Ritual

If I have learned anything in this life of teaching, it is this: the emotional labor of teaching is genuine. Routinely, class sessions left me exhausted. After most sessions I would need to sit in silence for an hour to regain my energies or have a meal to replenish my ...

On a Sunday morning in mid-April, my students and I gathered around the firepit in the open-air Council House at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Light drizzle pattered on the roof and danced through the open smoke vent, speckling the dust and ash at our feet. Just out ...

Our attempts to teach towards openness, towards possibility, towards new glimpses of an uncharted future mean that teaching can be demanding, even confounding. One way I learned to embrace this approach was by incorporating rituals in my course designs. The use of rituals in classrooms allows students an experience that ...

In her series of blog posts, “What Ritual Does,” Itihari Y. Toure elucidates the potential of ritual for teaching – reminding us of how ritual engenders “communal learning,” “extends the depth of our imagination,” brings us “into a divine dance,” and functions as a “restorying” activism. I am a witness: ritual ...

Many of us are familiar with the scripture from Jeremiah 1:5: “before you were formed in your mother’s womb, I knew you” (NIV). It reminds us of the immortal aspect of our human spirit.  In the context of West African cosmologies, it is our spiritual essence that is with the ...