Beyond Virtual Classrooms: Exploring Feelings in the Social World

In this column, I continue to focus on creating supportive relationships in the virtual classroom amid the pandemic and growing social unrest. As many schools continue to shift between hybrid and remote learning, I ask, how do we address our own and students’ emotional well-being to promote active learning during the pandemic? In addition to making time for students, frequent check-ins, and creating virtual space for casual conversations, how can we as teachers help students cope with this chronic stressor, be it the COVID-19 pandemic or the racial inequality? I share my own personal experiences here not to assume that my experiences represent everyone else’s but to use it as an example to stand by affect theorists’ argument that affect/feelings/emotions may be personally felt but are always socially and culturally conditioned (Blackman & Venn, 2010). ¹ Moreover, affect/feelings/emotions are embodied thoughts imbricated with social values and often involved in the preservation of social expectations and power hierarchies (Goodley et al., 2018). I end this column with a few curriculum ideas for readers to consider.

As new fall semester was gearing up this September, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with my mentor Randall Allsup about strategies to acknowledge the potential loss or challenges students and their families may be facing given this year’s numerous events. He shared with me a meditation exercise that he incorporated in his own course. He framed the exercise as a way to reconnect to oneself and reestablish a relationship with one’s primary instrument. While he did not assign a particular method or form of meditation, he framed this endeavor as “an attempt to find oneself, not for others but for self-excavation” (personal communication, September 10, 2020). I was intrigued by Randall’s idea and decided to give it a try. My first attempt went something like this. I tried to follow one idea and see where it would take me. My mind wandered from what I did that morning to a conversation I had that evening with my husband, an email announcement about the spring semester, and then the endless things on my to-do list. I found myself getting impatient and frustrated with my attempt to track my mind. “I was probably too tired to focus,” I said to myself. Attempt two, the next day. I decided to not track my own thinking but to relax my body, slow down my breathing and allow ideas to come and go freely. Interestingly, I found myself more aware of the sounds around me but did not find them distracting. Just when I grew more aware of these various sounds, I also noticed that I had gained a heightened awareness of my own senses. While my second attempt seemed to feel less intense in general, I was not sure what made these two attempts differ.

A few days later, I met my neighbor (also a teacher) in the hallway and asked her how she was doing. We jokingly talked about how this stressful life style has “numbed” our minds. I related to her how the fear of being infected by this novel coronavirus and in turn carrying it into my home exposing my family to novel coronavirus have occupied a large proportion of my mind. She in turn shared with me her thoughts of how the extra preparation required to teach remotely coupled with the concern of whether or not her students continue to receive the services they needed have added more stress to her work, not to mention the lack of child care that led many teachers with kids to feel strained. Our short conversation in the hallway left me wondering: what exactly could be done to help myself and others cope with the overwhelming stress that seems unbearable during these times? How can we help ourselves and our students as we continue to find ways to survive in our current overwhelming circumstances?

Recalling my own meditation exercises, I think now what made my second attempt different is the decision to focus on my senses rather than trying to follow random thoughts. Now, using what I have learned through meditation, I have started to pay more attention to my own feelings and will remind myself to slow down whenever my I find myself becoming stressed. As I slow down and pay more attention to my body, I start to recognize my own feelings. Even though I cannot completely avoid COVID-19-related anxiety, I now am aware of the source of my anxiety and have devised strategies to lower my stress level and cope with this experience. ² While these feelings may seem personal, I agree with affect theorists and suggest that these feelings are nevertheless the residue of the social phenomena (in this case, the pandemic), tangled with expectations (e.g., expectation toward teachers) and social values (e.g., parent guilt).

Affect theorists argue that the turn to affect and emotion is not to reject the work of critical theorists and cultural critics but to extend their discussion about culture, subjectivity, identity, and bodies (Clough, 2010). In other words, affect theorists extend their focus beyond the individually felt status and trace how affect/emotions across bodies and argue affect’s inseparability with cognition in understanding human experiences (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). For example, Sara Ahmed (2008) looks at how affect can be deployed as socially governed emotion and regulate people’s attachments toward certain objects. Happiness, as more than individual emotion, acts as a social and cultural ideal and regulates how individuals should feel or desire and constrain individuals’ ability to act upon their emotions. Considering the entanglement of individual feelings in the social world, I argue that instead of dismissing or trivializing the significance of students’ feelings, we recognize students’ feelings and create curricular space for students to ruminate their feelings. Thinking through their feelings and emotions, we may better understand their embodied experiences, devise strategies to help students cope with their condition and acknowledge how feelings/emotions are imbricated with social and cultural values and expectations (e.g., the insecurity of walking in a predominantly White neighborhood as a Black body).

As we enter a new year and begin to wonder how we may continue to cope with (or heal from) the chronic stresses of living in a pandemic, perhaps we should start by considering how this generation of students has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most notable changes may be social distancing, which has definitely changed how, when and where people interact with each other. According to Pew Research Center (2020), this pandemic has shifted this country’s social, political, and economic landscape and led Generation Z into an uncertain future. ³ Not to mention the enduring racial inequalities which are further exacerbated by the pandemic and are manifested in education, public health, employment, housing, and criminal justice system.

Meditation, either in person or via an online platform, may be one way for students to explore their feelings and become more connected with themselves and their surroundings. Another option (another inspiration by Randall) may be inviting students to take a sound walk in the park or in their neighborhood. Include questions that encourage students to use their senses to attend to the world around them: What sounds do you hear? How are the sounds vary in different parts of the neighborhood/park at different time? What surprises did you notice? Record a part of your journey and be prepared to share your found sound. Or, encourage students to keep a journal and create composition projects for students to explore their ideas and feelings. There are numerous ways for students to stay more connected with themselves and the world around them. We as teachers ought to move beyond the concept of feelings/emotions as personal and actively incorporate students’ vantage points into the classroom. To dismantle the enduring social injustice, attending to their stories may be one of the first steps we could take to work alongside our students to acknowledge their lived experiences. As we encourage students to attend to their feelings/emotions, to live with heightened consciousness and reflectiveness and to interrupt the banality of shared feelings, we may be more likely to stop reproducing dominant social hierarchies and exclusions.