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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.

Historians have sought for some time to understand why the labor-liberal coalition’s political influence declined and how the right instituted a conservative revolution in the 1970s and 80s in the US. Teacher Strike! shows that conflict over urban education was fundamental in this story. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike in virtually every corner of the US in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and in many cases, for weeks or even months at a time. The many contentious and lengthy teacher union walkouts during this era made manifest three interlocking limitations to postwar liberalism: the failure to provide public employees full union rights, the inability to ensure that African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities enjoyed equal educational and economic opportunities, and the drastic, insoluble fiscal crises brought on by deindustrialization and economic downturn in the nation’s biggest cities. This book uses cases studies from New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Newark—all led by locals of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)--to show both the range and depth of this phenomenon. Through this broad treatment of conflict in public education, Teacher Strike! charts the new neoliberal order that emerged from the ashes of labor liberalism and shows how critics’ linking teacher unions and the urban poor together as “unproductive” proved crucial to altering the nation’s political trajectory.