Care-Based Pedagogies During the Pandemic: Letters, Meditations, and Reflections

Erin Schaefer

We (Erin Schaefer and Mark Chen) welcome you to our conversation. We invite you to take part in the interview by selecting those questions that most interest you, in whatever order you choose. Each page contains a list of questions, which will change color once you've viewed them. When you're ready to move on to a new set of questions or wish to return to the previous group, you will find links at the top of the question sets for the previous and next sets. If you prefer a more linear format, you can click "View All Interview Questions" in the top horizontal navigation bar at any time. We hope you enjoy our conversation and that it inspires you to create more. [[Start the Interview|Start]] <h2>Introduction</h2> We are in a mental health crisis, and students are a vulnerable group in this crisis. Prior to the pandemic, university students' mental health was already a global concern, prompting the World Mental Health International College to conduct research which found that "more than one third of students screened positive for at least one of six mental health disorders during a 12-month period, and a lifetime prevalence of 28.7%" (Kang et al., 2021, p. 17, citing Auerbach et al., 2018). A review of major studies between 2009 and 2019 revealed that mental health issues like depression, eating disorders, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and compulsive disorders were common among university students (Kang et al., 2021). Educators are also facing a mental health crisis. They must support their students' mental health as they struggle to cope with their own (Halat et al., 2023). In "Mental Health in Academia: The Challenges Faculty Face Predate the Pandemic and Require Systemic Solutions," Ivy Bourgeault et al. (2021) noted that a staggering number of academics struggle with mental health: "Almost two-thirds of academics reported experiencing mental health issues such as anxiety, psychological distress, depression, and burnout, at some point in their career" (para. 5). Understanding these rising levels of stress and poor mental health among university students and faculty requires taking into account rising levels of polarization and violence in culture and society outside academia. In early 2020, when COVID-19 hit the world hard, one of the early loci of infection in the United States was Seattle, Washington (Mark's home state), which was forced to respond despite an incomplete understanding of the disease and how to handle it before the rest of the nation was forced to react. The United States was just coming out of the #MeToo movement, and, while the whole country was on lockdown in the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter was gaining traction in many major cities. This included the Pacific Northwest with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), also known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), which also occurred in Seattle. At the same time, hate crimes against Asians in America were rising alarmingly due to the ignorance of the general public, many of whom associated the virus with fellow Americans who looked like those from China. This sentiment was spurred on by President Donald Trump. Additionally, the United States was in the middle of an election cycle, and the President's refusal to concede prompted an insurrection in the Capitol. Indeed, it seemed like every month of the pandemic brought with it a bevy of other events that were unbelievable when they were happening and are still hard to understand. The pandemic, together with these social upheavals, played a major role in the worsening of students' mental health. In one study of 195 university students, 71% reported "that their stress and anxiety had increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic" (Son et al., 2020, para. 10). Students and educators alike struggled with increased isolation, disruptions to their routines, anxiety, physical health problems, difficulty managing tasks, and strained finances (Son et al., 2020; Visser & Wyk, 2021; Wang et al., 2020). Compounding these issues, the accelerated pace of information from official and unofficial sources, some of it conflicting, in response to a rapidly changing understanding of the coronavirus, led to greater anxiety and uncertainty, and to widespread misinformation. Students, in particular, who often already have fraught lives outside of the pressures of academia, were hit hard at a time of developmental vulnerability. When they attempted to rely on trusted sources of information (their community, governmental, and academic leaders), they had to face the reality that the so-called adults in the room often didn't know what they were doing either. Many scholars in writing and media studies (our home disciplines), together with those from a variety of other disciplines and public educators, activists, and policymakers, are recognizing the holistic nature of the mental health crisis, and their work is inspiring. In April Baker-Bell et al.'s (2017) "The Stories They Tell: Mainstream Media, Pedagogies of Healing, and Critical Media Literacy," for instance, the authors exposed the harm that both students and educators experience as a result of anti-Black media narratives. Instead, they offered care-based pedagogies that provide counterspaces for students to express and connect to counternarratives. In <cite>Designing for Care</cite>, Jerod Quinn et al. (2022) shared an edited collection focused on centering students' humanity in pedagogical design. Numerous books on trauma-informed pedagogies, geared towards both K–12 and higher education audiences, have been published in recent years, including Phyllis Thompson and Janice Carello's (2022) <cite>Trauma-Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education</cite>, Debbie Zacarian et al.'s (2017) <cite>Teaching to Strengths: Support Students Living with Trauma, Violence, and Chronic Stress</cite>, and Adam Wolfsdorf et al.'s (2022) <cite>Navigating Trauma in the English Classroom</cite>. In 2021, NCTE published <cite>Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching, Volume 1: