Resources by Emily S. Kahm

In my first blog on this topic I tackled the question of how to create attendance policies that are suitable for the class content and context. But all this focus on the students neglects one more important factor – what about an attendance policy for the instructor?This was not a major concern of mine when I began teaching, but in the years since, I have had children and communicable illnesses have become a substantially more regular part of my life. I also began my current role in Fall of 2019, just before the pandemic began, which changed much of our larger discourse about “pushing through” illnesses and being present no matter what. But the same issues arise for any instructor who discovers they have to cancel a class unexpectedly – anyone who needs to do more complicated travel to get to a conference than expected, who is invited for a guest lecture with limited lead time, who is on the job market and might get a coveted on-campus interview. How do we cancel classes well?Now that I have a preschooler and a kindergartener, I cannot get through a semester without a cancellation due to their illnesses (which invariably become my illnesses). This term, I finally wrote an attendance policy for myself that I included in my syllabi. Here are a few things I considered while creating my expectations:As with any job, advance notice is best. I have promised my students that I will let them know class is cancelled as soon as I possibly can – which sometimes means I need to make a decision the night before rather than the morning of. When in doubt, I err on the side of cancelling if I’m sick – nobody needs my lecture enough that it’s worth them getting ill.I will not require my students to do any “makeup” work that takes more time than a normal class would have; whenever possible, I will keep makeup assignments significantly shorter than class time. Piling on unexpected work just feels unfair to me, but this standard is also key since I may not have an alternative assignment available by their usual class time. I need to respect that the hours students carve out for my course might be all the time they have, and additional work may cost them time they have to allocate elsewhere. I can show respect for my students’ complex lives by keeping things concise.When alternate assignments are needed, I use methods that students are already familiar with so that they are not wasting time trying to explore a new technology when I want them to be focused on course content. If I don’t use discussion boards in a class, I don’t ask students to use a discussion board for a cancelled day. Typically, I record my classes and rely on the video to create a shortened lecture.Sometimes, just skipping the day is fine. This won’t be possible for all sorts of courses – when classes are composed so that prior concepts need to be fully understood before moving on, skipping may never be an option – but my own course design is more iterative and removing any one day isn’t going to collapse the structure. I always mourn when I have to pull out a day of content that I love, but sometimes it’s better for my students and myself to move on without stressing about covering every single idea and story that I hoped for.We don’t plan our syllabi with last-minute changes in mind, but having a few priorities when imagining cancellations – and taking a moment to craft your own instructor attendance policy – can save you time and headaches when things don’t go as planned.

There is nothing simple about creating attendance policies. Instructors, rightly, find themselves all over a spectrum of expectations and philosophies, informed by their own experiences as students, their departmental standards, their student population, and their own interest in monitoring learners. I myself have ranged from no attendance policy whatsoever, to point loss for absences, all the way to my current policy, which I’ll discuss below. Regardless, I would suggest that teachers think about two major questions when they have the freedom to craft their own attendance standards. 1. What is the likelihood that an invested student will have to miss class at least once or twice during the semester?This involves analyzing factors like the prevalence of communicable illness (do most of your students live in residence halls where norovirus could sweep through hundreds of them within a month?), the socioeconomic realities (do many students balance school with jobs they need for living expenses? Do they have access to reliable public transit, and if not, how does the need for carpools/rides or the reliability of their personal vehicles factor in?), and family obligations (are many learners parents who would be required to stay home with their sick children?). There’s no simple calculus here, but in general, if it’s likely that even the most earnest students will have to miss class sometimes, one’s attendance policy might need to be more generous. 2. How have I constructed the course and assessments?For courses where each day of class depends heavily on comprehending the materials of the previous day, attendance policies may be a way to incentivize that necessary regular attendance. For courses that circle more than build, an occasional absence may not significantly impact a learner’s ability to meet the larger course goals, and a looser attendance policy might give students a “release valve” to take care of their larger needs every now and then. One semester I found myself stuck after my loosey-goosey attendance policy meant that I regularly had half-full classrooms. I knew something had to change, so I reflected.First, in my context at a small women’s college where we focus on first-generation students, single moms, and undocumented students, I knew that missing class was part of life for my learners. Sick kiddos, broken-down cars, and demanding jobs – some of them full-time – meant that perfect attendance would be rare. It also seemed that my students, who have the incredibly high stress levels that come with all those considerations, get sick more often and more severely. I didn’t want a policy that added more strain on them.Second, my courses are designed to be spirals rather than building blocks; we