Mathew: Today, I am with Lois Lorentzen and we're going to be talking about Ignatian pedagogy. I know all of you should know who she is, but if somebody is listening at USF who doesn't or somebody who's listening who's not at University of San Francisco, Lois, I'm wondering before we get started if you can just introduce yourself. What kind of courses do you teach? What department you're in?
You don't have to go into much detail about the research because we're really focusing on pedagogy, but just people who don't know you, a little bit about your background.
Lois Lorentzen: I teach in Theology and Religious Studies, in Latin American Studies, and Environmental Studies. Regularly I teach courses in environmental ethics, and religion, and immigration. I have taught courses in liberation theology, women and religion, gender and sexuality. I've had the great privilege of teaching a lot of courses outside of the United States, including in El Salvador, in Mexico, in Cambodia, and I'm currently teaching the Erasmus course, which is a year-long living learning community.
My background, well, academic background, a PhD from USC in Social Ethics, a master's in Philosophical Theology, and undergrad in Sociology. I'm my own little interdisciplinary program.
Matthew: [laughs] Thank you very much. Well, really what we're going to be exploring today is Ignatian pedagogy. It seems like it can be defined a little differently depending on who you're talking to. Just to get things rolling, I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about what you see as being the essence of Ignatian pedagogy.
Lois: Great, sure. To get at that, I'd like to tell another little piece of my background as a way of getting to that exact question and it won't sound at the beginning that it relates to Ignatian pedagogy necessarily. When I was at USC, I was involved in activism against the war in El Salvador that the United States was financing. I got to know a lot of Salvadorans there and they said to me, "You really should just go to El Salvador."
I ended up going to El Salvador during the war, and then ended up working in El Salvador off and on for a long time, and I still go back with students.
I'm not Catholic, and I had never met a priest until I went to El Salvador. The priests in El Salvador that I met were Jesuits. They were amazing because they were, in many ways, the conscience of the country. They would be the people you would hear saying really bold statements on the radio, the Jesuit university there was like the best university in Central America. They would have all the research institutes that were about really intense examinations of the national reality and they just spoke out.
They were these excellent scholars, just top of the line scholars in philosophy, in theology, in sociology, in psychology, you name it. Then on weekends, they'd go and they would live in the most marginalized areas in the country. Then they were also doing this social analysis, but it was from this really high level. For doing this, they received death threats. They were courageous.
They would never have described themselves that way, they were just doing what they did. As probably a lot of people know, then a bunch of the Jesuits who actually taught at the Jesuit University were murdered by the government. I remember I went to the first anniversary of their killing and the entire university was packed with people, primarily peasants would come from all over the countryside.
They were sleeping in classrooms and it was so striking that, "Oh, here are some of the smartest people I'd ever met, and here are the people they have touched besides their own students." Then I was also thinking, "What is it like for a student to walk around this school and know that their professor was killed for speaking the truth and for wanting people to be critically reflective?" That really influenced me a lot.
Then when I was out USC, my first job out of graduate school was at a Jesuit university in Philadelphia, St. Joseph's University. I remember one of my advisors saying to me, "Interesting, Lois and the Jesuits. That's a good match." What he meant was he saw the Jesuits like the ones I had seen in El Salvador as merging academic excellence with social justice and a global outlook, and he thought that fit my profile even though I wasn't Catholic.
Then after being there, I came to USF, I've been at USF for 24 years. Before I became an academic, even after graduate school, I didn't know if I'd be in academics or if I'd be in policy work. I honestly don't know if I could have lasted in other academic jobs other than a place that actually does Ignatian pedagogy, which I had no idea what it was at the time and I honestly still don't think about it that explicitly.
I was also influenced during my years in Latin America by a Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire who wrote a very well-known book called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was based on literacy campaigns throughout Latin America, mainly in Brazil. He influenced Jesuits in Latin American, he influenced liberation theologians and a lot of people, and I'll come back to him later.
One of his insights was that-- he was teaching literacy campaigns and an insight was that even in the teaching of people how to read, you're teaching an ideology. If we're teaching Spanish literacy say, in the countryside, and it's about Juan Manuel in Spain going to the beach and getting an ice cream cone, that has nothing to do with the peasant reality.
People in liberation education very explicitly use people's own reflections, their own experiences for something as basic as literacy.
The Jesuits in El Salvador did that, Father Privettdid that, first time I met him was in El Salvador. What I like about USF, and then I will get to the essence of Ignatian pedagogy, is that even if people don't know they value Ignatian pedagogy, when I can say to someone-- I could say to you, Matthew, "Oh, so and so she's really USFy." It makes sense even if you can't define what that is.
