The other day, One Earth Sangha interviewed me about how I deal with conflict, polarization, and the messy topic of climate justice in my college classrooms. This was one of those interviews that had me trembling in my boots. Who knows how to do this? Nobody!
In truth, they were asking me these questions because I purport to be some kind of expert. Recently, I published a book called The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World, which admittedly gives me some authority on this topic. But as with so much writing, we are always working out our own big questions, and the writing doesn’t always answer them once and for all. The more I study these questions, the more I puzzle with teachers the world over about how to show up as a good teacher in these times, the more I realize I don’t know.
Nonetheless, the interview challenged me to think it through, and it even made me want to write more about it here. It brought to light so many of the ways that my own Dharma passion and mindfulness practices have shaped how I teach. I often imagined I wanted to be a Dharma teacher– to teach the actual Dharma to students who come to classes for that wisdom and practice.
But students in Dharma classes choose to be there, and so it’s self-selected for a base-level self-awareness. Are these the students I want to reach? I have a long-standing fondness for the age group on the precipice of adulthood, and feel inspired by the challenge to help them cross a threshold from youth to adulthood, so I am not quite ready to give up on that demographic of student.
Plus, it seemed a little nuts to me to try to hustle for Dharma students when I already have a lot of students in my college classrooms. After a short stint trying to teach mindfulness classes during a leave of absence from my professor life, where I had to advertise and get numbers, I realized that having a built-in demand for my classes was a great privilege. In college, the students are already there! They have to be there! I don’t have to convince them to come! What a thought!
How do my own assumptions about productivity, performance, and achievement harm my students, myself, and even the planet? It brings it back to an even bigger existential question – what exactly are we doing here together?
Instead of changing careers, I tried to imagine how I could bring the Dharma to my students in a way that isn’t explicitly about the Dharma, since that’s not the name of the classes I teach (like “Intro to Environmental Studies” and such), and therefore, it’s not really what they’re signing up for. And it’s not that I want to proselytize and convert all my students into meditators. I honestly don’t care at all if students have a spiritual practice, or whether they like mindfulness. In fact, since the Dharma is so precious to me, I don’t announce the Dharma outrightly much anyway, as I don’t want their rejection or approval of it to shape my experience of teaching them at all.
Upon reflection, I realized that the point of the Dharma for me as a teacher isn’t to share it with others, but to support student healing, to reduce the harms in the world, and above all, to use my position as much as I possibly can to ease suffering. Once I realized this was my purpose, it shifted everything.
It isn’t that I try to sneak the Dharma in through the back door. Rather, the Dharma has completely changed me, and so how I show up with my students is inevitably steeped in it. I don’t have to be teaching the Dharma directly to have the Dharma indirectly manifest through my pedagogy. It’s a how question, rather than a what question.
If this is giving bell hooks, you’re definitely getting what I’m saying. In Teaching Community she writes about how students come to her classes with “wounded psyches,” but they don’t want therapy, they want “an education that is healing.” This insight motivates me every day, especially on the bad days, when I cynically imagine that half my students would rather be hooked to Tiktok in their dorm than sitting in my classroom.
The main qualification you need in order to be a professor is a PhD. But during my entire experience getting a PhD, nobody taught me how to teach. The assumption was: get your brain full of expert knowledge in your field, and learn how to make some new, niche, narrow addition to the field, and somehow magically, doing all of that will mean you can teach college classes.
But anybody who has taught before knows that teaching itself is an entire disciplinary field. And even within the field of education, rarely is the emotional life of students and teachers, much less the emotional work of learning, considered. These are all pretty radical takes that folks like bell hooks and Paulo Freire and Parker Palmer know, but definitely aren’t mainstream.
I so appreciate that Dharma spaces like One Earth Sangha are thinking about these questions of the how of teaching so deeply. Although I’m not a Dharma teacher, and I don’t teach the Dharma, the Dharma is the taproot of my pedagogy and the taproot of my energy to teach. My interview with One Earth Sangha helped me see more clearly how it has come to show up in my teaching a lot more than I had noticed. In taking some stock about how the Dharma has slowly changed my teaching specifically over time, I thought it might be fun to share some of that with readers.