come back to the same major themes frequently throughout the term, each time from a new angle. I don’t need my students to fully comprehend a concept before we can move on because I know it will come back around and they might latch on better then. This means I can afford some leniency because a student can still perform very well on assessments even if they miss a day here or there.All of this meant that my first instinct wasn’t too far off – a gentler attendance policy works with my content and for my students. But how could I avoid those half-empty rooms? In the end, I did something radical – I asked my students what they thought I should do. I told them that I wanted to incentivize being in class, because a robust learning community makes the content more interesting and memorable, but that I couldn’t countenance a policy that would punish someone for being seriously ill or dealing with a major life event. Within the space of ten minutes, we had come up with a policy that made sense to them and me, and which I currently use. At the start of the term, each student gets a set number of attendance points. If they miss, I take away points… until they prove to me that they’ve caught up on the material. (I record all my classes, so my students watch the video and then show me their notes to get their points back). It’s easier for students to just show up than it is to do the makeup work, but no one’s grade is ever permanently impacted if they have to miss classes. It might not work for everyone, but it makes sense for my courses and context.How have you crafted your attendance policies?

Continuing on themes from the last blog in this series, another antiracism pro-tip for classroom teaching comes both from a story an early-career mentor of mine told me, and then directly from the mouths of my own students: for the love of God, always assign groups in class! If you want students to talk to anyone else in class, tell them precisely who they’re talking to and give them a specific question or two to work on together. Why is this an antiracist practice? In short, students have a strong tendency (sometimes conscious, sometimes not) to self-segregate in classes. Assigning groups disrupts this tendency.For this wisdom, I was allowed to stand on the shoulders of another teacher rather than waiting until I screwed things up profoundly enough that I actually noticed it. In one of my first years of teaching, a mentor in our new faculty circle talked about her past practice of telling students to just “pair up!” to discuss class material. She saw no issues with this practice, apart from a few quiet students, until one day when she was teaching a course with two Black male students among a much whiter cohort. These students didn’t sit near each other, or seem to know each other; but when she instructed everyone to find a partner, neither of them even bothered to look up to their nearest neighbors. Instead, a beat after everyone else had started chattering, the young man in the front row slowly lifted his head and made eye contact with the young man seated in the back. Both had assumed, rightly, that they would not be tapped by their white classmates to be partners; both knew that whether or not they were friends, they were “other” in this classroom, and that made them de facto partners.The obvious shame that my mentor felt in articulating this story stuck with me, and so assigning groups has consistently been part of my practice. However, I didn’t realize that I was doing something particularly different until I held an Antiracism Learn-Along event for students at my school where I opened space for them to discuss experiences around race and belonging at our college. Many of them immediately agreed that the school can quickly become “cliquey” and that racial groups tend to stick together unless prompted to do otherwise. Some students of color reported getting “dirty looks” when trying to join into a pre-existing group of white women, but even more said that they simply wouldn’t bother trying – they’d been burned before, often in high school, when attempting to be friendly to white people. They weren’t going to risk the same rejection here if they had the option of staying with people who looked more like themselves.Despite these experiences, the students said that professors requiring a mix-up of the room really did help over the long term, both in making friendly connections and being able to learn from other perspectives. I have endless ways of sorting students: making them “speed-date” in pairs that only have to converse for one minute, grouping them based on where they sit, grouping them by order on the roster, grouping them by alliterative first names (one of the unique joys of teaching at a women’s college in 2024 is being able to call out “Kiley, Kya, Kayleigh, and Caitlin” followed by “Haley, Hailey, Bailey, and Kayley” in rapid succession. I’m not even making these examples up). Sometimes I craft groups before class, and other times I sort it out when I see who came for the day. Some days I let students stay with their friends, and other days I make them talk to someone who sits across the room. I put my most boisterous people together and my shyest people together to see what happens, then try to balance the talkers and listeners on another day. Because my students are so used to being mixed up, they don’t even notice that some days I ensure that no student of color is alone in a group of white learners, or that some days I put all my Latina students together when discussing something relevant to Latinx culture, so that they don’t have to re-explain their heritage to others. Usually within four to six weeks in the term, students are comfortable enough with this apparent unpredictability that discussion starts flowing easily regardless of what group they’re in.Students may not notice how this practice can serve an antiracist commitment right away, if ever—it’s not as obvious as visually diverse representation on slides, or including authorial racial identities on an LMS—but assigning groups every time can very quickly disrupt the usual patterns of self-segregation in a classroom, and contribute to a more effective learning environment overall.

