Resources by Cláudio Carvalhaes

I continue pondering about clowns and clowning as I try to figure out how to engage my classroom with performance and clowning. I continue to contemplate the song[1] that asks: What is it that you give me? That has no measure, nor ever will? The clown is the purest excess, the figure of the exaggeration. The clown’s actions are always too much or too little. They carry something more than what is human, that which we all lack, that we owe, that we hope for, that is known to be lost. The clown is life’s box of surprises, Pandora’s box, the lost key to our desires. The clown is the poet of Manoel de Barros who will irrigate the fields with a sieve. What will it be? What has no remedy, and never will? What has no recipe? The clown has the remedy for all the ills in the world, but always forgets the exact recipe for things. It is also a risk because the clown offers us a mirror of ourselves that can frighten us, that makes us revolt. And that’s how it is, either the clown has the medicine but forgot the prescription, or they have the prescription but didn’t take the medicine. A disaster. What will it be? What happens inside us That shouldn’t? That defies the ones who are absent? The clown always defies authorities because they don’t even know what authority is. In the world of clowning there are no real hierarchies. The ones shown are only for the performance. The clown is an anarchist, they make their own laws. The clown lives solely and exclusively on the joy they desperately seek and give. They live in disregard of every law, of every yoke, of all suffering, of all pain. As the comedian Leo Bassi said, “The buffoon respects nothing and no one, be it the president, the emperor, himself, or even God.” What will it be? What is made of brandy that does not quench? What is it like to be sick of a revelry? The clown’s joy is the shadow of all our sadness. Their show doesn’t want to change the world, but just to offer a laugh, like brandy, to make life more bearable, to be able to take another step, to believe once more. The clown is always sick from their revelry, since their revelry is a flame. What will it be? That not even ten commandments will reconcile Nor any ointments relieve Nor all the breakers all alchemy Nor all the saints Clowning is a covenant without promises, a faith without beliefs, a convent of stupid monks who live off in an animist world. When they pray, they get the order of prayers wrong, when they email the prayer they send it to the wrong saint. They confuse the Orixás, call Jesus “Genésio,” think Ave Maria is Maria Bonita, offer padê for Exu while praying to the Holy Virgin, not really sure if she actually is a virgin. They call Buddha “my king,” Jesus “my comrade,” and Muhammad “my partner.” With all due respect! But don’t doubt the clowns, those holy knotty monks! In their shows, some of them carried the magic of witches and learned alchemy from magicians, dances from shamans, and spells from Spirits. What will it be? What has no rest, nor ever will? what has no limit? The world is so complicated now that the task of laughter is an endless, restless task. Joy puts a limit on hate, debunks anger and undoes the knot of resentment. Only joy has no limits in all its immoderation. Only a happy people will engage the revolution! What is it that you give me? That which burns me inside, what happens to me? That which disturbs my sleep, what happens to me? Ask any clown what’s burning inside and what’s more than heartburn. What makes the clown lose sleep is the quest to find a new way to make somebody laugh: a new face, a new choreography, a new tumble, a new song, a new shame, a new trip, a new look. What is it that happens to me? That all the tremors come to shake That all the ardors come to fan me That all the sweat comes to soak me That all my nerves are begging That all my organs are cheering What a fearful affliction makes me beg Clowning, like poetry, is the art of wonder; of the unkempt, disorganized chest; of the incessant search for a fullness that, it seems, was promised to us somewhere. However, the clown never searches for things to fulfill their heart. A flower is enough to fulfill the clown’s heart and make their green nose happy! Clowning is the fullest acceptance of our glorious limitations and its full celebration. Clowning is feeling every organ of the body vibrating and making it all laugh. Clowning is the ability to be kin with other species, to see the earth as a glorious place where billions of other worlds live. Wonders without end! Clowns try to learn to laugh like the animals do. Clowning is the art of listening, of listening where no one knows how to listen. Clowning is knowing how to look where no one else sees. And making people feel heard, seen, and welcomed. The art of clowning is pointing to our broken and breakable hearts, to the most exact compilation of the index of our faults. Clowning is thus our most complete translation. What is it that you give me? That is not ashamed, and never will be That has no government, and never will That has no sense What makes a clown a clown are their mistakes, their faults, their scattered pieces, their stupidities, and their open view of themselves. They know, with the qoheleth, that trying to go anywhere is running after the wind. But they love the wind! They’ve already made so many mistakes, they’ve already tripped over their own feet, too; they’ve done a lot of nonsense; they’ve already hurt a lot of people, they’ve already saddened so many others. But clowns don’t carry the guilt or shame of what they are because they know they are incredibly imperfect, exuberantly limited. They learn along the way. They change! They carry within themselves the feeling we carry within us: a simple, vulnerable, malleable, and vertiginous matter, and it is from this matter that we are all made. Oh, those clowns… they are a joke. What a joke! [1] The conversation is with the song “O Que Será que Será” (“What Will Be Will Be”) by Chico Buarque.

The mother noticed the boy tenderly. She said: My son, you are going to be a poet. You will carry water in your sieve your whole life. You will fill voids with your naughtiness And some people will love you for your nonsense -Manoel de Barros[1] If you have followed my two last blogs, I am adventuring into new forms of scholarship and for that I am entering into the realm of performance, clowning, and ecology. The play I am putting together is about a clown called Wajcha (Quechua for orphan) who is searching for Pachamama, his ultimate belonging. Since I am turning Wajcha into a clown, I need to understand the life of the clown. A note about Wajcha will come later in the process, but what is a clown? The figure of the clown has always enchanted me. My father was a clown, without paint, red nose, or big clothes. He had the Buddha’s smile. And he made everyone laugh. Because of him I learned to like the circus, which was cheap to go see, and I fell in love with the art. He loved cinema, did theater, and was a writer, poet, and musician. He played the violin, guitar, and harmonica. It was from him that I learned to laugh. With him I learned to like Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the Three Stooges. In Brazil, the clown that most marked me was named Arrelia. He always started everything by asking, “How are you, how are you, how are you?” And everyone said, “Okay, okay, okay.” It was the beginning of many laughs. Then I grew up, became an adult, grew stupid, and forgot about clowns. It was during COVID that the clown that inhabited my father his whole life came to visit me. There was so much sadness in the world that I needed joy and laughter. In this search, I had to wrestle culturally: to be a clown and to laugh are both cultural expressions. Living in the United States has changed me in ways I still don’t know. But what I know is that I found my voice here. Strangely enough, living here made me bigger, extravagant, multiple, and shameless, to the point of naïveté, and bold. It was through my immigrant persona that I found a deeper part of myself. On the other hand, living here also made me quieter, suspicious, and more serious, not knowing exactly who or what to trust. It definitely made me more fearful. And it is in between these two worlds within me that my clown showed up. My name should be “Clowndio”! The figure of the clown holds a multiplicity of selves: extravagance and exaggeration, silliness, lack of shyness, and excessive naïveté. How can one be a clown in a prudish, moralistic, and tense society? Or how can one be a clown in a very proper, serious, rational, academic world that also creates so much fear? While humor thrives in so-called proper places, humor does not survive fear. When humor is done with love, it stretches boundaries and casts out fear. If humor is connected with love, then as Saint Augustine says, “Be humorous and do what you want.” For humor is not “anything goes,” but rather a very careful craft of attending, paying attention to, and caring for those around you. Still, humor is not that simple. Humor is cultural and most of my Brazilian sensibilities do not fit here. My family here will say how embarrassed they often are with me. To find humor in another culture is to find its heartbeat and it is so difficult to get when you didn’t grow up in that place. And yet, humor is also universal in its specificities. I hate how clowns are portrayed on Halloween in the US. They are terrifying! I hate this relationship between clowns and horror. But after studying the history, I understand that it includes the the terror-striking clown. This helped me understand the Halloween clowns even though I can’t stand them. It is said that Stephen King wrote It, about the horrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown, after he found out that clowns are what scare children the most. I couldn’t believe it! However, King was right to portray a clown as a shape-shifting monster dealing with a void, and with its own “macroverse.” That’s true! The clown is not just a sweet person; they carry within themselves abysses and monstrosities. I, however, want something very different! I want my clown to touch the horrors of the world and return them as laughter, lightness, and silliness. I want a clown who pays close attention to the disasters of the world but interprets these disasters in a way that people can engage with and not shut down. I am fine with boredom, but I can’t stand boring things. There’s nothing worse than boring people. I want to be funny, at least for a few! Funny, joy, laughter, silliness: these are all forms of power against capitalism, which is the most potent producer of sadness in our time! The current demand for happiness everywhere is a symptom of this very sad society. No, happiness is not the measure of a good life, but to laugh is an antidote to the forces of death that keep pressing us down into places lacking joy and energy.  My clown emerges as an anti-capitalist character wearing flowers and a green nose as he searches for Pachamama. Sure, Wajcha doesn’t know what he is doing, and in that way we are very similar! All he wants is to make someone laugh and pay attention to the land. The clown is a person who feels a lot, who feels more than they should. They feel something, as the song[2] says, That springs forth from their skin And they ask: What is it that happens to me? The clown knows that they need to go where the people are, where children (small or big) are. Then the clown may even paint their face and do some tricks and, if you ask why the clown does it all, they’ll say: I don’t know, I don’t know what this is springing forth from my skin. What is it that happens to me? that rises to. my cheeks and makes me blush? The clown receives the heart of someone and carries it with care. The clown blushes with joy, never with shame. Holding life is a unique event; the clown blushes with the charm of the simplest things. What is it that happens to me? that jumps out at me, betraying me? The clown sees too much but doesn’t realize that what they see multiplies and remakes itself into other things that no one else sees. The clown is naïve. The clown doesn’t work in linear ways, but keeps looping in symbiotic moves. The clown betrays systems of profit. Fully present in the place, the clown doesn’t have much need for anything. A little flower becomes the clown’s whole world! The clown follows a bee around the world. The clown falls in love with a cactus and makes their life in the desert. What is it that happens to me? that squeezes my chest and makes. me confess? The clown is a confessor of their own stupidities, mistakes, limits, naïvetés, disappointments, sadness, and loneliness... And as a confessor, the clown opens to the confession of all the frailties of the world. The clown is a collector of peoples’ stories. As Zuca Sardan said, “The clown is the ultimate priest.” A disguised prophet, a compassionate one, a coyote trickstering communities, an ambassador without citizenship, a foreigner without a country, the clown despises nations. What is it that happens to me? What can no longer be concealed? The clown is incapable of hiding; what you see is what you get. The clown is so honest that they can’t help but be a tremendous pretender. “He pretends so completely that he even pretends that the pain he really feels is pain.”[3] And he also pretends that it is joy that makes everyone laugh. What is it that happens to me? That's not right for anyone to refuse? No, the clown does not understand the refusal of a smile and is stubborn until they succeed. With their annoying galoshes! For the clown has only one law: It is declared that everyone is given not only the right, but fundamentally, the duty, to laugh! What is it that happens to me? That makes me a beggar? makes me plead? The clown leaves their home, paints themself, dresses in strange clothes as if begging for a smile, even if only from the corner of someone’s mouth. Every clown lives off the crumbs of other people’s happiness. And it is this joy that makes them beg for any smile. [1] Manoel de Barros, excerpt from the poem “The boy who carried water in his sieve,” in Exercicios de Ser Criança (São Paulo: Editora Salamandra, 1999). [2] This is a conversation with the song “O Que Será que Será” (“What Will Be Will Be”) by Chico Buarque. [3] Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Scholarship through Performance – Part Two When I started to think about a play, I never imagined how hard it would be. To write/perform a play to bring my clown--a new entity--into existence, is a lot of work. I have a theater director working with me and he tells me to think from my body. We talk so much about bodies but we are so often consumed by our brains and mind. My Brazilian teacher, Luis Louis, tells me repeatedly: “Cláudio, you think too much! Do something first, then you can think.” Oh, this process is literally painful. I asked my teacher to be patient with me as I will struggle through this process of learning. I am learning with my teacher that I have to feel what is within me gaining form and shape, life and spirit! I have my clown living within me, but I must give birth to it! In order to do that I have to play with the movements of the body, with images, and with objects, clothes, hats, etc. And my teacher asks me many questions: How does this clown act alive on stage? Does he speak, and if so, in what language? Does he have repetitive body movements? Does your clown have large or small gestures? What is the heart of the clown composed of and what makes the clown alive? My teacher said: You bringing your clown to life is like your clown throwing a bucket of water into a world on fire, believing that you will be successful. Everybody knows that this is impossible, even ridiculous, but your clown does not know that. He wholeheartedly believes he can do it and will do it, no matter what! That is his gift to the world. The portion below shows my thinking process in engaging different forms of knowing, doing, teaching, and performing. This is how the play started to get a form and shape.   Main Theme A clown called Pachamama discovers that the Gaia, the earth, is hurting, and goes around the world feeling its pain and struggling with climate disasters. He then discovers that he is Gaia and a part of it. The show is made of several skits that compose a story and a trajectory (still undefined). Everything is yet to be fully developed and needs to go through the test of practice. In each scene I want the clown moving with death and life, disaster and possibilities, sadness and joy, responding to everything with its usual clumsiness, stupidity, awkwardness, sincerity, naiveté, joy, beauty, etc. With this show, I want to help people find courage to go deep into climate disasters and find agency, hope, and faith in the midst of it all, rather than running away from it. In the end I will honor Prof. James Cone and Union Seminary, who shaped me in so many ways.   Major Influences My father, Charles Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Emmet Kelly, and Slava’s Snow Show A Metaphor Emmet Kelly carrying a bucket of water in a circus on fire. “Seventy-two years ago today, in Hartford, Connecticut, someone photographed a clown carrying a bucket of water toward a fire. It’s a surreal image, haunting in the old black-and-white way. The clown is stepping through an arid landscape littered with what appear to be wooden crates, a lone railroad car, and the suggestion of bleachers. As clowns go, he’s the sad tramp kind, a pained grimace on his face. In front of him, to the left, someone is exiting the frame—a portion of a leg is visible—and the clown follows, gripping his bucket, exuding dread. He’s heading toward something unseen and tragic, something almost ghostly.” - William Browning This show is precisely this: the show is about a clown carrying a bucket of water to help the earth that is already on fire.   Place This is a theater play to be performed at Union Theological Seminary in NYC. The chapel has no fixed seating so I hope to have people sitting on two sides of the chapel (or in a U shape) with the play happening in the middle. The space has some lightning that I can use. Here is a picture of the space. How is this all going to be and happen? I have no idea. One thing, and one thing only, I know: this is much bigger than me. It scares me so much! I hope that with practice anxiety will turn into a certain trust and that as my clown starts to move, I will feel more confident. I will let you know how it goes.

