The bi-vocational blues

Yep; we have that much | (c) Jeff Parker/Cagel Cartoons

Student loan debt has been a hot topic of conversation lately, at least in my social media circles. It's always a hot topic for my wife and I because, well, we have a ton of it. Like three-masters-degrees-at-a-private-university-all-subsidized-by-student-loans worth of it.

Six years ago, when we first told my family that we were moving to Virginia for grad school, they were not impressed. My brother kind of angrily told me that I was being irresponsible with my family's financial wellbeing. At the time I thought, "No I'm not!," but there are plenty of days this side of the transaction that I wonder...

Debt certainly has set constraints around my call to the ministry, particularly in my rural context. The number of Church of the Brethren congregations in my district that could afford to employ a pastor full-time are very few. So when we moved back to rural Iowa, it just so happened that my not feeling a particularly strong calling to pastoral ministry worked in my family's economic favor. Even if I'd wanted to be a full-time pastor, I likely couldn't do it around here; so I kept my technology job for Eastern Mennonite University, an arrangement that looks to continue for the foreseeable future.

A restorative response to the Veishea riot

Not a new problem, apparently. (ISU student paper, 1940s ed.)

I'll never forget the Sunday afternoon during high school I came back to Iowa from a youth retreat in Kansas, and my dad telling me one of my high school classmates had been murdered at a party during Iowa State University's annual celebration, Veisha. It set off the most intense week of my entire high school experience, where every day felt like living in slow motion. That was 17 years ago.

But for the past 30 years or so, ISU's Veisha celebration has had a bit of an identity problem. What started out as a celebration of education at ISU had turned into an excuse for people to come from across the state, crash in their friends'/siblings' dorm rooms or apartments, and get really, really drunk. Riots have occurred enough times at Veisha for them to no longer be a surprise. - So when I heard this morning that there was yet another riot last night at Veisha (I didn't even know it was going on), I thought "Hmm," and went back to sipping my coffee.

Wendell Berry and Mennonite online education

This post is simply to cross-reference a few other posts I've written elsewhere in the past week, both relating to my work in Mennonite higher education, particularly in online programs. Each are at my work blog, Ed-tech at EMU:

• The ed-tech vision for collaboration in Mennonite education
• Cultivating affection in online education?

Here's an excerpt from the end of the second post:

What I find compelling about the potential for online education within the Mennonite tradition and its various institutions of higher education (including both EMU & Tabor College), is the possibility of a radical online education. One that’s “subversive” in the sense that it uses the tools of the digital age but calls out their contingency, questions their inevitability, highlights their pitfalls and ultimate limits. I’m talking about deconstruction. – But deconstruction on the way to developing attitudes and practices which can help re-construct something more life-giving than what our consumer culture can provide: Affection for self and neighbors – friends and enemies, affection for place, and ultimately (in the Christian context) affection for our creating and sustaining God. And when we do this in collaboration with each other - rather than mimicking the logic of consumer capitalism – the radical potential only increases, deepening roots and establishing routes/linkages that contribute to the common good of Mennonite communities and institutions, and those whom we serve (i.e. “the world.”)

NuDunkers: A vision for Brethren theological education

(Moocow image by Gordon Lockhart;
remix of ‘la vaca de los sinvaca‘
by José Bogado/Flickr)

Last week the NuDunkers held our second live discussion on Google+ Hangouts, on the topic of pneumatology. Here's the video, and the event page has a transcript of questions and discussion items that were raised by folks watching the video discussion. Unfortunately, I missed the whole event because of an internet outage. But I still benefitted greatly from the pre-hangout blogging exercise and the follow-up remarks from our guest (new NuDunker?) - Laura Stone. I think we're off to a great start.

Simultaneously, in my professional world of educational technology, I was busy participating in, thinking about, and writing critically (and humorously) about the MOOC - massively open online courses - a phenomenon that has the higher ed world all up in a tizzy.

And as often happens for people who wear multiple hats, my worlds happily collided. I thought to myself:

Is NuDunkers a MOOC?

It's my contention that the NuDunker project is almost a MOOC in some senses, and with a bit of tweaking and explicit thought around digital pedagogy, it could be more so. And not only that, but NuDunkers could be a vision for Brethren theological education. Stay tuned as I unpack this a bit...

Of course!

From the beginning last fall, NuDunkers has been framed as a conversation. It has been, though, a certain kind of conversation - namely a theological and somewhat academic one, but with the intent of doing theology from and for the church. We want to use our brains faithfully for the concrete work of God (discipleship, ministry, mission) through God's concrete people (the body of Christ). So in this way there is an educational dimension to our conversations and their intended impact.

For the foreseeable future, we will be holding these blogging/discussing exercises around particular theological topics (last week: pneumatology). Given that these topical, educational discussions have time dimensions put on them, we start moving toward something that could be considered "a course" - that is, a particular group of people engaged for a particular period of time in the work of teaching and learning around a particular set of topics. I want to say that theological education is already happening in NuDunkers.

Open season

One important mark of a MOOC is that it is open. NuDunkers, from the start, has been intended to be open in a number of ways very similar, if not exactly like a MOOC. We're open with respect to...

• Cost - If you have a device with an internet connection, you're in. No registrar, no admissions, no tuition.
• Participation - You only have to have an interest in the work we're doing and a willingness to engage in respectful dialogue. You're not required to have a bachelors or associates degree, or even a high school diploma, and you don't have to be a professional pastor or seminary professor (in fact, that would probably help overall).
• Media - We're carrying this out in an array of online media and networks that are open to the world: YouTube, for everyone to watch the discussions; Twitter, for everyone to see tweet-sized bits of information; blogs, for everyone to read the more substantive writings and discussions. We're not locking this stuff behind university or seminary systems.

