How Do We Teach Moral Brilliance?

How Do We Teach Moral Brilliance

Nethan Reddy and Nadinne Cruz

October 2, 2022

Here is my (Nethan) discussion with Nadinne Cruz, a Filipina American scholar-activist who pioneered the service-learning movement, a movement which strove—and continues to strive—to integrate community engagement into university education across the United States and the world. As someone who is a scholar of service-learning myself (particularly as it relates to working with youth and my own Asian American identity), I regard having this discussion as a pivotal point in that journey. I expand more on my own journey elsewhere in this anthology, and that story of service-learning may not even have happened if it weren’t for the pioneering efforts of service-learning activists like Nadinne. In my mind, I include this discussion as an honoring of that legacy and a “passing of the torch.” I am beyond honored to have received it here. One thing I would like to note before you dive into the discussion is that the torches are plentiful—limited only by the imagination—and up for grabs. It is my hope that this discussion conveys this truth to you, the reader and that you consider taking one yourself. I believe that our responsibility as scholar-activists—in fact as people—is to the next generation of people, and I hope this discussion serves as a reminder of that ultimate purpose.

In this discussion, we reflect on what storytelling means and what it means to us. We specifically reflect on a story told by Cruz that grounds the questions we raise. That is the story of Le Chambon. Le Chambon is a rural French commune whose members made it a haven for Jewish people fleeing the Nazis during World War II (1939–1945). Nadinne describes the central quality the people of Le Chambon possess as “moral brilliance”: their capacity to know what is the right to do, to decide to do it, and to attend to the hundreds of daily details of organizing and living with their choice to give refuge—over a sustained period of time—to people who would have otherwise perished with the many thousands in the Holocaust. Using the people of Le Chambon as our model, we explore how we can cultivate moral brilliance in our universities, our communities, and ourselves. In full disclosure, the title of this chapter is posed as a question because we do not offer a definitive answer. Rather, we are working towards an answer through discussion, and we invite you to ponder with us what it means to practice moral brilliance, as well as what a pedagogy for moral brilliance might entail.

NR: “May my story unwind like a long thread.” This is a quote by Leslie Marmon Silko from her book Ceremony that you reference in one of your speeches that you shared with me.

NC: Yes.

NR: Coincidentally stories are one of the main themes of this anthology. Can I ask the story behind why this quote resonates with you?

NC: Hmm. When I was growing up, a lot of family gatherings focused on uncles and aunts telling stories. For the longest time, I always felt that what happens in families with things as common and ordinary, at least in my experience, as storytelling, is diminished by its ordinariness. And so, it struck me when I read Trinh T. Minh-ha and then thereafter began to look at various forms of stories as narratives that provide a structure for speaking out of truth. Not truth with a capital “t,” but truth-telling. I think part of what she said was that storytelling is “one of the oldest forms of moral truths.” That’s what she was saying, “moral truths.” And of course, by adding an “s” and making it plural, implicit in that there are many truths, and it’s contested. But storytelling requires an audience, those who hear the story, the one who tells the story, and in that sense, it’s a dynamic interaction whereby who is hearing matters to who is telling the story. I think in my own experiences, telling my truths in this field of civic engagement and service-learning and so forth, I tended to speak depending on who my audience was. The words and phrases I would choose would depend on who the audience is and what I think they wanted to hear. But anyway, I am curious too. In your experiences, what does storytelling mean to you? How have you experienced storytelling?

NR: In an article I wrote (and a revised version as a chapter in this anthology),[1] I share a story about my own, I guess racial consciousness, as it relates to being Asian American and the hate crime that happened at Cornell University. Something I knew about that story was that it was relatively controversial because I was open about Asian Americans, young Asian Americans, and what it means to be an ally as it relates to Black Americans. Me coming to terms with what allyship means, that was through the story that I crafted for myself. Now, I critiqued allyship because I felt like there was, especially in terms of service-learning, an implicit association between, you’re not tying your struggle, or your liberation with someone else’s if you’re saying you’re an ally. That’s just my perspective, and that’s a bit controversial. I learned to undermine the binary between “servicer” and “recipient of service” in the service-learning program I did at Cornell. Before I engaged with an Asian American community outside of campus, I identified as an “ally” to communities I felt I was more privileged than in one way or another, and I thought that meant rendering services to them because of my comparatively higher privilege. Through service-learning, I learned that works to normalize that higher privilege in some ways instead of working to undermine it. I think undermining it means diminishing barriers, between “servicer” and “recipient of service,” but also other barriers like class, race, gender, and sexuality. Of course, that’s easier said than done, because as Trinh T Minh-ha wrote, “categories always leak.” So that’s a struggle in itself.

