John Warren tells us it is important to trace how one arrives to the classroom, to make those pedagogical moments public, and to engage in the transformative moment of shifting from the “I believe this to be true” to “I believe this to be true because” (Warren, 2011, 140). We do these things through autoethnographic pedagogical history, critical ethnography, and performance. In the forgiveness as pedagogy link, I share my brief critical autoethnographic history in performance to the tune of hip hop. Linked to that are my students’ voyages creating the forgiveness quilt, or what I deem an embodiment of forgiveness as a pedagogical journey. I came to forgiveness through a process of learning how to forgive myself. For instance, and available through auditory and illustrative elements here, I experienced several moments throughout my collegiate career and as a new professor that required me to be self-reflexive and forgive myself.

★★★

1999. Theology 101. My instructor, a nun, teaches me about Catholicism for an entire semester. At the end of class I ask, “Why is this course called theology 101 if we only learn about Catholicism. There are many more theologies.” That semester I record my first C. I forgive myself for earning the lowest grade of my collegiate career if it meant learning to think critically, and exercise my right to voice. Besides, I still got my Ph.D.

★★★

2000. I am Jr Communication major, dance minor sitting in Dr. Scott’s Black Women in Society course. Olga Davis, Marsha Houston, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks. Their names are liquid gold in my young mind’s quest for liberation rhetoric. I watch my identities unfold before me on a page, mirroring my insides as they squirm and dance. But it’s not just the dance of liberation. It is a dance of contestation. The politics of respectability police my body. Clean it up. Sanitize. Water it down. Make is acceptable. But that is not me. I want to shake it. I want to move and groove to the tune Vivrant Thing. I was a vivrant thing back then, in my feminist skin, doing my thang. Cognitive Dissonance. I forgive myself for policing my own desire to be ratchet.

★★★

2001.  MA candidate. I thought video hoes were bad people. Their bodies performing inhibited desire and setting back women’s suffrage a century. Didn’t those women know it was not okay to be on display? I forgive myself for policing the rachetness of others.  I promise not to police in my own classroom community.

 ★★★

2006. Interpersonal Communication. I am a newly minted PhD and professor now. We talk about communicating in intimate relationships. I share a story about peeing in my boyfriend’s bed the first night I slept over and how we communicate deception in times of crisis. I begin with a disclaimer. “I am really transparent. And I have no filter or tact so you might hear things in this class that violate the public private personae of the professor. But I promise you will learn something.” I forgive myself for providing a disclaimer when transparency should be a goal in our pedagogical practices.

★★★

I am a professor who listens to hip hop, knows how to shake it, remains transparent, and loves the reflexive process of forgiveness. To forgive is remember, re-process, understand, let go, and replace. We remember the harsh lessons life teaches us about prejudices, biases, appropriateness. We re-process them to be more transparent and honest, understanding that we all have flaws. We let them go, replacing them with a celebratory awareness of difference.  Forgiveness is my pedagogy. It comes from forgiving myself.

★★★

The Forgiveness Quilt is an art installation project that asks students to be transparent about their biases and racist/sexist/class-based/ability-based/religious imperialistic thinking. After the midpoint of the semester, when students have become comfortable talking about painful, and sometimes violating, subject matter, each student is instructed to purchase a small canvas (or many depending on the number of biases each student wishes to share) and portray their biases through art. Once they depict their bias(es) with words, images, and color, the students are instructed to ask for forgiveness and forgive the “other” for their difference. This forgiveness is a deliberate act of remembering, re-processing, understanding, letting go, and replacing. And it is written in bold for all to see and shared publicly as a celebration of difference.