This semester I am on sabbatical and I decided to shift some gears in my scholarship. I have depended so much on a certain scholarship for my teaching that I feel now another world is opening for me. Since I opened myself to a different relationship with the earth, one of allowing myself to be affected by it, so many things are happening to me. I have always been eager to know everything I can learn about what I hear, touch, and see. My library is way too big and what could have been my retirement is now composed of shelves packed with books. For a few years there has been something growing in me that tells me to slow down that eagerness and sheer desperation. A while ago I lost 1,600 computer files with all my texts, books, scholarship, research, which was devastating. I was thrown into a place of fear, grief, anger, and loss. I felt like I had nothing to rely on. After a long period of reflection, I now wonder if it was my own unconscious telling me: enough with that, that eagerness, that desperation to know. I started pondering my reasons for hiding under those unfulfilled desires. Was I trying to cover up everything that I actually don’t know and am so afraid people will discover about me? What was this desperate need to try to know everything? I am still wrestling with it. And let me say, books haven’t stopped arriving. But now that I am trying to figure out how to pay attention to the earth, I have more to learn and more to read and have to pay attention differently. There is something in me now that is closer to joy than obligation when I read, when I research, when I teach. As I move closer to the earth, I am trying to do what the Brazilian song says: “Caress the earth, know the desires of the earth.” As I do this I am getting closer to myself and whole new worlds are opening up. And that means other ways of learning, teaching, relating. As I learn with indigenous people that the earth is always inhabited by doubles and multiples and other natural and social relationships, I am discovering the joy of my symbiotic being and keep pondering what it means to live in these forms of world relations. My spirituality, always so much dependent on modern forms of thinking, is now becoming freer, as I search for untapped forms of my own traditions and other wisdoms and ways of being. I feel I need to know the world through my belly button, through my intuition, through my perception, but how do I do that? This discovery is pushing me to a world of feelings and sensations, experiences and knowing, that are pretty much anathema for proper scholarship. But I am allowing myself to feel with other beings in ways that I never allowed myself to do and be before. I am gaining the company of other thinkers: other theologians, artists, anthropologists, biologists, geologists, and indigenous thinkers guide me. It was during COVID-19 that the idea of a play came to me. It started with a visitation from my father who was a fantastic artist with a combination of many gifts: a musician, a clown, a theater actor, a song writer, a movie buff, an inventor of games, a poet. During my daily walks I felt his presence. He came to me as a clown and a question started to circulate in my head and my body: How can we engage climate catastrophe, devastation, and grief using humor and laughter? What if a clown walked around the earth figuring out its disasters, sadness, and losses and responded like a clown with naiveté, stupidity, awkwardness, lightness, and humor? Since then, the idea of a play has stayed with me. I have written a script and am looking for funds. But how do we raise funds when all we know in academia is about writing books, editing books, articles, journals, and so forth? Furthermore, the word “clown” is a red nose, oops, a red flag to any serious scholarship. I tried applying for scholarships from the usual places I know to no avail. They all look for innovative thinking, but let us be honest, even the word innovative has limits. Clowning? Really? A friend who proofread my proposal asked, “Do you really need to use the word ‘clown’?” It was a great question and I laughed. Fundraising seeming hopeless, I started to save money. I asked my school for help, and I am getting great support which I am so grateful for, and I feel blessed. But this project will need more money and I am trying in every way I can to get some. I decided to include students and created a class on humor, laughter, and performance in order to do this through pedagogical lenses. I will teach this class with a musician and scholar from the Ifá tradition in Brazil. Here is the course proposal:   Humor and Laughter: Resilience and Resistance Across Religious Traditions To be able to laugh, be humorous, and silly are tremendous ways to resist, show love/compassion, and affirm life at a time when depression, anger, sadness, climate catastrophes, and disasters of all kinds are piling up. This course focuses on the following resources of world sense: the Russian Christian tradition of the Holy Fool, Indigenous traditions of Coyote, Afrodiasporic oralities present in the sacred Itan of Ifá, and the multiple presences of Exu with the recognition of the coexistence of positive and negative forces. This course is a theoretical-practical introduction to religious humor and laughter through musical improvisation, sound sculpture, dance, and ritual-performance integrating the senses with the environment. The course will end with a collective performance/play called When Pachamama Meets Gaia. This course is taught by religious teachers/performers who have their foundations crossed by the religious traditions of Christianity and Ifá. Now I need to catch up with my own ideas and proposals. The syllabus is on the way but the most difficult thing now is practicing so my clown can come to life. Next time I will say more about the show and the processes of transformation I am having to go through in order to do this.

When I was doing my PhD, I remember being anxious about the readings to be done. Union professors used to assign hundreds of pages to read every week. I am a slow reader and I would always come to class with my readings incomplete. That generated an enormous anxiety that made me fear classes rather than enjoy them. I kept myself very quiet, trying to hide from my teacher as much as possible. Other students, who didn’t do the readings either, would open the text on page seventy-six, read it, and make a comment. These comments were clearly made up on the fly but at least these students participated. I was notably quiet. Only when I was able to read the texts would I speak. I remember a class for which we had to read one novel per week. My goodness, I couldn’t even get close to finishing the novels. I remember the amount of anxiety during that semester. I didn’t know about Cliffs notes and we didn’t have YouTube or Google. One day, when we were discussing a novel in small groups, I mentioned that I had not finished the novel and couldn’t participate. The TA was present in that group. Sure enough, my final evaluation came with the statement that I didn’t read the novels. I was devastated. When I became a professor, this is what I knew how to do: give many readings to my students. It was the way I had been taught. I was shocked when I was at Louisville seminary and Professor Amy P. Pauw told me: one hundred pages is enough. I was shocked. In my first years of teaching I thought it was very poor educating! For me, the amount of reading was proportionally related to the success of the class. But not only that. I realized that my anxiety transferred to the students. Would they read? I never did quizzes, I abhor quizzes, mostly because they were traumatic in my early learning years. Every quiz was a test of my inability, an entrance into my real fake world, a door that would show how stupid I was. Every quiz/grade was a litmus test of who I was and what my future would be. And in that cloud of anxiety, I had to make sure students read all the assignments. I would question some students if I felt they had not finished a reading. I developed ways of knowing when students didn’t read. I could never penalize them, but knowing that students would have not read made me anxious and angry all semester long. It took me a while to understand that my anxiety was not about my students but about my own self, knowing I didn’t do the readings when I was a student. Embarrassing. Fast forward to now; I am just now learning to assign less readings. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it gives me some sense of security. However, I have learned to do things differently. Now I tell my students: There is a lot of reading, but you read what you want, what you can, or what interests you. All the readings have to do with the issue at stake but differ in how they approach it. I have also added movies and art as different resources. Some classes are more successful than others. But what is most important now is that I tell my students they don’t need to read the texts. I stress how important it is to read and that without the texts the class will be boring and less engaging, but that I understand how life is and how difficult it is to make it all work. It is not only that texts will create a great class, but a good class will entice students to read the texts. If therapy has helped me see how much I cast a net of my own projections, fears, and insecurities over my students, teaching has helped me see that I need to constantly change. My forms of knowing and doing change, so my classes change too. However, these changes are necessary not only because of what happens to me but because of the ways societies shift and how methods of educating are becoming obsolete. The transmission of information is no longer critical. Information is everywhere now and easily accessed under our scrolling fingers. We have way too much information. Thus, our classes have to be different. If a class is the same passing of information and content as the scrolling of news, it doesn’t really matter if the class is online or in person, if the class lasts three hours or fifty minutes. The time and medium are different, but the transmission is the same. What makes education unique is this fantastic time/space together when something happens that cannot be gained elsewhere. A time not to create results but to be transformed. To learn and educate each other is to venture into other pedagogical forms that will engage learning differently. We go from passing information to being fully there and bless each other. We then engage knowledge as something to know and to savor, to heal and to transform. We carry something else in our heart and if we can somewhat remember these times is because our bodies loved it. To know comes from a precious moment when we learn together, in a territory, a shared place; living in an eco-system, with other beings. To know as to rediscover the learnings we already carry within us, and recover ancestral forms of knowledges. And classrooms become a place where knowledge is both in me and in you, but most fundamentally, between us. THAT is the place of education! Tião Rocha, an educator from Brazil says that there is a difference between the teacher and the educator. The teacher is the one who teaches, and the educator is the one who learns. Then, how can we all, professors and students, become teachers and educators? Tião Rocha says that the educator needs to know three things about their students: how each person engages their forms of knowing, their doings, and their desires.[1] Students already hold many forms of knowledge. What are they? How did and do they go about knowing the things they know? Students already do things and engage life practically. What are they doing and how do they do it? Students already have many forms of desire in them and they go about life desiring and living life from these desires. What are these desires? What are the desires to unlearn, what are the desires to learn? Education only happens when we learn about each other’s knowings, doings, and desires. That means that we learn the theoretical/practical ways of living so we can give contours to life, can change our realities. That also means that the format of classrooms should change. Our syllabus should be an unfinished map. Teachers must offer different forms of learning, different configurations of classrooms, different forms of engaging texts, different ways where bodies can actually think, different strategies to do assignments. That is when art can help us by expanding the venues of learning and doing. I offer my students creative forms of engagement with the class. A student once offered a dance as a final project and wrote about it, and it was fascinating. Final papers done together. Half of my class is discussion. The other half is practice. As we think/do/desire this craft we do, we can’t forget that the vortex of energy behind us is capitalism and the key and center of anything is the production of stuff. We have to produce good classes with good results and the students must produce good results to feel that they have accomplished something. We end up striving more for the diploma than for the journey. We are all hooked up into this modulation of learning. And it is hard to change. When we go to AAR or other guilds for instance, the pedagogy is the same: three to five people sitting at a table in the front talking for three hours to an audience who stays seated until they can say a thing or two. After a whole day going from one seating to another we are exhausted. Nonetheless, we produced a good day of learning! To change this would be to fall into wishy-washy stuff. And yes, I understand, there is a lot of that around. But I wonder how we move from the producing of things for the sake of results to a form of knowing that creates community where being together, telling stories, and sharing about the struggles of our lives is more important than the outcomes. My quest is to discover how texts and ways of teaching and learning can help turn our experiences into learning together that orients the practices of our lives. Not experiences that take us into forms of autonomy but rather, into what Derrida once called “heteronomy without servitude.” I wonder how we can find a way together in class when our stories are woven into a form of a certain common tapestry, when what we speak about ourselves is not as narcissists but as collective knowers, implicated into each other’s lives. If education is about desire as Tião Rocha said, then this is something we can strive to do: Passion above all creates a dependent freedom, determined, bound, obligated, included, founded not in itself but in a first acceptance of something that is outside of me, of something that is not me and that that, precisely, is capable of falling in love.[2] That is the place where we are grounded, in that classroom, in that neighborhood, in that environment, with many forms of living. That is the place of coexistence and dependent freedom. That place is the “in between” place as we teach and learn together with all of our knowing, doing, and desires. Assigned readings then, are invitations to join much larger communities, made of those who we might know a bit but also, made of those we have no idea or have nothing in common. They are just that: invitations! With these invitations (intrusions) we build a class, a village! Perhaps that is what we might call a good class: a village! Or as Brazilian thinker Alana Moraes says: A good class invites us to think together, including what the best texts can be to accompany us on this journey. Obviously, professors play an important role in this choice, but there needs to be space to think with students about the best paths for a unique collectivity. It is more difficult, it requires more openness, but it is no longer possible to defend democracy in the abstract if we are not able to radicalize our everyday ways of teaching and doing research in any way.[3]   [1] A Arte De Educar Com Tião Rocha, https://www.cpcd.org.br/portfolio/a-arte-de-educar-com-tiao-rocha/ [2] Jorge Larrosa Bondía, “Notas Sobre A Experiência E O Saber De Experiência,” Revista Brasileira de Educação, Rio de Janeiro, Jan/Fev/Mar/Abr 2002 Nº 19, 19-28. [3] Alana Moraes, Twitter, August 26, 2022, https://twitter.com/alanamoraes_x

