Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In response to the increased student mental health challenges that arose during and after the pandemic, I was asked to develop a course that would support student well-being. The process of developing and teaching the class was exceptionally instructive, highlighting the pedagogical approaches that will be necessary aids in addressing well-being in higher education and culture more generally. First, I had to understand what students needed—the source of their struggle. Emerging out of the COVID-19 crisis, they found themselves feeling numb and hopeless, disoriented by a network of imbricated sources of stress. The pandemic was, as Henry Giroux has noted, far “more than a medical concept,” but also a “ideological and political plague” that arose, among many other things, from the failure of the public health system, political unrest, oppression of communities of color, ecological decimation, and the increasingly polarized nature of human relationships, driven by neoliberal capitalism. This presentation reflects on how one addresses the complexity of these experiences. Specifically, it suggests an incorporation of pedagogies of emergence that address the dynamicity of students’ experiences while also complicating these pedagogies by suggesting that they must be grounded in embodiment practices. Through this emergent, processual approach, the conversation gestures towards ways that the classroom can function as more than a place of informational exchange, one that creates space for students to conceptually and somatically work with the stressors of this historical moment, and thereby opens space for creative, deep learning.