A few weeks into the start of the 2021 fall quarter, as I anxiously yet eagerly returned to teaching in person after having spent a little over an entire academic year teaching online, a university administrator and I met over tea to reconnect. We shared some of our experiences, hopes, and challenges in relation to the pandemic and a “return to normal.” With some trepidation, due to the revolving tumult of the pandemic, we expressed a deep desire to be in the classroom. Toward the end of our conversation, I was asked: What can [the university] do to support you? It was an earnest sincere question.
As an early career scholar and pre-tenured faculty, I appreciate the care, advocacy, and support by colleagues who genuinely ask and offer resources or guidance. In that moment, two thoughts surfaced for me as I discerned a response. The first: “I should be properly compensated for my diversity, equity and inclusion labor, for the emotional care and support I provide to students, and for the mediation I often have to facilitate between student leaders and administrators who overlook students’ needs and grievances.” The second thought: “Our students need mental health support, and academic resources—from food and housing to access to reliable Wi-Fi and technology to learning strategies or techniques to help them build community, and skills to advocate for their needs, and meet the academic performance demands of higher education.” I opted to share a version of the two, stating: “If our students are supported and cared for, I too am supported. Supporting our students means supporting faculty as well. You can best support me by listening, caring for and meeting the needs of our students.”
A Crisis of Care in the University: Cultivating Care in the Classroom
By the end of the 2021 fall quarter, as we looked toward the holidays and winter break, three students on our campus had lost their lives. The campus community, specifically students, were devastated, deeply unsettled, and traumatically wounded. Nothing of the purported “return to normal” was experienced as “normal” on campus, and this was especially expressed and felt by our students who organized themselves to have their voices heard. Students needed so much more than what I could possibly offer as an educator. I strived to offer a safe, affirming and humanizing critically compassionate learning community environment in my classrooms for all students to feel supported and cared for, yet I was not trained for the mental health and psychosocial emotional needs that students deserved, required, and demanded.
As the campus community grieved, I also mourned for the precarity and fragility of our lives, the wavering sense of community, resources and support, and the absence of enacted cura personalis—care for the whole person—that was seemingly missing or fading away. Cura personalis is purported as one of the leading values on our campus. As a private Jesuit university located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara University is not an exception to the mental health and overall wellbeing challenges expressed and experienced by students. Both the American Psychological Association (2022) and the National Education Association (2023) published reports on the mental health crisis on college campuses, highlighting that students of color are less likely to seek out support and care. As a faculty member in the Ethnic Studies Department the majority of my students are from communities of color, from low-income and working class families, some of undocumented or mixed status. Some students are also of marginalized genders, first-generation college students, and experiencing food and housing insecurities; the intersections of their identities can lead to compounding experiences of institutional marginalization, isolation, and academic challenges. The wellbeing of my first-gen students of color and marginalized genders has always been a priority. I firmly believe that academic engagement is possible when students’ health and basic needs are met—in the absence of that, learning, education, and academic thriving is nearly impossible to sustain.
Returning to teaching in uncertain pandemic conditions during the winter and spring quarters of 2022—a few weeks online, some hybrid modalities, and then a jolt back to in-person—was challenging. Faculty were consistently having to adjust their pedagogy. In this context, I was drawn to integrate adrienne maree brown’s (2017) emergent strategy principles, specifically mindfulness practices, which I had found beneficial throughout the pandemic. Examples of mindfulness practices included present moment awareness, breathing techniques, setting an intention, engaging reflexivity, anchoring imagination, and somatic exercises—from body scans to embodied and sensory guided meditations to visualization and resourcing, which is bringing to the present a positive memory that serves as a resource to bring a sense of ease and calmness. Over the years I have integrated some of these practices into my daily life to help me restore a sense of wellbeing and steadiness in stressful moments, as well as healing from experiences of trauma. The practices are also beneficial for developing a feeling of hopefulness in times of despair, and gratitude in conditions of precarity, uncertainty and grief. I tried these practices with my students over the course of several weeks, and to my surprise students responded with openness and goodwill. Together, we explored, experimented, and engaged these practices.