Yesterday I was doing my walk and I found this little newborn bird on a sidewalk. She was alive and gasping for food. Her eyes were still closed and there were only few very thin feathers on her back. I was so lost I didn’t know what to do. I looked around to see if there was a nest nearby, but there were no trees or signs of any other birds around. Flies were already buzzing around his tiny body, so I took my shirt off, wrapped it around him, and brought him home. On my walk back I started searching Google to know what to do. I couldn't find any rehabilitation place to take him. I learned that wet dog food and a boiled hard egg could serve as food. I placed her in a cardboard box, got a thick winter pair of socks, and covered her body to keep her warm. I finished preparing her food and when I got it to him, he was eager (opening her mouth widely) for food. I was so happy he was eating. From six p.m. to midnight I fed him every fifteen to twenty minutes. But just before going to bed she stopped eating. This morning she wasn’t moving much or gaping for food anymore. I sang to her, I whistled to her, I tried to move her so she knew food was there for her. But to no avail. I went to check on her again and she wasn’t breathing anymore. He died. As I did her funeral, I realized how my spirituality has changed. These recent connections with the living and the dead, the human and more than human, are throwing me into loops that have taken me into so much that is unknown and confusing. The amazing part is that the more confused I become by the presence of other beings, the more I unlearn and the more I open myself up to other forms of spirituality. The more I lose my forms of knowing, my bearings, the more strangely free I become. I start most of my classes by opening the windows and asking my students to listen to the birds. If we can’t listen to the birds, we simply can’t listen to what we often call “ourselves,” that is, a discrete form of an individual being. The need to listen to the birds is to listen to our own songs. For we are never autonomous individuals but inter-relational ones, living in what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. Listening to the birds is a form of spirituality that blurs what might be inside and the outside.  I am searching for spiritualities where all of my senses engage other forms of life, affected by ways of paying attention to other living beings around the landscape I am a part of. I am having more trouble with forms of spiritualities that are primarily ingrained in the mind without much attention to the body, or are even the mind with the body but removed from the surroundings and relations with broader ecosystems. I am having problems with spiritualities that are more attached to buildings and things than to the fullness of life outside and the vastness of the natural worlds with its patterns, relations, connections, and complexities. Spiritualities that are attentive to a set of beliefs and practices that are disconnected from the land are becoming more difficult for me. Spiritualities that are way too human, with a God who mainly relates to humans, that is also becoming difficult to relate. I am learning to deny these forms of spiritualities while also recognizing other forms of life of the Spirit through the patch of land where I live. In other words, a spirituality where the land orients the ways of believing and being. What one might call a more enchanted form of (local) living.  The spirituality I was taught never helped me to pay attention to my landscape, to other forms of life around me, to what was underneath my feet. That spirituality made me look to the sky to search for heaven but never paid attention to birds, to the top of trees, to clouds, to rain, to stars and planets. Moreover, the theology of my spirituality taught me about class struggle but had nothing to do with nonhuman forms of life or with other species. I know how to talk about agri-business and the power of capital. I know how to set up a critique of a higher colonial class destroying the worlds of poor people. But I never learned to talk about the ways in which the poison of agribusiness fills the soil, runs to the rivers, and spreads in the fields, killing communities of people but also communities of plants, vegetation, fish, bees, and so many other living species. I never realized that the monoculture proposed by the agribusiness is the same erasure of diversity within cities, that the destruction of biodiversity is the same program that operates in jail systems.  Bees, fish, soil, plants, and animals are deeply correlated with indigenous, black, brown, and poor people and women. They must all be part of my class struggle analysis. As I said, when I saw this newborn bird, I was lost. I grew up in São Paulo and learned to walk around beggars and animals. Stopping for a newborn bird was immensely surprising to me. In my lostness, my spirituality was challenged to relate more deeply with the breath of this little precious creature. To help this little bird is to help that living being to survive. But also, to help his bird is also to sustain the environment, the whole mutuality within the systems where s/he belonged. But most fundamental perhaps, it is to learn to see myself as part of this system, imbricated in this system, responsible for this system. I was wondering about the natural gaping movement of that little bird, her own ancestral knowing searching for food, and the forms and movements of knowing in our classrooms. How do we search for that which keeps us alive? What is it in us that is still related to the movements of the earth that orients our gaping, our longings, and processes of mutual formation? In classrooms, perhaps teachers gape for respect and positive responses, for a place where they are seen as the ones with power holding some sort of knowledge. Perhaps students also gape for respect and positive responses but know they are there to receive knowledge. A friend pictured the classroom as a nest. I was wondering about that too. How so? Who brings the food and who gapes? Is this a one-way movement from teacher to students? Aren’t we also gaping? We are all gaping for something. Our desires are shaped by the world we live in. Our education system is a Cartesian system becoming a neoliberal product where we are taught to gape for efficiency, for objectivity, for calculation of measures and results, for precise syllabi, for clear learning outcomes, for the ability to say that this class will fulfill items 2.1, 3.7, 4. 3, and 7.5 of the educational mission of the school and give the results (profit) promised. There is very little life in this nest. Or perhaps there is only gaping for a certain food, just like the bird needs a very specific food to survive.  I always return to Rubem Alves who said that teaching is the production of espantos: wonders and awe! I wonder about a pedagogy of affections, a pedagogy of the heart. This bird provoked a thousand espantos in me. And so much sadness. That connection affected me and changed me. Perhaps this is what I hope to do in the nests of my classrooms: find connections, be affected, and create affections; change my way, my heart, and perhaps even change the class assignments, readings, final work, and so on. I am slowly learning that classrooms are not this calculated event where students show their acquired knowledge to the teacher. It is more about the heart, and the knowledge they need to gain for themselves.  In this pedagogy of affections, I might need to continue to keep listening to the birds. Can we hear them? What are they saying, singing, uttering? So much I need to learn. But one thing I know: they are singing our songs, they are ourselves “out” there.

This semester I am teaching a class called Theology and the Arts. In this class we are engaging the earth with the five senses of the body. During our last class we engaged the sense of vision and read about it. To see is modernity’s main sense; to see is to know, to define, to control, to classify, to order, to establish regulations and distinctions, rules and limits. To see is to establish or hide delineating social markers such as color/redlining, gender and sexuality, class, abled bodies, citizenship, and so on. Colonization is the mastering of a certain vision over the others’ vision. You have to see what I see. A view of the world means a way of living in the world. The panopticon is now the 24/7 surveillance that watches everyone. Control of vision is among the new forms of coloniality in the social sciences and scientific work as well, all marked by objective lenses and detached views. After our discussion we went to The Shed in New York city to see the exhibition Particular Matter(s) by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition has several rooms showing particles and spider webs, but I will just describe the one named Free the Air: How To Hear the Universe In a Spider/Web, 2022. A huge round courtyard is organized in two levels of wire mesh nets, one suspended 12 feet above the floor and the other very high up at 40 feet. After about two minutes of walking on the net, you lay down, the doors are closed, and darkness takes over the room. You feel a mist flowing and you start to hear sounds from microphones attached to the net as well as vibrations throughout the net. Saraceno describes: Unheard voices become felt vibrations in this arachnid concert in four movements. The first movement of the concert is a quiet period, providing an opportunity to detect subtle signals from subsurface seismic sources that would have been concealed in noisier times… These vibrations were created from recordings of the Earth, including the movement of air particles and the spider/webs on view in the exhibition. [The sounds are like] an aria from Grandmother Spider, played by a solo Trichonephila clavipes, as she plots and maps her web of life… The rhythm of vibrating spider/webs—more audible since the pandemic-affected reduction of anthropogenic seismic noise—invite visitors to extend their senses towards new forms of embodied cognition. Yes indeed: new forms of embodied cognition. Spiders do taste and smell but their strongest sensorial organs are their legs. They sense vibrations through hairs and can “hear” these vibrations from 10 feet away. This “sixth sense” helps them discern the size and weight of things caught in their web. The students and I were trying to learn about cognitive variations by considering cognition from a spider’s perspective. Or perceiving or knowing the world through varieties of senses. (There were no spiders anywhere and we did not engage any.) I had to prepare myself before we went. Just knowing that I was going to be locked in a totally dark room produced a lot of anxiety in me. I had to decide if I could face it, so I meditated in darkness throughout the week. I talked to my psychoanalyst about it and asked my brother Greg Snyder, a Buddhist priest and scholar, to teach me how to wrestle with my fears. In our exchange of text messages, he wrote this for me: Breathe. Feel the energy of the anxiety in your body. Don’t concern yourself with the thoughts. Treat them like phantoms. Feel into the actual energetic force without needing to call it anxiety. Then allow that energy to be swept up by the current of the breathing, as if the banks of a river were eroding into the river itself. As the energy joins the breath, it will find the rhythm of the breath. Syncing the energy of the anxiety with the rhythm of the breath will give space and movement to that energy in ways that allow the system to calm down. Any excess anxious energy that cannot join the breath can be channeled down into the heart of the earth. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel your connection to the earth. When you exhale, train yourself to exhale down into the earth. So you are inhaling energetically up from the center of the earth and exhaling down into the earth. As the anxious energy joins your breath, exhale that energy with the current of the breath down into the vast warmth of the earth. Inhale the vast warmth back up into the body. Exhale the anxious energy back down, each time the energy dissipating into the vastness and warmth of the earth, each time inhaling vastness and warmth, spaciousness and strength. This guidance truly prepared me for the experience. When we got there, I was tense but still determined to go. We were divided into those who would go into the 40-foot-high web or the 12-foot-high web. I was the only one on the 12-foot web. I told my students this was a huge challenge for me and they were very compassionate. I was embarrassed to be so vulnerable with my students but they were a group I could trust. We hear “Never trust your students, you never know what might come to you!” on the grapevine. This can be true. But sometimes it isn’t. They were immensely gentle and kind to me. While laying down on the net I had an incredible experience, one I cannot fully describe. It was an experience without feelings. I didn’t feel anxious, fearful, or joyful. It was close to feeling happy. The web felt like an earth womb; I felt I was laying down in the vastness of the universe. The sounds of the earth were sparkling sensations. The net vibrated and my body felt that intensely—almost an out-of-body experience lived fully in every inch of my body. Everything was in movement but at its own pace. It was as if the sounds and vibrations and forms of relations manifested in the dark had always been in my body and I was visiting the earth at its very formation. No anxiety, no hope, no fear, no desire, no love. Just a sense of what I could call fullness: past, present, and future disappeared. Another experience was very distinctive: I felt the wonder of perceiving the world from the perspective of another species. Well, sort of…. I have never before felt a sense of otherness so powerfully in my body. The awareness of that totally different world made me feel absolutely distinct; foreign and lost in every possible way. The worlds of the spider are truly something else. The way they live, connect, build their nets, perceive, engage, protect, hunt, hear, and see—everything has its own wisdom and language. The wonder was that in all its strangeness, the spiders’ worlds live in codependence with mine and with so many other worlds. A multiverse! In my house, they are building worlds in different places and they can sense my presence 3 meters away. As much as I might fear spiders, my awe and wonder for them now moves me towards respect, honor, and reciprocity. After the event my body was completely exhausted, like I was carrying the tiredness of all the years of my life. It took a whole week to go away. The connections between this experience and my classrooms are so many and I am still pondering it all: if a classroom is a web, we are literally entangled together. Hopefully not to eat each other up but to foster “net-works” of care and refuge. I need to learn to perceive my students not just with the objective eye of academia and checking their written work. I also need to perceive the pulsing of their hearts, the sounds they make, the fears they bring, the hopes they have, the anger they carry, the longings they vibrate. The classrooms as webs are like many worlds interlocked and we as spiders are catching the various sounds of the worlds, of people, and other species around us. Mostly blind to what we can’t see, we are trying to figure out sounds, vibrations, and temperatures around us. Depending on each other, different worlds making space for each other, holding each other in deep care as we discern how to live. I wish I was a spider! And my classes were spider webs!