Cultivating Healing-Centered ELA Classrooms</cite>, edited by Sakeena Everett. We join these scholars' efforts by sharing our own experiences developing and practicing our care-based pedagogies. Our conversations revealed five lessons. First, we need to talk about what's going on. In their study of 195 university students, "Effects of COVID-19 on College Students' Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study," Changwon Son et al. (2020) noted that many students are using unhealthy coping mechanisms, including "ignoring the news about COVID . . . distracting themselves by doing other tasks . . . and drinking or smoking" (para. 23). It's understandable that students and educators alike may choose to turn away from the stressful events of the world, and that the frequent social isolation which took place early in the pandemic perhaps encouraged this response. At the same time, as Baker-Bell et al. (2017) convincingly demonstrated, students and educators need spaces in which to discuss what is happening. We need to reflect on the events of the world, as well as the media narratives about them. In our co-interview, Mark explores letter writing as a way to spark and have conversations about what is happening while Erin demonstrates contextualizing current events within a framework of both hope and care. Second, we need to recognize that these conversations are uncomfortable and require acknowledging, tending to, and responding to the emotional aspect of care practices. If we are to care for ourselves as educators, as well as for our students, we must practice empathy and emotional self-awareness. Given the troubling nature of current events, as well as the emotional strain of the pandemic and academia, we must also embrace a "pedagogy of discomfort" (Boler, 1999, p. 180). This pedagogy involves sitting with uncomfortable emotions, such as anger and fear. In our co-interview, Erin shares how her self-society care unit, centered on mindfulness of both the body and mind, helps support students' ability to have difficult conversations. Third, critical media literacy is inseparable from care in today's academic world. Mark, who teaches media studies, explains how the pandemic encouraged him to focus more on critical media literacy, including readings on "conspiracy theories about QAnon, readings on fake news . . . , surveillance capitalism, and algorithmic culture." We discuss, too, the intersections of emotional literacy with digital literacy. As Baker-Bell et al. suggested, educators can use the classroom as a space for "catharsis, a letting out of emotions that become painful or even dangerous if they remain internalized" (Morrell, 2008, p. 169, as quoted in Baker-Bell et al., 2017, p. 139). Students need space to express how media narratives make them feel. Erin discusses the affordances of mindfulness-based emotional literacy as a tool to support students (and instructors) as they encounter and emotionally process disturbing and harmful media narratives. Fourth, care should center on communities of support. In <cite>Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope</cite>, bell hooks (2003) wrote: <blockquote>When as professors we care deeply about our subject matter, when we profess to love what we teach and the process of teaching, that declaration of emotional connection tends to be viewed favorably by administrators and colleagues. When we talk about loving our students, these same voices usually talk about exercising caution. They warn us about the dangers of getting "too" close. Emotional connections tend to be suspect in a world where the mind is valued above all else, where the idea that one should be and can be objective is paramount. (p. 127)</blockquote> She went on to argue that, while "teachers are not therapists," "there are times when conscious teaching—teaching with love—brings us the insight that we will not be able to have a meaningful experience in the classroom without reading the emotional climate of our students and attending to it" (p. 133). We similarly believe that our goals as educators should always be centered on genuine care and that we should encourage our students to do the same. Thus, we reflect together on practices we use to support care and community in the classroom. Finally, care requires coping with the difficult nature of impermanence. Impermanence, "defined simply as the fact that reality is constantly in flux, transient, and effervescent," can be quite troubling (Cicchini, 2020, p. v). The pandemic has heightened many people's awareness of (and discomfort with) impermanence. We share our quest to cope with this impermanence both personally and through our teaching. Erin, who was on the job market at the start of the pandemic and began a new job from a distance without having set foot on the campus, reflects on her personal struggle with the unknown. Having lost a loved one shortly before the pandemic began, she describes how she came face-to-face with her relationship to impermanence through her relationship to grief. She also offers mindfulness practice as a tool for noticing and becoming comfortable with constant change. Mark explains how he uses letters to help students (and himself) put the present moment and current events into a less myopic perspective while remembering that impermanence always offers hope that things can get better. Of course, each of the lessons discussed in our co-interview (the need to talk about what's going on, managing the emotional dimensions of care, promoting critical media literacy, building community, and coping with impermanence) also recognize constraints to personal and pedagogical care practices. As Mark notes, some students may not read his letters because they are limited by time or academic obligations. Cultural values, both in academia and in our capitalistic society, can encourage both educators and students to linearly focus on jumping through academic hoops, rather than building a classroom community or caring about other people in our surrounding communities and the world. These constraints are ongoing and require, we believe, ongoing dialogue. Our hope is that our interview will encourage not only further scholarly discussion but also