Over the course of the quarter the practices became fundamental to building a critically compassionate learning community. For example, in the classroom, I noticed students’ energy shift; there was a felt sense of belonging, of being in community with one another, and in-class dialogues were unfolding with critical compassion, openness, and an expressed or enacted form of collectivized care. Students were compassionate in challenging each other’s perspectives, asking questions to try to understand where their peers were coming from, and withholding judgments and assumptions. Instead of “canceling” or shutting down a student for a problematic or seemingly offensive comment, students were holding back their critique to think about how to best respond to one another with care, and in doing so we were building a learning community. In other words, students were looking out for one another, respecting each other’s perspectives whilst asking questions that would push the conversations and dialogues deeper. Additionally, students were checking in with each other about coursework, and if a student was absent from class, they would reach out to each other to share notes, materials, and check in on their wellbeing. All these practices affirmed students, especially students who felt insecure about the return to “normal” or who were overwhelmed by the shifting environments from online, hybrid, and in-person teaching. Most of all, these practices were reminding us to take care of one another. Quoting Audre Lorde’s (1988) powerful statement: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p. 332). We embraced collectivized care as a strategy to help us ease back into the classroom.
Cultivating, facilitating, and sustaining these practices in the classroom was beneficial to students. Yet it was significantly self-depleting as I had stepped into a caretaker role, in addition to being a teacher-scholar, community-engaged researcher, and youth worker. My personal responsibilities to immediate and extended family were compromised by my caretaking in the context of the classroom. I was concerned and unsettled by the seemingly institutional inaction by the university that manifested as the limited resources or forms of support to adequately address student’s wellbeing. In some cases, the university’s capacities to meet students’ basic needs for food and shelter, and even Wi-Fi access, were challenged by the uncertainties of returning to the classroom, remaining online or in a hybrid format. If our students are supported and cared for, we as faculty are too. Cura personalis is care for the whole person. Cura collective is care for the community; when all are well, the self-thrives as well.
As I began to feel the weight of multiple roles and responsibilities, I wondered: Who takes care of or cares for us as educators, as teacher-scholars? Are we caring for ourselves and each other in alignment with our values of cura personalis? Is the university fostering a structure or culture of authentic collectivized care for all—students, faculty, and staff?
Collectivized Care as Relational Wellbeing
Ensuring the personal, academic, and social thriving of our students means creating opportunities, practices, conditions, relationships, and sociocultural environments that allow for all members of the university community to feel supported. Because faculty, unlike any other group on campus, are most frequently interacting with and among students, it is fundamental that the university create structures of support with resources and access to opportunities that can help faculty feel supported and cared for. Such resources can help faculty feel connected, valued and cared for so that we may in turn sustain our capacities to foster a critically compassionate learning community for our students within and beyond the classroom. Supporting faculty in our needs and wellbeing, supports our students. Supporting our students means supporting faculty.
Siloed in our respective projects, research demands, writing deadlines, and consumed by teaching online/hybrid/in-person, along with the ticking clock of tenure for faculty on such a path, there seemed no answer in sight to my wondering questions and thoughts about the culture of care, specifically collectivized care, at SCU. During the pandemic, seminars, workshops, and training sessions on topics of online teaching, DEI, and mental health were offered; grants for modest amounts of funding for research were developed; some financial aid to those who meet certain criteria, such as early career faculty, were provided; and extensions on performance evaluations, assessments and reviews were granted. All these resources were and continue to be most appreciated and valued; however, they overlook the broader structure, or system of power that shapes the culture of higher education in the U.S., which is characterized by individualism, hyper-productivity and excellence in academic performance rather than a well-rounded personhood. Institutions of higher education where white supremacy, patriarchy, and individualism are implicitly the norm also often help shape campus culture, policies, and expectations for students. Together these conditions help to reinforce neoliberal ideologies.