So, for what it’s worth: here are three major themes that capture how mindfulness and my own Dharma practice shape me as a teacher– compassion, ego, and relationship.
Compassion
This is the biggest one. My Dharma teacher reads a poem now and again by Miller Williams that basically says, have compassion for everyone, because you have no idea what pain they’re suffering “where the spirit meets the bone.” This is a mantra for me as I move through life.
I am a super-judgey person, in truth, so compassion practice is definitely the edge-work I need to do! And students challenge my judgemental-ness on the regular. I can easily slip into a litany of complaints about how they lack, how they fail to care enough about any number of things, how low-octane they are, how sorry I feel for myself having to muck around in mediocracy.
Or, and this is where I much prefer to be, I can choose to bear witness to their transformation, their awakening, their journey. I can choose to imagine the many ways that they suffer where the spirit meets the bone. My heart does in fact break when I think of their lives and the historical moment they’re coming of age in.
I’m choosing to reframe the surface behaviors that annoy me as rooted in some form of pain—shaped by alienation, trauma, dissociation, unhealed wounds, moral injury, fear about the future, and perhaps a childhood that didn’t equip them with the skills to face this mess. Of course they would rather scroll their lives away on Tiktok. Wouldn’t you, given the world we’re handing over to them?
My practice is to take a mindfulness breath before I walk into any classroom and just invite compassion for them. It just means that I see all their behaviors through this “wounded psyche” lens rather than as a disciplinarian trying to extrinsically motivate or extract certain behaviors from them.
Along these lines, my practice is also about unlearning how harmful systems work through me, and therefore letting go of a lot of my own expectations about what “good” student behavior looks like. How do my own assumptions about productivity, performance, and achievement harm my students, myself, and even the planet? It brings it back to an even bigger existential question – what exactly are we doing here together? How has my own training as a teacher been shaped by values I don’t agree with anymore, as these years of the Dharma seep into my cells?
And I wield the power of the grade, so I have implemented grading practices that align with my values (check out the movement for “ungrading” as an example): that students are suffering, which means that they, we, and the planet need them to heal and practice collective solidarity. If I’m honest with myself, I really don’t want to add to their suffering, and I would very much like to create the conditions for their education to be healing, h/t1hat tip to bell hooks again.
Because here’s the thing: what a gift it is that we can be together in a classroom in these times, figuring out how to move toward building a better world. And what a gift that I could have a role in that. What does that ask of me? Well, to not get in the way of these possibilities, and to help students hone their heart-mind instruments for the hard work ahead.
I notice that many students come into the classroom with a lot of shame-energy around how they will interact with me. Shame for not doing their homework, shame for not being as good a student as they want to be, shame for sundry things.
This seems to be the default in mainstream education – to ask students to leave their hearts and souls at the door, come into class with just their heads, and conform themselves into products that can succeed in the marketplace. And where they fall short, the resulting emotion is shame.
I find that even this basic assumption about what education is supposed to do for students is inherently violent. The world has done a number on us, and on some of us more than others. We want to add to the healing, not the harm. And this is an environmental argument – it always comes back to the earth. The question isn’t what do we need to do to solve the climate crisis? It’s who do we need to be to heal our relationship with the planet?
For me, this all starts with compassion. After all, we’re all just sacks of flesh and nervous systems that aren’t well-equipped for the challenges we’re facing.
And then I find everything is so much better when I filter everything else I’m doing with students through that lens: What would a compassionate response to this or that question be? What would a compassionate response to this student’s absenteeism be? What would a compassionate response to this student’s use of AI be? I find this makes me a better teacher, but mostly, it reduces so much conflict, helps me get to the root of my students’ issues, and helps me be a messy human with them.
Ego work
A second way that my Dharma practice shapes my pedagogy is in examining how my ego drives so much of what I do and my responses to students. My ego’s need for acceptance, approval, and accolades runs deep.
The question isn’t what do we need to do to solve the climate crisis? It’s who do we need to be to heal our relationship with the planet?
