More Than Teaching, It's Ministry in Motion

May 2026 Time Keepers of the Flame

THE SERMON: THE CALL, THE REPETITION 

To be an educator is not simply a profession, it is a calling. It is a call that lives in the body as much as it does in the mind, a call that requires alignment: spine, breath, intention. In this work, we are never only one thing. We are guides and strategists, facilitators and disciplinarians, nurturers and protectors. We are called to stand in the gap, holding space for bodies that are still learning how to arrive fully at themselves.  

To educate within a liberative and embodied practice is to move beyond instruction. It is to guide students into understanding, and from understanding into embodiment. In this work, knowing is not complete until it can be executed, repeated, sustained, and trusted in the body. Theory becomes practice, practice becomes repetition, repetition becomes memory, memory becomes instinct, and instinct becomes freedom. This is the choreography of learning.  

Every class is a rehearsal of becoming. Every correction is an invitation into deeper alignment. This work requires space in the joints, in the breath, and in the spirit. To teach is to make room for expansion while holding the container steady enough for growth to take place. 

These callings can carry tension. There will be moments when the body resists, when alignment feels unfamiliar, when the dancer cannot yet access what is being asked. There will also be moments when what is offered does not settle in the body, shaped by experience or survival, and cannot release into the work. In those moments, the responsibility is not to force, but to remain, to witness, to adjust the entry point, and to meet the body where it is while still calling it forward. 

As bell hooks reminds us in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, the classroom can function as a counter-hegemonic space housing a site of resistance within a dominator culture. ¹ In the studio, this resistance is carried in the body. Students may long to move freely and be seen fully while also holding the imprint of systems that have taught them to shrink or conform. In that tension, the body often chooses what feels safest.  

What is the work, you ask? It is to teach the body that it can release, to teach the voice that it can sound, and to teach the spirit that it can expand. This is not neutral practice. It is liberative, political, and spiritual. Because of that, it will not always be affirmed, rewarded, or even welcomed. At times, it may be resisted by those we are called to serve. And still, the work continues.  

Because there is no fixed blueprint. The room shifts, the rhythm shifts, the bodies shift. But what remains is the lineage and the imprint of those who trained us, corrected us, and stayed with us until the work lived in our bodies. I carry that lineage.  

Growing up in New Orleans, I was shaped within an educational experience where learning was embodied, where rhythm, voice, repetition, and presence were inseparable from knowledge. One of the educators who formed me was my sixth-grade academic teacher at Henry W. Allen Elementary School, the late Ms. Betty Steward. She was not my dance teacher, yet the structure of her pedagogy continues to inform how I teach across disciplines. Her approach affirmed that the principles of learning, discipline, repetition, embodiment, and presence transfer across all forms of study. 

Ms. Steward taught through structure, rhythm, and presence. Repetition was her method. We stayed in it until the words settled into the body and until we could carry them, speak to them, and perform them. She would not move forward until we could demonstrate what we knew. She made us speak clearly, confidently, and out loud. It was breath work. It was projection. It was training us to trust our voices. She stayed with us until the task was fulfilled. 

She modeled embodiment, precision, intention, excellence in how she carried herself. I watched her not only as a teacher, but as a Black Southern Woman in full alignment with who she was. She was direct, disciplined, unwavering, and always rooted in care. Her corrections called us into alignment with what she knew we could hold. Now, I recognize it clearly: I have embodied what I was taught. I carry her rhythm, her insistence on repetition, and her commitment to staying until understanding lives in the body. I honor Ms. Betty Steward, and I continue the phrase she began. 

This is the work of education: to set the intention, to mark the movement, to repeat until it lives in the body, and to hold the space until transformation occurs. You may not reach them all, but when one body releases, when one voice emerges, when one student stands fully in their alignment, that one becomes evidence. Evidence that liberation can be embodied. Evidence that the work is alive.  

This is more than teaching. This is ministry in motion. A ministry that covers, guides, corrects, and calls the body back into itself. Though the work may be demanding, and at times isolating, it remains necessary. Because even when you cannot yet see it, the work is in the body, in the spirit, in the breath, and in the repetition. In time, it will rise, it will move, it will testify. To whom much is given, much WILL be required. Continue On In Grace! 

Asè.
Amen.
And so it shall be.

Michelle N. Gibson, MFA

Division of Dance

Professor of Practice in Dance, Culture, & Life

Meadows School of the Arts

Southern Methodist University

bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003).