Teaching with Tenderness

Toward an Embodied Practice

Becky Thompson

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099731
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Imagine a classroom that explores the twinned ideas of embodied teaching and a pedagogy of tenderness. Becky Thompson envisions such a curriculum--and a way of being--that promises to bring about a sea change in education.

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries; and praises self and community care.

Tenderness examines contemporary challenges to teaching about race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, religion, and other hierarchies. It examines the ethical, emotional, political, and spiritual challenges of teaching power-laden, charged issues and the consequences of shifting power relations in the classroom and in the community. Attention to current contributions in the areas of contemplative practices, trauma theory, multiracial feminist pedagogy, and activism enable us to envision steps toward a pedagogy of liberation. The book encourages active engagement and makes room for self-reflective learning, teaching, and scholarship.

1

Thatched Roof, No Walls

The rise of feminist pedagogy, trauma theory, and contemplative practices can all contribute to a more expansive and humane teaching. Yet conversations among people in these fields are just beginning. For the most part, it still feels like teachers carry our minds to one place (to work, the classroom, our desks), our bodies to another (to the gym, yoga studio, or couch), our spirits to another (to church, synagogue, mosque, mountains), our psychic healing to another (to the couch, the bed, to vacations), and our activism to another (to prisons, borders, the streets). Students sense and feel these splits. They are trying to learn amid these splits. And we are, somehow, trying to teach amid these splits.

This is why creating a pedagogy of tenderness requires its own new bridge work that is asking us to think bigger than we have before, to start from a place of imagination and go from there. For starters, I imagine the coming together of people who practice tenderness but have not necessarily been talking with each other. While we would need a big room for such a gathering, I certainly wouldn’t want it to be a windowless, overly air-conditioned hotel conference room. Instead, since this is all in my imagination, let’s opt for the gathering to be in a warm place where there is a domed, thatched roof but no walls, just open space looking out onto a sea, or mountains, or hills. Let’s imagine that there is public transportation to this meeting site—maybe a properly funded Amtrak with a stop close to the thatched gathering. And let’s imagine that anyone who wants to come can (which means child care, wheelchair ramps, plenty of different kinds of food, rugs for praying five times a day, and soft chairs for people who need to sit).

Then let’s imagine that this space gets no television, Internet, or cell phone reception. We are stuck with each other, for a few whole days maybe, just talking, moving, breathing, eating, walking, and imagining with each other. Then let’s imagine that some of the people who come might include bell hooks (who wrote Teaching to Transgress way before anybody else had the words), Alexis Pauline Gumbs (self-described “Black feminist priestess, Love Evangelist”), Kathy Kelly (Catholic antiwar protester, founder of Voices in the Wilderness), Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (Zen priest and author of The Way of Tenderness), Joy Harjo (Muscogee poet, professor, and saxophonist), Alice Walker (poet, novelist, currently writing a blog to her beloved chickens), Brenda Dixon Gottschild (a dancer/scholar from Philadelphia), Sister Buddha Canice Fernando (Sri Lankan nun and activist), Don Coyhis (Mohican, founder of the Wellbriety project for Native American sobriety), Angela Farmer (elder yogini and activist), Angela Davis (scholar, prison abolitionist, yogi), Winona La Duke (Ojibwe, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project in Minnesota, previous Green Party vice presidential candidate), Laura Whitehorn (AIDS prevention educator while she was a political prisoner), Brian Williams (trauma surgeon and spokesperson for peace), Diane Harriford (professor at Vassar College, frequent contributor to tenderness), Bobby McFerrin (extraordinary composer who uses his body as an instrument), and Sonia Sanchez (mother of the Black Arts Movement, queen of haiku, and professor). All their parents, children, grandchildren, and chosen family would be invited. There would be a special chair for Graça Machel and for Nelson Mandela’s spirit. We could also call on the spirits of other people who have departed from their physical bodies but who might be willing to visit us in their new forms.

