Page 139 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

‘The experience of the sufferer’: Embodied pedagogy, trauma and mental health in the classroom
It is the second-last week of the term (term three, 2021), and although we are in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic (August 2021), I have started to work from campus and to do student consultations from my office at the University of Johannesburg. On this Friday afternoon, I am meeting two of my students.
One is a final-year student who wants me to help him with his National Research Foundation (NRF) application for postgraduate funding. The other student is a postgraduate candidate in the department whose research work I am supervising. I find both
the students waiting for me outside the department. I greet and joke: ‘my son and my daughter’ and we laugh as we walk into the department. It turns out that they know each other, having done some modules together. We walk to my office, and I ask for time to do some minor admin. They both share that there is nothing confidential that they wanted to communicate with me, so they do not mind consulting in the presence of each other. As I work
on the documents before commencing the consultation, I hear snippets of their conversations which touch on their academics, dating lives and mental health. The postgraduate student shares that she has recently gone home for funerals. She shares how she has been struggling to keep up with her academics and research in the midst of death, grief and loss. She shares with us that it is not until recently that she started to take seriously the issue of mental health. She confides that she literally had a panic attack in the early hours of the morning, and that it took hours to (re)regulate herself back normalcy. The student does not only have academics to concern herself with. She works full time and is self-funded. At various points in our conversation, I see tears in her eyes as she shares the mental health challenges she has been facing, induced by death, academic pressures, work stresses and various other personal issues. By the end of this conversation we have cried, laughed and allowed ourselves to feel deeply the struggles we
all face in the Covid-19 context, and how we have so little time to process and grieve all that has been lost in this time. We discuss various regulating and healing practices that touch on both biological regulatory approaches, as well as religious and African spirituality practices of (re)centering the self...”
This vignette shows many of the contemporary challenges confronting black students. The vignette shows clearly the desires students hold for education, to excel and to produce their best work. Yet, it too shows the challenges that confront our students and the developmental chasms that threaten to eclipse their academic pursuits. This includes issues of mental health, financial struggles and unsympathetic systems in universities that do not always understand how students learn and process grief.
In this consultation, the postgraduate student shared how some lecturers expected her to produce death certificates to be able to get grace marks for falling behind on academic deliverables. Coming from the same linguistic, cultural and ethnic background as the student, we discussed the cultural complexities that come with producing of death certificates in African cosmology. I shared how in our cultural contexts, access to
With education systems mired and saturated
by ‘narrow-minded educators’, hooks powerfully argues for educators to agitate
for educational forms that refuse ‘plantation culture’ (hooks 2003: 92, 93) through a humanising education that values freedom and the weaving
of humanity into education expertise.
Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
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