At the end of November I experienced a disastrous event: I lost about 1,600 files from my computer. For reasons I’d rather not discuss, all I know is that years of heavily curated material and so much hard work are gone. All of the books I’ve written are gone. All my syllabi, my class preparation, my texts—everything is gone. Some things from many years ago remain, but I don’t even have the courage to go look. It will only show what I don’t have anymore. Four years ago, I made a huge turn in my scholarship and am now trying to learn from the earth and working from a perspective that could be called the law (and lore) of the land. This deep change has shifted me and all my ways of knowing: classes, readings, pedagogies, resources, and relations. Entire worldviews! During these four years I took classes online and placed huge amounts of resources and readings in files, some of them with thirty, fifty, even a hundred pages, with journals, articles, websites, magazines, newspapers, list of books, and lots of references. Gone. I have written so much and given talks, some more academic and some less; all sorts of format and content of texts. All gone. I was working on a book that was missing just the introduction. Gone. My sabbatical proposal with the full first draft of an extensive play I was working on. Gone. A book I was writing about my experience of becoming a father to my three adopted kids; five years of texts and notes. Gone. As the days went by, I realized I had to teach a workshop without any materials at hand. I was reminded that I had to teach an intensive online seminar to graduate students in Brazil and again, I had nothing to rely on. I will stop here. I was so desolated I didn’t know what to do. I went to see Wonder, the tree I always visit to talk and listen to. While I was there, I realized that crusts were growing on her which belong to a family of fungi that live on “dead wood.” Wonder—my companion, the one who had been teaching me about my relation to the earth—was dying, or had died, I don’t know. My heart fell to the ground. If I had had a map under my feet, now this map had disappeared. There was nothing to guide me, or to turn back to, in terms of “where” my thinking, my writing, and my teaching were. Those who write, teach, speak, work, and play with words know that to lose what you write is to lose yourself. For writing becomes our body and soul; it is all biographical, even if not necessarily about ourselves. A very specific way of knowing shapes us into who we are and how we make everything meaningful and life possible. In fact, the where of knowledge has pursued me for a while. As a liberation theologian, the where has always been fundamental to how and with whom I think. Ecological thinking helped me realize that I need to think beyond the humans around me. It is interesting how we have replaced knowledge and memory from local, oral history to paper, books, cabinets, and libraries, and then to online files and the cloud . But when we lost our oral history, our bodies where detached from the land and it was as if our memory and knowing was placed elsewhere. Not fully within us anymore and “us” here means the whole landscape we live in. Thus, to know is to go somewhere else to reach a certain knowledge: a school, a class, a book, a library. The knowledge that we carry within us has been replaced by the knowledge we gain elsewhere, and it is only formally channeled by proper forms of scholarship. Surely, knowledge is always relational and we learn from one another. Surely Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual as the movement between formal and popular knowledge is fundamental. But what I am thinking here is more about how plantation and modernity have shifted knowledge from the land, and our relation to each other and to other species, to an outside abroad place. Colonialism and capitalism have turned us into renters of spaces and knowledges. We buy to know. This outside place is embodied by slave owners and the specialist, both of whom master the field. I cannot be a fully respected scholar if I don’t master my field. This process has also replaced our forms of memory. Uprooted from the land, we don’t carry the memories of the land anymore. We carry the memory of books or a file that holds the place of a certain knowledge. We have forgotten bodily (land/human/more than human) forms of knowing, practices where our knowledges lean on bodily knowing in relation to plants, animals, cells and are intrinsically implicated. This dis-location of knowledge creates various forms of anxiety. Entangled in a catch-22, this way of knowing comes with years of placing my knowledge elsewhere, in a place that is neither fully me nor fully outside of me. It hangs somewhere and I access it through my ability to buy a book, enter a school, or remember where it is in my computer. But now, without that imaginary/physical/online location where everything I have was placed and was lost, I do not know what to know anymore. One thousand six hundred files gone. Professor Marc Ellis said this to me: “It might be a prompt to move to another level of consolidating and deepening your thought.” I didn’t want to hear that, but something in me knew he was right. I am still battling this loss, but I think that what happened to me was not only about the evil online machinery spirits. It was actually me saying: I can’t take this weight of academic control, this burden of mastery, this desperation to know the field(s), this much running after knowledges, this much anxiety of knowing. For knowing in this modern process, is not about being, but being included. So, this can actually be a chance for me to change, even though I don’t know how exactly. But I know I have to pay attention to the where I live and that will suffice: it has to be in my body in relation to what is around me. I now want my body to know in relation with non-human species, perhaps I need to do far closer readings, pause, and go slower than I have ever gone. While one’s knowledge(s) are always in relation, it is only a perspective from a point and from that point we understand everybody else’s worlds. Each world in relation to many other worlds do not compose a totality under which a seamless background unites all the worlds. Rather, my point of perceiving is oriented and transformed by thousands of other worlds of other species also in flux and relating with thousands of other worlds composing different perspectives. None of these with any center to hold. I need a view of the world that is not only human. Another grammar of perception, a bodily one. I need to learn to see but also learn to be seen by the animals, for example. What do their eyes do to me? As I learn the names we give to plants, I need to learn the names those plants give to me. What do their bodies/feeling/being do to me? We breath because they created the oxygen! How do I learn the laws of the trees more than the laws of my religion? I want to be able to listen to the birds whom I feed in my backyard, to try to get to know them better. I am trying to get the food they like best, trying to understand their own perspective in relation to me and other worlds with which they relate. I want to live with them and with other species: plants, animals, beings. Entire worlds of knowledges! Stories of many worlds together! Yesterday I went to the store to buy seeds and the guy said: Use this so the squirrels will not come. And I said: But I want them to come! I want as many worlds together as possible. What about that possum? Oh, can we all live together? I don’t know what to do with mice—I have this utter fear of them, and I have kids at home. I put some poison out for them. Tragic! I want to know why so many worms are now out of the grass and frozen on the cement. I am struggling with the very few birds we have since it is winter. It’s brutal not to hear them loud every day. Rachel Carson always rings a cold sound in my heart when I can’t hear the birds. The bees are more often absent. The Codonoquinet river near my house; I need to know about this ancient presence and what makes a river possible. I am grateful for the many scholars in other fields and community leaders who are helping me known better now. I recently went to visit my mother in Brazil and I walked around my neighborhood paying attention to the trees I grew up with. In fifty-two years, it was the first time I paid attention to those who saw me growing and gave me a world to live in: the trees around my house! There were about thirty different trees in four streets! Ten of them had fruits! The memory of my father being a clown also visited me again. I realized I need to let my clown come out more fully and bring joy to myself and my kids. That makes me pause. To pay attention to my students differently. Do they carry any form of happiness that will help them brave through this difficult world we are living in now? A clown teacher? Other forms of imagination and creativity. No more demanding readings or results. Rather, unfolding worlds together… Learning to remember like the seeds do and to walk in the pace of the cows. Coming back from the data recovery store in downtown New York, I hopped onto the subway and there was a homeless man in front of me. He was eating. Not a single grain was left behind. He was so well organized, keeping his five small plastic bags near him. Perhaps that was all he had. I kept looking at him. I tried to make conversation with him, but he didn’t want to talk. He finished eating and put his head down. The train arrived at my station and I left. Coming out into the cold I was searching for some bird singing, but I couldn’t hear any. Only one thing captivated my mind: I lost one thousand six hundred files, but this man only has five small plastic bags.

As we finish this semester, it might be a good exercise to look back and see what worked, what didn’t quite work, and what will never work. Student evaluations often convey needs or anger or unfocused frustrations; very little that can actually teach us, so we must ponder our own little achievements and many frustrations. At each semester’s end, it would do us good to ponder what a classroom might be and what we can do in that environment in relation to the larger social-political arena we live in now. In a short excerpt from an interview,[1] Gilles Deleuze speaks about the classroom less in terms of mediating processes of apprehension and comprehension, and more in terms of movements and processes of becoming. He contends: “A class does not have as its sole objective total comprehension [of a subject matter] . . .  A class is an emotion . . .  It is not a matter of understanding and absorbing everything. It is a matter of awakening in time to capture that which is meaningful [to our own realities].” In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze speaks of experiences that force us to awaken, to feel, not merely to comprehend something novel: “this something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental encounter,” he writes.[2] The arts are capable of generating such encounters—they undo the seams of our limitations, habitual circumstances, belief systems, values, and knowledge to weave the invisible back into the perceptible. Beyond a representation of subjects, facts, history, data, encountering art affectively allows us to sense and not cling to the world as it is but to imagine it more expansively, with further potential becomings. As such, the arts require the totality of our beings-in-bodies to be present and to co-create our realities anew—whether in classrooms, art galleries, the streets, or in the intimacy of our closest communities. Artistic manifestations often allow us to access and connect, individually and collectively, with what is meaningful, potentially generative, and ultimately transformative. It is less about fully understanding the world as such and more about being alert to discover the opportunities that this world offers us. For that to unfold, we must rise, we must awaken! We must be willing to co-participate in this unfolding. There is no room for passive observation here. We must be willing to move from dormant complacency into the position of co-creators, conjuring up new possibilities of being. Julia Kristeva describes this aesthetic awakening with a reminder that our bodies must take part in the experience with art not only to contemplate the art object but also to sense it. She writes: “The ultimate aim of art is perhaps what was formerly celebrated under the term of incarnation. I mean by that a wish to make us feel a real experience [in the body]” through lines, colors, sensations, abstraction, volume, textures, and participation.[3] The arts are poised with the power to remind us to celebrate our body-realities. As Mayra Rivera puts it, works of the imagination allow us to move beyond the limits of our earthly flesh and encounter God as we strive to transform this world. Seeing and touching and moving and speaking and feeling is participation in theopoetics—an articulation of the character of God understood through our embodied, affective experiences.[4] Brazilian visual artist Lygia Pape’s performance piece entitled Divisor (1968) does just that: it probes the limits of our sensorial and psychological conditions, relying heavily on the physical, embodied, affective, and—most importantly—collective participation of viewers. Divisor is at once performance and sculpture, interweaving bodies of spectators/participators, physical space, mobility, and artwork in a literally moving piece.[5] Originally performed in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1968, this performance was re-enacted in the streets of New York on March 26th, 2017, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[6] Comprised of a 30-meter, white cotton fabric in the shape of a square, the piece has two hundred holes symmetrically perforated in the fabric through which viewers are invited to “wear” the sculpture, so to speak. Once 200 co-participators and co-creators are properly positioned, they are invited to enact a procession while wearing the artwork. Pape’s white fabric reposed over the shoulders of the participants, isolating the rest of the body, allows a commanding procession to take place. The effect is both poignant and powerful: a multitude of differently “bodied” people, unified by what takes on the shape of undulating waves, moves through the public arena in a procession. Their movement transmutes precariousness into potency. The work of art highlights the simultaneity of the shared life of those present: their bodies both tied to one another and acting upon one another, are transformed by one another. Such “imbrication of bodies in the fabric of the world,” as Rivera puts it, facilitates a union of sorts. What works of art such as this require of us is an awakened presence that is able to move forward in solidarity, entanglement, capacious resistance, and, most importantly, with response-ability, to borrow Catherine Keller’s language. How can we teachers conjure up opportunities in our classrooms that resemble the communal potency of Divisor? As the semester draws to a close and we reflect on strategies for learning and teaching and living, we ask ourselves: how can we wake that which is dormant inside of us? If another reality is possible, how can we work towards its actualization? How can we even keep the love of teaching when our very schools are crumbling down? How can our very understanding of education continue to produce a teaching-wonder and teaching-resistance that is so fundamental to the fullness of our lives and our communities? Knowing the dazzling possibilities of education and the dangers entailed in it, we are required to place the practice and the thinking of education in relation to the structures of our time. And we don’t live in the easiest times. Educators are rapidly becoming dispensable people who are supposed to teach whatever it is that has no critical engagement. In Brazil, for instance, a growing number of people are calling Paulo Freire to disappear from curricula. He is accused of being an ideologue, a communist whose education project aims only to destroy the values of family and country. Just recently, Judith Butler was almost physically attacked at the Sāo Paulo airport by a Brazilian woman who saw in Butler’s feminist and queer theories a threat to what she understood as the “traditional” Brazilian family. In the US, education, like health insurance, religion, among a great number of other things, has come to be understood as a private value dependent on individual efforts. Having been taken hostage by neoliberal systems, education must “produce” something, preferably at a profit. In this model, students must be treated like customers—education is less about formation than production, like an assembly line. The assaults by the Department of Education, the constant push to make education a matter of corporate profit and endless student debt, the targeting of colleges as a bad thing for the life of the country, the cutting of educational budgets for the sake of “austerity plans,” the creation of prison systems, the loads of money the Koch Brothers injected into higher education, the Senate Tax Bill that was passed recently, all form a narrative worthy of Dante’s Inferno. If education should only serve to produce people to fulfill the lines of jobs, the endless testing and precise measurements of syllabi begins to make sense. No wonder many of us in the classrooms have become apathetic and anesthetized. If one was able to go to AAR this last November and paid attention to the conversations that happened in between the academic sessions, you would know that the plight of so many educators is dire. I heard a professor saying to a friend at the exhibition hall: “I have been battling for 3 years now and I can’t continue doing adjunct jobs. This is my last year trying to find a job, or I will have to find something else to do. I can’t keep living this way, I have a family.” If the classroom and school bring daily struggles, embarrassment, precariousness, and even humiliation to our colleagues, how are we to keep our love of teaching? It is easy for me Cláudio to say, let us keep on loving our teaching and do it the best way we can. But I have a good job with great colleagues. Yohana who co-writes this blog post is a Ph.D. candidate. Will she ever find a good job? We need to engage our profession with a more critical sense of what it means to us, and how it can be made more expansive and sustaining. How can we support and accompany our colleagues who contest the violence of a plutocratic state, the erosion of our communities, the criminalization of protest, rising poverty, constant blaming of the poor, debt, emotional and physical exhaustion of those who are poor? There are no easy answers. There were never any easy answers. Perhaps we can start by thinking that our classrooms are places where we can still be awakened, that every time we meet we can raise up what was dormant in us. Perhaps we can discover that we need to pay attention to our emotions, our bodies, the communities that are formed in each classroom. Perhaps we ought to find better and more sustainable technologies of self and communal awareness, or spiritual practices that can become resources for our constant battle against the empire and its neoliberal systems. Perhaps we can also see our gift to teach as a way of positioning ourselves: first within ourselves, and then as a way of positioning ourselves in the world. Perhaps . . . . [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ln2A0fkA78 [2] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139. [3] As quoted in Stephen Bann, “Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust,” in Parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 64–65. [4] You can see more of this articulation in Rubem Alve’s work. [5] Fernanda Pequeno, Lygia Pape e Helio Oiticica: Conversações e Fricções Poéticas (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Apicuri, 2013). [6] Metropolitan Museum of Art *Blog Originally Published on December 14, 2017

