These assignments included many creative exercises, including a Personal Ethical Inventory, a Socio-Religious Autobiography, and a Womanist Rhetorical Methodology for Projects of Possibility. Each syllabus, each assignment, furthered our appreciative understanding of womanist religious thought. I continue to benefit from the student-centered mutual-learning approach that characterizes Dr. Instead, she encouraged us to take some deep breaths as a preparatory measure for high impact intellectual aerobics. She neither ignored nor sought to diffuse apparent discomfort. Equally evident was her dexterity in reading embodied transcripts as she employed a process that did not assign normative value to broad non-contextual generalizations. In a nondescript classroom on the grounds of Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) whose library archives house documents that justified support of chattel slavery in the United States, Cannon’s proficiency in Socratic methodology was evident. On this day, which marked the one-year anniversary after buildings imploded and exploded, after planes crashed, after countless lives were forever changed on September 11th, 2001, Katie Cannon posed a question (which I no longer recall) about this fateful event that required each student to delve into our own interiority and respond from a place of interconnected interwoven realities.Ĭannon, known for her ability to allow silence to function as a catalyst by which students engage in genuine introspection, sat with us in the silence. On a warm late summer September day in 2002, I gathered around a table with two Black women, an Asian woman, an Asian male, a White woman, and two White males to begin a journey of ethical theological reflection with Dr. KEYWORDSĬultivation of intellect, womanist ethics, teaching strategies, oral histories, integration of research and teaching

Cannon’s assignments, including the Personal Ethical Inventory and the Socio-Religious Autobiography, and expresses her gratitude and indebtedness in prioritizing experiences and contributions of Blacks as an essential aspect of graduate theological education.

Katie Geneva Cannon reflects on her mentor’s pedagogical strategies and techniques and how they have impacted her own teaching, as well as her approach to research and writing. This tribute by a former doctoral student of Dr. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ABSTRACT NEW-ARTICLE-CODE FORUM Deep Breaths and High Impact Aerobics: Reflecting on Teaching Writing in the Key of Katie Geneva CannonĢ020 1:1 101–105 The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching

Lynched by Angela D. Sims