Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice

154 Pages·2017·1.51 MB·English

by  Becky Thompson

Teaching with Tenderness
TRANSFORMATIONS: WOMANIST, FEMINIST,
AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES
Edited by AnaLouise Keating
Teaching with
Tenderness
Toward an Embodied Practice
BECKY THOMPSON
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thompson, Becky, 1959– author.
Title: Teaching with tenderness : toward an embodied practice / Becky Thompson.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2017. | Series: Transformations: Womanist,
feminist, and indigenous studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001718 (print) | LCCN 2017030025 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252099731 (ebook)
| ISBN 9780252041167 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252082702 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Teaching—Psychological aspects. | Compassion. | BISAC: Education /
Experimental Methods. | Social Science / Gender Studies. | Education / Teaching Methods &
Materials / General.
Classification: LCC LB1060 (ebook) | LCC LB1060 .T53 2017 (print) | DDC 370.15/34—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001718
Angela Farmer
~teacher
AnaLouise Keating
~nepantlera
Ginny Onysko
~sister
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword
AnaLouise Keating
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Thatched Roof, No Walls
2 Inviting Bodies
3 Creating Rituals
4 Why We Flee
5 To You, I Belong
6 Our Bodies in the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor’s Foreword
Transformations: Womanist,
Feminist, and Indigenous Studies
ANALOUISE KEATING
What does transformation look like? What is the relationship between
scholarship, research, pedagogy, and transformational, progressive social justice
work? How can we use words, ideas, theories, class assignments, writing, and
reading to provoke change? How can we enact transformation in our daily
practices? Transformations: Womanist, Feminist, and Indigenous Studies has its
origins in these and related questions. Grounded in the belief that radical
progressive change—on individual, collective, national, transnational, and
planetary levels—is urgently needed and in fact possible (although not
necessarily easy to achieve), this book series offers new venues for
transdisciplinary scholarship informed by women-of-colors theories and
postoppositional approaches to knowledge production and social change.
Books in this series foreground women-of-colors theorizing because these
theories offer innovative, though too often overlooked, perspectives on
transformation. Women-of-colors theories give us the intellectual grounding and
visionary yet pragmatic tools to understand, challenge, and alter the existing
frameworks and paradigms that structure (and constrain) our lives. They are
riskier, more innovative, and more imaginative … rich with the potential to
transform. Take, for example, postoppositionality, an alternative approach to
social justice work. Postoppositionality invites us to think differently, to step
beyond our conventional rules, to liberate ourselves from the oppositionally
based theories and practices we generally employ. Although postoppositionality
can take many forms, they all share several traits: belief in people’s
interconnectedness with all that exists, acceptance of paradox and contradiction,
and the desire to be radically inclusive—to seek and create complex
commonalities and broad-based alliances for social change.
With its foundation in women-of-colors theories and its desire to produce
postoppositional scholarship, praxis, and knowledge, Transformations invites
scholars and activist intellectuals to reflect on our conventional practices and
develop additional approaches to knowledge production and social change.
Goals for this series include the following:
• to showcase the transformative contributions women-of-colors
scholarship can make in dialogue with mainstream academic disciplines
and theories
• to provide opportunities for authors to take risks (thematically,
theoretically, methodologically, and stylistically) in their work—to build
on but move beyond disciplinary- or interdisciplinary-specific academic
rules and, through these risks, to invent new (transdisciplinary)
perspectives and methods
• to develop alternatives to conventional forms of theorizing and
academic scholarship, which generally rely on oppositional
epistemological and ontological frameworks
• to offer opportunities for transformative conversations among the
humanities, the social sciences, and other academic fields
• to promote scholarship that is highly readable and practical while
intellectually sophisticated and conversant with recent developments in
the field
• to expand what “counts” as women’s, gender, and ethnic studies
Becky Thompson’s Teaching with Tenderness offers a beautifully appropriate
beginning to this series. Grounded in women-of-colors theories and practices,
this book is postoppositional, transdisciplinary, radically inclusive, theoretically
innovative, risky, and accessible to read. Thompson’s formal training is in the
social sciences, but she draws from her personal experiences, literature,
multiracial feminist pedagogy and theory, scholarship on contemplative
practices, trauma studies, yoga (defined broadly to include philosophy, teaching,
and asana practice), and a wide array of additional scholarship from many
disciplines and artists. In so doing, she creates a space where divergent methods,
epistemologies, and ontologies mingle and converse, facilitating transformation.
This rich, synergistic mixture speaks to the transdisciplinarity this series calls for
and aspires to illustrate and enact.
Teaching with Tenderness is inclusive in multiple ways—from the academic
fields and authors Thompson draws on and the broad audience she addresses
(students, university teachers in the humanities and social sciences, K–12
teachers, skeptics, social justice yoga teachers, trauma specialists, and more) to
her nuanced multiculturalism, which pays close attention to power dynamics and
encompasses ability, gender, health, nationality, race/ethnicity, region, religion,
sexuality, and other systems of difference. This inclusive approach—which does
not ignore differences among us but instead views them relationally—is a key
characteristic of Transformations.
Adopting an intimate, accessible voice that is theoretically sophisticated yet
not elite, Thompson models an innovative approach to theorizing. (Take a quick
look at her table of contents and note the poetic chapter titles.) Her tone is
invitational and postoppositional. Making herself vulnerable, she risks the
personal. She invites readers into her words; she asks us to work with her,
together creating pedagogies of tenderness.