I think part of that, "Oh, it's very USFy," relates to Ignatian pedagogy. What's the essence? Again, I'm not Catholic so the explicitly spiritual or religious aspects of it aren't at the forefront for me and I don't think that matters because I think that's again, the beauty of USF. You have all these people, some who are Catholic but a lot who are everything else, who are so into being USFy and in this way of being.
Part of its essence for me is in liberation theology, it's called the hermeneutic circle or the circle of interpretation. Although that isn't Ignatian pedagogy words, I think it's very similar where first, you ideally understand your own context. The context in which you're teaching, the context in which your university is located, the context of your students. What does it mean to be a first-generation student? What does it mean to be a student from China?
That maybe isn't something you're doing really explicitly with the students, but it helps if you are contextualizing. Then with the students, it's this circle of experience, trying to draw from their experience, not in a shallow way, but using experience as a way to move to critical reflection and then in many cases, to action. Then evaluating that circle and beginning the circle again. It is highly dialogical and I like to think that we're co-learners, faculty and students.
Paulo Freire would say it's not a banking model and it's not just like opening someone's head and lecturing and pouring it all in. It's not answer oriented. In Erasmus, we rarely discuss solutions, even though we look at social problems, and I'll get back to that a little later. Another term that's used not just by Jesuits or by Ignatian pedagogy, but it is used, is cura personalis, which is formation of the entire person. Those are things that come to mind for me.
Mathew: Lois, this is really a rich background, but I wanted to follow up with on a couple of points you made [inaudible 00:09:44] my second question first, then I want to go back to the one I'd like to spend a little more time with. You were talking about this circle of experience, critical reflection, action, evaluation, then starting over again. Yet, you were talking about in your current experience with Erasmus that there's all the stuff that goes on but really deliberate action. I think of a deliberate [inaudible 00:10:09] coming up with solutions. I think of the solutions and action as being similar and either I'm not thinking of it the same way you think of it, or there's something where you're making the adaptation under those conditions. I'm wondering if you can explain that a little more.
Lois: Yes. That's a really good question. Part of that is context, is in the US-- this is over-generalizing, we are action-oriented in what can be a shallow way. I see a problem, I go on an immersion trip, and two days into the culture, I want to figure it out and figure out what to do.
Matthew: That's pretty good. People wait two days.
Lois: [laughs] In Erasmus, what we try to encourage is not jumping to solutions, but assuming that we need a lot more information to do a really good, informed analysis and that it takes a long time. When we were in Cambodia last time, a former student is working there and we had dinner with her. The reason I wanted the students to have dinner with her was to show how long it took for her to understand even a little bit was going on and to gain competence to be able to be helpful there.
I think if you, in the first month, are encouraging them to jump to solutions, they're not good solutions. They're ill-informed. It feeds your own arrogance. It relates to-- Yesterday, who was the speaker? We had a speaker--
Matthew: Jose Bowen.
Lois: Yes. Jose Bowen talked about college and faculty members as maybe the only role models for slow thinkers that the students will ever see. It's not that we're de-valuing action, but trying to show all the critical reflection that has to happen before you can do any action. That it's also maybe not you doing the action but following what a community is doing after you understand the community, which you don't at the beginning.
Matthew: That makes a whole lot of sense. It is our tendency to want to solve things right away. I remember there was some research done at the end of the '80s, more or less on mathematics, completely different context. This was with high school students. Students, if they couldn't solve a problem in four minutes, figured they couldn't solve it, or if they were really arrogant, they figured it was unsolvable. Most of the time they thought they just couldn't solve it.
There's also this wanting to solve things quickly, but also the same patience with taking time. I want to go back to a step earlier. That really helps tremendously. I love how Jose Bowen framed it as slow thinking. I'm almost thinking about how we have the slow food movement, it's like the slow thinking movement a little bit. Another part that goes into that besides the action, how you're dealing with it is this notion of critical reflection.
Really embedded in that, I want to ask you a couple of questions, but the first one is, why call it critical reflection instead of reflection? Are they really the same thing and it's an emphasis?
Lois: That's a really good question. I think it's an emphasis. Oftentimes when people talk about reflection, it's more feelings, interior, maybe meditative. It's more about affect. There's nothing wrong with affect. The critical piece adds the cognitive more explicitly, like when Bowen said that we're cognitive coaches. It's a type of reflection. I think it's an emphasis and it's informed because reflection, you think, "Oh, I'm going to reflect on that."
To me-- maybe I'm wrong, it doesn't imply that, well, they'll really critically connect on this. I should read this and this and this, and maybe talk to this person and consider this, and then I can reflect on it with knowledge.