By the end of the academic year, like an incense stick glimmering away at its last flair before reaching its needle thin end, I felt burnt-out by the amount of caring labor, advocacy on behalf of students, and uncertainties in teaching modalities (online, hybrid, in person). Teaching during and post-pandemic was differentially challenging for educators. Recognition of our needs and the limits of our capacities were minimally considered within the structure and culture of the university. We supported our students as much and as best as we could, and in return some faculty received additional burdens of responsibility, such as administrative service in task force meetings or committees on DEI, mental health, and academic advising. Most of these demands also implicated a certain degree of caring labor. The responsibilities and labor were especially taxing for women of color faculty, including faculty at the intersections of other institutionally marginalized identities or positionalities. Certainly, the burdens were racialized and gendered, as well as unrecognized or unaccounted for by the structure and culture of the university.
Love Ethic Pedagogy: The Value of Collectivized Care
Reflecting further on my teaching experience during the pandemic, I recognized that I embodied a pedagogy rooted in bell hook’s (1999) love ethic:
Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn. (p. 94)
Enacting a love ethic oriented pedagogy was depleting my capacities and skills to sustain my own wellbeing and, for lack of a better word, self-care. Self-care is a concept that has always troubled me, and one I certainly did not subscribe to given its individualistic orientation, and capitalist connotations. Relational forms of caring, specifically collectivized care, resonate with me and were more aligned with the perspectives on collectivized care and radical self-care practices I sought to foster among students in my classroom.
Collectivized care is the practice of caring for ourselves through caring for our communities. Mariame Kaba (2021) boldly states: “I don’t believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various ways? How do we do that? How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people who are not just our prayer warriors but our action warriors who are thinking through with us?” (Beyond Prisons Podcast, Episode 19). Cultivating possibilities for and toward freedom and liberation is at the core of collectivized care. Kaba’s (2021) proposes that collectivized care is not and should not be understood as theory or an idea but rather a reality that communities can create for each other. In this way, collectivized care is associated with values of abolition, which is defined as the elimination of systems of oppression, violence, and trauma so that people can live wholesome healthy lives free from harm. Kaba’s collectivized care offers a conceptualization of care aligned with a feminist framework of relational wellbeing.
Rooted in Black and Latina feminist praxes, radical self-care is “self-preservation.” Specifically, a recognition that wellness and wellbeing is communal and multidimensional. Radical self-care is having our physical, mental, emotional, and personal needs met. Yet the fulfillment of these needs hinges on having greater access to necessary resources and support for sustainable living, such as food, shelter, health, and community. Grounded in an understanding of relational care as an individual and communal process of collectivized care, I took to heart Angela Davis’s (2018) words: “Anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of herself, himself, theirselves.” As a response to this invitation, I strived to foster collectivized care in my classrooms through intention setting, breathing activities, community building, and setting boundaries for my own wellbeing and care.
A Restorative Reset: Troubling Self-Care Discourses
In the spring quarter of 2023, I experienced my first sabbatical. Although it only lasted for a quarter, and a rather a brief pause from teaching, when it came through it felt as a blessing. Time away from teaching would be the remedy to restore and reset my wellbeing, as well as reflect on my teaching practices. I was eager for rest, moments of reflection, and renewing my commitment to fostering student wellbeing. I was also desiring to understand what my students were needing, and how we could build a critically compassionate learning community. I needed time away from teaching to reimagine the structure and culture of the classroom, and consequently the climate of the university. I desired to unpack why the presumed privileges of being an academic, specifically a teacher-scholar, which is a rather unique professional pursuit, felt self-depleting, unsustainable, and undervalued, especially in U.S. society. My one quarterly sabbatical was a restorative reset on a path toward collectivized care.
Encouraged by a dear colleague and friend to be more intentional about my wellbeing, I was invited to go on a “retreat” to help me decompress from the academic pace and mindset. The invitation was for a “healing and self-care” themed yoga retreat in Bali. Never having experienced retreats, I was hesitant and reluctant. Yet, curiously open to the opportunity, I cleared my calendar for seven days and embraced the experience.
