Grief, multiculturalism and the body
Does grief, or any emotional break from the norm, have a place in the classroom? If so, how do we acknowledge it--even more so learn from it?
How might we use grief--and other forms of emotion that call attention to teachers (and students) as bodies) as a site for examining the construction of bodies as well as their physicality? Can both happen?
Can the physicality of bodies provide a place for intersubjectivity? Or is physicality to closely tied to other ways that the body is always-already marked?
posted by Leda @ 11:04 AM
2 Comments:
I remember once sitting in my american cultures class a few days after a fellow student took his life. The faculty are sometimes the last to know these things, and my professor walked into the room having clearly just gotten the news moments before. She broke from the traditional ritual of the classroom and just stood before us for a moment at a loss. Choked up, she began to tell us what she knew and how she felt about it. This particular women was very articulate and very sweet, and I can't recall what she said exactly because her voice was breaking, and there were tears and her face became blotchy and the intense ugliness of it, the powerful grief of it was too much, too raw, for me to connect to it. I was too busy feeling (a) uncomfortable, and (b)as though i needed to measure my reaction to her, that my status was tied up in hers, or i guess her lack thereof, and so I needed to not be taken in, I had to resist her beckoning me towards a moment of shared empathy.
I want to believe that grief, like joy or awe absolutely has its place in the classroom, and I want folks to be able to fully embrace any of those in a room where I am, but then I think back to this day. I'm a pretty touchy-feely kind of person, that is, my Masters' is in counseling, and I am pretty quick to believe in things like community and group catharsis, the transcendent wonder of healing, forgiveness, and then I think about that classroom and doubt if its possible.
It makes me think, what are the conditions that must be in place for folks to step out of their protective practices and risk the vulnerability that accompanies emotional expression in the classroom.
How must we know each other?
What are the standards I'm willing to agree to and endorse so that personal expression is validated and lashing out is minimized?
What sort of self-healing needs to take place so that I don't use other people to feel the momentary rush of self-righteousness, the ephemeral cure to my soul-deep wounds of worthlessness and alienation and abandoment?
How do we make that a pre-requisite?
How do we take time to model risk and validate it without recreating a patronizing affirmation for risks that we approve of or agree with?
and then thinking about the body, I watch students squirm in my classroom at the thought of having to move in front of others. I think about the Boal stuff we did in class last week, and I was struck by the numbers of questions that seemed to me in (perhaps small) part to be about delaying the moment when our bodies would have to be invoked, and I think how do you warm people up for this? what is a gradual way, coaxing way to make this less scary, more comfortable, given how absent it is in PUBLIC space, not just the classroom.
those are some of the things I thought about upon reading your reflections; I'd love to hear others' thoughts.
Very moving story, Rachel.
I didn't speak about this in class, but I lost two graduate students in two semesters one year. One was in my critical pedagogy class; he was attending a rally when he had a heart attack. It was all so sudden.--there one day, gone the next. We went to the memorial service and talked about his spirit and his life in class. The next semester I knew immediately that a student of mine had died. It was crazy; we were on winter break when i heard that a plane had gone down. I knew--gut feeling-- that she was on that plane and she was. Since it was the end of the semester, I just let people know about the memorial and we all went together. We tried to do a few things in her memory but these projects just fizzled out, I'm ashamed to say. Life at UMass keeps me focused on the next thing--rarely a pause to witness or to take in lives ived and lost here.
At other times, I have had students (and once a faculty colleague in the office next to my classroom) go into seisure and have had to call emergency, etc. in the middle of class. After they had left and it was time to resume class, we focused on our own discomfort and the incompetence of the UMass police and emergency staff. It was actually, one of the first times as a teacher that I openly discussed the absence of the body in the classroom, and the consequences of our discomfort with the physical invasion of our academic space.
Leda
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