Matthew: Then from a practical perspective, because I think the notion of critical reflection fits most courses, maybe not everyone, but a lot of courses in a lot of contexts. Are there any specific tools or exercises that you take students through that seem to be particularly effective for them undergoing what you're calling critical reflection? I think that's the thing that faculty will struggle with at times.
Almost everybody's interested in the students thinking about things deeply. How do we structure either through the live class, what they do outside the live class, in such a way that they actually think about it critically and carefully and give a measured response?
Lois: Oh, that's really hard.
Matthew: Well, that's good to know too, if that's something you work with [inaudible 00:15:35] .
Lois: No, it's really difficult. I think it's really difficult and generally, I probably don't do it well. I like the theory of it rather than my execution, a little plug for CTE. CTE has been super helpful because I think many faculty, I really spent most of my teaching career not thinking explicitly about pedagogy. Even if I did some of these things right at times, it may have been dumb luck or just about my temperament or whatever.
For a lot of my career, I taught the way most of us do where you do a lecture and then try to get a discussion going and often poorly. To go in the backdoor, there's maybe some examples where I think I've come the closest to it, and Erasmus is one. There's an advantage because the students are with us for a year and it's a small group, always easier in a small group. We meet once a week.
Outside of class time, we have lunch with the students. It's team-talk with Mike Duffy. We have lunch with the students and that's just lunch. It's just lunch. We talk, we laugh, we're silly, we're whatever. It's not obligatory. Some students have class, so they can't. Then we have lunch. It's in Lone Mountain and our classroom is just down the hall. Then we, "Oh, it's time for class," so then we just walk from lunch to class.
That in itself sets up a different dynamic. If there's a teacher standing in front and then everyone comes in, then, of course, we rearrange the tables so we're all facing each other. The other teacher and I never sit together. Wherever he is, I'm not going to sit there. All these things to break up that dynamic. When there are discussions, if they're looking at me, I look away, so they can't be talking to me. All these things to train people--
Matthew: That's a big thing actually.
Lois: Yes. All these things to train people that it's not doing this and it's difficult. At the beginning of the year, one of the first-- Well, we do a combination of fiction and theory. We can do this with Erasmus because we [inaudible 00:18:09] to do a little more. Over the summer, they have to read. We assign a fiction book and that's the first thing we talk about when we get there. They enter, so they're ready to discuss something the first day of class that they've lived with, that's about the affect.
Then, we reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed and we refer back to that the entire year as our model of what we want the seminar to be. We do a really close reading of that and we'll read passages out loud and discuss them. Then, like I said, I think Bowen said this too about repetition. We're always coming back to Pedagogy of the Oppressed and we're telling them [inaudible 00:18:54] it's experimenting.
Then, over the course of the year, we might lead the first discussion then help someone lead the next one. Now, at this point, we don't need any discussions. It's all student-led discussions and they're really good. I was so uncomfortable with Erasmus last year when I first taught it. I was just following what Mike did. At the beginning, I wanted to sit on my hands because I was thinking, "You need more content. You have to lecture more."
I went an entire year without giving a lecture. We had guest lectures. We had site visits, we saw films, we did a lot of things. When they were in Cambodia, they were so impressive. They were just brilliant. The types of questions they were asking, what they knew. You could tell that people they would see are used to doing maybe having an immersion where you have to explain everything to them. These kids were already way out there and asking really great questions. That was part of it. It's this combination of providing a context for learning, a scaffolding, but they know that it's self-consciously built on something. Bowen suggested you don't give them the syllabus. What we do is a version of that where we read the syllabus collectively. They'll each read a paragraph and then they'll explain to the class what the point of that paragraph or whatever they read and does it make sense.
They're not constructing a syllabus but they're reading it as a text collectively in our first class period. You have to be uncomfortable with silence. It's not being an entertainer which I think is also a tendency to get student interest. It's taking student intellect really seriously. That's Erasmus. In general, in my experience, out of the country classes have been a little easier to do this with because they are experientially based in a lot of ways but they're going to sites. They're hearing other people lecture.
It's easier to look like a co-learner because I'm sitting with them with all of these things and I can certainly supplement but they'll ask me questions. Then the readings are directly related to something they saw. They'd say, "Well, that doesn't make sense," and say, "Okay, we're going to read this then we'll discuss this tonight." There's just a higher level engagement.
Another example of that is years ago, we did this twice, Michael Stanfield in history and I had a January course where we bicycled from San Diego to Cabo, which is 1,200 miles. It was a course on history. The Jesuit history of Baja, environmental history. We camped half the time. We stayed in really awful motels half the time. It was fascinating because we did some lecturing then, but they were contextual and on the fly.