For several decades I have practiced yoga. I began the practice in high school while accompanying my father to classes after he suffered a debilitating back injury that left him unemployed and in pain. Then, in graduate school I resumed it while feeling the pressures of academia, and experiencing stress, anxiety and panic attacks. I do not consider myself a yogi, however I have deep respect for the practice, principles, and purpose it serves in my life, and the lives of those who pursue it as a profession and/or as a spiritual path. I am not one to chant mantras willingly, perform it as entertainment, or post acrobatics on social media—to me, yoga is the practice of being present, intentional, and purposeful in the most heart-centered ways. Actively fostering a presence or way of being that is mindfully attuned to or in-tune with breath, body, thoughts and emotions, yoga is the long journey of sustaining a healthy relationship with myself. If I am in a healthy relationship with my body and mind, I have the capacity to be in nourishing relationships with all beings.
On our first night of the retreat, the yoga instructor opened our practice with several questions: What does “self-care” mean? What does it look like and feel like? What do you need to pursue “self-care” as an everyday practice? I immediately had flashbacks of advertisements or commercials purporting ideas, products, and discourses on self-care, which further reinforce individualism, consumerism, and capitalism. I winced at the neoliberalism of privatized health, wellness, and care. The flashbacks included slogans: Long day at work? Get a mani and pedi—a treat for self-care! Dress for self-care through the latest fashion trends! Self-care Frappuccino soy latte with a splash of hazelnut syrup! On and on are the ads for a temporal, materialistic and illusory notion of self-care that overlooks the relationality, coexistence, and interdependent mutuality of our lives, and the interconnectedness between the self as a body and mind in the context of or in relationship with communities.
I recoiled at the questions posed by the yoga instructor because I was hesitant to subscribe to a selfish individualistic notion of care. I struggled to piece together words to describe my reluctance to answer the questions that centered the “self.” I was troubled by how much of the “self” is lost or wasted when we are unable to hold together the complexities of the self and the collective, or relational caring in our constructions of care. I was tired of caring about care. I needed to unravel the intricacies of caring beyond the self to arrive at an understanding of the possibilities of cultivating collectivized care in the university.
Comunalidad as a Form of Collectivized Care
I have long believed that care is relational. Care is about community, communality, or as the Spanish word best characterizes it: comunalidad. Defined by the processes and practices of relationship building, comunalidad far exceeds Eurocentric or Westernized understandings or views of being in relationship with other people, of community life and coexistence. With roots in Indigenous epistemologies, especially Oaxacan communities, and Mesoamerican community struggles for justice and liberation, Jaime Martínez Luna (2015) describes comunalidad as:
Un concepto vivencial que permite la comprensión integral, total, natural y común de hacer la vida; es un razonamiento lógico natural que se funda en la interdependencia de sus elementos, temporales y espaciales; es la capacidad de los seres vivos que lo conforman; es el ejercicio de la vida; es la forma orgánica que refleja la diversidad contenida en la naturaleza, en una interdependencia integral de los elementos que la componen. Por todo ello, es una conducta fincada en el respeto a la diversidad, que genera un conocimiento específico, medios de comunicación necesarios, y hace de su ser un modo de vida fundado en principios de respeto, reciprocidad y una labor que permite la sobrevivencia del mundo de forma total, como el de cada una de sus instancias y elementos, que consigue bienestar y goce.
[Communicative translation in English: An experiential concept that allows for the integral, total, natural and common understanding of living; it is a natural logical reasoning that is based on the interdependence of temporal and spatial elements of life; it is the capacity of living beings to exercise life in communion and communality; it is the organic form that reflects the diversity of nature. For all these reasons, comunalidad is based on respect for diversity, which generates specific knowledge, and necessary means of communication, and which approaches life on principles of respect, reciprocity and work that allows the survival and thriving of the community.]
