Teaching from the Body

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

The life of the mind might be a fantasy of intellectual work untethered from the material conditions of reality, but this vision is nonetheless seductive. When confronted with the limitations on our resources, it is enticing to think that our problems would be solved if we simply had more. We need more time: we only have students in our orbit for a limited number of weeks, and we want to make the most of this narrow window that we can. We need more students: in a world of shrinking humanities majors and budget cuts, we need to prove to the administration that our enrollments are healthy and growing. We need more funding: more money to continue on with basic operations, to say nothing of the big dreams that we have for our departments and curricula.

We need more. We deserve more.

Chasing these dreams of intellectual fulfillment can feel noble, but they incorrectly frame the problem as one of scarcity. Paulo Freire envisioned conservative educational approaches using a banking metaphor, where instructors and students exchange facts and ideas in a cycle of deposits and withdrawals. But a better analogy for the function of our broken education system might be one in which the bank has a fixed amount of currency in circulation. The economics of the system pits teachers and students in competition with each other in a zero-sum pedagogy with winners and losers. Whatever funding windfalls received by the colleague across the hall appear to take away from the bottom line available from your work. It can feel like a loss if the bright student in our course declares a business major instead of English.

The solution to this pedagogical dilemma is not to contest the lack of supply in circulation but, instead, to rethink the system entirely. Instead of chasing a pedagogy based in abundance that does not exist, we must reckon with reality. Student enrollments will wax and wane. Time is finite, and no amount of wishing will add an extra hour to the day or weeks to our syllabus. There will never be enough funding for all the big ideas—there is often not enough money for the small ones. Instead of pursuing a fictionalized life of the mind, divorced from the day-to-day possibilities in the classroom, we must resist institutional narratives that encourage us to think about our work as teachers and learners in competition with one another. We must, instead, re-affirm our shared educational mission, one that must be collective and embodied.

After all, the body is inescapable. Christine Smallwood’s 2021 novel The Life of the Mind describes the difficult labor conditions of an adjunct professor who struggles through post-PHD life in a world with too few job postings and too many obligations. The novel’s view of this intellectual life is, from the very first sentence, inescapably tied to the body: “Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail” (1). Dorothy, an adjunct, is several days into continuous menstrual bleeding following an abortion that she has not discussed with her therapist (one of two she is currently seeing). Smallwood is intentional in her setting of this moment in the library: the infrastructure that supports intellectual pursuits fails to address the needs of Dorothy’s body and means little in the face of these failings. Throughout the novel, Dorothy juggles her own arrested development, academic obligations, and tormented body, all of which thwart her attempts to address her mental wellbeing.

Smallwood’s novel describes a woman in stasis, unable to pull herself out of a cycle of pain and neglect because of her labor conditions: “That Dorothy seems to view her life at a remove has much to with her in-between professional status, which has made it impossible for her to think beyond the end of the semester. How can you plan if there’s no stability?” (Linden 2021). Unable to plan and pinned down by precarity, Dorothy drifts from moment to moment struggling to exist or to feel, approaching everything with clinical detachment. In another memorable moment, Dorothy encounters a graduate school ex-boyfriend who insists on reading Frank O’ Hara poems into her vagina during sex. The moment crystalizes the novel’s parody of academic ecstasy, but Dorothy finds herself unmoved: “She had been confused for somebody else, the kind of person who could orgasm over a poem” (116). In the terms the novel puts forth, the mind cannot be sustained without the body, but the mind also cannot give real, authentic pleasure. The title becomes a joke—The Life of the Mind is one bawdy encounter after another as body and mind smash into one another.

The Life of the Mind might feel sensationalist, but if anything it undersells the real-life working conditions of adjuncts. While persistent Dorothys do exist, hustling to get by despite the pain it inflicts on their bodies and souls, her example is far from the direst. In 2019, Thea Hunter’s adjunct positions had left her without health insurance; she eventually passed away from a health condition exacerbated by her inability to seek a diagnosis (Harris 2019). In 2013, adjunct professor Margaret Mary Vojtko passed away “after a heart attack at the age of 83, destitute and nearly homeless” while she and others attempted to unionize at Duquesne University (Sanchez 2013). Ellen Tara James-Penny lived out of her car for nearly a decade while teaching four courses each year at San José State University (Flannery 2017). For every Dorothy there are countless stories of teachers struggling to make ends meet in pursuit of a life of the mind that leaves their bodies devastated or barely hanging on. The body cannot be ignored.

If the material conditions of teachers directly affect their ability to teach effectively, students are no different. The media has a tendency to frame college students as entitled—upper class, white, and elite. But, if we look closely at real student stories, we find an altogether different picture. Sara Goldrick-Rab’s work with #RealCollege and the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice shows how often these narratives ignore the lived realities of our students. Goldrick-Rab “[encourages] institutions of higher education to focus on the basic needs of college students (food, housing, transportation, childcare, and mental health)” (Freie 178). To put it plainly, the life of the mind means very little without a body to sustain it. It is hard to learn while hungry. The body holds important sway over one’s ability to participate in education.

We might think that we know what it means to live an academic life and make reasonable asks of our peers. We might ground such assumptions about what it feels like to be a teacher or a student in on our own experiences. But your understanding of living a certain way gets weaker with every year that passes between you and the actual experience. Consider the massive shifts in education in just the last few years: MOOCs, the COVID-19 pandemic, AI. Sea changes like these have repeatedly rendered higher education virtually unrecognizable every few years in the last few decades. This is to say nothing of personal struggles with conditions such as poverty, racism, or chronic disability that impact student life on an ongoing basis. We also cannot know what it is to live the work of a fellow teacher. Your colleague might be struggling with mental health. They might be homeless. They might be caring for a loved one in ways that prevent them from doing their job. There is no escaping the limitations of our bodies and the ways in which they affect our ability to teach and learn. And we cannot understand these factors in isolation. What we need is a pedagogy that recognizes the personal and collective struggles of all bodies.

We ignore the ways in which our institutional structures encourage pedagogies of intellectualism and deny the body at our own peril. At best, doing so creates learning environments ignorant of the very real conditions under which teachers and students work. At worst, doing so can lead us to pass on generational trauma, where our students and fellow teachers have to suffer because we did. As I have argued throughout this book, we can teach our way towards better institutions. Our pedagogies can seek to understand and uplift rather than divide and oppress. They can heal rather than harm. We can teach from and to the body—not the brain.

Flannery, Mary Ellen. 2017. “The Homeless Professor Who Lives in Her Car.” neaToday (blog). November 1, 2017. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/homeless-professor-who-lives-her-car.

Freie, Carrie. 2010. “#RealCollege: The Work and Activism of Sara Goldrick-Rab.” In The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. London, United Kingdom: MIT Press. 171-182.

Harris, Adam. 2019. “The Death of an Adjunct.” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019, sec. Education. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/adjunct-professors-higher-education-thea-hunter/586168/.

Linden, Grace. 2021. “The Adjunct Gaze.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-adjunct-gaze.

Sanchez, Claudio. 2013. “The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate.” NPR, September 22, 2013, sec. Education. https://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/224946206/adjunct-professor-dies-destitute-then-sparks-debate.

Smallwood, Christine. 2021. The Life of the Mind. London New York: Hogarth, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group.