As I said in my earlier blog in this series, it can be a relief for teachers to know that making a course more antiracist isn’t only about introducing fraught topics and crossing one’s fingers that students have the self-awareness to handle them; antiracism can be present structurally, in much the same way that racism can be present structurally. In this blog, I will explore two practices I use in my own teaching to help promote a more antiracist learning environment, neither of which involve staging contentious debates or calling out individuals to speak on their experiences. While neither practice can suddenly create a perfectly antiracist classroom, they can help move one’s overall teaching farther along that spectrum.The first place to start is examining imagery usage in one’s class. I personally came late to PowerPoints in my teaching (only really becoming proficient in slides during remote-synchronous learning in the pandemic when writing things on the board was no longer an option), so imagery for me was initially confined to my online course structure in my LMS. I dislike “plain” pages with nothing but text, so I was habitually using stock images on assignments and pages to offer some visual breaks – close-ups of water, forest photos, and so on. This continued until I was slotted to teach Women in the Bible and started exploring imagery for the Biblical figures I planned to focus on. Initial Google Image searching yielded everything from cartoons to Renaissance oil paintings and everything in between – but the enduring theme was that most representations depicted Bible characters as white, white, white!This was irritating on multiple levels. Historical accuracy was certainly a factor, but even if we could all agree that nobody really knows what Ruth and Naomi looked like, why do so many artists seem to assume they were pale-skinned and fair-haired? (The answer, in short, is white supremacy and Eurocentric Christian bias, but if you’re reading a blog like this one, you probably already knew that). I was saved in that course by discovering James C. Lewis’s Icons of the Bible artistic photography series, a project that depicts Bible figures more accurately with models who are exclusively people of color. Sweet relief!Once slide decks became a more typical staple of my teaching techniques, then, I already had some experience realizing that the way I depicted people and communities on these slides would affect my students’ imagination. I teach at a women’s college, so I started by ensuring that my stock images included far fewer men than women, and then aimed to depict a wide range of racial diversity in each slide series. In teaching my class on Bodies in Christian Theology, I also learned to emphasize size diversity, visible disability, and visible queerness to continually enforce the implicit curriculum that Theology is for everyone and is done by everyone. For those who mostly use slides for text, I encourage you to experiment with the color and liveliness that comes with human images – and to use two or three stock photos rather than just one at a time. PowerPoint’s Design function can help you work them in tidily, and you have another subtle antiracist practice in your toolkit.