I am consumed by grief. At home in Brazil, the situation is horrendous and bodies are piling up,  as it was here in the US last year.  We will soon surpass 3 million deaths around the world due to COVID-19. People who lived their lives in so many ways. So many people have been taken from us, dear friends that left us before their time. Just this week, the mother of a dear friend, Rosevarte, left us. His pain and mourning are raging rivers whose strength he does not yet fully understand. And David, who lost his entire family one by one, just like that. First it was his mother, then his sister, and then another sister. All in less than two weeks. His grief silenced him and today he struggles to find words that might stubbornly bring him back to life in the midst of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we are a world mourning governments that deliberately seek out, create, and cause death. A world whose governance takes the form of genocide and whose ruler is the primary cause of death. We are a world mourning because of a virus. But more than that, for many the virus is just another wave of well-known histories of colonization. Everywhere, we hear about the death of poor people, everywhere. While we feel like this pandemic is subsiding in the US, it’s not the same around the world. I hear 85 countries don’t have access to vaccines or money to buy them. This is a third of the world and at least half of the world’s population! Unless the whole world is vaccinated, we will continue to wrestle with an endemic situation. In Latin America there are estimated 231 million people living in poverty due to COVID, without access to clean water or food security, who will become refugees in the coming winter. We are a world in mourning because of a virus. But more than that, we have lived fully into many forms of dominium over people, the earth, animals, and oceans. Dominium brought us COVID. Our mourning is our perpetual banishment and our historic undoing. In our grief we learn that we are not what we thought we were and know that we will not be what we want to be. Our desires are trapped in our interdictions and are sabotaged by stories that we did not want to read, an economic system that both alienates us and intensifies our desires until they’re impotent. We destroy the earth with myriad forms of extractivism depleting so many forms of life, while financial markets skyrocket. No coincidence: the growth of financial markets demands extinguishing jobs, exploitation of people, erasure of social welfare, extinction of animals, mountains, and human lives. Grief is undoing our social fabric of relationality, solidarity, and mutual sustenance. COVID-19 has taken away our rituals of death and mourning. We feel more alone, feeling that there’s no one else to see us, hear us, or feel our pain. Our cry is simultaneously trapped in our throats and also released, like the sound of a cannon inside our chest, metastasizing our spirit, causing necrosis of life tissues that used to animate us. With each daily announcement of the number of deaths we need a defibrillator to start feeling life pulsing in us again. When we teach, we are drenched by many forms of grief. The loss is too much. How do we keep our heads up? So many people have lost their jobs, universities and colleges cutting positions by the thousands, tenured positions dismantled, and adjunct faculty teach eight classes a semester to survive.  How can we not worry about losing jobs? How can we support our students when we ourselves are eroding inside? How can we have necessary discussions in the classroom when the world is falling apart and our students’ worlds are discretely crumbling? Capitalism has made us think individually, just as Social Darwinism made us think our cells were essentially selfish, fighting to survive. However, as we now know, our cells work together to sustain the whole body. If we could think and act like them, we could care for each other, instead of feeding a culture of merit and rank. Perhaps we could start thinking how absurd it is for a president of any school to get so much more money than teachers. Or for tenured teachers to get more money than adjuncts. I just heard from an adjunct professor who on top of teaching sells his blood every week to make ends meet. I am reminded of how my school, Union, once thought differently and its faculty donated 10 percent of their salaries to support an unknown scholar from Germany named Paul Tillich.  To think like this today is absurd. We are taught to fend for only ourselves: I care for me and you care for you! Perhaps I have COVID-19 and it is affecting my brain. In the same way that our mourning is a political act of resistance, as Judith Butler told us, our living together in mutual care could also be a collective act of political resistance. Our mourning is a gesture of continuity in the war against death in the midst of death itself! Our mourning is the refusal to accept what the governments want: that we forget about our dead, and our social structures. On the contrary, our mourning is a constant reminder, an announcement that, once and for all, we will not surrender to death and the neglect and normalization of sick and dying people! It is a reminder that we must care for each other somewhat somehow. It is good to say out loud that death will not kill us! At least not all of us! As my beloved Mercedes Sosa sings in Como la Cigarra So many times, they killed me So many times, I died And yet here I am coming back to life Thank you for your disgrace And your fisted hand Because you killed me so heartlessly   And I kept singing Singing in the sun like the cicada After a year under the earth Just like survivor What a war  As we walk around dead bodies, may we make mourning the death of our people our most subversive act!  Even in our teaching! For we fight for ourselves and also for our dead. If we lose, they lose too!

Rubem Alves was a Brazilian theologian who became a psychoanalyst, educator, and writer of children’s stories. In one of his short stories called Happy Oysters Don’t Create Pearls, he tells the story of an oyster that was different from all the others. This oyster could not be happy like the others and was always very sad. The cause of his sadness was a grain of sand that had entered his body. He felt that excruciating pain day and night. As a way to survive the pain he sang sad songs. His songs were so sad that they tormented the oysters that sang happily. “Why is he so sad?” they asked. But the truth was that he had to live with the pain caused by the arrival of that unexpected grain of sand that was plaguing his life. One day, a fisherman threw his nets and took all the oysters, the happy ones and the sad one too. At dinner, the fisherman was eating oyster soup with his family when he felt something hard inside his mouth. When he took that stone out of his mouth, he realized it was a pearl! And he gave it to his wife. Rubem Alves then says that happy oysters do not produce pearls, only those that suffer a piercing pain in the flesh. In the Bantu and Yorubá traditions, it is said that the Orixá Obaluaê, also called Omulu, is the Lord of the Pearls. There is a story where Iemanjá, the Orixá of the seas, adopts Omulu when he is sick. She washes his body and heals his body with the water of the sea. But Omulu, who goes around the world offering healing and producing plagues, is poor and sad. Iemanjá takes compassion on him for she doesn’t want to see her son poor and his body covered with wounds. Iemanjá gets all her riches, her pearls, and makes beautiful necklaces to cover Omulu’s body so he could go around shining. These two stories can help us figure out a certain pedagogy of astonishment. Four ways to think about it: First, education as an oyster space that listens to human suffering The stories of Alves and Iemanjá and Omulu, in such different and diverse ways, tell us that pain and suffering are central issues of our existence. We must be attuned to the ways of suffering in our time. We are seeing so much suffering everywhere and COVID-19 has not only eroded so much of what we knew but also expanded poverty, stretching the already frail social threads of our communities. Our political and economic organizing systems are creating forms that deny the ways we recognize pain. We live at a furious pace of life, giving more to get much less. We are so alienated from nature. Our illnesses shift and expand in uncontrollable proportions. We live in a world of depressions, refluxes, panic attacks, heart attacks, barbiturates, anti-depressants, antihistamines, and painkillers. We medicate every form of feeling and morbidity, we lose the capacity for wonder. More than ever, we need to find “oyster spaces,” to transform our sadness into pearls and songs of sadness and joy to sustain our lives. Education thus can be this oyster space, when hearing and exchange provides possibilities for the remaking of ourselves. Education becomes this oyster space when the hearing is also seeing, understanding, going deeper, creating empathy and compassion. When that happens, the classroom becomes this oyster-like environment, conducive to the metabolization of pain in other forms of life, sustenance, imagination, resistance, and forms of living in the world. For the pearl is that amalgam of the body, mind, heart, and soul that learns from itself, and is able to remake itself from the experiences of pain and suffering. If the oyster is that place of astonishment that turns itself into pearl, the attentive classroom can also help us wonder, turning the pain of life into a delicate and strong stone, rare and beautiful. In this way, each teacher who feels and even perhaps can come close to understanding the pains of the world and the pains of the students, is also a therapist who listens and engages in the process of transference; the teacher is also a healer who offers symbolic exchanges; is also a clown who activates other forms of lightness and laughter; and is a magician at reordering worlds so that the life inside the oyster can continue the symbiotic movements of life. In this oyster space, the pearl becomes the capacity for continuous amazement with the potential of life that is continuously remade. Second, education as the oyster place to produce beauty Omulu had his body covered with sores and that is why he lived hidden under his straw clothes. Iemanjá, as an affectionate foster mother, wants to see her precious son shine with his healing gifts. The queen of the sea creates pearl necklaces that cover Omulu’s entire body so he would be honored, and live happily and proudly. His body would continue to be marked by the wounds of his scars, but now he shines the light of pearls, that like white flowers adorn his skin; the shiny stones made from the pain of oysters now caress his skin and adorn his suffering body. From here, we can regard education as the care of Iemanjá for her son Omulu. Education as production of beauty that helps us to move around the world. Educators as oysters, who use their own pearls, gestated by the symbiosis of their bodies in pain, and offer their precious, beautiful, luminous pearls to decorate their student’s lives. The same way in which students offer their own beautiful pearls to decorate their teachers’ lives. Often educators cannot change the situation of their students, but they can pay attention to their wounds, hold their bodies in care, enlarge their thoughts, help their knees to walk and fly, strengthen their hands, illuminate their eyes with the sparkle of astonishment, bewitch them with words of life in resonance with the words of death, and pace their heartbeats in a rhythm other than the destruction and annihilation that often surround their worlds. The educator is not all-knowing of everything. The hope is that the educator has already learned to be in awe with life and has been astonished in many ways. If that has already happened, then the educator becomes a double path, or a bridge, that helps others to be astonished and is wide open to be astonished by others. If the educator is ready to engage this double path, pause and listen, be astonished by the very presence of the student, the educator will see this encounter always as a thrilling surprise, as the production of desire that changes and transforms, creates mutuality, brings spells, charms, and chistes to life, providing tools of defiance and self-sustenance, building paths for new trajectories. In this way, the educator and the classroom as this oyster space will not be voyeurism of one’s suffering, but rather be a mutual singing of songs of sadness, a mutual creation of pearl necklaces for mutual survival. The healer in history is not Iemanjá. Omulu receives healing from the forest and from Olorum. But it is Iemanjá who takes care of the healing symbology, covering Omulu’s wounds in beauty so his joy would be full. In the same way, we educators must strive to be like Iemanjá, looking for beauty, for pearls in the sea to put on the wounded bodies of our students. Pearls that come from inside our own bodies like oysters that learned to make pearls, pearls that come from the history of our people and other people, pearls from ancient wisdom, pearls from below, and pearls produced by the students themselves. The pedagogy of astonishment is thus the crafting of necklaces of thousands of forms of beauty in multiple pearls and of several places for entire bodies, both individual and collective, to shine. Third, education to open ourselves to engage the different, the uninvited grain of sand Fourth, education that helps us hear the suffering of nonhuman forms of life. To be continued…

The term “pedagogies of cruelty” was created by the Argentine-Brazilian, feminist, anthropologist Rita Laura Segato.[1] Her development of the term has to do with the ways we must learn nowadays to get used to the cruelty of our times. This can be clearly seen in the ways governments are dealing with the SARS-Covid-19. As we have seen, politicians are telling us that this virus, whose first name is always absent, SARS- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is just a flu and some necessary death will happen in order for the economy to go back to normal if we all want to survive.[2] The perversity of capitalism demands an education based on violence, terror, and cruelty. One that destroys any form of solidarity or empathy. We have to learn to see suffering, cruelty, and death as normal, and even inevitable presences in our times.  Since the liturgies of the state must be liturgies of cruelty, control, and death if it wants to survive, the pedagogies of this capitalistic economic system train us that we must accept any liturgical form of cruelty necessary. In other words, necropolitics needs necropedagogies. Thus, we must get used to the prison system because this is necessary for our safety. We must get used to debt because there is no way to live without debt. We must get used to climate collapse otherwise we can’t get all we want. We must get used to health care offered to some people and not all because the costs are too high to provide for all. We must get used to poor people dying because they have no reason to exist. We must get used to walls against foreigners because we can’t accept all immigrants. We must get used to mental illness because this is a crazy world. These “new” pedagogies of cruelty appear as a continuation of previous pedagogies of cruelty already normalized in our social living: we have already gotten used to the notion of private property, staggering salary differences, lack of rights for workers, use and abuse of women, the need to be constantly at war, and so on. The co-opting of the commons by private sectors have financialized health, education, and the earth, turning what is common into “resources” owned by a few proprietors. Due to that, Segato says we cannot understand the capitalism of our time without thinking about the owners of the world’s richness. The speed of the concentration of wealth is alarming, eroding the world’s entire networks of systems and balances. The case for education is the same. Turned into profit, we must now get used to education being for the few and accept its systems of cruelty. Thus, we must get used to student loans and large amounts of debt because higher education is necessarily costly. We must get used to the gap between schools’ administrators and teachers because, you know, it’s a matter of responsibility. We must get used to working for big endowments that grow off the exploitation of the earth and people because we need to offer a high-quality education. We must get used to paying adjunct teachers less and no benefits so we can compete in the market. The same argument surfaces in Brown University’s president Christina Paxson recent article where she calls for returning to campus this Fall. She says: “The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple—tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue.”[3] In other words, school is based on profit and we, the people, not the state, not the government, must pay the price for its existence. It’s simple! We must pay the salaries of high ranking business educators too. Pedagogies of cruelty aim at depleting any source of solidarity and any form of vincularidad, of connection between people, people with animals, and the earth. We must learn to cope with the pain of the other and make sure to pay attention to ourselves since this is a vicious world and we must survive at any cost. Using military strategies of deflating the power of pain of the other, pedagogies of cruelty teach us to look at the death of other and say: such is life, or what can we do, or I am sorry and move on.  Who cares if the largest number of deaths due to SARS-Covid-19 are in poor areas and among minority people? Who cares if black people are dying in greater numbers? Who cares if poor white people are dying? Who cares if migrants are dying in private prisons or if black people are dying in prisons? They are all already expelled from society. What can we do? This is the crux of the pedagogies of cruelty: to take away any sense of agency and political action from us. We are lost. Both main political parties are suffused with these pedagogies even if in different modules and intensities. We feel we have no way to go. When we teachers go to the classroom, we come already indoctrinated by these pedagogies. To care for the students is getting more and more difficult. Both because they are not our business and because we must protect our schools so we can keep our standing. If we can fulfill the “learning outcomes” we are doing our job. The subjectivities of our students paired with their objective lives must be placed in a second plane of awareness. At the end, they are on their own as we are on our own too. We can lose our jobs at any time. Unknowingly, we reflect in some way or another, these pedagogies of cruelty in our classrooms. Our task then is to constantly raise a sign and scream: NO! we must continue to be in solidarity! We must continue to create bonds of affection and care! We must keep the threads of vincularidad, of connection, of mutual belonging. We must join other groups and expand the public spaces that have been encroached on by capitalism. We must foster communities of alterity, of other forms of living, thinking and relating to life. In Latin America, there are many communities who live on the exteriors of our systems: indigenous, quilombolas, raizales, palenqueras, communities led by women in the Amazon and the Zapatistas.[4] They are the deepest target of pedagogies of cruelty, for they still hold a counter narrative to the system. However, they are the ones who can teach us how to resist, how to create pedagogies of affection, of relationality, of vincularidad, of production of collective means of care and a common life with other people, species, and the earth. The task at hand is immense or even impossible. But as somebody said: Who said the impossible wouldn’t be difficult? [1] Pedagogies of Cruelty is a development of Hannah Arendt’s political education in Hanna Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. Segato understands the current form of ‘capitalism of cruelty’ as one that creates forms of education to keep the edifice of the system protected and moving. In her words, “the pedagogy of cruelty is the system's reproduction strategy… which is “absolutely essential to the market and capital in this already apocalyptic phase of its historical project.” in Rita Laura Segato, Las Nuevas Formas De La Guerra Y El Cuerpo De Las Mujeres (Argentina: Tinta Limón, 2013), 23, 80 [2] Trump’s Deadly Mistake In Comparing Coronavirus To Flu, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/25/coronavirus-flu-comparison-trump/?comments=1; Texas lt. governor on reopening state: 'There are more important things than living,' https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/493879-texas-lt-governor-on-reopening-state-there-are-more-important-things; Chris Christie argues for reopening economy because "there are going to be deaths no matter what," https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chris-christie-reopening-economy-deaths-no-matter-what/ [3] Christina Paxson, College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/opinion/coronavirus-colleges-universities.html [4] Eliane Brum, The Amazon Is A Woman, https://atmos.earth/amazon-rainforest-indigenous-activism-history/

