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Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice

Online ISBN:
9780252099731
Print ISBN:
9780252041167
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice

Becky Thompson
Becky Thompson
Simmons College
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Published:
1 August 2017
Online ISBN:
9780252099731
Print ISBN:
9780252041167
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks’ 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. Teaching with Tenderness identifies a range of stresses that students and faculty bring to the classroom—as young people worried about the state of the world, veterans, trauma survivors, people with disabilities, and social justice activists—and ways of teaching that remind us that we belong to each other. It identifies why people take flight from their own bodies and strategies that enable people to stay fully present for each other. The book draws upon the author’s teaching at a range of universities in the United States as well as in China, Greece, and Thailand. Thompson writes as a professor, poet, yoga teacher, and humanitarian worker seeking spontaneous, planned, and found rituals of inclusion that lean us toward justice, rest on rigorous study, and treat the classroom as a sacred space.

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