Academic Dean’s Report

REV. DR. MAI-ANH LE TRAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS AND ACADEMIC DEAN

It’s only when the vague, drifting muddle of the way we usually think about ourselves is blown away by the Spirit that we see the underlying contours—the deep needs, the ingrained resistances, the aching hopes and loves.

Rowan Williams, Candles in the Dark (2020)

In the spring of 2020, I reported to the Board of Trustees that the seminary has been “acted upon” by a myriad of forces internal and external, with the COVID-19 pandemic being the last straw that leveled many of our assumptions about self-determination and pushed our value system through a severe stress test. Indeed, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote in his meditations amid the pandemic, the “muddle” of our “business as usual” was blown away, revealing deep needs and gaping individual and communal wounds. At the same time, the sweeping gust of the Spirit also resurrected in us instincts for resistance, for perseverance, for “good enough” faithfulness in tasks big and small while in the thick of socio-cultural and epidemiological storms. We reminded each other what it means to ache for hope as one body, bound in Christ’s love.

Since that fateful spring and throughout the 202021 academic year, the faculty and the seminary administration have had to make difficult valuesbased and data-driven decisions about how to care for the community, to persist with excellent and liberative theological education, and to remain responsible stewards of our resources. The following commitments and activities illustrate the faculty’s “disciplined improvisation” over this past year:

1. Taking seriously trauma-informed academic policies and pedagogic practices: We drew on the principles of trauma-informed teaching and learning in the wake of a pandemic and middisaster social reality, as we sought different ways to teach and support students through prolonged psychosocial stress. Theologically, we called this being receptive to God’s grace as we learned to extend grace to ourselves and to one another.

2. Venturing on new course formats and modalities:

In times of crisis, good teachers become

“leading learners.” In record time and through countless meetings, the faculty re-scaled and re-calibrated course offerings for remote teaching and learning. Through peer-to-peer support, gungho adaptiveness, a little bit of trial and error, and attentiveness to student feedback, our faculty engaged in more generative discussions than ever about curriculum, curricular imagination, pedagogy, instructional technology, and course design.

3. Prioritizing student learning: The faculty, staff, and administration recognized that our academic programming must reflect attentiveness to the

“Coronavirus gap” that impedes student learning success. We discussed such issues as: how to support students who cannot afford textbooks and/or cannot access digital library resources; how to work with students’ limited access to necessary technological resources for successful learning (e.g., laptops, wifi); how to track visa regulations, financial aid and scholarship requirements, and denominational mandates; how to expand access to library resources; how to enhance policies for learning accommodations and increase research/writing support.

After one full year of remote teaching and learning, the planning for “return” and “re-orientation” to campus proved no less difficult and continuously unprecedented. Our preoccupation now is on Covid safety protocols, social distancing, vaccinations, accreditation regulations, and embodied learning that is regulated by a collapse of context and complexities of technology. We are growing restless not only because of the plasticity of this social moment, but also because we have been reminded that the “curriculum” is not what we “deliver,” but rather “who we are” in our beautiful unfinishedness.

In all of this, we are learning how to “perceive” as a spiritual practice. For, behold, God is already doing “new things” in, through, and all around us.