentally, a member of the Seabury faculty had recently identified the Searle Center at Northwestern University as a resource available to us.^[10] As the faculty considered how to evaluate the first quarter of Gospel Mission, we turned to the Searle Center. In their “Small Group Analysis” process, a staff member comes to the class to conduct focus groups, asking three questions:

·                    In what ways has the instruction/instructor helped you learn in this course?

·                    Can you suggest some changes in the instruction/course that would better help you learn?

·                    Are you learning?

For an assessment of Gospel Mission, the faculty requested that the center add a question asking how well we had created a classroom environment that enables people with diverse voices and experiences to participate in a learning community. We then scheduled a follow-up meeting for all the faculty to hear what the staff had learned from our students, and we followed a similar process for the second quarter of the course.

The process provided some anecdotal data that was more useful than the standard course-evaluation form. However, we also found that the consultants, accustomed to working with undergraduate students and graduate students who are primarily in their early twenties, were surprised by the high level of motivation and assertiveness of our seminarians. Faculty have expressed hope that the Searle Center staff will be able to provide more in-depth analysis as they become more familiar with the dynamics of our institution and student body.

In addition to resources that focus on pedagogy, Seabury has turned to Crossroads Ministry, a Chicago-area interfaith ministry for racial justice, as a resource to help us better understand the nature and power of racism in our own institution and in the contexts of Church and contemporary society. As we planned our meeting with graduates, we identified a facilitator from Crossroads Ministry to work with the faculty. This facilitator did not meet the same level of resistance as the previous consultant, but several faculty members commented afterward that they had learned little about institutional racism that they had not known previously. Although the concept of institutional racism was not new, hearing about how it is experienced at Seabury by people of color was nevertheless difficult for faculty. Our graduates encouraged the faculty to listen with hearts as well as heads, a recommendation which points to the enormous challenge of living such an emotionally laden question.

Crossroads Ministry will also provide the intensive anti-racism training in January 2003 for the members of the seminary community, including students, administration, and trustees as well as faculty. The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, working with three ELCA (Lutheran) synods in Illinois, has in recent years developed the Illinois Lutheran Episcopal Anti-racism Project, and some Seabury faculty and students have participated in these training events. Bringing the training to Seabury, with different constituencies of the seminary learning together, reflects a desire to build a coalition committed to and empowered for the work of dismantling racism. We hope that even as we focus on the wider culture of the institution, we will also gain new insights into creating a classroom environment where people with diverse voices and experiences participate in a learning community. Our earlier experiences with consultants may help us recognize the reality of resistance even as we engage in this work, and to move through resistance to develop vision and strategies for the seminary and particularly for our pedagogy as we work for racial justice.

In addition to these outside resources, which have resulted in both resistance and new insights, faculty have turned to resources within the seminary community. At a faculty colloquy in Fall 2001, two members of the faculty led us in an evening of conversation about concepts of culture. Using the same readings assigned to students for Gospel Mission,^[11] the colloquy helped us develop our understanding of a key concept in this course. This ongoing academic dialogue is critical to our cohesiveness as a faculty as we jointly teach this course. However, our reflection about concepts of culture surfaced a significant difference in perspective that remains unresolved. The faculty leading the dialogue highlighted the importance of deconstructing “culture,” that is, to recognize that it is fluid and complex, not a unified whole. Other members of the faculty, speaking from their experience as members of less privileged groups (people of color, women, homosexuals), spoke of the significance of some patterns that identify subgroups. For them, formation of group identity was critical to the possibility of empowerment. Unfortunately, there has been no direct follow-up to this conversation. Use of our own resources proved helpful in surfacing the difference, but we have not continued to address it.

Graduates of Seabury were another important resource. Faculty develop significant relationships with students while they are here, and thus we approached our conversation with graduates from a basis of trust. There was much less overt resistance during this meeting than the conference with our first consultant. In addition, the graduates showed particular trust in the two faculty members of color by inviting them to dinner and then speaking candidly about their more painful experiences with particular faculty. In turn, the two faculty who heard these stories have used their relationships of trust with colleagues to bring to individual faculty members particular concerns that were identified by the graduates.

Another resource became apparent as we began to reflect on our project: a time-line. For the final project consultation, a time-line was prepared that placed the Lexington Seminar project in the context of our recent institutional history, with particular attention on efforts to address racism. This time-line is enabling us to gain perspective on our history and experiences in order to envision the next steps as we live the questions of anti-racism.

