## Metadata - Author: [[Becky Thompson]] - Full Title: Teaching With Tenderness - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([Location 458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=458)) - 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. ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=567)) - Nowadays, more of us teach in multitribal classrooms (even though most faculty meetings are still monotribal). We can either continue to teach to a monotribal group or deal with the range of tribal histories students bring with them. Such a challenge requires us to deal with powerful emotions—guilt, shame, confusion, complicity, and fear—that are woven into our histories. ([Location 608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=608)) - In her critique of how the “language of commerce” dominates the culture of education, poet and professor Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, “I think we should challenge this dialect, because it insults the sacredness of our calling. We deal with what can’t be bought; in fact, I think the pervasiveness of this shabby rhetoric reflects an attempt by the mysterious forces that drive consumer culture to annihilate the spirituality of our work—to annihilate it out of fear, because nothing is so scary and puzzling as a person who can’t be bought or a pearl with no price tag.”21 Contemplative practices are free, accessible, and daily ways of reminding ourselves that we both, as teachers and students, are the pearls. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=619)) - Buddhist studies professor Robert Thurman explains that it is misleading to think that people in the United States do not tend to have contemplative minds. Everyone practices contemplation. It is just that what we contemplate as a culture might need to be reconsidered. He writes, “Education in any particular culture builds up a worldview constantly reinforced by symbols and images that are contemplated throughout life. Television, modern culture’s peculiar contemplative shrine, supplies a contemplative trance to millions of people, for hours on end, day after day, year in and year out. It is unfortunately a trance in which sensory dissatisfaction is constantly reinforced, anger and violence is imprinted, and confusion and the delusion of materialism is constructed and maintained.”23 The challenge then is to find methods of transferring contemplative energies from one focus (the television and smart phones) to another. What better place to try this model than in the classroom? That is the rub, though, isn’t it, because to take on such a project requires “taking a stand” against multiple interests that are opposed to the nurturing of “contentment, detachment, tolerance, patience, nonviolence and compassion.” As Thurman explains, commercial interests are not exactly enamored by the development of contentment and less greed. The military industrial complex hardly wants the wholehearted upholding of nonviolence and compassion. And ruling groups “do not want the ruled to become too insightful, too independent, too creative on their own; the danger is that they will become insubordinate, rebellious, and unproductive in their allotted tasks.” ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=634)) - As a progressive Jew, Maury was not comfortable with privileging the German Holocaust as the worst atrocity done to mankind. He wanted us to move beyond ranking oppressions, to seeing how people search for the essential, the truly human amid despair. And he wasn’t willing to somehow let the U.S. government off the hook in the process. This is why teaching Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions and Lakota Woman, right at the center of the course, became so important.7 With these texts, Maury was teaching us that while Eastern traditions of meditation, mindfulness, and chanting offer powerful antidotes to advanced capitalist life, earth-based traditions that revere spiritual practice are homegrown as well, right under our feet.8 The profundity of Native knowledge about taking care of the land, of growing food in sync with the earth’s rhythms, and of centering their spirituality in an honoring of women stood in stark contrast to Protestant values of conquering the land and enforcing patriarchy. From Lame Deer, Maury taught us to look from the eye of the heart, not the eye in our heads, giving students a model for writing papers and talking with each other that was in balance, that made room for analysis and feeling, reasoning and intuition. ([Location 757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=757)) - What I didn’t know early in my teaching is that creating multiracial communities required finding ways to teach about power and privilege that loosened people up rather than hardened them, that countered defensiveness, that helped people get to a soft place with each other. ([Location 855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=855)) - As Charles Johnson explains, “All true art is a contagion of feeling; so that through the true reading of true books we do indeed read ourselves into the spirit of the masters.” ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=1080)) - One of the most famous political adages of the twentieth century was said by Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of this revolution.” My sense is that we need to make justice studies irresistible, both its rhetoric and the actual pedagogical experience. ([Location 1757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=1757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Over the years, it has made all the difference when I have known specific people in student affairs, the dorms, and the counseling center whom I can trust to really listen to and honor the emotions students carry with them. Sometimes I have felt that my most important work in academe is as a conduit between the classroom and the counseling center. ([Location 1902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074RFMX1T&location=1902)) - Tags: [[blue]]