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How to Write about Ferguson

Posted on by Brooke Lester

Allow me first to correct the punctuation in my title, above:

"How to Write about Ferguson?"

Now you can hear it the way it sounds in my head.

For a week and a half, I've been preoccupied by the Michael Brown tragedy, by the ensuing protests, and by the depressingly and infuriatingly (but not surprisingly) misconceived police response that still grips the city and daily threatens further loss of life. At the same time, I bang out nearly-due revisions to one writing project and draft two more, both also under deadline. At the same time, I prepare my fall upper-level course for waiting learners.

Today, Nyasha Junior, biblical scholar and public speaker, rightly has asked:

The ONScripture piece is a resource for "preaching reflections" on Michael Brown and Ferguson. "#SBL" refers to the Society of Biblical Literature, the flagship professional society for academic biblical studies.

I am primarily an academic, though I do preach occasionally, as an unordained layperson. I teach the literature of ancient Israel, understood as having two interpretive "anchor points": the likely meaning of biblical texts in their ancient Near Eastern social/historical context, and the range of possible meanings such texts may support for us johnny-come-lately readers in our own social/historical contexts. Additionally, my job description asks me to explore digital learning, finding and modeling better practices of online pedagogy.

My habitual mode, then, is less to tell people HOW to interpret biblical texts in light of the murder of an unarmed Black teen by a white law enforcement officer, and more to PREPARE learners to generate such interpretations as they might find liberating, for themselves and for others.

My habitual mode is less to rally faculty colleagues to a particular understanding of the racist and preposterously over-militarized police response in Ferguson, and more to rally them to the possibilities for facilitating online communities of inquiry where they and their learners can be genuinely present to one another in a time of crisis, even if the learners are prevented (usually for economic reasons) from enjoying on-campus residency.

In an upper-level seminar on "Inner-Biblical Allusion: The Old Testament in the New Testament," I may ask learners to write creative, biblically-allusive blog posts on Ferguson, white power, and casual brutality. Persuading faculty colleagues to learn to live-stream lectures & panels, I may appeal to their desire to reach at-risk communities…perhaps including Ferguson. I'm working up notes! But shit takes time. And the revisions, and the drafting, and the fall classes.

For now, I'm a white academic whose relative privilege would allow him to monitor Ferguson passively while sweating out those scholarly revisions and drafts. For whom Ferguson is important but for whom (let's face it) Ferguson need not be treated as urgently as some other things in his life. How can I write about Ferguson now?

Like this, apparently. And by letting people know, here and on my Facebook feed, that I am Tweeting about #Ferguson and (more importantly) Retweeting about #Ferguson, and that they should be too. By letting people know that they can become better informed. That other academics are trying to figure out what we owe our learners now and later in response to Ferguson.

If you are a non-Black biblical scholar, then (aside from preaching), how do you write about Ferguson?

What Makes it Play-skool? Fear and Safety in the Learning Space

Posted on by Brooke Lester

Play-skool and peer review: Commonly, I have my class write a project in stages, with peer review of each stage. Every time I introduce peer review to my learners, they go willingly enough through the exercise, submitting their work to one another and accomplishing their reviews. Then, as reliably as heartbreak, one of them asks optimistically, "So when will we get our real feedback?"

"You just got it," I reply with the even voice of long practice. Cue chill breeze and blowing dry leaves in twilight.

On the next round, the peer reviews are always better: more detailed, more genuine, in closer engagement with the assignment rubrics. The reviewers tackle their assessments as if something were actually at stake, which of course it is.

They have discerned the truth: peer review, in my class, is not "Play-skool." It's the real thing. They are afraid to let one another down, and they should be. A "safe space" is suddenly something that it's up to them to construct.

Slight shift of gears: In a recent faculty discussion about race and racism, we compared notes about how we address systemic racism (or, for another example, systemic mysogyny) as a subject matter in our various courses. As often happens, a colleague mentioned the frustration expressed in class (sometimes professionally, more often unskillfully) by the white man, usually young, who feels targeted in such a discussion. We talked about how to facilitate a safe space for him, but at the same time, we agreed that that's just the way the ball bounces: "The learning space is never completely safe. And shouldn't be." If it were completely safe, it wouldn't be a learning space.

It would be Play-skool.

So. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that the creative activity of making meaning can only happen in a space where fear has been removed…or removed enough, or removed in the right places. I have determined this in the crucible of fairly long experience. But at the same time, if all possible fears have been removed, if the space is made unsurpassingly safe…then we're in Play-skool, and learning is done.

Thoughts coming later on parsing this out more completely. What are your thoughts on fear, learner safety, and Play-skool?

[What Makes it Play-skool? Fear and Safety in the Learning Space was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/10/01. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]