NC: Yeah I thought in your story, it seemed like it was doing many things at the same time. There is a narrative, a storyline, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like how you got involved, why, what happened when you got involved, what happened afterward, so that’s the storyline. At the same time, you were interrogating your involvement in it. How it ought to mean, or didn’t mean, this and that, the way you had hoped. The questions that it raised, the challenges, and what is required of you to resolve some of those questions that arose while you were participating. In many ways, the storytelling served the purpose or served the function of having a narrative that you interrogated but honored at the same time. A story in a way allows you to present it as an inconclusive narrative where it both states what happened and raises questions at the same time. And allows you to be personal while not having made up everything either, it’s not an illusion, and at the same time you are not presenting it as an objective act either. It’s complex and I thought it was a wonderfully written story with all those elements in it. Which I think to me means you were able to do your truth-telling in it, while at the same time raising questions that, in a way, allow the reader to also think about “Hmm, is that a question for me as well? How does that fit me?” I did wonder about that because in a presentation on my thoughts on service-learning, that most people who work as an ally or in solidarity with a people’s struggle would consider what they are doing as civic engagement or service or community outreach. They would call it, “I am working in solidarity with” or “I am working in allyship with others.” I do understand allyship as a process in which I identify my location in a political struggle, and I understand what others may be struggling with, and I draw a line between those two struggles, and in that commonality is the space where allyship happens. Because then I understand how my struggle for liberation, the category of people that I might be categorized with and their struggles, what that has in common with the struggles of other people and if I connect those two then I am in allyship with them but it requires me to understand my location in some struggle, not only their struggle, but my struggle, and when you connect the two then there’s allyship. And solidarity, I think of that less as necessarily connecting the two struggles, but that I am simply declaring my support for and affirmation of the struggles of another group of people who are not the people I belong with. For example, I could say “I am in solidarity with Black liberation movements as expressed in Black Lives Matter.” That’s different from if I say, “I work in allyship with Black Lives Matter by working with Filipino liberation groups who connect what they’re doing with BLM.” I think that’s a different thing and it’s a lot more complicated and requires a lot more of us, but you started out with the question of storytelling, and I wondered why you were drawn to ask that question, or if you are hoping to go to another question.

NR: The reason I asked about storytelling is because the anthology is centered around truth-telling and I heard you mention that quote by Trinh T. Minh-ha in one of your talks, so I just wanted to know your story behind why that resonated with you, and to some extent it resonated with me because that’s how I understand things now, through stories.

NC: When highlighted the people of Le Chambon in Southern France and the individual, Mang Ando, the peasant, who taught me a moral truth;      I felt that it was more effective to tell their story in order to get that across than to say it as if I were just telling a historical fact. In a story like that of Le Chambon, I personalize it, because I can tell an audience why that resonated for me. For example, when I tell that story…      when I first heard it, I felt I was haunted by that tale. I was haunted by a question after hearing the story of Le Chambon and their housing of several thousand Jews during World War II at the risk of their own lives. What haunted me was a question like this: what if we taught in colleges and universities in such a way that one of the outcomes of all that teaching is that everyone who graduated would be capable of doing what those people of Le Chambon did? What would we teach? How would we teach it? That was what haunted me. Ultimately, if what we want are individuals who are capable of understanding a challenge, taking risks, having courage, act effectively, humanely, and ethically, and all those elements are in the story of the people of Le Chambon, they didn’t have a university degree, so what is it that we’re missing? If that’s the outcome that we want.      I’m wondering, maybe that isn’t the outcome that we want—it’s not necessarily for moral brilliance. It’s for something else, and of course, we know it’s for something else.

NR: You mentioned the book Where’s the Learning in Service-learning?[2] In a past conversation. It made the argument that service learning was good because it benefits the student cognitively and in terms of their career and skill set. Am I far off?

NC: No. I think it was making the argument that we’re not losing anything academic by engaging in service learning. We shouldn’t worry that there’s a lack of rigor in the learning from service-learning by engaging in it which was what they were trying to address. That was the worry. Once you take students out of the classroom and they’re out running around in communities, they’re engaged in projects it’s going to “dumb down” the curriculum.

NR: It’s interesting because you posed the question of what education the community, Le Chambon, and what education can lead people to be other-centered, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. I think it would be interesting if a service-learning practitioner was overt about their belief that an other-centered education is ideal. Especially since we are talking about solidarity and allyship, what greater allyship is shown by putting your life on the line for other people on the basis of humanity? Common humanity. It’s interesting because they didn’t get a university degree, but then the question is how should a university education instill those values?