Let’s imagine a lot of people I don’t know who are interested in tenderness also coming. Let’s imagine we can really talk and dance and sing with each other. So the feminist scholars who have been writing bravely during the past forty years on power dynamics in the classroom could talk with the psychologists who have been offering us new ways of understanding trauma and healing, who could talk with the yoga practitioners who have been thinking about enlightenment and social justice, who could talk with the former political prisoners who have been teaching in prison, who could talk with the Native American activists who have created the Forgiveness Project Way Home Tour.1

I find myself yearning for these intergenerational, multidisciplinary, multioccupational conversations, these mind and body stretches, these new ways of being with each other. What I envision is a pedagogy of tenderness that is part mindfulness, part playfulness, part intuition, part analysis; a pedagogy that works inside and outside of the classroom; can climb prison walls; leans toward the poetic word; makes intimacy a safe and generative resource of power; can hold us together during social upheavals, natural disasters, and disasters of our making; honors the very young and very old; invites everyone to talk; isn’t afraid of silence; starts and ends with music; pulls people from online courses back into classrooms; grows with the times; returns us to joy.

Why We Are Scattered

So what would such conversations ask of each other? In part, they will require willingness for everyone to take down our guards, to recognize a community of intellectual and spiritual belonging as possible. Such a task is not easy since there are some significant differences in the underlying presuppositions in each of these fields.2 Practitioners have been cordoned off from each other amid ideological divides that we need to name in order to genuinely listen to each other.

SPIRITUAL BYPASS

Historical chasms between contemplative practitioners and feminist teachers partly reflect differing ways of conceptualizing power and inequality. For example, one of the centerpieces of contemplative practices is to recognize what human beings have in common, to see that ultimately we are all linked by love, that what makes us different as human beings is far outweighed by our similar sufferings and desires. This is a goal that feminist teachers have criticized, since seeing only each other’s similarities runs the risk of flattening tremendous power differentials. Philosopher V. F. Cordova (Apache) offers an elegant critique of flattening differences into sameness. This conflation runs right over Indigenous conceptions of “bounded space,” which is an inherent belonging to land and awareness that people and places are not interchangeable, replaceable, or easily moved.3 The question then becomes one of how to hold in a single frame the belief in our shared humanity and enlightenment (god, peace, connection) alongside understanding the mess that we are in as a civilization—that there is nothing postracial about segregated schools, that the refusal to offer refuge to refugees denies an education to a whole generation of young people, that Black lives matter.

Spiritual bypass that skips right to “om-ing” together is a good way to ensure that the only people om-ing will be white.4 As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes, “I am not encouraging a spiritual bypass of the palpable feelings that we experience.”5 The widespread association of contemplative practices with upper-middle-class white women on retreats in the Berkshires certainly doesn’t encourage faculty who teach about racial justice to consider contemplative practices in their classrooms. Core Indigenous methods—such as grounding one’s study in the land we are on, sitting in circles, practicing egalitarianism in the classroom, storytelling—are often unknown (even maligned) by many non-Native teachers who have been trained to see storytelling as the precursor to analytical thought, who have, perhaps generations ago, lost track of a belonging to the land.6

Ambivalence on the part of race-conscious teachers about incorporating meditation and yoga into the classroom also speaks to resistance against a long history of Orientalism that exoticizes and trivializes Eastern cultures and politics.7 Orientalism includes reducing yoga to a series of exercises devoid of deeper philosophy and cherry-picking what works for making a profit while ignoring yoga’s ethical underpinnings.8 For example, the second and third yama (satya, asteya), of telling the truth and not stealing, clearly can be interpreted as restraint from colonialism. Because yoga is an earth-based practice, finding alignment in poses requires being aware of the land we are practicing on and that, in the United States, that land has been stolen from Native people. Identifying yoga as a practice with multiple roots—in South Asia, North Africa, and Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere—refuses simplistic renderings of yoga history.9 Yoga practiced in prisons, church basements, and domestic violence shelters; in front of buses to protest the privatization of public transportation; and in demonstrations against police brutality are all examples that shake up the notion of yoga as a white upperclass affair.

Conversations about “decolonizing yoga,” while vibrant within multiracial yoga circles, are barely considered in mainstream yoga settings and have yet to be afforded significant attention in academic circles.10 Such attention includes recognizing yoga’s complicated history and that pre-twentieth-century yoga was different from asana-based practice in the United States today.11 One-hour yoga classes held in spas are a far cry from the yoga beautifully described by Roopa Kaushik-Brown, whose female relatives saw vegetarianism, Ayurvedic medicine, singing, and breathing as a way of living, yoga as a way of life. In their writing and practice, South Asian feminist yogis are standing up against “yoga as property,” while honoring a holistic understanding of yoga as a liberatory practice.12

