Learning and Purpose

Learning has always been more than a box to check. From the beginning, when my grandmother would make me bring all my textbooks home and have me read to her, I witnessed a running dialogue with the text. I would read the history told in my books and my grandmother would interrupt with the REAL story; the parts they refused to include in books for children. Whether we listened to Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, or watched a movie featuring Lena Horne, grandma always gave me the back story. I grew up understanding that there was always a story beneath the story and truth wasn’t something given in the first iteration you hear. The story beneath the story and the “why” are what always made learning worth the effort for me.

The curiosity that drove my academic efforts was the same source for every frustration along the way. At times, teachers were frustrated with my questions, and it seemed their core motivation was to stifle thinking beyond the most surface, authorized facts contained in their curriculum. Nowhere was this more true than in religious studies. The Baptist Sunday school books and mandated Catholic school curricula required round robin reading, repetition of basic facts, and unblinking, vacant acceptance. The texts made sure never to share aspects of biblical accounts, clearly evident in biblical text, that would lead to deeper questions about who God is or His intentions. After scoring 100% on an exam, proving I had memorized the Ten Commandments, my Catholic School religion teacher still refused to answer my question about why we were being told to pray to Mary and the saints when the first commandment appeared to forbid it.

Now, as a career educator, my core goal is to encourage and elicit the same curiosity and critical thinking inspired by my grandmother. As a teacher educator, I do not only desire that students understand the basic theories of human development and learning. I want them to be able to look at the human beings in front of them with curiosity. I want the teachers I influence to seek out the strengths and hidden motivations of children who have not responded to the “proven” methods. I want all of my students to know that they are not in higher education to merely check a box, but to learn how to see in ways that will help their students thrive and positively affect generations to come.

Likewise, my desire is to implement and extend the ethos of questioning and critical thinking to my broader faith community. I believe that the forcible flattening of faith to be dependent on the willingness of spiritual leaders to tell the truth is killing the church. Through my published Bible studies and blogs, my goal is to inspire questions that cause people to reach out to God for answers. I would like to normalize a reading of the Bible that instigates an interrogation of culture, society, economics, and the essence of what it means to be optimized in an era when artificial intelligence has been created with the goal of replacing us.

In my own small way, like a pebble thrown into the ocean, I am offering the gifts with which I was born and have nurtured through academic preparation back to God who created me, Christ who saved me, and Holy Spirit who guides me. Thus, I am releasing them into the world and will wait to see what the Lord does.