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Paulo Freire’s magnificent book Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Wabash journal, Teaching Theology and Religion, has published a Forum to  to celebrate the book and Freire’s legacy. Very few books in recent history have made their way around the world expanding the ways people think about education and learning processes. Freire’s legacy is one that will always be developed and challenged. Developed by those who care for deep, critical thinking and challenged by people and governments who see the danger of Freire’s thinking. Regarding the latter, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the new president of Brazil, where Paulo Freire is from, sees a danger in Freire’s work and legacy. While campaigning, the new president said that he would go into the Ministry of Education with a flame-thrower to burn anything associated with Paulo Freire. Even though Mr. Bolsonaro most probably has never read any of Freire’s books, he claims that Freire offers a sectarian and socialist education whose Marxist teachings undermine the education of the student. Along with Bolsonaro, the Brazilian new conservative movement called “Schools Without a Party” also blames Freire for making students receptacles of ideologists who want to put socialist interests before the love of Brazil and threaten the “Christian values” of family, property and church. It is with good reason that the president of Brazil and conservative sectors of society are all concerned with Paulo Freire. Freire’s education helps people to figure out their own lives more fully, to develop critical minds, to engage into social mobilization, to gain their own sense of liberation, and become subjects of their own history. This process helps people to see, judge and act, challenging all forms of power. Education for Freire is the unfolding of worlds for the one who is learning. It is a way to gain conscientization of one’s own life and the environment in which one lives. When Paulo Freire is teaching a village of fishers, he starts by asking people “what is a fish?” Then he asks what is the meaning of the fish to the community, and how fish and fishing are connected with their own ways of living, as well as how they relate with other fishing villages, the environment, and even big fishing companies. Through pursuing the meaning of the word “fish,” the fishers describe several power relations around their lives. In the end, people learn not only how to spell and write “fish,” but also how “fish” tells people about their lives, their world, and the other worlds with which they are connected. Done this way, education is a path from being oppressed to become free. Education is a way of giving voice to the voiceless and gaining conscientization that unleashes the struggle against the domination of those in power, of realizing that everyone has the strength to organize and struggle to change their lives. This form of education is everywhere in the world and as educators we must go where transformation is at work. In order to continue to honor Paulo Freire, we must acknowledge that popular education is present in the movements of resistance and emancipation. For us to get a better sense of what Freire’s pedagogy can do, we should listen to those who are at the bottom of society trying not only to survive, but to thrive. It is from those places that we gain a much better sense of what Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed means. As Oscar Soto says: The popular education of Paulo Freire is the possibility that workers, peasants, landless workers, excluded and marginalized people will think and re-invent themselves in the transit from being spectators to become genuine creators of the material conditions of life. It is not in vain that the language of the pedagogical rebellion of the oppressed is spoken in the popular movements, in the base communities, in the theories of dependencies, the sociologies of exploitation, the liberation theologies, the Latin American socialisms, the research/activism, participatory action and so many traditions of resistance in Our America.[1] On the other hand, Freire’s pedagogy can also be relevant for teaching contexts with privileged students in elite universities. It can help students gain a sense of vincularidad[2] or deep relationality, of unbalanced power, exploitation, and class struggle. By gaining consciousness of our lives in the relation with others and larger societies, we learn how to act towards somebody else, and move from protecting our own groups into seeking common justice for all. This opening of the world of oneself into the world of another brings a demand with it, namely that we engage in each other’s worlds. What happens then is that I have to check how my own ways of thinking and living are related to other forms of thinking and living, how my habits of eating fish relate to fishing villages and the massive destruction of the sea life by big corporations. This consciousness of our common situation and the fundamental sense of vincularidad challenge teachers and students in any school, poor or rich, to engage in uneven exchanges. Freire’s education for consciousness is the beginning of the unfolding of a vast world of wonders and imperfections that need to be engaged. For instance, if we want to deeply honor Paulo Freire and his legacy, we must respond to one of the most fundamental challenges of our times: patriarchy/fascism and the “masculine mandate.” Rita Laura Segato calls our attention to the war against women and how the new forms of fascism are aimed at the destruction of the women.[3] How can we engage pedagogies of liberation that help us engage and relate with this those being oppressed by it? How can we find tools, together, to understand it and create conditions of possibilities for transformation? Our lives, and the life of our planet, depend on forever-expanding forms of conscientization that keep demanding freedom, and justice for every person. In this way, the work of Paulo Freire, developed by the work of women, indigenous voices and popular movements, can reach any and every school and community, connecting us deeply with the work of Martin Luther King who said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (Letter from Birmingham Jail) [1] Oscar Soto, Freire, Mariategui y una educación popular campesino, Noviembre 22, 2018, http://contrahegemoniaweb.com.ar/freire-mariategui-y-una-educacion-popular-campesina/ [2]  Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham:  Duke University Press Books, 2018). [3] Rita Laura Segato, La Guerra Contra Las Mujeres (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2016).

It was my first semester teaching about 10 years ago in a seminary. Our class of about 35 students was into the second week of the semester and I was speaking about the complicity of the United States in the attack of 9/11. In the midst of my talk a student raised his hand and I asked him to speak. He proceeded to offend me in many ways: telling me I was not from this country and that I shouldn’t be in the US, much less teaching. After he was done, I was possessed by an anger that took away my ability to think. In the midst of it all I remembered that I was wearing a microphone so a student with impaired hearing could listen to my talk. I then went to the back of the class and asked the student to speak again into the microphone so the other student could hear. It was during this movement from the front to the back of the classroom that I gained some clarity. I got very close to him so he could use the microphone that was on my chest and I said, “Can you please say it all again so Mary can hear what you said?” I was so close to him I could feel his breathing. He was so surprised that he started stuttering and said only 20% of what he said the first time. And then we had to continue the class. We became opponents of each other and it was a very strange, fearful, and awkward semester. The current political atmosphere in this country is one made of confrontation. We address each other with the goal to win the battle, and in some or many ways, to annihilate the opponent. There is a certain pleasure not only in winning an argument but in depriving somebody from their own joys. Many polarities in our society are based on the assumption that these important issues can preserve or eliminate the very possibility of life. Whites see minorities as a threat to their social position, and even their lives; minorities see whites as owning a privilege and control of things-supremacy- that impedes them from living fully and even existing; heterosexuals see queer people as a threat to the nuclear family, ‘normal’ social composition and God’s design; queer folks see these heterosexuals not only limiting their social rights, but also endangering their very lives. Be it race and ethnicity, economics and class, sexuality and gender, we seem to locate ourselves in opposition and from those places we fight for our very lives. Classrooms are not exempt. Teachers and students come from the corners of those sides and may reproduce in class the same divisions experienced in society. Readings become ideological brainwashing, free speech is endangered on both sides, and taking a position offends someone. The results can be disastrous. It is not difficult to foresee uneven power discussions becoming a screaming contest with the aim being to wound the opponent. But also, there are discussions that produce silent harm in their aftermath. A friend of mine told me that her president asked faculty for ways to help her school to improve in terms of diversity. When my friend, somewhat naively, pointed out some aspects of the institution and its life that were alienating for minority persons, the discussion in the meeting skirted the issues she had raised and failed to recognize the problems. The next year, my friend didn’t get tenure because the president had felt personally offended in that meeting and said he couldn’t trust her anymore. In a culture that often does not know how to deal with conflict, where offense and injury are  seemingly inevitable when we discuss difference and litigation is the only vocabulary we know to solve disputes, how do we model a culture of mutual appreciation and begin to create spaces where people can speak what they need to and, at the same time, be challenged regarding what they say? Marcia Y. Riggs in her article “Loves the Spirit”: Transformative Mediation as Pedagogical Practice,[1] gives us wonderful tools to create a space where dialogue is fostered instead of debate. She says: “The concept of dialogue is critical to intercultural communication because it is more than simply conversation; it is communication that nurtures relationship. This is the case because dialogue is based upon mutual respect and listening and learning from one another over time; “earning such respect comes through a willingness to accept the ‘other-ness’ of others.”[2] Dialogue creates a possibility for many voices to contribute, but debate opposes one person over another. Surely, we can’t go into dialogue with the naïve feeling that we need to be nice to one another. Surely we can’t be unaware of the power dynamics and tensions always present in organizations and schools. Fearful sentimentalities when pronounced through pedagogies formed out of the fear of conflicts easily succumbs to other fears lurking in the space and end up avoiding the very issues that we are supposed to discuss. The same thing happens with “safe” pedagogies that tend to create safe/artificial spaces where people only speak what is “non-threatening” and the very issues at stake continue in a latent mode. We need pedagogies of courage that help us confront each other fully by creating forms of trust and recognition, offering tools and programs that do not work from fear and don’t aim at simply checking the proper list of mutual respects. Just recently I was in a classroom in my seminary where my colleague who teaches a difficult class allowed students to ask, talk, and make mistakes, fundamentally practicing honesty. Fiery conversations with fiercely made arguments can be just as fine to engage if what is at stake is an idea and not the dignity of a person, or a people. Surely ideas can put people’s dignity under attack, and it can be tricky sometimes to distinguish between “mere ideas” and the dignity of a person. Especially in some subject areas. However, it is the practicing of pedagogies of courage that gives us the awareness to feel, listen and speak, or see, judge, and act. We must learn to live in rough planes of uneven ideas, disjointed and opposed worldviews and stay there, breathing within our differences with the intent of, perhaps, mutual relations. A very difficult task. As I write this article I wonder what I would do if someone like that student of mine, who must surely be against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, would come to my class again. The extinguishing of this program has deeply affected me. Now that I have tenure in a very liberal institution and have a better sense of myself, would I have patience with this student? Would I be able to create a space where this student could thrive as much as he would be challenged and respected? I don’t know . . . . My ethicist friend asks me: What is teaching for? What can happen in the classroom that is important, that expands the world for students, and for us as teachers? How can we create classroom communities that practice justice in the same ways that we want our larger community (neighborhood, city, country) to be more just?  Perhaps we can try to think about our opponents not as people to be thrown away or put down (how different would I be from my very opponent who wants the same?) but rather, as part of my own wellbeing. I cannot allow myself to be reduced to my opponent in regard to their ideas and propositions. But I must know that we are made of the same human material, the same vices, horrors, joys and honors, the same desires to destroy and to build. To acknowledge the humanity in those whom I can easily despise and would enjoy seeing their demise, is the first step into this space of some commonality. For those with some power, it is getting closer that empowers us rather than running away. My people made me strong to face our enemies and I am with them for them. Without fear! I simply don’t have the possibility to run away! I must face them while I don’t need to eliminate them! While I can’t stand the president of the United States and all that his administration is doing, I cannot just say, “Well, his term will end soon.” While he is a threat to the very condition of life for my people, all the minorities, and the earth, I can’t demonize him! I can’t demonize him even after I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The First White President"[3] and his sharp while contestable, yet fundamental analysis of what the president represents. I can’t dehumanize him even though I have enough content and rhetoric to do it easily. I cannot allow his white resentment and grievance to make me work from my own resentment and grievance. I am not spending time dealing with an anger he wants me to feel, thus preempting my criticism and action and defusing my strength. I will engage in other forms of feeling that he does not expect. I will move closer to him and I will breathe next to him a different breath! Until he moves or is moved away! In fact, he is teaching me so many things and challenging me to think in ways I had not done before. In this way, he is actually making me feel stronger to contest him and his administration in more thorough and unforeseen ways. The weirdest thing: he is empowering me with opposite signs! I don’t want to destroy him! I once heard Professor Orlando Espin say this: “You cannot free somebody by dismissing and destroying someone else.”[4] So I won’t do it! But if you ask me, “Can you fight this man and his administration?” I will say it out loud. “Oh yes! Oh yes, I can!” In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, recently remembered by Rev. Dr. Serene Jones and Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas:[5]“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” In order to drive a spoke into the wheel we need to get closer, even very close, to our enemies and listen to them. That is what that microphone in my neck taught me. I got closer to my student and he changed. As I also changed. It is from this closer place that we gain our strength and we are able to see somebody else’s humanity. From that place we listen, agitate, contest; we confront and radically change things and people.  Perhaps the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who coined the term “socially engaged Buddhism” can help us see us in a multitude of places, names, and situations. He helps us name all of our names: Please Call Me by My True Names Don't say that I will depart tomorrow— even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am a mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin a bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp. My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion. [1]Riggs, Marcia Y., ““Loves the Spirit”: Transformative Mediation as Pedagogical Practice,” 2016 111 E. Ott Marshall (ed.), Conflict Transformation and Religion, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56840-3_8 [2] Ibid, 113. [3] Ta-Nehisi Coates, The First White President. The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=fbb [4] Dr. Espin also emphasizes that “among unequal people, if to make victims free from bondage requires to hurt the dominant abusive dictatorial oppressor, I don’t have ethical problems with that.” [5]We Condemn President Trump’s DACA Betrayal, https://utsnyc.edu/condemn-president-trumps-daca-betrayal/