Say, for example, there's a Guadalupe shrine here, I'll pull over and I'll say, "Everyone stop over here. Let's get around this shrine. Let's wait till that truck driver goes by." The truck driver goes by and they see the truck driver stop and do this. I would just say, "Mike, tell us about the importance of--" "Why did the truck driver did this?" "Tell us about the importance of Guadalupe in Mexican history and why there are shrines all over?
What she means, what she's meant politically in the past, and what does she mean politically now? Mexican migrants, what do they think of this?" He would just do an on-the-spot lecture like that. You're just around there and you've just seen the truck driver. What cracked me about that trip, we brought books. We had a van so we had books with us, readings with us, and we'd have time during the day to read. We'd talk at night, they'd write.
One of the books was this 500-page really dense, pretty tedious history of Baja, especially the Jesuits in Baja, that if I'd assigned in class up here, people wouldn't have read it or they would've been really annoyed. These kids just gobbled that thing up and they would have discussions about things in the footnotes because something like what was carried on a donkey from Mexico City. They just had a hard bike ride in the desert so they can envision what that meant. It was just amazing.
We went whale-watching. Then you could talk about San Francisco's involvement in killing all the whales. That was really the best. I'm not as good at doing it in a normal classroom of 40 students. These contexts, I find a lot easier to do that.
Matthew: It's useful for us to think about because even though it's not the "normal" classroom, what it emphasizes, what we as instructors have to stretch and imagine for ourselves is context is so important. You really can't separate it out. Obviously, not all of us can go to Baja or do something like that, but I think we can push ourselves, maybe it's in vacation time where our minds are a little more free but to think about how do we set up a different context.
It's not just the context. It seems to me the way you're describing this is you set up a context that has great potential for shaking them, shaking how they think about things because of the experiences they come across. It's really wonderful. I'm going to skip a couple questions because of time here.
I wanted to ask you, if you look backwards and given how you've described what you see as the essence of Ignatian pedagogy-- and you've given wonderful examples here. If you think about it through the lens of somebody who's a brand new faculty member. Who knows where they came from, University of Illinois, it doesn't matter where it was, but they probably haven't been thinking about USF no reason or the Jesuits no reason.
What would you take out of all of that Ignatian stuff as probably being the most useful to think about or use as a new faculty member in your first year, two, or three year? It's a little bit how do you [inaudible 00:26:07] the shallow end?
Lois: Some of this isn't just for new faculty. Especially, coming out of graduate school, where you really are supposed to be smart and know everything, that's a lot of pressure. I walked into a classroom thinking I had to know everything and the answer to every question. Just part of it is attitude, you don't have to know everything. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. Your students can be smarter than you, that's okay.
It is more difficult to do Ignatian pedagogy than it is to construct a brilliant lecture and that encouraging deep thought is about creating a scaffolding as much as the content pieces.
Again, this is for everyone but including new faculty, it's about an attitude. There's, in academia in general, a lot of student-bashing. The students aren't good enough, they don't read enough, they are in the social media thing so they have a short attention span. That's context.
That's part of Ignatian pedagogy is understanding the context, not trashing, criticizing the context but using the context, knowing the context. We teach who's in front of us. How can I use their context which Bowen talked about a lot. Really, that genuine attitude of valuing each student, believing they're learners. That's really hard, and consciously using their experience not in a shallow way.
I used to teach Rightward Bound which was based in experiential education. We would wake up and say, "Are we doing experiential education or are we just lazy?"
[laughter]
Lois: You can do it in a way that's really lazy but let's just talk about how we experience this. You can do it in a way that's a lot harder, that really brings the affect and the cognitive together. Use direct experience, use field trips, guest speakers. All those things outside of class that Bowen talked about, films, and games, and whatever. To self-consciously think about as many different ways of learning that you can and as many different modalities of encouraging learning as you can.
My solution thing that not doing solutions. Kara McBride, with the CTE, has this wonderful question that she introduced to Erasmus and that we use all the time, and you probably know this question, you probably heard it from her. Now that you know what you know, what do you need to know? It's affirming that you know something. You've already learned something here, but now what do you need to know?
It's not that like, "What's the answer," but, "What do you need to know and how do you get that knowledge?" This education is about this classroom. We'll end the semester. Now that you that you know what you need, now what are you going to [inaudible 00:29:18] , now what do you need to know, and how are you going to know that?