It’s a relief to some professors to find that making their course antiracist is not simply about introducing heavy and sometimes politicized topics into class discussion. I find that moving one’s course further along the antiracism spectrum can, and should, start with the syllabus!None of the below suggestions can magically turn a course antiracist – my experience is that antiracism is a lifelong journey, consisting both of moments of inspiration and, perhaps more often, moments of face-palming as you realize the way you’ve done something for years is problematic, but you literally never noticed it until right now. This is part of why I think many professors shy away from explicitly naming their own journey in antiracist teaching – it requires you to feel embarrassed about the way you used to do things and then using that embarrassment to fuel something better. But the glorious thing is that it does produce something better!The first thing to do with your syllabus is to take stock of the racial representation of your authors. If you use one or a few textbooks, this will likely be easy. If you rely on a variety of resources, it’ll take longer, and often require a bit more research. When you tally up who students are primarily hearing from, what voices are most prominent? Do white men win the day? Or is there substantive authorship from people with other racial identities?In my department, we calculate these totals every semester based on course days. Basically, what days are students only hearing from white people, and what days are they hearing from people of color? (It could be advantageous to do this in a more granular way too – examining how Black authors compare to Latinx authors, etc., but unless your percentage of authors of color is fairly high, you may not have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions). We submit our percentages every term, and part of our annual assessment is examining if we’ve met our minimums and if we’ve increased racial representation or lost ground overall. The fact that we can work in hard numbers here also tends to encourage something of a gamification of our syllabi – seeing if we can beat our last “high score” is motivation to make our authorship more racially diverse each semester. A single replaced reading feels like a victory in this context – and it is!Once that work is completed for the term, the next step is to ensure that it’s visible to students and that they understand why it’s significant. I do this in two ways: including relevant expertise and identity markers, including race, along with the link to the course readings, and telling my students directly about what I’m doing with authorship in the course. The first involves setting up Canvas (or whatever LMS) with more than just links to required text. I include the link, and then provide context after it about the writer. For example, “______ is a Black woman and a seminary-level professor of Theology,” or “______ is a white male journalist who primarily writes on religious topics.” This is part of an overarching lesson that people’s context is always relevant, and that nobody writes without bias. It’s also a practice I royally screwed up the first time I tried it – I only included the racial identities of authors who weren’t white and didn’t mention race for white authors. You know, because white is… normal? White default bias for the fail. Thankfully I caught that one halfway though the semester and worked feverishly to remedy it on the day that awful realization struck me.Finally, I like being transparent with my students about the “why” of my teaching – it makes them feel trusted and included, and it helps hold me accountable for doing what I say I will. On the first day of class, I show the students our hard numbers for the course and explain that the field is historically and currently white-dominated, but that our program values students learning from a variety of perspectives and voices, so we’ve made a particular effort to use and highlight authors of color. For whatever reason, this is the moment on day one when students will actually take their eyes off their syllabus and look at me directly. I find that there’s power in critiquing your own field, and doing it right away – it helps students feel more able to offer critique and criticism when they feel it necessary.So, there you have it – if you want to be a more antiracist teacher and aren’t sure where to begin, start with your course authorship and make your choices explicit to your students. It’s far from perfection, but it’s a starting point for the journey.

            …and they had the best class ever. I was honestly surprised I made it a whole month into the semester before getting sick, what with a preschooler at home. Much of the time, despite everything we should have learned from COVID, I strap on a mask and go teach anyway – but this time, my voice was gone and I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I had to cancel classes. At least, I thought I did. My introductory course wasn’t going to happen, but what about my majors- and minors-only seminar? It was a new course, filled with mature students I had invited to study theology more deeply, and the whole point was that it was discussion-based. They could do that without me, couldn’t they? It was a wild morning – I decided to NOT cancel the seminar, but wanted to be sure I shaped the space and had some accountability for it, so I spent all the moments in my doctor’s waiting room typing out ideas on my phone. Before the class met, I had a structure ready. A colleague was going to go “start” the class for me by reading our weekly Alice Walker poem and handing out materials; students would have worksheets and assigned groups for a critical reading activity where they examined our text (a passage from Teresa of Avila) for aspects they thought were relatable and useful, or irrelevant and unhelpful. I also gave all twelve students a task for the day – everything from timekeeper to worksheet distributor, discussion leader to careful note-taker, and clock-watcher to pacing/energy manager. About half of them were told to send me materials as soon as class ended – pictures of their notes, or the sheets they filled out, even just emails to tell me how things went. After that, all I could do was sit at home in my robe with a hot cup of tea, and wait. The emails started trickling in about an hour after class was due to end. “Everything went really well!” one adult student gushed. “We stayed the whole time!” (I had explicitly told them it was okay if they decided to finish up early). When I saw notes and the filled-out worksheets, I was a bit startled at how detailed everything was. Despite not hearing the discussion, I could get the flavor of it – long story short, my students don’t like it when women writers in spirituality are self-deprecating, and they were annoyed that Teresa of Avila kept undercutting her own authority by calling herself a “mere woman” (fair enough, blossoming feminist theologians). By the time I was back on campus and started running into students