Brazilian writer Eliane Brum tells this story: Vanderley was a man who used to go to an agriculture fair in the south of Brazil with a broomstick saying that this broomstick was a pure breed horse. He was known around as the “little cuckoo guy.” One day I asked him, "Are you really Cuckoo Vanderley?" And he said, "Don’t you think I know this isn’t a pureblood horse? That this is just a stick? But this is my way of thinking about that which I will never have.” Perhaps we teachers could be more like Vanderley, a little cuckoo, imagining that which we cannot think, have, or teach, and make it our own. Perhaps we can engage a double pedagogical movement: to listen to those students who actually have a broomstick and see what meanings they give to it, and help those students who don’t have one to invent a broomstick as a pure breed horse, or whatever else, and make it their own. Our classrooms need an inventory of broomsticks! Broomsticks that can give us a sense of our reality. In order to do that we need more art! Art helps us access the madness of our realities. Art helps us think and feel differently. Art gives us access to different forms of reasoning of our bodies and our relations in our world. Art wires our brain differently. Art gives us a space beyond objectivity so we can venture into the unknown in order to reshape our realities. Unfortunately, our pedagogies are often centered in objective knowledge, positivistic thinking based on progress, and detached forms of thinking that celebrate a necessary distance between the seeing and the thing seen. Sadly enough, this form of knowledge can’t catch our realities from the point of view of Vanderley. We need something else. We need other venues and forms of thinking that can help us invent and imagine something that can actually affect our reality. We feel that our objective words can grasp our reality in some forms and yet, it feels also that what we say is like unopened letters that end up returning to us.[1] We can’t be transformed only by precise objective readings of our reality. We need the enchantment of the unknown, gray areas of thoughts and beliefs, the uncontrolled parts of our lives, the broomsticks of Vanderley. The Brazilian theologian, poet, philosopher, and sociologist Rubem Alves lived in the academy for many years and produced many books. One day he realized that his kind of work wouldn’t change people. He then started to write short essays and children stories. With the theoretical knowledge he gained, he delved into the abyss of the quotidian life of people by way of children stories. He would mix Escher, Camus, Bachelard, Bach, Celan and many others with daily events in life. I was introduced to art by his theo-poetics writings. In my classrooms, I am growing more skeptical of only objective readings of realities. We are lost trying to grasp the ever-expansive disasters of our lives. We need rituals! We need art to tap into that aspect where objective knowledge can’t go. Words alone can’t do it. We need other mediums to express the absurd of our present, to retell stories of pain and trauma of our past and imagine our future. Without addressing the present, reshaping the past, and gaining a good sense of future we will be lead to a future that will continue not to be ours. However, life will be given to those who can invent life in its multiple, timely possibilities. And for that, we need new partners! When we bring Doris Salcedo to our classrooms we have a much-expanded way of addressing violence, trauma, and loss. When we invite Tania Bruguera and Weiwei to present their works to us, we can have a better sense of repressive governments and societal systems. It is when we wrestle with Favianna Rodriguez, Justin Favela, Guillermo Gómez-Pena, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, and Alvin Ailey Dance that we can wrestle with a flow of white supremacy, race and identity politics. When we deal with the artist Banksy, we can learn about social contestation. When we engage Giuseppe Campuzano and Miguel A. López, we see new figurings of sexualities and gender nuances and immensities. When we open up to know Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, we can see the complex collective interdisciplinary environmental colonial/postcolonial gaze of native people. It is when we listen and watch Mona Haydar, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar, we can deal with the cultural racial pop culture. We indeed need more art in our classroom! But we have many challenges to do that. First, we don’t feel we have enough expertise to do it. We would need to learn how to teach it. Second, we don’t know what to do to assess it. Once in a faculty meeting, I heard from friends that they wish they could use more art but they don’t have criteria to evaluate any work of art. Third, art doesn’t seem to have the same academic weight. We all know the fight Cornel West had to undergo at Harvard when he was accused by the president Lawrence Summers for not doing proper scholarship when he ventured into recording a rap CD. Yes, to use art we need to cross these boundaries. We have to venture into that weary space in order to know a little more. But we can start by looking and imagining. And helping our students to look and invent as well. The best “final projects” in my classes are the ones students can imagine and invent. Perhaps we can give up a little of our sense that we have to control every corner of what is to be taught, both for proper reasoning and meaning, but also for coherence. Not to dismiss intellectualism and proper theoretical work, but to actually expand it for better ways to grasp life. Perhaps we can start by trying some new things out. GO visit a museum, a street artist, a mural. Perhaps we can start by listening to a song, watching a performance in a video, looking at a picture. And let the artists help us expand ourselves and our imagery/imagining. They might help us dream, invent, figure out something else! They might help us see that Vanderley’s broomstick is indeed a pure breed horse! And that we desperately need one too! [1]Eliane Brum, O Brasil desassombrado pelas palavras-fantasmas. Como o sonho e a arte podem nos ajudar a acessar a realidade e a romper a paralisia, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/07/10/opinion/1499694080_981744.html Resources:  http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/transvestite-museum-of-peru/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idMJIEFH_ns http://postcommodity.com/About.html http://favianna.tumblr.com

Like many teachers, I was trained to expect student’s participation in the classroom to be many things at once:  prepared, right on the issue at stake, ready to offer deep insights and if possible, be passionate. I also was trained to exclude the needs and subjective experiences of my students, expecting them to bracket their suffering, their sorrows, and their traumas, at least during class time. Oh, and I was trained to expect students to be as text-based as I am, even though reading habits have changed. I still resent it when the connections made in class are not related to the texts. After a while, it is so easy to catch students who are just pretending that they have read or make a comment based on a line on page 78 without having actually read the text. I get really frustrated when students don’t read the assigned texts or when they are not fully present, having their hearts and minds elsewhere. All of these forms of participation in class demand practical responses from the professors that are not as clear as we might hope. Let me give an example: one day a student offered a harsh critique of the book we were reading. I asked him to name what in the book he didn’t like. After 3 attempts to continue with his critique, it was clear he didn’t read a thing. What do I do? Call him out in front of everyone? Talk to him in private? Wait until the end of the semester? Other forms of participation, or non-participation, are part of the experience of the class. Students who “participate” by sleeping in class, or using their phones and computers. There is the gaze of the one who is checking emails and looking at Facebook. And there are the smiles, facial reactions, and even laughter when they are texting. All this is why I tend not to let students use computers or phones during class. But how to do that when the readings are on their computers, or when the cares of the world are (often) more compelling than what our students find in our classrooms? When we have only their bodies, and not their minds and hearts and spirits, passions and convictions, strong yesses and necessary nos, then what? Maybe we have to be open to the possibility that some of our students are part of conversations they cannot tell us unless we ask and are open to what we will hear.  Besides the objective forms of grading participation regarding reading texts, there is so much more that is at stake when our students are in the classroom. I had a student who would sleep every day in my class. For a long while, I thought about sending him an email saying he couldn’t make this class his bedroom. But then, I decided to talk to him personally. We met and he then told me that life had been very difficult for him, that he was working overtime to take care of his unemployed mother, his little brother, and teenage sister. He apologized. What do I do? Tell him if he continues this way he cannot pass? Find ways to help him when I don’t have time to help? Keep him in the class for as long as I can until he resolves his problems? Another student was quiet all the time. Couldn’t speak. Talking to her I learned she was going through very difficult personal times, but couldn’t say what it was. She kept quiet. What to do? Flunk her? After the semester was over she decided to talk to me and told me she had become pregnant but had lost the baby. She could not make sense of her life, and the only places she found some sort of sustenance, relief and perhaps even coherence was the classes she took that semester, including mine. Another student received the news that his mother was terminally ill. He missed more classes than he was allowed in order to pass this class. What was I supposed to do? Objectively speaking, knowledge is a composition of several issues. Knowledge is not only about the present of abstract thinking but also by what is around us, with its feelings and emotions, the composition of social classes, objects and images used, sensations around expectations, fears and hopes, general conditions of life. The best forms of learning are the ones that can integrate all these aspects of life in direct and/or transversal ways. But for students in crisis, the ‘best forms of learning’ may require each teacher to bend a bit, to listen a little longer, to walk with the student an extra mile as she is able. Does that mean that every teacher needs to be a therapist or a chaplain? Yes and no. Perhaps more yes than no? Well, yes because when we teach we are teaching about the whole life and not only about the specifics of a certain discipline/knowledge. Even the specifics of a certain knowledge influences the whole way of living. And no, absolutely no, since we are not professionals in these areas, and we do not have the required formation, and cannot offer the appropriate care. In classrooms, there are so many borders to negotiate and fundamental boundaries that must be kept and honored. To deal with each case that arises in our classrooms is always so difficult to discern. But if I am unwilling to listen, or if I am captive to my objective model of learning, I may be injuring my students while professing rigor, standards, and policies. How teachers and students learn together is a wonder for me! How we survive a whole time together is a mystery to me! And when we witness transformed lives is a miracle to me! These truths are sometimes too much for me. For you, too?

In a poem entitled The World’s Feeling,[1] the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade has a line that says: “I have only two hands and all the feelings of the world.” I love this metaphor and I feel that this is how I have been living lately. The political arena seems to be depleting us day by day with news of atrocities, shocking moves that place the world at a tipsy point, and new national laws that put people in danger and potential situations of disaster. And we have just started! Too many feelings, too much disastrous news, and too few defused responses and ideas without anything that seems to be truly articulating the moment in any clarifying direction.  Every movement is divided. The so-called leftists, living in a time of potentialities to create a new left, is bitterly divided over issues either defending one candidate or accusing another. However, there have been positive moments. The Women’s March was a balm to many of us. As were the responses from Boston and NYC about Trump’s threat to immigrants and registering Muslims. As a citizen and as a teacher, I feel the weight of the feelings of the world and yet I only have two hands to deal with it all. The task of living our days in resistance to power seems insurmountable and that also seems to be the hope of the leaders of this country. The battle at hand is not only on the front of new laws and administrative resolutions but also on the controlling of feelings and emotions. The attack on media as the new enemy, the creation of “alternative facts,” and actions such as “President Donald Trump to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants,”[2] are all tactics used by the government to disturb our feelings and confuse our ideas. This is not removed from the classroom. Students carry their emotions into every class. Teaching engages the world of ideas and contemporary movements. Teachers must engage ideas and human feelings at the same time. Ideas are dependent on feelings and feelings are affected by ideas and it is in this chiaroscuro time and place where teachers work. Antonio Gramsci defines our time in precise ways: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” An empire is eroding, a collapsing new world order is emerging and in the midst of it all, there are monsters of all kinds! We can surely name them! It is in this chiaroscuro time that faculty are called, even demanded, to attend to teaching in ways that take seriously the complicated interplay between ideas and feelings in their subject matters and within the student’s lives. Our classrooms are containers of the world’s feelings with only few hands. However, if education is for life and not for a program of profit and if outcomes are hoped for the decolonization of the minds and bodies and not to fulfill a neoliberal project of processual measurement, then we can meet each other now; but also, beyond the surroundings of the classroom: in soup kitchens, in marches for rights of people, in strikes against economic austerity deals of destitution. We can continue to organize something that will be plural, filled with ambiguities and paradoxes, but that can somewhat, produce sustainable forms of resistance to be engaged. In order to do that, teachers must teach with their heart and mind filled with feelings of strength and possibilities. Classrooms must be places for thinking and feeling, where emotions embolden ideas and where ideas help organize emotions. Our classes should fuse Descartes with Antonio Damasio: we think and we feel, therefore we are! We need idea-feelings, that is, thinking that feels and feelings that think. In this way, classrooms will be spaces with deep liberating thinking and expansive feelings. The song Volver a Los 17[3] (Returning to seventeen) calls us to engage our feelings: What feelings can grasp knowledge cannot understand, not even the clearest move not even the widest thought, the moment changes everything We need poetry and songs to continue moving! Art, poetry, and songs to expand us, to help us be better teachers. The same song says something akin to our endless task of teaching: Entangling, entangling it moves, like the ivy on the wall, and so it flowers, and it grows, like tiny moss on the stone. Oh yes oh yes We are ivy on the wall of empire! Entangling in everything there is. We are flowers inside of guns, we are tiny mosses on the stones of our reality. Oh yes oh yes! When our minds cannot grasp the intensity of this moment, we can recur to our hearts. For there, in our hearts, if well cared, we can find solace, peace, and sustenance. For the hearts of teachers are bigger than anything. The hearts of teachers embrace all kinds of students and realities, wrestle with all kinds of theories, and engage all forms of thinking-feeling. So we don’t fear the world! If the world looks frightening, our heart knows better. As the same poet Drummond says… World, world, wide world, wider is my heart.[4] [1] Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sentimento do Mundo. [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-publish-weekly-list-crimes-immigrants-commit-refugees-aliens-executive-order-us-a7546826.html?cmpid=facebook-post [3] Song by Violeta Parra. Hear the song here by Mercedes Sosa and Milton Nascimento: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB37oAxOkzA [4] Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Poema de Sete Faces.