In resonance, Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado (2016) notes that comunalidad is an integrative process that merges and reproduces collaborative forms of shared understanding, labor and care that challenge or disrupt the capitalist individualism of education, labor and living. Building on the work of Juan José Rendón Monzon (2003), in a recent publication Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio (2021) summarized prior scholarship to characterize the four principles of comunalidad. The principles include: 1) shared power; 2) collaborative work; 3) collective space; and 4) relational joy. Bridging the Indigenous philosophy of comunalidad with Black and Latina feminist radical self-care, collectivized care is urgently needed in the university. Reflecting on the possibilities for integrating practices and processes of collectivized care within the structure the university requires reimagining teaching and learning, and fundamentally the entire culture of higher education institutions to center collectivized care.
Turning Toward Collectivized Care in the University
As I continue to reflect and reimagine, I remain open and wondering: Is collectivized care in the university, and broadly the academy, possible? How can universities foster collectivized care—or processes and practices of comunalidad or radical self-care—within the structure and culture of an academic institution? As educators we are often held hostage to an academic social environment of hyper-productivity, performance, and expectations to do more with less support, resources, funding, and time, all while ignoring our health, and even spiritual wellbeing, as well as cognitive, physical, and emotional limits until we burn out. How can we care for ourselves and each other in the academy and beyond?
As an educator, I believe the classroom space is a place of radical possibilities. Therefore, I pursue this path toward collectivized care within my classrooms where I cultivate opportunities for mindfulness, critical reflexivity, somatic activities, and community building. In the classroom we share stories, lived experiences, and dream up solutions to the problems we analyze from a historic and contemporary standpoint. We also check-in on each other as people—we strive to put into practice cura personalis, and by extension cura collective.
Guided by the framework of comunalidad, in the classroom, shared power is characterized by developing a set of community agreements for how in class discussions and reflections will unfold, how student participation will be evaluated, and according to what standards. Given that students have varied ways of expressing themselves—through voice, writing, art, and other modalities—we co-develop assignments, and adjust deadlines and evaluation of such work collectively. Furthermore, collaborative work is best illustrated through projects and/or assignments where students can support each other in their mutual learning, engagement, and growth as learners-teachers. We specifically cultivate a commitment to each other and develop practices of accountability for a shared ongoing process of experiential learning. In relation to both shared power and collaborative work, collective space involves fostering a critically compassionate learning community environment where students feel a sense of belonging. In other words, where students are welcomed and seen for who they are—and are treated with dignity and respect. Lastly, relational joy encompasses an enactment or expression of fulfillment. For example, creating opportunities or moments for students to see the value or purpose of what they are learning, and how knowledge is grounded in a recognition of our interdependence and coexistence to create a more just world. The comunalidad principle of relational joy is best captured by the words of abolitionist Mariame Kaba (2021): “We can’t do anything alone that’s worth it. Everything that is worthwhile is done with other people” (p. 178). Care is and must be done with others. We must actualize collectivized care within the university.
Fundamentally, collectivized care is characterized by both an interwoven process and practice of creating environments or conditions to be present or grounded in the moment. Collectivized care implicates caring for the self; to embrace and embody my most authentic self and heart-centered way of being to embrace and care for others as well, especially students. Thus, informed by principles of comunalidad and radical self-care, collectivized care is developing and sustaining our capacities for equanimity to be in a nourishing, adaptive and expansive relationship with the self and others. Most importantly, it is co-creating conditions, environments and/or practices that can allow us to thrive, heal and truly care for each other.
As we trapeze our way through yet another academic year, a balancing act between teaching, research, and service, pressing deadlines, and a revolving door of demands on our time and capacities, let us take a moment to hold ourselves with care and compassion. I offer this reflection as an invitation for us to pause and reflect, reset, and realign our time, energy and intentions with our actions, desires, and relationships to teaching in sustainable, nourishing and wholesome ways. Perhaps this will allow us some clarity and direction as we reimagine higher education, and the possibilities for a “new university”? Let us be open to reimagining our classrooms, student relationships, teaching, and pedagogy, and most of all the structure and culture of the university toward cura collective.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Dr. Laura Nichols for her support and care in fostering a culture of collectivized care among faculty. Gratitude as well to the Breathe Together Yoga community, especially Jennifer Prugh for her guidance and care.