I’m not alone; for many of us, the brain needs evidence of acceptance to feel safe. A sense of being a good person, a sense of having agency, a sense of belonging – the need for these are evolutionarily imprinted. With a combination of nature and nurture, those needs can be heightened or not, and can even create maladaptive responses to the stimulus in our lives. Culture, causes, conditions, plus wiring, can all conspire to make us need a constant state of assurance that we’re ok. It’s not egotistical in the nasty sense of “having a big ego”; on the contrary, the ego’s need for assuaging and belonging come from insecurity and instability.
I notice my ego flare up all the time as a teacher. Noticing my ego is a constant practice with teaching. I notice it when a student even marginally rejects something I’ve assigned or challenges me on something I’ve said. I notice it in these moments of minutiae, that would have been unnoticeable to me before taking up mindfulness in earnest.
Every time I feel resistance to something happening, that’s probably my ego taking issue with some threat to my sense of self. Here, one student being on their phone in class my ego interprets as disrespect. There, another student’s mental health problems my ego interprets as me not being good enough to “save” them.
You know the drill. My ego interprets everything students do that is outside my expectations or desires for them as a personal insult.
I had to hit a rock bottom of this through what can only be described as an ugly phase. I got very resentful of students for not accepting the limitations of what I can do as their teacher. Why couldn’t they be happy? What do they expect from me, to land them their dream jobs, reverse elections, and pull carbon out of the atmosphere? I remember crying a lot during this phase. And lashing out at students.
But on what universe is it my job to make them happy, perfectly adjusted to this crazy world, and economically, intellectually, and emotionally fulfilled? What kind of ego thinks it can do all of that? Who did I think I was? Oooof. Humble pie medicine.
This is where Buddhism entered to help me out with the “three marks of existence” – impermanence (annika), non-self (annata), and suffering (dukkha). As my teacher put it, “Nothing is personal, nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent.” This phrase is written on a huge whiteboard in my office. I need the reminders that badly! When I cling to perfection or permanence, or take external phenomena (such as student behavior) personally, that’s my ego at play.
Applying this to life as a teacher, when my students are not ok, that doesn’t mean I’m failing. When they direct their frustration at me, that doesn’t mean it’s actually about me. I don’t need to get defensive; I can help figure out what it’s really about, or just let it go. Just when I think I’ve nailed how to teach and think I can coast, something changes. Just when I think I hate teaching, something changes.
There’s also a beginner’s mind vibe here: if I treat every day as offering many possibilities, it’s going to be more fun, creative, and stimulating. I can even leave what we do together up to the students’ energy and needs as I read them in the moment. If I treat every day as a drag, I may not be open to the fun parts, and my ego is more threatened when my students want to go off-script.
The three poisons of ill will, greed, and delusion enter here as well. The more I accept the three marks of existence, the less ill will I feel toward my students and greed I feel about needing accolades and comfort and ease, and the less personally I take all the messiness of working so closely with all these students and their imperfect souls (to say nothing of my own).
You can start to see how this all comes together to ease my own suffering as a teacher. And this gives me more energy to think about students, which is how I want to show up. It’s not about me giving, giving, giving to them with no boundaries. It’s about the pleasure I receive when I make the journey about them, not about me.
Relationship (over content)
The final value I want to write about is not necessarily something I get from Buddhism (though Buddhism absolutely supports it) is from a combination of my study of neuroscience and social movement theory – the need for connection.
Our brains do better when we learn in community. Our democracies do better when we work in community. Our planet is healthier when we are in right relation. I’ve written about this elsewhere in much more detail, so I won’t belabor the point here, but I would like to unpack the implications in the classroom.
If it’s true that the medicine that could heal our own hearts, our polarized political communities, and our relationship with the more-than-human world is the practice of being in right relation, what does that mean for what I’m doing in my classes? How do I unlearn and stop teaching in ways that reinforce individualism? How can I teach my students to unlearn individualism and prioritize relationships over righteousness or self-interest? This continues to be a growth area for me, as it’s very much against the grain of education in this country, and the way I was raised.
