Educator profile: David Fleenor
Rev. David Fleenor, BCC is Director of Education for the Center for Spirituality and Health at Mount Sinai in New York, as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is also a participant in the Boston University-Chaplaincy Innovation Lab project Educating Effective Chaplains, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Q: What most excites you about the field of chaplaincy?
A: I feel really excited when I hear people like [Lab founder] Wendy [Cadge] talking about the development of chaplaincy as an academic field. It is past time that people are able to put some serious academic attention to research, study, and reflection on this field, which feels like it’s starting to be legitimized in a way that it hasn’t been before. I feel very excited about that possibility, especially at a time when higher ed is having seismic changes. This is especially true when we still don’t know what the effects of the pandemic will be on higher education in the long term.
Q: What do you see as challenges to the field at present?
A: I think most concerning to me is the lack of common agreement on what a chaplain needs to know. I feel like I work somewhat in isolation, even though I feel very connected to colleagues in seminaries and CPE, but there’s always a sense of isolation in what we’re teaching. One of the ways I’ve tried to address this personally is through conducting some research over the last few years that simply helps to map out what certified educators are doing. I published a survey article on the prevalence of journal clubs in CPE. I’m writing up a survey right now about ethics education in CPE residences in the US. But this preliminary knowledge leads to another question down the road: “Now that we know what it is we’re doing, is it what we should be doing?”
Also, things have been done very locally. In many ways we’re still a cottage industry, a small guild, on the cusp of becoming really professionalized.
Finally, we know very little about online clinical pastoral supervision. I have to assume that since around April the majority of my colleagues are practicing this. I think there is such an opportunity for study in that area, and it’s a conversation we’re having within ACPE. What questions do we need to ask? Who’s doing it? What are you doing in it? Other fields have been actively studying online therapy, supervision, social work, counseling education – there are bodies of knowledge out there. An attitude that CPE and chaplaincy is so unique that it can’t be studied the same way puts up barriers to learning anything.
Q: What do you consider to be the most important skills to cultivate in future chaplains?
A: The most essential is managing one’s own emotional life because the primary practice of chaplaincy is a one-to-one encounter with someone else — a care-seeker. I really believe that from a do-no-harm perspective, this is important, because of this fundamental theological belief: we are wonderfully and ingeniously created to survive and to meet our own needs and that’s one of the primary purposes of our unconscious life. The biggest danger of our unconscious life is unwittingly inducing someone else to take care of me. We must manage our own emotional life and the needs that come from that life, in relationship with other people. That’s the heart and soul of any CPE program or chaplaincy training program. Beyond that, there are lots of other interesting and demanding things, such as organizational intelligence, social intelligence, the ability to walk into an organization in which you are a stranger and size it up – its dynamics and hierarchies, and figure out how to function in those systems ethically and effectively.
Q: How can educators respond to the pandemics both of COVID-19 and systemic racism?
A: This is interesting because looking at the intersection of those two is supporting by Mount Sinai. We’ve engaged in some searing self-reflection on the structures that support inequity and keep our field at a place of status quo. I just did a SWOT analysis with the other educators here to look at CPE programs in relationship to racial inequity. This included nuts-and-bolts things like taking a hard look at our costs for tuition, our application fees, an application process that might prioritize people not of color. So we reduced tuition for upcoming fall unit, more than cutting it in half to recognize the difficult state of the economy because of the pandemic and concrete ways we might reduce racial inequity. That’s a first step, and maybe it’s a token step.
What are we doing in our work and how can we dismantle those structures? It’s as simple as this: people of color are disproportionately under resourced. Just one example here: we had a person of color who wanted to apply but doesn’t have a computer and, thus, cannot complete the application. My educator colleagues who are people of color have argued that students should be able to hand write their applications. And why not? We also have to think about what that means for the next step in their education. Do we need to teach basic digital literacy skills, in addition to emotional-social intelligence kinds of things? We need to think deeply about the pedagogy of the oppressed. I feel really fortunate to be in a health system that has doubled down on racial equality and grateful to be in a position to be part of this change with a lot of institutional support.
Michael Skaggs is Director of Programs at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.