Resources

Covid-19 is not the first crisis through which I’ve taught. The past year has been one of intense personal crisis for me, and I’ve had to keep teaching right through it. Now we’re all in personal crisis. Everyone is doing a new thing in higher education. No one was prepared for this, we’re all learning how to do it, and we’re not doing it in a vacuum. Many of us are suddenly in crisis; people we know and love may be out of jobs or ill with Covid-19, or suffering in some other way. I have learned an important thing in this past year: When in personal crisis and needing to keep teaching, I have to change my expectations of myself. When I am in crisis, I will not be everything I think I should be as a teacher. (Even when I’m not in crisis, I will not always be everything I think I should be as a teacher.) In crisis, though, I have to let go of those expectations and get realistic. I will not have energy to meet with every student about his or her paper drafts like I usually manage to do. I will not have energy to create an imaginative new assignment or even, perhaps, a new exam. I will not have energy to have lunch with students every week to get to know them better. My energy will be expended by caring for myself—making sure I eat properly, see supportive friends, and work through my own stuff. There will only be so much energy left after those basic things. I have to make energy choices. Am I caring for myself before my students? Yes. In the same way that airline attendants insist we put the oxygen masks on ourselves before we put them on our children. If I am taking care of myself, I am some good to my students. If I ignore myself in order to do the things I think I should be doing, I will be no good to my students because I will be exhausted inside of a month. Start by checking in with yourself. Reflect on where you are and what you need. What are you thinking and feeling? What do you need for your physical health? What do you need for your mental and emotional health? What structures will enable you to feel somewhat stable and keep moving? Who do you need to help you? Once you’ve established where you are and what you need in this moment (and these things may change day-to-day), take steps to put these things in place. Get yourself set. Then look at your syllabus. What are the 2-3 things you most want your students to get from class? What on your syllabus will accomplish those? What can you cut and still make sure students receive those things? If you’re reading this blog, you’re a good teacher. Because you are a good teacher, even if you cut some things, your students will still have a good experience and learn what you want them to learn. Readers of this blog are professors who care about our students. We want to do well by them, to teach and mentor for their lives. This means we probably have exceptionally high standards for our teaching. We are probably inclined to forge ahead trying to make this new learning environment work for our students or even to make sure they have what they need in their personal experience of the crisis. But if we forget to attend to ourselves, we’ll pass out from exhaustion before we have a chance to help our students.

Last summer, I packed up our house, defended my dissertation, and moved to the greater New York area to begin my first tenure-track teaching position. There was nothing in new faculty orientation about teaching in a pandemic. However, I find myself drawing from my doctoral experience researching and directing a theological education program in prison as a very present help in this moment of crisis. Here is why. Teaching in prison is to teach in frequent states of crisis and disruption. It was not uncommon to hear of violent assaults or deeply unsettling “shake downs” that left the community enraged. Both of these and worse happened– and more than once. Crisis and disruption were more the norm than moments of structure and peace. I learned during those times that the most essential thing to do was to show up for class. “Showing up” is a pedagogical practice of “being with and for others” in times of crisis. In prison, that meant physically working our way through security checkpoints, gates, and locked doors so we could open physical and metaphorical doors for others. The journey to class was often filled with so many obstacles that it left us all physically and mentally exhausted. But there was an unexplainable source of energy (grace) that came when we all showed up. Showing up was how we, teachers and learners, held together a physical place where those who wanted to gather, could gather. In those times, I learned that showing up in crisis risks encountering human emotion. In crisis, the classroom can become a place where lament and laughter co-exist, weaving in and out of one another in ways impossible to control but necessary for survival. The classroom can be a space where rage gives rise to revelation … or not. I learned that emotions are an essential and expected part of processing crisis and my role as an educator is not to be a therapist or a counselor, but to bear witness. To bear witness in crisis is to be present to the confusing and unpredictable shifts between joy and anger, between light-hearted relief and soul-crushing fear, between wanting to lament and wanting to get on with the lesson of the day. This experience bearing witness to uncomfortable moments of pain, despair, sadness, and rage has, in many ways, prepared me for the present. When my University shifted to remote learning, there was the familiar question of whether or not to have class. The overwhelming response of students was yes. Showing up, even virtually, allowed us to maintain a sense of community and to be present to and with one another as gift, a balm. Students wanted a place where they could gather, listen, and be heard. I knew from my prison teaching experience that to hold a place where people could be heard in crisis was to risk exposing human emotion–and I was okay with that. As a curator of classroom experiences, I often begin with communal hearing sessions or check-ins. Sometimes I do this as a large group, sometimes in smaller breakouts. Hearing from one another does not normally take an entire class session. There were many times in the prison where I simply asked students to share one word describing how they felt as they entered class that day. At the end of class, we closed with a one-word hope for the week ahead. The ritual of hearing from one another allowed us to gauge whether we needed more time checking-in or whether we moved on to the lesson for the day. As our time in crisis extends, I find myself varying the prompts I use for communal hearing, embracing different forms of poetry, guided meditation, and music--sometimes using silence. Recently, I asked a Zoom class to sit in silence for five minutes while reflecting on an unexpected source of hope or joy from the week prior. I closed the time with a short, one-sentence prayer. Testimony, art, silence–all mediums for processing emotion, bearing witness, hearing one another, and for showing up. All mediums I grew comfortable using while teaching in prison. As a graduate student, I did not know then how much teaching in prison was radically shaping my openness to and ability to teach in moments of uncertainty and disruption. I suspect teaching in this crisis will have a similar life-altering effect. How do you hope teaching in this crisis will radically shape your teaching for years to come?