Wellness (or something like it)

Teaching and learning through embodied cognition

Later this month I’m leading a workshop for the Toronto District School Board’s 2022 Parents and Caregivers as Partners Conference. I’m discussing what pedagogies of care mean for student success. I admit that when I crafted the proposal it was the adult attendees I had in mind. Maybe I’m still riding the high of last June, the end of what was a wonderful school year with a group of brilliant teenagers, but in general I think the kids are going to be alright. I’m not always sure about us adults though. The highly individualistic self-care push I’m seeing play out on social media these days points to something ironically missing from wellness discourse — actual care! In an educational sense, a caring relation is made up of the cared for and the one doing the caring. In that there is no student without her teacher, and vice versa, all parties benefit when pedagogies of care play out in a classroom. So as I write this I’m asking myself and I guess you: what would it look like if we took such care beyond classroom walls?

Back in 2019 I sat in my office at Humber College and wrote what I hoped could be a helpful educational care framework for alternative educators who often find themselves working without access to collegial supports. I remember writing how care could be lived out by any “good enough” teacher, alternative or mainstream, if relational interdependence was recognized, balance was sought after and creativity was engaged in a classroom. But even as I wrote those words my body was suffering. The isolating impacts of teaching alone for five years (and then Covid!) made me physically sick. I was writing about care and yet there I was, inherently unwell. Looking back now, I can see that my list was incomplete and embodied community care was missing from my framework. What I really needed was a hug!

Connecting community to self-care and wellness has gotten me thinking about embodied cognition, the connection between body and mind. (If you really want to dig into this idea you might start here with Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Experts in the field suggest that the body, the mind and the environment are all connected and our interactions between them — and with others — must be recognized as part of our learning processes. It follows for me that if our bodies, minds and environments are connected to how we learn then a healthy experience of community might actually be the most important (and often missing!) part of anyone’s self-care regimen.

We learn by living together in the world. We shape each other, smoothing out our rougher edges with every interaction. I want to get so practiced at giving and receiving care in the world that talking to parents about it at an educational conference will feel like a natural extension of how I live. A good enough goal.