Centering Vulnerability and Heart in Teaching and Learning

What draws you and keeps you in the classroom?  Many days teachers  ask themselves this exact question.  Dr. Becky Thompson’s vision for teaching is clear: she’s in the classroom to experience those moments of “amazing intellectual work that also [have] some heart in it.”  It keeps her coming back, year after year. Join scholar, poet, and activist Becky Thompson and I as we discuss teaching and learning broadly and the role of contemplative practice as a means of fostering deep connections between teachers and students within the classroom.  Important to this conversation is the consideration that not all classrooms are within the four walls of the institution.  Dr. Thompson shares her experiences she’s had within a refugee center in Greece, witnessing the resilience and fortitude of people fleeing everything they knew in order to start a new life in a foreign land.  This is a truly special conversation about the important role that teaching can play to open conversations, shape our humanity, and ultimately change our own lives and the lives of those we are fortunate to encounter.  In a time when students are increasingly reliant upon artificial intelligence as a source of “safe” supportive information, we need to consider how we change our interactions in the classroom to foster increased sense of safety and belonging?  In what ways can we allow students to express their tension and frustrations, leaving them freer to be who they are?  What is intellectual work without full expression with access and opportunity to explore, wonder, and be?Becky’s work that you may  consider:Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice by Becky ThompsonBeyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence Becky Thompson and Sangeeta TyagiMaking Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees by Becky Thompson and Jahen BseisoTo Speak in Salt by Becky ThompsonOther Texts:Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating The Somebodiness of Students and EducatorsJustice Seekers: Pursuing Equity in the Details of Teaching & Learning by Lacey Robinson