The time-line was the focus of the Lexington Seminar team’s report to the faculty at our regular fall faculty conference in 2002. The faculty conversation focused on crisis moments that the team had identified as they prepared the time-line. With a stated goal of listening to one another, members of the faculty shared their experience of these critical events in an atmosphere of open dialogue that acknowledged painful moments and developed a fuller narrative of our institutional history. We celebrated our progress evident in identifying racism as a curriculum problem and so recognizing racism as our problem, one requiring us to repent. We also acknowledged that good intentions have often led to crises, and that the panic that ensues has not sufficiently taken account of people’s feelings.

4.                  Project Results

Our project, although focused on teaching and learning in the context of a particular new course, is closely tied to both curriculum development and ongoing efforts to address institutional racism. The time-line prepared in June 2002 helped us see the complexity and interrelatedness of the issues. Our results come not only from the activities explicitly designed for the Lexington Seminar project but also from other events along the way.

An important discovery is that there were a number of attempts throughout the 1990s to identify and address institutional racism at Seabury. Despite resistance, some students and faculty have been willing to name the reality and challenge the institution to respond. The critical incident that was the essence of our Lexington Seminar narrative was one more step as we live these questions. The project which ensued has been a continuation of this work. With the institution-wide anti-racism training scheduled for January 2003, we have made a deeper institutional commitment. Our experience with the project teaches us to expect the work to continue. We are learning to recognize progress in building a diverse community that forms leaders for mission in diverse communities, and we are beginning to realize that painful moments of resistance and confrontation are part of this journey.

The time-line also helped us see how often students have led the way despite institutional resistance. For example, a statement of concerns presented by students of color to the Dean in 1991 led to the formation of a “Committee on Racism and Cross-cultural Issues”; after that committee dissipated when it became clear that there was no institutional will to make changes, student initiative in 1996 led to the formation of a “Committee to End Racism”; student response to the Feast of the Presentation celebration in 1999 identified the institutional racism evident in the all-white altar party; students first suggested that the seminary schedule an institution-wide anti-racism training. Students are an important resource, and their courage and commitment are vital to the institution’s anti-racism work.

As we developed and taught Gospel Mission for the first time, we found ourselves challenged to reflect on our different understandings of teaching and learning. We crafted the goal statement, “faculty will develop their pedagogical abilities as teachers and learners, creating a classroom environment where people with diverse voices and experiences participate in a learning community,” midway through the first quarter of Gospel Mission, after our difficult experience with one consultant and focused discussion of pedagogy at the all-seminaries faculties conference. While the statement indicates the emergence of a different vision, faculty acknowledged after completion of the first year of Gospel Mission that we were not always successful in creating a “community of truth” in the classroom. Nonetheless, we remain committed to living into this model.

Teaching together gave us numerous opportunities to experience one another’s pedagogical style and several opportunities to collaborate in groups of two or three while leading particular sessions of the course. Team-teaching in itself was a new experience for several of us. In addition, observing our colleagues’ methods enables us to consider our own methods, not only in our team-taught class but also in the classes we teach individually.^[12] We are not developing a single teaching style, but our experiences in a classroom together are enabling us to develop a community of discourse in which we are more aware of our pedagogy and so better able to develop consciously our pedagogical abilities.

While the project has had some impact on our teaching and our reflection about pedagogy, it has also had broader effects on our faculty processes. Significant differences surfaced in our responses to the first consultant and to our conversation with our graduates. Our work of curriculum revision had been relatively easy, with few significant “turf fights,” but our work around the Lexington Seminar project has been more conflictual. Faculty have a shared commitment to living the questions of academic rigor and dismantling institutional racism. But in living those questions, we are faced with our personal differences, our different social locations, and our various pedagogical approaches, and these cannot always be harmonized. Some of our conflict may reflect our evolution as a faculty rather than the specific project: we are a young faculty, with only two of the eleven members of the faculty here for longer than a decade and three members beginning their fourth year in Fall 2002. But our conflict may also be attributed in part to genuine differences in pedagogy and in part to the complexity of racism in our country today. Conflict itself is not problematic, since it offers the possibility of genuine encounter as we become more willing to risk revealing our deeply held values. However, our conflict also presents a challenge for us to learn how to disagree and how our differences might be a gift to one another and to the institution.