from that class, it became clear that they’d had an unexpectedly delightful time. “We were so nervous!” it always started out, “But once we got going, everybody was really engaged!” By the time we met again a week later, I was confident in opening class by saying, “So what do you want to talk about?” while I sat back and ate crackers from a missed lunch. There was some hemming and hawing, but after a minute or two, they launched into the topic of the week. I almost felt unnecessary. Aside from tremendous pride in my students, the biggest lesson I took away from this unorthodox day of teaching was to get out of my own way. It doesn’t seem like a hard lesson, except that I’ve spent all my years at this institution pushing in exactly the opposite direction. The students who show up in my introductory courses are predominantly anxious – most have never studied religion before and are fearful of the difficulty of the course. One of the ways I help them feel more confident is by tightly controlling the space and making the boundaries and parameters clear – you will be in small groups for this many minutes, have one answer to share about that question, etc. When they know what I expect of them, they relax, and we have better interactions overall. It’s not quite the open forum that I loved in many of my favorite undergraduate courses – the ones that started with “well, what did you think of the readings?” and went from there – but it’s appropriate to the situation, and it works. I knew it might be a little tricky to switch out of that mode for my seminar class, but I had underestimated how intentional I would need to be to not take over the room. It turns out that not being in the room in the first place was the hard reset I needed. I was still present in the ways that I shaped the space and crafted the reflective forms of learning, but students didn’t need my voice to be so loud when they were still learning how to amplify their own. I’m still early enough in my teaching career that it’s helpful to have reminders that I’m not growing into just one type of professor; I’m growing into being several types of teacher that I can pull out when I’m in the appropriate context. This semester, I’m going to aim to enjoy both the courses that I carefully control, and the one where I should be more of a fly on the wall. And in the future, I might strategically abandon my students a little more often, just to see what they can do without me.

One of my favorite genres of fantasy fiction is the “magical door” story – tales where a person finds a mystical, strange doorway into another world. Alice in Wonderland is probably the best-known example, but I’m more fond of the contemporary takes, especially Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway (2016) and the Wayward Children series that follows it. In McGuire’s books, children disappear into doorways that lead them to worlds where they feel profoundly at home – sometimes pretty ones, like a world where everything is made of candy, but just as often menacing worlds where lightning can raise people from the dead or where they fight alongside merpeople against the Eldritch horrors of the deep. Besides being the ultimate escapist fantasy for anybody who felt wildly ill-at-ease and out of place in their adolescent years (everybody, perhaps?), these stories also convey that we aren’t really looking for a docile, perfect place to be – we just want to be where we know we fit. This magical door framework recently snuck up on me during an exercise on teaching – we were asked to artistically represent our teaching selves, or the “bother” that spurs us on as professors. Without realizing the connection to some of my favorite books, I quickly crocheted some drab ribbons into a doorway – and on the other side of that doorway, I painted wild and colorful movement, represented in glitter and pom poms and sticky foam. This is how I see my teaching in theology – trying to coax students through a doorway into a world that is bright and overwhelming, chaotic but lovely. Looking at my hasty picture afterwards, I found myself realizing again why students can be so hesitant to jump into this wild world. The doorposts are pretty, in their own way, and they certainly are familiar. We all cling to groundedness when we’re uncertain, and higher education is constantly uncertain, with students suddenly struggling with topics they once found simple, oscillating between the career plans they expected and the ones that better fit their skills, fretting at each new professor’s style of teaching and grading. While my students as a group aren’t particularly religious, for some, their fundamental beliefs about God or the universe or that everything happens for a reason are one of the few stable parts of their identity. My theology class threatens to shake up even that. So, at least on the tough days, they cling to the doorposts and lintels like a toddler avoiding a bath, grasping onto anything rooted until the danger has passed. Or, maybe just as often, they go quiet and inward, not wanting to step through the portal into a conversation they feel unprepared for. Questions and options seem to help – “Do you want to get into groups now, or should we do a poll first?” “I know we might not know much about vows of silence, but who in here needs complete quiet to do homework?” I get them talking about themselves first, and our content second. That way, they can peek through the windows before deciding whether to come outside, and that first tiny step might be enough to build momentum. It’s a helpful reminder that my students are always doing hard work to engage with me and the readings I assign – almost any class day brings up questions. “Do I believe this?” “Could I live that way?” “What commitments would I die for?” “What commitments will I live for?” Even for the non-religious, theology class always holds the potential for deep introspection alongside factual learning, and introspection is hard. With my doorway image in mind, I can recall the importance of gentleness and compassion in my role – not easy-ness, but a gentleness that reminds me to notice the uncertainty, even fear behind the disengagement, and to be ready to try again and again to connect with each individual. I can see more clearly how chaotic and overwhelming the field seems, especially to those who have never crossed the threshold, and look for ways to reassure them that there is something familiar and good on the other side, and that I’ll accompany them until they find it. I remember well a young Latina student pulling me aside after the last day of class and whispering to me, almost like a secret, “Until this class, I didn’t realize I could be both Catholic and a feminist!” She had found her place to belong in the mess of it all. It helps me remember how badly we all want to find a place where we feel welcome, and to create that with both my affect and my syllabus. Every day is a doorway in theology class, and my role is to stand behind it, beckoning, and reassuring, “It’s wonderful here. All you have to do is take another step.”