True, the language will be a bit academic, but again this is an educational endeavor, and we're trying to build a bridge here between the academy and the church. Negotiating the language games is going to be tricky at times, but we're convinced that risking those negotiations is both necessary and worthwhile.

All in for online?

U.S. institutions of higher education, including theological education, are in big trouble these days. The cost of college and grad school is, like health care in this country, spiraling out of control, while at the same time the plight of the professional pastor is looking increasingly grim.  Many schools are turning to online programs to bolster enrollments in their flagging institutions. But these programs often foster very little in the way of substantive engagement between students and instructors, and provide food for the head only, starving the rest of our bodies and our relationships.

While NuDunkers is being carried out entirely online, we're trying to do so in ways that engage more than just our intellects; we tell stories, we laugh, we pray. We also share an emphasis on the importance of local bodies of worship and discipleship (i.e. congregations) - so our work online should inspire and propel us deeper into local and more embodied forms of mission and ministry.

Questions going ahead

• For NuDunkers: How can we take our pedagogical vision further?
• For Brethren institutions: Are you interested in NuDunkers? What if you somehow got involved? What if you granted credit for participation in NuDunkers?
• For Brethren in the pews: How can we better engage you for the renewing of our minds in the body of Christ?

#etmooc assignment: Make an animated GIF

V1

V2

Online animated GIF generator: Picasion

What's a MOOC? Why philosophy?

Here we go!

This week I am starting one of those MOOCs that higher ed people have been hearing so much about over the past year - Introduction to Philosophy from The University of Edinburgh (via Coursera). For the uninitiated, MOOC stands for "Massively Open Online Course." (I pronounce it with a long "o" and a hard "c.") In the paradigm which they've been most discussed, they are free online courses offered by prestigious universities who have partnered with for-profit companies who provide the software platform through which the course is delivered. (Smaller, non-profit - and more creative - MOOCs like DS106 have been around longer.)

Enrollments run in the tens of thousands, though actual participation through the entire course usually ends up about a tenth (at best) of the initial sign-up count. These courses are college level, though they don't come with any academic credit at the end, though this could conceivably change - and already has in this case.

MOOCs have been hailed as "game changers" and "disrupters" and all sorts of other high praises and/or epithets, depending on how you feel about the state of higher education in the U.S. (existential and financial crisis) and what to do about it. Probably the most reasoned critique I've read comes from Ian Bogost, a game designer, theorist, and professor, in this piece at The Atlantic: Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online. I'm very sympathetic to Bogost's critique, but I also wanted to see what all the fuss is about. A few at EMU have expressed interest in the MOOC wave, wondering if we could somehow ride it. So as the ed-tech guy for EMU it's part of my job to figure that out. Call it R&D. But why philosophy?

Eastern Mennonite University: Welcome to my home

Exhibit 1 of what I'll miss: Sunrise over Massanutten & Park View/EMU

There are two senses in which I intend the title of this post to be taken. 1) In an autobiographical sense, as in Eastern Mennonite University has become my home in a significant way; and 2) as if the institution itself were uttering the phrase. I'll use the first to get to the second over the course of this post...

For the past four years I have called this Mennonite village my home. I have come to understand that EMU is but one part of what I've just called a "village," because it's embedded in the Park View neighborhood, in the city of Harrisonburg, in the region of the Shenandoah River Valley/South Fork watershed. This is an area that generations of Mennonites have called home for over two centuries. On this stretch of beautiful earth, these Mennonites have attempted to embody the Anabaptist tradition of Christian discipleship in their families, congregations, and institutions.

As an Iowan Brethren with no prior substantive experience with Mennonites, I only knew there to be an historical connection between the two traditions, that connection having something to do with "Anabaptism," a word I only knew in name and not content. So it was upon coming here that I discovered the Anabaptist tradition not only articulated but embodied in substantive ways. The "thickness" of this embodiment is something I immediately felt, and it was only after more than a year of living, studying, and working here that I began to understand and be able to myself articulate what was going on and why. More on that later...

Wringing Out Saturated Selves: Christian Education in a Secular Age

This morning I gave my senior capstone presentation at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which was based on a paper I wrote with the same name as this post. I've embedded the paper below, but let me make a few comments about the concerns animating this paper/presentation, the paper's major flow and points, and where it leads from here. I take the upcoming #Occupy Empire conference I'm helping organize as one particular project within my broader process of ministerial-vocational discernment.

In some ways, this paper and presentation marks the "philosophical turn" in my graduate studies.  This turn was precipitated by the existential and intellectual angst of being the first dual degree student at EMU's seminary and its Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Philosophy eventually became extremely helpful in trying to adjudicate - both in terms of overlap and difference - the distinct "embodied rationalities" in those two programs. This led me to the philosophy of Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, and most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre.

But I've also been compelled by the biblical hermeneutic of John Howard Yoder as a way to keep me grounded in the biblical narrative as the primary "script" for my life as a ministering Christian in the body of Christ.

In my ministerial-vocational discernment these past years at grad school, I've come sense the call to being an educator in/for the church, putting the intellectual gifts which God has imbued within me to work for the sake of God's reconciling mission in the world. In testing this, I've been able to teach the same class in two radically different cultural contexts. In this paper, I try to weave all these threads together in a very short space (12 pages, 20 minute presentation). No small task.

In responding to my presentation this morning, my advisor, Mark Thiessen Nation, quipped: "What you've really done here, Brian, is lay out a research agenda for yourself." Likewise, my district executive in the Church of the Brethren described this as the start of a life-long journey. I think those assessments exactly right. There are hints in this paper to most of the influential work I've picked up and how I've been starting to assemble that toward a constructive vision for my developing vocation as a ministerial educator.