As with the faculty, it is difficult to attribute institutional change to the project alone. Institutional commitment to anti-racism work is apparent in the upcoming training, with members of each constituency, students, faculty, administration, and trustees, voicing willingness to participate. Students, not just those who entered in Fall 2001 and took Gospel Mission, continue to show a commitment to anti-racism work and to learning about diverse cultural milieux.

The small numbers of students of color enrolled at Seabury makes it difficult to have sustained conversation about racism and racial diversity and to see these students as individuals rather than as representatives of their race or ethnicity. In Spring 2002, Seabury announced the Absalom Jones Initiative,^[13] designed to work with African American congregations to identify and send to seminary candidates for ordained ministry.

International students add another dimension. These students bring further diversity to the classroom and the seminary community, but because their experiences are so different from those of our United States students of color, their presence increases the complexity of our efforts to address institutional racism and to consider questions of cultural diversity.

5.                  Sharing the Wisdom

On January 21, 2002, for the first time in our institutional history, Seabury cancelled classes for the celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. We celebrated Eucharist at 5:00 p.m., with a guest preacher, an African American newly elected to the Board of Trustees from the Diocese of Minnesota, and many participants from the Union of Black Episcopalians in the Diocese of Chicago. The festive celebration ended with the congregation singing “We Shall Overcome.”

After dinner in the seminary refectory, the guest preacher, at the invitation of the Dean, convened a conversation with students and faculty. She began by inviting us to speak candidly, without the usual constraints of role at Seabury. The meeting took place in Seabury Lounge, a large room which for years has been adorned with massive formal portraits of bishops robed in their ecclesiastical finery. As the evening progressed, a student voiced frustration with the portraits as monolithic images of white men, conveying a strong message about the identity of our community. Other students chimed in. Then a faculty member spoke: “I’m tired of talking about this issue! Faculty have not only been equally dismayed with the pictures, we have made numerous suggestions over the years.” Another faculty member suggested, “Let’s just take them down!” The conversation continued, with some students expressing surprise to learn that faculty found the pictures as offensive as they did. Eventually talk turned to another topic. When the evening ended, those gathered stood up, looked at one another, and began to take down the pictures. The Dean claimed for himself the removal of the picture of Samuel Seabury hanging over the fireplace. From the hall someone brought in the portrait of Enmegahbowh, a Native American priest, which for years had hung outside the entrance to Seabury Lounge.^[14]

This incident captures many aspects of Seabury’s Lexington Seminar project. It took place outside the classroom, reflecting the broader context in which the Gospel Mission course is set. As has happened so often, students led the way by naming the concerns about the portraits. Faculty commitment is evident not only in their contributions to the conversation but also in their initiative in actually removing the portraits. The growing institutional commitment is suggested by the decision to celebrate King’s birthday with the rest of the nation and by the Dean’s insistence on removing the portrait of our patron saint.

But there were also awkward moments and places of resistance, both of which have also characterized our project. Members of the Union of Black Episcopalians were invited to the Eucharist, but dinner plans were less clear. Informal invitations were quickly extended after the service, but the meal was not as elegant as we might have desired for so many guests, and food was not abundant. Resistance appeared later, as members of the community not present for the evening expressed confusion and wondered whether we were abandoning our heritage or demeaning the bishops whose portraits were removed.

Follow-up has also been uneven. An ad hoc committee recommended that the Lounge not have portraits that are installed permanently, but a process for ongoing decoration is still being developed. On Ash Wednesday, our African American chaplain for the quarter led an art pilgrimage to two sites in Chicago that had redesigned their worship spaces. At the same time, a labyrinth was made available in Seabury Lounge as an alternative means of pilgrimage. Participants on the art pilgrimage were almost entirely second-year students, while first-year students, those in Gospel Mission, remained to walk the labyrinth. Later in the year, some of the portraits removed from the Lounge were re-installed at other locations in the seminary, without seminary-wide discussion, leading some to question the seminary’s commitment to a different vision.

Despite the awkward moments, expressions of resistance, and uneven follow-up, the energy evident on Martin Luther King Day was a powerful expression viewed by many as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. We are coming to recognize other crisis moments as Spirit-filled opportunities. At Seabury, we continue to live the questions, learning how to build a diverse and welcoming community of empowered and empowering leaders for Christ’s Church and God’s mission in the world.