Aware Magazine | Spring 2022

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CUTTING EDGES: A SCHOOL THAT LEARNS Reverend Dr. Mai-Anh Le Tran, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean

“Theological education is local, but the local isn’t local anymore,” a senior scholar opined in a faculty conversation on the changing landscape of theological education in my early years of teaching in the 2000’s. The comment has stayed with me since, rising to mind each time I wrestle with how theological teaching and learning is simultaneously local, global, and translocal—or, put simply, both defined by place and not confined to a particular place. On March 8, 2022, Garrett-Evangelical announced the expansion of hybrid offerings to increase the accessibility and affordability of four of our master’s degree programs. The tongue-in-cheek reference is that this was a “4.0 upgrade” to our curriculum, a nod to the evolutionary developments of the World Wide Web toward more symbiotic interconnections between human and machine. If Web 4.0 is understood to be “Web meets world,” then so must our theological education be better at meeting the real needs of the real world. The faculty has always understood this principle: theological study best occurs in situ, in which learners explore the real needs and questions of concrete communities, situations, places, settings, and contexts of ministry and leadership. The challenge remains: how do we make that kind of theological education more accessible and affordable in a time when multiple pandemics have exacerbated our ability to connect across time and space, while revealing the complicated symbiosis of human and planetary ecosystems? The curricular updates that we have made are modest, yet they are inside the energy of our missional commitment to making GarrettEvangelical’s education more accessible to and affordable for individuals and communities who need it most. Far from chasing after market-driven 8 AWARE MAGAZINE | SPRING 2022

strategies to deliver “fast and cheap” options for theological learning and far from the colonial hubris of assuming that what we possess is a “gift” to the world, we are reminded that engrained in the seminary’s institutional DNA is the concern that the theological school exists to equip leaders to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable in our midst. As stated in the catalog of one of Garrett-Evangelical’s three founding institutions, the Chicago Training School for City, Home and Foreign Missions (circa 1913-1926), “A Christian training school should be in the heart of a great city for the same reason that a medical school needs to be near a hospital” (Hilah E. Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Women in New Worlds, 191). Or, as a staff colleague recently asked, how is our education accessible and affordable to those who are often told, “We don’t have anything for you”? “Increasing access” is more than cosmetic retrofitting of our current norms and standards to accommodate a few individuals so that they could fit in, literally and figuratively. Rather, it requires nothing short of an overhaul of our theological and educational design and a deep exploration of the material, financial, technological, social, contextual, and lifestyle barriers that impede learners’ success and thriving. To expand “access” is to query our assumptions about what needs to be taught and learned, how it is taught and learned, and who does the teaching and learning. It begs the hard question of whether our pedagogies (theological, digital, or otherwise) reflect divergent human abilities and the many ways of knowing across cultures and contexts. It also invites us to examine whether we have, with requisite humility, learned to seek out God’s re-creative power within communities that are still unknown and unfamiliar to our dominant frame of reference—communities in our own city, in this country, and in other parts of the world. What if, in becoming more accessible, Garrett-Evangelical understands itself as “a school that learns” rather than a place that teaches?


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