Westmont Magazine New Faculty Books

For more than three decades, Michelle C. Hughes has been teaching or serving as a school administrator in the Santa Barbara region. She decided to give back to the profession she loves by co-editing a new book, “Joyful Resilience as Educational Practice: Turning Challenges into Opportunities.”

“Teaching is hard work,” says Hughes, associate professor of education. “It’s courageous work; it’s not for the meek or weak. This book is our love letter to all teachers.”

Hughes collaborated with her colleague and friend, Ken Badley from Tyndale University in Toronto, to offer ways to reframe obstacles in teaching as opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Hughes graduated from Westmont in 1989 and earned a Preliminary Teaching Credential in English. She served as assistant principal at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta from 1996-2009 and taught English at Goleta Valley Junior High School from 1989-1996. She earned a Doctorate of Education from George Fox University in 2014.

The cover of the book features a rose growing and blooming from a crack in the sidewalk. “As a journey, teaching requires pruning and growth,” she says. “Thorns in our daily work don’t immediately bring to mind great rewards or reciprocities. Yet the consistent work we all do in classrooms for students reveals why we keep showing up and making the best of the challenges — and why we keep transforming hurdles into opportunities. This book is our thank-you to all the teachers who encourage and empower us. May it remind you that your work is meaningful, joyful and inspiring.”

Hughes wrote the second chapter and co-authored three other chapters with Badley. Andrew Mullen, a fellow Westmont professor of education, also contributed a chapter. The editors hope readers will recall the rewards of teaching and the resilience it requires as well as the joyful resilience that teaching brings to light.

In addition, Hughes presented “Dispositions are a Teacher’s Superpowers” at ICCTE’s Virtual Conference with Mount Vernon Nazarene University in May. She contributed two teaching stories, “Phantom Joy” and “A String of Ah-Ha Moments” to “Generating Tact and Flow for Effective Teaching and Learning” (Routledge).

Sandra Richter, Robert H. Gundry professor of biblical studies, serves on the New International Version (NIV) Committee for Bible Translation (CBT). Few women have joined the prestigious team translating the top-selling English- language Bible.

“Knowing the reach of the NIV and the reputation of the excellent scholars already serving on the CBT, it was a quick ‘yes’ for me,” Richter says. “I tell my students it’s like going from nine months of teaching P.E. to getting to play on the All-Star team.”

Richter, who has taught at Westmont since 2017, serves a life-long appointment to the 15-member CBT with two other women. “It’s a sad testimony that we, the Christian community, have failed for so long to encourage women to pursue their gifts in leadership and biblical studies,” Richter says. “As a result, there’s a dearth of women to fill these roles. But that’s changing rapidly.”

Classically trained in biblical exegesis and the history, language and anthropology of the ancient Near East, Richter offers expertise in Hebrew, its cognates, and the world of the ancient Near East. She attended her first meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in June 2021.

“These contexts become critically important when we try to move an idiom or practice in the Old Testament into current usage, both in the U.S. and throughout the English-speaking world,” she says. “If the committee doesn’t fully understand what’s going on in a particular text, how can we translate it for the everyday Christian studying the Bible at church? We dive deep on these issues, doing our best to understand the ancient authors so we can best communicate their words to the modern reader.”

Seventy-five percent of the committee has to approve a proposed change before it takes effect. “This group is so careful to hear every voice, consider every option, and deliberate fully before taking action,” Richter says.

She’s identifying passages that feature in new, emerging research as possible areas for change. “My dissertation research and work on Deuteronomy — particularly the sexual misconduct laws — are the sorts of proposals I’m bringing before the committee,” she says.

In a new book of poetry, English professor Paul J. Willis takes his readers on a path through California’s coastal redwoods and giant sequoias in the Sierra, weaving in adolescent practical jokes and sharing unexpected epiphanies. Slant Books published the latest book by the former Santa Barbara poet laureate.

Willis’ seventh volume of poetry ascends the switchbacks of ordinary experience to cross paths with song-leading rangers, exhausted mothers, dirt-loving children, terrified immigrants, Arctic climbers, face-masked students, beatified counselors, rejected suitors, honest morticians, talking ferns, mourning crows, stinking fungi, vengeful rivers, raging fires, FAITHFUL brothers, the world’s largest pinecones and an innocent pair of twin grandsons. The Virgin Mary, Sir Philip Sidney, George Vancouver, David Douglas, John Muir, Ernest Hemingway and the inimitable Ruth Kerr of the Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company all make appearances.

“At times wistful, occasionally heartbreaking, often humorous and always tender, Paul Willis’ ‘Somewhere to Follow’ is a love letter to the natural world with plenty of affectionate notes to humankind jotted in the margins,” says Tania Runyan, a poet from Illinois who wrote “What Will Soon Take Place.”

“Poet Paul Willis sees life’s everyday, usually-passed-over- without-a-second-thought events, and he finds the sacred,” says Glynn Young, editor of Tweetspeak Poetry. “The sacred can surprise you, and it usually does. And it often surprises you years later, because sometimes you see the sacred only long after you experience it.”

On his fall sabbatical, Willis taught a four-week poetry workshop to Christian college students attending the Gordon College program in Orvieto, Italy — on which he felt, for the most part, like one of Mark Twain’s feckless innocents abroad. He guided the students in writing about the works of art that surrounded them and the rolling Umbrian countryside just beyond the city walls. Though Twain compares most everything unfavorably to the splendors of the Sierra Nevada, and Willis was tempted to do the same, he had to admit in the end that Italy has a few things to show for itself.