We Are Not Living or Learning in the World As We Knew It
Higher education needs to give its faculty, staff and students a little more permission to be human.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, trauma unmakes the world and our world has been fundamentally unmade. When something like a global pandemic happens, it breaks what we understand to be our assumptive worlds. The way we see ourselves in the world is based on a series of assumptions that make life make sense — they’re often simple — things like, I will wake up in the world that is familiar to me, I will go to work, I will come home. These assumptions that guide our day to day routines give our worlds order. But trauma, the rapid and unanticipated collapse of social structures like school, for example, unmake our assumptive worlds. Some people’s worlds, in fact, were never made. The world’s of marginalized bodies, people of color, women of color, trans women of color were always marked by pain and trauma and the pandemic hasn’t changed that, only compounded it. Black trans women, for example, are deeply vulnerable in this society, their world was precarious before and it is precarious now. For students, this precarity doesn’t go away in classrooms and the trauma of the pandemic cannot be easily cast aside in order to prioritize learning.
So as we call on one another to push quickly to return to normal, let us first think about two things. The first, normal isn’t all that great for a lot of people, I wrote about that here and I believe that to be demonstrated by the powerful eruptions of protest we’ve seen in the United States throughout this year. The second is that it is a disservice to ourselves and others to treat the present moment as only in service of a normal future.
What I mean by this is, I’ve observed a general malaise about the pain and suffering of the present, and my students often tell me that they experience two things — either their teachers don’t engage with the pain and trauma of the present moment or they are so future oriented that students don’t have time to process the very real situation of the now (I recognize this is not the case in every classroom!). My students often ask me, knowing my background in studying trauma, if it’s okay that they can’t seem to focus, or think, or read as quickly and efficiently in their studies as they could before. Of course that is okay. Neither can I! Our minds and bodies are responding to droves of uncertainty. Powering through that as though nothing has happened is a disservice to those students and to ourselves. Treating classrooms as if the only thing that has changed is that the four walls have been replaced with zoom links and chats is not enough. This too should be a reminder that for marginalized bodies, the classrooms that power forward as though the trauma and pain of living in a racist, ableist, classist, sexist world based in the logics and norms of white supremacy and heteronormativity is not real have always done a disservice to students.
And let me be super clear, this is not a repudiation of teachers, we are all doing our best and I know SO MANY amazing faculty in higher-ed who are constantly staking themselves to teach their students from a framework and space of radical vulnerability, honesty and with a passion that inspires me to get up and go to work each day. I applaud those teachers. I appreciate those teachers. I am in awe of them and seek to learn from them in all things. What I refer to more is that our institutions of education, even while often enabling progressive thought and radical action, are still normative institutions with long histories that have resonances for our current behaviors, structures and values. They are also, unfortunately, businesses that have a bottom-line that must be met to keep us all going forward. It is a tricky space to be in for sure.
The world has fundamentally changed in this year. The experience of a pandemic is new for us. The experience of isolation that comes with that is hard on many. The experience of loss of income has left so many in poverty. The experience of having to manage childcare and education while working from home is taxing. The politics of the moment are fraught, at best. And our students, college students, they see this and feel it and live it. Much of the mainstream rhetoric around students is whether or not they will follow COVID safety guidelines rather than if they are okay , and while loads of wellbeing resources have rightfully been released by universities across the country, so many students feel like chatting with a therapist is one more zoom call to add to their already long to do list. They are feeling the pain of this moment like we all are. They are also feeling the pain of all the moments that came before this — the pain of our society that we so comfortably pushed through in order to go to work and keep driving forward. They feel, like I feel, the pain of kids in cages, and racist, extrajudicial violence, mass shootings, and more. And yet, we keep trying to learn as though the world we lived in was normal and that this will pass and we will return to normal.
And we push for a return to normal with articles that advise us to dress well on zoom or curate our spaces and enforce classroom rules. And I understand this impulse, I understand the need to minimize distractions and try to maintain the sacred space of the classroom, the thing is, we’re not in the classroom. So yes, our students are in class, but they are also at home. I’m not saying to throw out all rules and boundaries, respect is crucial to learning, but I’m also saying, let’s cut ourselves and each other a little slack, given that so many things about our worlds have been unmade, and even moreso for those already coping with marginalization or lack of access to resources.
As a teacher I see the listlessness this pandemic causes. I see it in the reluctant faces on zoom and the quickly multiplying black squares. We are in a space of ambiguous grief for the future in addition to the very real and palpable grief of the present. We have adapted to days filled with news reports that inundate us with the numbers of dead people and arguments of the value of a mask. We’ve adjusted to the uncertainty of public space and hedge both online and off. Some of us look this pain directly in its face, but others look away. And when we look away and find comfort in it, we get kind of good at looking away.
Well, as teachers, I wonder, what would happen if we refuse to look away and invite our students to look directly at us too? What if in giving them empathy we invite that window to look back in, and trust them to give us some empathy too?
If trauma unmakes the world, then we must rebuild it and the space of the classroom, even when digital, is an extraordinary space through which to remake our worlds. We need to become world builders.
When the pandemic really started to take hold last spring I had roughly 40 students in my charge. I told them to take a week to get settled, to rest, to feel, to make their ways back home from the dorms, if they had a home, and I told them that we’d reconvene soon, but not too soon.
Then every time a student was struck by the depths of their fear, grief, pain, suffering, confusion, listlessness caused by this massive trauma that had ruptured all of our worlds so quickly, they’d send me a note to apologize. To say they were sorry for not finishing their work. They were sorry for needing to sleep more. They were sorry for needing to turn their camera off during zoom because a lesson about the world as it used to exist had been too much for them. These are all real things students apologized for.
They kept telling me they were sorry.
I didn’t do anything special in response. I just told them that there was nothing to be sorry for. I told them that they did not need to apologize for being human — messy, unpredictable, sensitive, smart, beautiful humans. I told them that we would come up with a plan. That we would find a way through the work. I told them it was ok that their focus had shifted and that they were in the complicated, but full of possibility, process of remaking their meaning making schema so they could exist in a world where our mortality suddenly stares at us in every movement, gesture or thought.
I didn’t think I had done anything special.
In their responses, in their emails, in their gratitude for the tiniest bit of compassion shown, I realized, however, that in a world that gives us constantly dehumanizing messages, I had just done something revolutionary.
I had dared to give them permission to be human.
And they had dared to accept.
And what I found was, when we lift that burden of hiding our humanity, by naming our suffering, our need to be seen and heard by embracing our own humanity and that of others, performance improves. I got some of the highest quality student work I had ever seen.
And sometimes all it takes to get the best out of people, is to just be there with them. But not a performance of being there with flowers and candies and the right thing to say, really being there.
I’ve tried not to pretend that things within the technologically manufactured boundaries of the so-called class room are normal. And I try to break normal and turn it on its head. I know peers and colleagues who have done the same to great success. Some days, for me, it goes really well, students respond with honesty, empathy, vulnerability — and discussion is vibrant. Other days I stare directly at myself in the video call and resolve myself to not give up on them when met with silence, apprehension, and stress and hope they will not give up on me either. I hope we can all follow suit with those who have inspired me in this period and give ourselves, our students and each other our honesty, our vulnerability and our empathy. Let’s let each other be a bit more human — and not just in a pandemic, all the time.