Sometimes classrooms feel like our family living room, with our families around, exposing all kinds of political positions and emotional responses, all of us trying to respond to some events that are going on in the world. We look at each other for help, or to hate, we hope for some understanding and make some sense of wild things. Our schools are in some ways, the extension of our common life and there we try to figure out our lives together. Porous as they are, schools and classrooms breathe and vibrate the world outside of them - subjectively and objectively. We get anxious about what is going to happen to our schools and if we are going to be able to cope and survive. Minorities feel the intensity of worldly events in particular ways. Thus, schools and teachers must be aware of social political events going on around us and respond to them in careful ways. When institutions offer a collective response, with open spaces and written documents, it is easier to deal with the expansive classroom responses. Let me provide two examples of what I have experienced in the US: September 11, 2001, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The first event was my first day of class at Union Theological Seminary in New York and the second was my first semester as a teacher at Union Theological Seminary. September 11 was a dramatic anxious day in NYC. We were lost without information and feeling so afraid. Classes were canceled and a gathering in chapel at noon was called. As we gathered, our school “pastor” started with words of assurance, sustenance, and support. We had people leading us in prayer, silence, and sharing words of wisdom for such a time as this. At the corner of the chapel, professor in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History & Professor of Byzantine Christian Studies, and Orthodox Priest John A. McGuckin stood at a corner of chapel holding a long prayer bead and a cross that was swinging back and forth while his body moved back and forth in prayer for the world. I remember holding hands with now Prof. Jackie Hidalgo and finding solace in her company next to me. At some point, an airplane flew over our heads and we didn’t know what to expect. The whole chapel went into a deep silence as we waited for the airplane sound to disappear. We were together for about two hours and we left with more information about what was going on, how to protect ourselves and to learn how to rely on each other as the day went by. In 2016, one day after the election of Donald Trump, the whole school, surely a very liberal school, went into an emotional and political shock. Classes were not canceled but a call to gather in chapel was issued to occur after the chapel service. The worship service for that day had to be reimagined as well with lots of meditation. After worship, we were to talk about the post-effects of the election that we thought would never happen. Dr. Su Pak and I were called to lead that time and we divided the time into two main blocks: mourning and hope.  We started with an introductory word from our president Serene Jones and started singing the South African song: “the journey, the journey, the journey is long… walk with me for the journey is long.” We then proceeded by opening up the floor for anyone who wanted to express their emotions, their feelings about the results of the elections in their own bodies/souls, their communities and the possible consequences of this election. This time we had Muslim and Buddhist professors and students around, as well as other (non) religious affiliations. After a long time sharing an immense variety of emotions in the warmth of a community, we opened up the space for the possibility of hope and sustained commitment to justice and peace. We left singing “the journey, the journey, the journey is long… walk with me for the journey is long.” While fragile in its approach to the immensity of these times, these collective events served as a sense of communal support that was fundamental for gaining a larger perspective, to voice our own feelings, to know we needed to support each other, especially minority communities at higher risk, and to help us keep going. After these collective events, the work that was to continue in our classrooms was somewhat easier. No classes should go without pausing to attend to events such as these and to give voice to those either agree with us or are opposed to us. For someone to voice their support to Trump at Union was not an easy thing and we teachers have to hold them in their right to speak and honor their place in our midst. In times such as these, we are tempted to demonize the ones we are disgusted with by their practices and cultivate hidden feelings that desire their sheer disappearance. It is easy to feel trapped in these opposed dualisms. However, to live with the contradictions of this seems incredibly absurd. Yet, this reality is what drives us to continue to engage each other, keep safety as a priority, and protect the most vulnerable and fight for what we believe. It is a daunting, even haunting task for the teacher in his/her classroom. If educational institutions can provide open spaces to deal with our fears and doubts and find support, we will be better teachers. At the American Academy of Religion last month, there was a space provided by some groups and led by the Liberation Theology Group that did just that: an open space was provided for conversation, to find out what to do, to learn with each other about the best ways to address political issues ourselves, with our peers and when back to our classrooms. This blog is such a public space as well. Throughout these blogs posts, we will gain a better sense of how to access and engage our realities, of how to listen to one another and make classrooms open spaces that will better prepare our students, and ourselves, to deal with our burning world.

I am starting a new job at Union Theological Seminary in New York city. It is a joy beyond measure for me. As we know well, when we start a new job, our new position comes with lots of expectations, insecurities, hopes, and power. It is incredible how an institution can make us feel more or less powerful. The moral and historical weight of some institutions have a deep impact on our psyche. In this time of adjustment, I am busy settling in and getting prepared for my first of everything: faculty and student meetings, all kinds of meetings, chapels, classes and so on. I am getting very anxious. Not a surprise, this anxiety found a place in my dreams. Last week I dreamt that it was time for Convocation (I am supposed to speak at convocation this year) and I was running late. I walked to the chancel where the faculty was seated and I had no robe and was walking barefoot. You now have all you need to go anywhere you want in interpreting my dreams. Email me if you want to give me tips. However, the fundamental interpretation of my dream is mine. Contradictory to its pieces, a vague possibility of meaning can be: walking late is my anxiety with being here and not follow things properly; walking barefoot might be that I am relaxed and able to be myself; and walking without my Doctoral robe can be the eternal impostor syndrome that affects so many minority teachers, I am not sure what people might think of me and one day they will discover me, since I am an impostor. In any case, the sharing of my dreams is to say that my full being is entrenched in the very craft of teaching. Our inner life is never detached from our outer life. We feel and think together, our bodies are part of a much larger scheme of things, we get sick when workplaces are dysfunctional. Thus, my class is just a fold within many folds of correlation in the lives of my students, the school, and this country/world. Our classrooms have deep implications associated with the social, racial, sexual, religious, cultural, economic conditions of our students. No text is a text that stands on itself. Every reading is a dialogue, some better than others of course, with worlds opening and/or closing, colliding in many ways, and in all of the teaching/learning exchange life is figured, disfigured, and refigured. Extending the many folds of our classrooms, our schools are enmeshed in specific economic models, models that are changing our craft in so many ways. The neoliberal system that presses any institution into turning a profit, moving education and health systems into forms of gaining money, is transforming practices and conversations about education. Schools are becoming pawns of the market and its educational strategies are more often in the hands of economists or market specialists than educators. Without money, we can’t do anything. While it seems and feels that this is fundamentally right, the results in my view are desolating. For the students: students receive a narrow education; mostly to perform specific functions in the market; students become customers and teachers become the student’s employees. For the professors: faculty receives cumulative work for administration with the same or larger teaching loads, the disappearance of tenure -- especially when minorities are raised to tenured positions, increasing adjunct positions, a loss of worker’s rights, smaller salaries, and reduced benefits. All of this suggests how expansive a classroom can be and how anxious it can become. Nonetheless, when we check the borders of our classrooms, we realize that no pedagogy is neutral, or objective. Neutrality is often a form of pretending we are not supporting a political, economic system. Objectivity has been, in the words of Adrienne Rich “little more than male subjectivity.” In some ways, very small ways, the borders of our classrooms, both the content and the frame, can help shift worldviews, forms of living and help create new worlds. Critical pedagogies engage students to criticize the inequality of our class system, undo many forms of coloniality, contraband knowledges, create common spaces of differences, debunk ideas, demise economic systems, break down blind consensus, shift some circles of feelings that serve capitalism, challenge political views, confront ignorance and break chains of oppression. If our classes, whatever classes we teach, do not aim at undoing injustices, confronting capitalism/globalization/imperialism and serve the poor, it will tend to maintain conformity and complacency with the powers that be, sustaining class structure and inequality. Capitalism is eating us alive! We cannot let it go without criticism and action. We need teachers who know what their classrooms and pedagogies can do! Peter McLaren says the following: This is because naming let alone questioning the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements under capitalism constitutes a form of political intervention and activism that for many educators is simply too risky. Instead, many engage in a form of “soft-radicalism” that scantly scratches the surface of the mechanisms of the dominant ideology. Here, protests reverberate like distant eructations from the bar stools of the local pub. Other colleagues may hide their class and race privileges in an obscure political and ideological discourse and language that leaves little room for actually addressing the material needs of those in our society who permanently live on the margins and the periphery.[1] Educators have to be aware of the many borders that clearly mark their classrooms. In this very short post, I just want to remind us how, from dreams to social class exploitation, from syllabi to gender troubles and sexual fluidities, from course evaluations to race and class struggles, from advising to students' loans and debts, from class discussions to being under neoliberal economic systems, everything is part of our daily craft. Either we see and talk about it, or not. For me, we have a moral responsibility to address it.   [1] McLaren, Peter; McLaren, Peter; Farahmandpur, Ramin (2004-11-23). Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (p. 7). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

As we go back to the classroom (and shake off the dust of summer), we all have mixed feelings and expectations. While some of us will just go back to the normal, others will be anxious and perhaps fearful about a new semester. The beginning of a semester can carry a feeling of being displaced, a sense that we don’t know what is coming our way and what is next. In one word: the lack of control. That is why we occupied so much of our syllabi in order to gain immediate control of that space we actually cannot control, and in fact never have controlled. What will my class be made of? How many students and who are they? Will we be able to control everything? Be fair with everybody? Be attentive to our own tasks, juggling the school’s demands and all that the teacher hopes for? The specific details of the practical aspects of our syllabus, the division of tasks, the proper tools to be used, the connections to be made, the boundaries to be established. In truth these are questions that only end when classes are over after a whole semester. Besides, after being away from the classroom for a while we may feel a little out of joint, as if the classroom is again a foreign/home space, until the map we draw (our syllabus) will help us travel through this newly foreign terrain. In our classrooms we are both professors and educators. Rubem Alves makes a distinction of these two roles. He says: “A professor is an employee of institutions that manage lagoons and puddles, specialist in reproduction, an instrument of the social apparel of the state. As the educator, on the contrary, [the professor] is a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.” [1] As we go back I wonder how our duties as professors will cast a shadow over the role of the educator. Will our pedagogies be more faithful to the management of forms of reproductions or attentive to the ways our students can become more expanded, more fully human beings? Will we dare to be a “mediator of hopes,” or a “pastor of projects?” If we only trust the readings of our classes we are more professors than educators. If we believe that the evaluation can only take a form of a formal final paper we will not tap into the rich resources of our students. If we make classrooms be a “one fit for all” place, we will make our educator side slip into the perfectly devilish/delightful combination of institutional bureaucracy and personal fears. A combination where students pay the price of teachers whose hope is confounded by fear. In classrooms we are educators! That is why we gather together: to share knowledge as we share tastes, to share complexities and differences as we share life together. But in order to get there, we must be awakened! That is what Alves says of how to prepare the educator: “is necessary to wake her/him up… its enough that we call them from their sleep, by an act of love and courage. And when awakened, they will repeat the miracle of the instauration of new worlds.”[2] I think we are very good at managing lagoons and puddles. However, our task as we begin our semester is to be awakened into the educators that live inside of us and be(come) a co-founder of worlds in our students, a stretcher of horizons, jokers of our common worlds and satirists of our own stupidity, doing what we do with a sense of praxis that will be able to transform actions, gestures, movements, feelings and create possibilities. In a word: dreamers of new realities! Paulo Freire talks about this dreamer in a more academic language. Forgive the sexist language: “Because he admires the world and therefore objectifies it, because he grasps and comprehends reality and transforms it in his action-reflection, man is a being of praxis. Even more so, man in praxis… His ontological vocation, which he ought to existentiate, is that of a subject who operates on and transforms the world. Subjugated to concrete conditions that transform him into an object, man will be sacrificing his fundamental vocation… Nobody is if he prevents others from being.”[3] Every dreamer must start in reality, it the midst of contrasts, racial divides, economic disparities, political dualisms, violent neighborhoods, dialectical complexities and all kinds of conflicts. We must make unhidden the social processes of reality that prevent change and transformation especially for minorities and oppressed people. Educators can (be)come the very material they use in the classroom, the texts they read, the dialogues they have, the educational tools they use, the theories they choose and the very awareness of what kind of pedagogy that they foster. We are caught into this action-reflection that stirs up, criticizes and amplifies theories and praxis. We are not detached from the world, but rather we are the result and consequence of the world we create. Our pedagogies are not meant to keep the status quo but to transform things and people, even if we know that what we do will not transform anything or anybody. More than anything we must keep our fundamental vocation as teachers, whatever that might be, so we will not prevent students from being the fullest they can be, in the owning of their bodies, their feelings, their thoughts and their capacity to reach out, to expand, and to listen to their own selves. As we go back to the classroom, let us awaken ourselves into the praxis of being educators! Dreaming dreams of new worlds and human beings fully stretched, while hoping for a good semester with all the rights and wrongs we will certainly make if we dare to be “a founder of worlds, mediator of hopes, pastor of projects.”   [1] Rubem Alves, Conversas com quem gosta de ensinar. (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 1980), 27. [2] Ibid. [3] Paulo Freire, La Concepción problematizadora de la educación y la homanización.” Cristianismo y Sociedad. Montevideo, 1968, 18. Freire... quoted by Carlos Alberto Torres, "Dialetics, Conflict, and Dialogue," in Moacir Gadotti,  Pedagogy of Praxis: A Dialectical Philosophy of Education (New York: Suny Press, 1996).

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