A couple of ideas, though:
- Building lateral relationships between students, and centering the class community as the point over content delivery or me as the teacher.
There are lots of ways to do this. I like to have the students opt-in to a “mutual aid” chat group to share when they have extra zucchinis or are too shy to go to an event alone and would seek company, or if they’re performing Saturday night at the coffee shop. This is also where they might ask each other questions about class that I would prefer not get emails about in a piecemeal way (“When did Sarah say X assignment was due?”, “Can someone remind me what Sarah said about how to format Y assignment?”, “Is anybody else confused about Sarah’s instructions about Z essay?”, etc).
I frame the chat as the class’s own lab for mutual aid; in other words, the care they can take with each other there is the medicine for what the world needs. Can they practice this muscle? Can they rely on each other? Can they find solace and pleasure in offering company, soup, celebration, or commiseration?
That’s just one way, but you can imagine the numerous ways to design the class so students create their own community outside of the teacher, and how that can go well beyond whatever is on the syllabus. One tip: make sure students know that the class’s community agreements (which we also create together at the beginning of class) apply to the group chat as well, to practice avoiding/repairing harm.
- Having students bring their full selves to the classroom so they can get to know each other and create trust
One thing about that PhD assumption I described above, where just getting a PhD is supposed to make you a good teacher, is that it also exemplifies what radical pedagogy calls “the deficit myth.” The deficit myth is the idea that students are empty vessels when they walk into your class, and you are the one with the big head full of PhD knowledge, and their job is to fill up on some of your knowledge. The reason it’s a “myth” is because students come in with lots of wisdom and knowledge, and it can do “epistemic violence” to them to assume that your knowledge as the teacher is better than theirs.
Belonging. Trust. … Maybe they’re not just the means. Maybe they’re the entire point.
Furthermore, classes that are just focused on my own content as a teacher are just so limited and serious, because I’m a very serious person. Centering student knowledge achieves many things – it signals to students that they have important knowledge from their lives, that I don’t presume my knowledge is better than theirs, and that learning from them is also an important (and dare I say, fun) part of being in college.
One way I do this is to have an opt-in assignment where students offer “delight leadership” or a “wisdomshare” to the class. They sign up in advance, and when it’s their day, they take up ten or so minutes of class time to share their love of playing the didgeridoo, or teach us their indigenous language for “thank you,” or share how to get off streaming music and divest their music consumption from capitalism, or offer their favorite yoga postures. One student taught us about kelp by having us move our bodies like different types of kelp.
Next thing I know, four students in the class are bringing a sick student food for the week. Or, a senior is doing a survey for their capstone research, and the class are willing subjects. Or, a huge portion of the class is organizing to stand in solidarity at the courthouse for vulnerable members of our community.
I’ve been doing this combination of the group chat and delight-lead/wisdomshare assignment for about three semesters, and I cannot sing the praises of this pedagogy high enough. Students learn about each other, they follow up on the group chat to learn more, then start following each other on instagram, and they celebrate each other’s mad skillz. (Many students are supremely insecure, and this practice lifts their self-esteem.)
And these networks of connection just build out in ways that I’ll never be able to measure. If you create the conditions for students to connect, they generally really want to. And it is the medicine they need.
I often bemoan that my sixth grade child hates school, even though she is willing to go, on account of her friends there. I’m trained to think of this as a sign of failure, or a sign that she’s not going to succeed in life.
Yet, in my own classes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to achieve. I’ve come to think that no matter how terribly they’re doing in school, if students still come to class because they want to be in community with each other, that is the ultimate testament of my success as a teacher. I’ve decentered myself as the authority with whom they mostly just feel shame (which many teachers unwittingly exploit to discipline students to perform in ways that ostensibly just train them for their lives in capitalism), and instead centered the support they receive in community as the main take-home point of the class. Just like sixth grade again!
Belonging. Trust. How did we ever expect students to learn anything we would want to teach them anyway, without these things? Maybe they’re not just the means. Maybe they’re the entire point.
This article was originally published on Sarah’s Substack. It is reprinted here with permission.
References
- 1hat tip