Decolonizing yoga requires accepting that asana practice does not, by itself, promise social justice. When the yogi Wendy Cook recently asked the Dalai Lama his view on yoga, he said, “‘Oh yes, yes yes. At least it doesn’t harm. I heard even Vladimir Putin does yoga,’ followed by a hearty laugh. Then the Dalai Lama reiterated his advice that the most important practice was through study, contemplation, and mediation on the teachings of the great Buddhist philosophers.” Wendy Cook’s takeaway from the Dalai Lama’s answer was that: “yes, yoga is beneficial; it must be practiced with ahimsa (non-harm). You should not get hurt. Yoga does not necessarily create transformation even as dictators do it; for radical transformation to occur it is essential to include deep, analytical study, contemplation, and mediation on authentic texts by realized beings.”13 A social justice–minded yoga is one that takes into account the contradictions and layers of history, sees study and practice as interwoven, recognizes the history of the land where yoga is being practiced, and creates inclusionary spaces where all are welcome. These commitments are not easy, a reality requiring much more dialogue, both within academe and beyond.

FEAR OF MELTDOWNS

Fruitful conversations between trauma specialists and teachers have also been halting, for understandable, albeit fraught, reasons. Many teachers have resisted drawing upon the language of psychology in the way that we talk about teaching. We haven’t had the training that psychotherapists have. We have our hands full just covering the required reading. Encouraging student intellectual development is, itself, a megaresponsibility. We are afraid that dealing directly with trauma in the classroom may lead to emotional meltdowns and conflicts that may derail intellectual discussion. Our fears that the classroom might look or feel like a therapy session still stop teachers from seeking guidance about how to deal with emotion in the classroom.

On the trauma specialists’ side, it makes sense that they might be hesitant about the extent to which the classroom is “safe” enough for students to risk talking about their lives. The history of seeing trauma as individually experienced (rather than collectively survived) also plays into the notion that it is only individually treated, processed, and healed from. It makes sense that trauma specialists would be hesitant to translate individual psychic processes into group dynamics, a step that is essential for trauma theory to be relevant for pedagogy. Given these splits, it is no wonder that those of us who teach about trauma and make space for students to have emotional reactions to what they are learning have often kept to ourselves about how we teach. The whispering we do among trusted colleagues certainly has not helped us develop a paper trail for ways to create healing space in the classroom.

TURF WARS AND DESK CULTURE

Those of us trying to create a pedagogy that links trauma research with justice studies with contemplative practices are also scattered because such interdisciplinarity remains a political endeavor—one that confronts long-standing hierarchies within the academy. It makes sense that some faculty are resistant to interdisciplinary studies. Faculty in the liberal arts have worked hard to establish and build departments of sociology, political science, English literature—to get the faculty lines, curriculum, and students they need to create cutting-edge disciplinary knowledge. Interdisciplinarity does make space for new kinds of conversations. It can also be a way that financially strapped universities justify the merging of disciplines—sociology, anthropology, political science—into one department, as faculty in traditionally recognized fields lose lines, tenure is undercut, and foundational introductory courses are watered down or eliminated. The structure of the academy in a capitalist society continues to narrow and contain the very questions we ask, the conversations we need to have.

This containment also shows up in faculty and student uneasiness in moving outside of our chairs and desks that have traditionally housed our bodies. To begin to move and breathe with each other when we are used to secure positions behind lecterns and tables can feel uncomfortable, if not scary. While studies in yoga practiced in classrooms illuminate many benefits, most of this emerging research has focused on primary and secondary schools, as if, by the time we are adults, we no longer need to stretch and play, as if college curriculum is so demanding that taking time to practice yoga would be silly, if not self-indulgent.14 While an increasing number of faculty practice yoga themselves and some are yoga teachers, few have had training to share their practice in classroom settings. Yoga teacher trainings have yet to include modules on teaching in college classrooms. And training that faculty receive about pedagogy rarely includes instruction on teaching yoga. It is as if we need a down dog that can stretch between these two locations, opening space for yoga in college classrooms and training in justice studies in yoga studios. My hope is that this book can offer some of that bridge work.

INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL SILOS

Conversations about pedagogy and contemplative practices have also been halting since such bridge work can feel like we are dancing on the edge of pedagogy and spirituality. Such dancing requires teachers to risk our own vulnerabilities and somatic uncertainties, to ask ourselves to consider teaching as a form of “spiritual activism.”15 Anzaldúa asks, “How do those of us laboring in the complex environments of an academy indifferent and even hostile to spirit make our professional work into a form of spiritual practice? … [W]e must bu...