NC: Don’t forget, it was skillfully done because they achieved it. They achieved hiding people in a sustained way, over thousands of them, over three thousand of them over several years, and got away with it. It wasn’t like they just risked their lives;      they did it skillfully. They hid people in beehives. They dressed them in ways that they could look like they were part of a farming community. It was very skillfully done, and there was a lot of collaboration and communication. There were arguments among them about how to do it, and how to avoid the Nazis. It wasn’t simple. It required cleverness,      skill,      commitment, and a whole lot of things we say we hope college graduates will be able to enact and embody. But we have to intentionally teach it. So, this truth-telling that is in the anthology; we can’t expect that students know how to do it unless there are models for it. You have to have models. Sometimes those models are out in communities. In as much as we want to think that our excuse for being in communities is that we are out there to benefit them, in many ways, a huge excuse for us to be educating students is for them to connect with people who embody moral truths. Or what I call “moral brilliance.” It’s not expertise like civil engineering or mechanical engineering. It’s something else. I’m not saying that we throw out the things we learn in college to get our degrees;      it’s just that there’s something missing. This truth-telling and liberatory process should be an important part of each learner’s education, but we are not making space for it.

NR: Something that came across my mind was that there are a variety of pedagogies that I’ve seen in the world, at least from my understanding, that lead people to be extremely altruistic or self-sacrificing. Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophies motivated people, both Black and white, to put their lives on the line. That’s one source of liberatory education. But I also think about, well, the most extreme example, the Buddhist monks who self-immolated to protest. So that was another education. I don’t know his name, but apparently, he self-immolated without moving a muscle.[3] That was from his own identity as a Buddhist. I’m unclear about this, what was the education of the community of Le Chambon?

NC: Well, I think that they were a very close-knit subsistence farming community that had for hundreds of years, suffered persecution as Huguenots. They created a very tight-knit community. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they would reach out to others, but they embodied their belief system. Or, they embodied their beliefs. But we don’t embody our beliefs as a whole campus, for example with refugees. We don’t say “Well, we have X number of beds available during summer break.” We don’t use residence halls. Why don’t we use them for refugees? We’re not set up to think of campuses as a collective embodiment of civil society. It’s as if it is something else. It’s not quite that. In any case, I think there are many critiques of education as not being liberatory and therefore not a space where students are going to learn truth-telling. That’s just not going to happen. Not as a core or focused part of the curriculum. It seems to me that part of the premise of this anthology is that students need to learn how to liberate themselves as learners, which is hard to do if you go into college thinking you’re privileged. So, if you think you’re privileged, you don’t need liberation. I think that’s another difficult thing. That’s a very complex analysis, it requires complex analysis to understand that it is possible to be privileged and oppressed, or privileged and not free.

NR: Being both privileged and oppressed is what a lot of young Asian Americans do, that’s how they characterize themselves.

NC: Yeah, I read that in your story.

NR: Yeah, we have relative privilege but also the minority experience is still salient. I just think that that’s an important insight that young Asian Americans have hit upon. The conventional wisdom is ‘well, we’ll leverage our privilege to help people.” We are somehow higher in the hierarchy, I’m getting into that kind of recipient and beneficiary binary that I think traditionally comes with ‘allyship.’

NC: That’s tough to do, what you were saying, to be privileged and oppressed and to use one’s privileges as something to leverage on behalf of those with less privilege. If Asian Americans are not themselves organizing in resistance struggles, mobilizing to deal with anti-Asian hate crimes for example, or workplace practices that would be considered oppressive, then it’s hard to say, ‘Well I’m going to leverage my privilege on behalf of others who have less privilege’ because we’re not even organized. I’m just saying ‘we’ hypothetically. There are a lot of Asian Americans who feel privileged, but they are not capable of being mobilized in political action because they have no clue how to do political mobilization. They have not, in fact, participated in different forms of political organizing. There are all kinds of ways to do community organizing, there’s labor union organizing, community-based, and grassroots organizing, but if you have no idea how one’s own group is organizing, I don’t think you can leverage anything because you are just leveraging your own individual self, standing alone naked. That’s not a collective power of anything. Where do students learn how to organize? For several years, I taught a community organizing course; and some of my former students are statewide, national, and international organizers. They learned how to organize. But that is not commonly taught in colleges and universities. We prefer student learners to be individuals going out there and benefiting communities, but we don’t want them to be politicized by organizing on behalf of their own liberation. We would rather have them think about other people who need them, and how they can apply their own skills, and less about how “     is my own group needing to fight against oppression and how do we do it.”      That’s the basis of being an ally—when you can connect that struggle with another struggle. That’s not benefitting somebody else. That’s connecting my struggle with your struggle. It requires a whole lot more learning and education than is available through a typical service-learning course,      project, or anything like that.

NR: I think you hit the nail on the head. And I know you don’t identify as “Asian American,” or at least I don’t think so.

