This is a time like no other

We are we doing our best to survive multiple pandemics-

• COVID 19 - The global pandemic and appalling healthcare disparities that has caused the death of  over half a million persons within the USA. 
• Police & Justice System brutality - The continued state sanctioned violence that disproportionately strikes Black, Latinx and Indigenous bodies 
• Anti- Asian  – There is increased violence, discrimination and hate crimes towards AAPI (Asian American & Pacific Islander) communities. Hate crimes against Asians spiked 149% between 2019 and 2020.  
• Continued sexual, reproductive and economic violence against women, including the targeted murdering of black trans women. 
  

As Educators we help our students understand that spiritual care does not happen in a vacuum. They bring the fullness of themselves into the spaces in which they minister with the intention of meeting the fullness of the suffering other. It is essential that we also remember that CPE education does not happen in a vacuum. We are educating students amid these pandemics. Our students’ social locations include multiple identifications with groups that have undue privilege and power, and with those that are disenfranchised and oppressed. Some of our students are more intimately impacted by these pandemics than others however we are all embedded within these systems. As Educators this requires that we incorporate these realities into our curriculums.  

My purpose as an educator is to create a learning environment that fosters critical thinking and encourages integrated ways of thinking and being. I use critical engaged pedagogy as understood through the works of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Freire defines education as the process of integration in which we first consciously confront reality and then develop the critical capacity to make choices and transform that reality. Within CPE students encounter themselves and others as persons embedded within cultural systems and as individuals with particular ways of being. I invite students to become critically aware of their own social locations, their worldviews, their biases/prejudices and their intersections with the lives of the persons they serve. hooks articulates that all education is contextualized to the culture of the society it is a part of and can be used to reinforce dominant narratives and ways of feeling and knowing. I invite my students to understand that within all cultures there are values and traditions that maintain power-over relationships and those that create mutual empowerment, and further to explore ways power-over relationships create contexts of suffering. 

I have incorporated this engagement into my curriculum in several ways including didactics on race/racism, power analysis, microaggressions, COVID-19 disparities and the 846 ACPE series. I assign readings and videos from persons with varied backgrounds, especially from systemically silenced and minoritized communities. This affords my students the opportunity to experience education as freedom, both freedom from and freedom to. It is freedom from living unexamined lives that are created from ingesting dominant culturally accepted teachings. Freedom from includes identifying those aspects of one’s lived experiences that hinder and help our being authentic whole persons. It is a freedom to have authentic-deeper connections with self and with others in ways that promote mutuality and healing. This queering (or blurring the boundaries) of space focuses on naming socially constructed constricting labels, which deny us the chance to lives as full humans in healthy relationships, in order to dissolve them.  

If you feel unequipped and need support in incorporating these realties into your curriculum OR if you are already doing so and want to glean fresh ideas to incorporate you need to attend this year’s conference.  

Reflection Question:  How does your CPE curriculum/continuing education plan address issues of bias against the top three demographics you serve?  

Rev. Malu F. Fairley-Collins is an ACPE Certified Educator and can be reached at Malu.Fairley@caromonthealth.org