“Keepin’ it Real”—When Scholarship Meets the Political A Conversation with Shanell T. Smith

Abstract

In this conversation, the Reverend Dr. Shanell Smith shares her strategies for incorporating politics into the classroom via an explicitly politicizing technique, “Keepin’ it Real.” She discusses the process of considering what to include and how to include it (and why we must!), and offers a window into how it might look in the classroom, using examples from a class on Mary that she teaches in an online seminary setting. Smith emphasizes the importance of modeling personalized scholarly inquiry for our students, including and especially the openness and vulnerability that make our scholarship matter both to us and to the world we share.