Another thing that's really hard for all faculty but especially new faculty because if you're coming from some elite school that less is more and this is rough because faculty say, "They don't read enough and I have to dumb it down." Dumb it down usually means they're not reading enough. Now, a really deep discussion about a lot less is better. I believe in reading out loud in class too. When we have student discussions, I'll give them a prompt the week before of how we're going to look at-- the jumping-off point, how we'll look at something. They have to use concrete text within the text to do that and then the students would go, "Yes, that reminds me of over here when the da, da da." High expectations. It's the thing if even less is more and you have higher expectations.
I would let students identify how they learn best, so they're telling you in a way, what are the ways that they've learned the most. Don't be afraid of ongoing assessment of the class, the collectively of the class go to CTE, go visit other classes.
Matthew: Well, Lois, I didn't want to take too much of your time today, but you've given some such rich examples and I've tried to ask the best questions I can obviously, but it's easy for me to miss something or leave something out. If there's any other issues or just concepts surrounding how you think about Ignatian pedagogy that we haven't tapped into, can you talk about it now, or maybe there's nothing left to talk about?
Lois: They probably are things I've said but a little more about experience because I love theory. I know when people would talk about using experience, it always made me really nervous because I didn't want it to be something shallow. To learn how-- work at knowing how to explicitly tie experience to theories or models and one example for me was in my migration class.
I would do some very simple where students would give their own family history of immigration and they're going to have all these different stories. Some point during the class, their story will intersect, something we're learning. A really simple thing like theories of why people migrate, what pushes, and what pulls. Then in your stories, where does your story fit with those theories of why people migrate?
Things like that and then the use of the concrete to illuminate the highly theoretical like Bowen mentioned Foucault. Use a concrete example and what would Foucault do? Understanding Foucault isn't just about being able to talk about in a theoretical way. It's like to say, "How does that illuminate recent Supreme Court Justice decisions on reproductive rights or whatever?"
Then it's harder than regular teaching, it's more rewarding. You'll fail, again, and again. There's no formula because if it's formulaic, then it isn't authentic and these are ideals that sometimes happen.
[laughter]
Matthew: One of the things that maybe has been unsaid by you but seems to come across and how the stories relay and how you talk about things is that you seem to be very open to taking pedagogical risks, things that may not succeed. How did you get to that point? Were you always that way, a risk-taker? Was there something-- even with something you said simple like you talked earlier about you have to be willing to allow some silence in the classroom and that can be uncomfortable to people.
Were those all kinds of things that were part of your pedagogical toolkit day one when you came out as a teacher? How did you grow-- not with the particular tools, but how did you grow in terms of being willing to take little risks? A lot of what you're describing have been either large risks to you or a little risk at the time. I don't know how you felt inside, but there were risks at some level that you were willing to go with to see if it would really help your students.
Lois: Well, some through brutal failure. I don't think I started out being a risk-taker at all. I remember one class, ethics class, I taught here in my second or third year at USF is a huge class and there's a student left a voicemail on my machine--
Matthew: For modern faculty, voicemail [inaudible 00:34:54].
Lois: Yes, students did that. They would leave voicemails and we would listen to them. This message, she didn't identify herself. She just said this [inaudible 00:35:02] class and she said, "You have to do something, please. It's so boring." Which is just like a dagger to your heart and then you want to be in control and you want to-- and so it was devastating. I thought, "Okay," and I went to the class next time and said, "This isn't working, so Let's talk about ways that this could work better.
Here's what I need to happen, here's what you need." Then they broke in small groups and they talked about and then we collectively reshaped the class and it turned out to be a great class. That was forced on me, but I'm often terrified by teaching.
It helps if I get close to the students, not in a weird, intimate, inappropriate way, which is threatening too, but if I know them, that just helps to know what we can do together. I can ask them, "Did that work?" That's harder with bigger classes and no, it's not fun to fail at all. Last fall, the whole Pedagogy of the Oppressed thing was new to me, but then we had talked about it after we got the book.
It said, "This is an experiment. We might fail collectively at this," but also making it a collective, "We might fail at this." You might want the banking model, you might want us to lecture, so this might be a big failure. I just bring them into it too, but again, sometimes I do it.
Matthew: These are wonderful stories. Thank you so much. You really have taken a lot of-- whether it was thrust upon you or whether it was your own choice, you've clearly taken a lot of pedagogical risks in your life that have ended up enriching your students. Which hopefully is a lesson that all of us can keep in mind, never to get too complacent, but always be trying something new.
Well, thank you so much for the graciousness of your time and this is just wonderful how you're conveying this. Thank you very, very much.
Lois: [inaudible 00:37:26] fun.
[00:37:28] [END OF AUDIO]


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