My teaching style has always been a bit on the lighthearted side; I crack jokes, use ridiculous metaphors, draw inelegant pictures on the whiteboard and make my students guess what I’m trying to convey in an odd version of academic Pictionary. Being funny is a great way to keep students engaged! But now that my school, along with everyone else’s, has gone fully online for the duration of the semester, I’ve had to reframe my humor–what I usually think of as a useful teaching tactic, I now see as an indispensable tool for teaching effectively in a global pandemic. It’s already cliché to say that everybody’s stressed out by this health crisis, but the sheer variety of ways to be stressed is staggering, and my students seem to embody every one of them. I teach at a women’s college where traditional undergraduates learn alongside non-traditional working students; about a quarter of whom are parents. We’re heavy on the health sciences, so while lots of our undergrads are suddenly unemployed from their server and retail jobs, those who work in pharmacies, elder care, and hospitals are being begged to pick up extra shifts. My classes are an eclectic combination of the desperately bored and the profoundly overworked. The only thing they all seem to have in common is how badly they need a laugh right now. I can’t cure their anxiety, but I can offer them a momentary opportunity to forget about it while they’re smirking at one of my quips. These little breaks are a big part of how we can cope with our new normal. I usually rely on reading a room for my jokes, so I’ve had to get more creative. I’m terrible at creating dynamic PowerPoints, for example, and I’m now using them for nearly every lecture. To keep things interesting, I insert snarky comments into my slides making fun of my own dismal formatting and don’t call attention to them while I present, leaving them like Easter eggs for the attentive watcher. When I require Zoom meetings, I ask every attendee if they have a nearby pet or small child they can put on screen for the rest of us to coo over before beginning our discussion. I’m still teaching loads of content in the midst of all these less-serious moments, but it’s obvious that the content flows better when I make space to be a little silly. When my students pop up on webcam to talk about their upcoming papers, they’re visibly tense–this disappears almost immediately when I say that I do want to talk about their paper, but I also insisted on this meeting because I’m lonely and want to be reminded that other humans exist. They smile, I smile back, and for a second or two, they feel better–and then are better able to listen and learn. Beyond benefiting my students, prioritizing humor also helps me look forward to teaching and gives me a hint of that refreshing energy I used to get from being in the classroom with so many personalities. Staring at my laptop for hours on end is a little more bearable when I’m also thinking about whether there’s a way I can insert a picture of a chicken into my presentation so it’ll flash on screen at random intervals while I’m talking. Teaching is a haven for me amid my own apprehension, and it feels even more purposeful when I can try to make it haven for my students too. There is no one teaching style that will spell perfect success in this tumultuous time, but for even the most serious professor, I urge you–try for some silliness! Change your Zoom background so you look like you’re lecturing from the middle of the zombie apocalypse, offer pictures of your  pet as a reward for students completing required tasks, come up with a rude nickname for your online learning platform (I like to refer to Canvas[1] as “that jerkwad”) and use it whenever part of your haphazardly constructed course site doesn’t work the way you thought it would. Give yourself the gift of being a little ridiculous, and you’ll find that your students’ attitudes–and their work–will benefit from the break. [1] No offense to Canvas. It is a beautiful, elegant system, even when I can’t for the life of me figure out why it keeps taking assignments off of the student to-do list.

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