NC: Well, yes and no. It depends on what the context is. I mean, I’m Filipino American because I am an immigrant from the Philippines. But then people today are saying ‘Well, is that Filipino American or Filipinx,’ just like Latinx, which has a different political connotation. And what does it mean for a Filipino American who identifies as an Asian American? In terms of the collectivity of Asians, people identified as Asians, and the interconnectedness of their histories of oppression as immigrants coming to this country based on race, ethnicity, etc., I am also Asian American. I think of that identity in a political context. Understanding the continuity of themes across many different groups who are categorized as Asian and their fight and struggle against injustices in this country. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I do identify as “Asian American.”

NR: Ok, that’s good to know. So do I. I also feel like I’m Indian American but also Asian American. I also identify as South Asian American because that’s a different racialization. It’s interesting, I’m racialized differently from East Asian Americans but we share a lot in terms of the model minority stereotype.

NC: I have to show my ignorance here, when people say “South Asian American” then do they include India and Pakistan?

NR: Yes.

NC: And when they say “Indian American” they don’t include Pakistan?

NR: Yeah, then it would be “Pakistani American.”

NC: Oh, ok.

NR: Can I just raise one more thing?

NC: Yeah.

NR: We’ve been talking in a broad sense about the education that college students, especially Asian Americans all college students, what type of education leads them to build identities related to social change and contributing to the social good? Do you think that’s not necessarily something that colleges and universities want to cultivate in their students? Because of the potential in creating citizens who are actually–I think there is an ideological reason that having students learn through community engagement might be against their long-term interests.

NC: Whose long-term interests, the students or the university?

NR: The university.

NC: Hmm, I haven’t heard that one. As long as it’s not being politicized against the best interests of the university, I think more often universities like to tout their community engagement as a way of communicating to neighboring communities that they are good for them because they are always fighting against the criticism that the university is a giant among smaller power neighbors and that they are not benefiting those neighbors. Especially when it comes to ‘oh the university is buying up all these houses.’ Now housing prices go up because the university is buying up houses for faculty and staff and converting some of it for their own university uses, so that’s one criticism. Or that their students are noisy and a pain in the neck, we have to live with that. So the university keeps using engagement as a counter, ‘we’re good, we benefit the community.’

NR: I guess I’m trying to say that I have a theory that universities encourage student activism but channel it through individual advancement.

NC: That’s true.

NR: They encourage citizenship but there are aspects of citizenship that I think they don’t necessarily want to cultivate in their alumni, and part of that I think is having a collective consciousness or an organizing consciousness, creating more community organizers.

NC: That’s true. They would rather have individual heroic figures that they can write up about as individual heroic alumni. But not like some groups, or alumni have organized or mobilized getting out the people of color to vote in places like Arizona or Pennsylvania, which some of my former students have done.

NR: One last question. What is your favorite book and without giving out too much detail, why do you recommend it?

NC: Wow. I don’t think I can give you a favorite book. I have a corner of my bookshelf where I have stacked or shelved books that have meant something to me over time. Because I’m seventy-three, I have had many more decades than you on earth, it means that over so many years there can’t be a book that, oh my gosh, just opens the world for me.

NR: Every year, Cornell has a book they send to all freshmen to read, and that’s like the community read. What would you suggest for the next class if you could choose that book?

NC: I guess I would go back to Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place because it’s small, it’s a story, but it’s packed. It raises a lot of questions.

Readers: The Nadinne Cruz Community Engagement Professional Award recognizes an exemplary Community Engagement Professional who has demonstrated collaboration with communities focused on transformative change, a commitment to justice-oriented work, and an impact on the larger movement to build ethical and effective community engagement locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Consider applying or notifying someone else about the award if they may be interested!

A final note: Nadinne and Dwight E. Giles, Jr. authored an article in response to the seminal service-learning book Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? that I mentioned in our discussion. The article is called, “Where’s the Community in Service-Learning Research?”[4] While the former addressed the benefit of service-learning for students, the latter broaches the question of how communities benefit from service-learning, if at all. Reading this article actually introduced me to Nadinne’s work, and I highly recommend it to everyone for whom reading this chapter has led to more questions, perhaps more questions than answers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cruz, N. I., & Giles, D. E. (2000). Where’s the community in service-learning research. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7(1), 28-34.

Eyler, Janet, Dwight E. Giles, Jr., Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

“Monk Suicide by Fire in Anti-Diem Protest,” New York Times, June 11, 1963,

Reddy, Nathan. “Teh Bà Ta Hkèh Poo,” Community Works Journal:

[1] This chapter, “Teh Bà Ta Hkèh Poo,” is  a revised version of an article that appears in Community Works Journal on the following website: .

[2] Eyler, Janet, Dwight E. Giles, Jr., Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

[3] An elderly Buddhist monk died by self-immolation in a well-known protest. See “Monk Suicide.”

[4] Cruz, N. I., & Giles, D. E. (2000). Where’s the community in service-learning research. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7(1), 28-34.