personal dialogues among colleagues and students. We hope that our practices inspire educators as well as students to reflect on their own care practices. As we note in the Thanks section (linked in the top horizontal navigation bar of this webtext), we found this conversation to be an act of care in itself, as care always involves listening. As we explain in the first paragraph above (here in the Project Home section), this is an interactive piece; you can choose the direction and order of the co-interview. We hope that you see this, then, as a chance to participate in our conversation, and we thank you for listening and taking part. <h2>References</h2> Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [Video]. <cite>TED Conferences</cite>. <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story</a> Baker-Bell, April, Stanbrough, Raven Jones, & Everett, Sakeena. (2017). The stories they tell: Mainstream media, pedagogies of healing, and critical media literacy. <cite>English Education</cite>, 49(2), 2, 130–152. https://doi.org/10.58680/ee201728918 Bourgeault, Ivy, Mantler, Janet, & Power, Nicole. (2021). Mental health in academia: The challenges faculty face predate the pandemic and require systemic solutions. <cite>Academic Matters</cite>. <a href="https://academicmatters.ca/mental-health-in-academia-the-challenges-faculty-face-predate-the-pandemic-and-require-systemic-solutions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://academicmatters.ca/mental-health-in-academia-the-challenges-faculty-face-predate-the-pandemic-and-require-systemic-solutions/</a> Boler, Megan. (1999). <cite>Feeling power: Emotions and education</cite>. Routledge. Cicchini, Emily Jane Ball. (2020). <cite>Communicating impermanence: Temporal structuring of the COVID-19 pandemic in everyday organizational life</cite> [Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin]. ResearchGate. <a href="https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.22794.54724" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.22794.54724</a> Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, & National Writing Project. (2011, January). <cite>Framework for success in postsecondary writing</cite>. <a href="https://wpacouncil.org/aws/cwpa/pt/sd/news_article/242845/_parent/layout_details/false" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://wpacouncil.org/aws/cwpa/pt/sd/news_article/242845/_parent/layout_details/false</a> Everett, Sakeena (Ed.). (2021). <cite>Special Issues: Trauma-informed teaching, Volume 1: Cultivating healing-centered ELA classrooms</cite>. National Council of Teachers of English. Halat, Dalal Hammoudi, Soltani, Abderrezzaq, Dalli, Roua, Alsarraj, Lama, & Malki, Ahmed. (2023). Understanding and fostering mental health and well-being among university faculty: A narrative review. <cite>Journal of Clinical Medicine</cite>, 12(13), 4425. <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12134425" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12134425</a> hooks, bell. (2003). <cite>Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope</cite>. Routledge. Kang, Harmeet Kaur, Rhodes, Christopher, Rivers, Emerald, Thornton, Clifton P., & Rodney, Tamar. (2021). Prevalence of mental health disorders among undergraduate university students in the United States: A review. <cite>Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services</cite>, 59(2), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.3928/02793695-20201104-03 Quinn, Jerod, Burtis, Martha, & Jhangiani, Surita (Eds.). (2022). <cite>Designing for care</cite>. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc. <a href="https://pressbooks.pub/designingforcare/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://pressbooks.pub/designingforcare/</a> Schaefer, Erin E. (2018). Using neurofeedback and mindfulness pedagogies to teach open listening. <cite>Computers and Composition</cite>, 50, 78–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2018.07.002 Son, Changwon, Hegde, Sudeep, Smith, Alec, Wang, Xiaomei, & Sasangohar, Farzan. (2020). Effects of COVID-19 on college students' mental health in the United States: Interview survey study. <cite>Journal of Medical Internet Research</cite>, 22(9), e21279. <a href="https://doi.org/10.2196/21279" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://doi.org/10.2196/21279</a> TEDx Talks. (2016, December 14). The Muslim on the airplane | Amal Kassir | TEDxMileHighWomen [Video]. <cite>YouTube</cite>. <a href="https://youtu.be/UIAm1g_Vgn0?si=PjIYDxclzrbmII7a" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://youtu.be/UIAm1g_Vgn0?si=PjIYDxclzrbmII7a</a> Thompson, Phyllis, & Carello, Janice. (2022). <cite>Trauma-informed pedagogies: A guide for responding to crisis and inequality in higher education</cite>. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92705-9 Visser, Maretha, & Wyk, Eloise Law-van. (2021). University students' mental health and emotional wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown. <cite>South African Journal of Psychology</cite>, 51(2), 229–243. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/00812463211012219" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://doi.org/10.1177/00812463211012219</a> Wang, Xiaomei, Hegde, Sudeep, Son, Changwon, Keller, Bruce, Smith, Alec, & Sasangohar, Farzan. (2020). Investigating mental health of US college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional survey study. <cite>Journal of Medical Internet Research</cite>, 22(9), e22817. <a href="https://doi.org/10.2196/22817" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://doi.org/10.2196/22817</a> Wolfsdorf, Adam, Wedlock, Kristen Park, & Lo, Cassandra. (2022). <cite>Navigating trauma in the English classroom</cite>. National Council of Teachers of English. Zacarian, Debbie, Lourdes, Alvarez-Ortiz, & Haynes, Judie. (2017). <cite>Teaching to strengths: Supporting students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress</cite>. ASCD. [[Start the Interview|Start]]

↢ PREV QUESTION SET [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|Move on...]]
1. [[Can you tell me a bit about yourselves?]] 2. [[How do you two know each other?]] 3. [[What do you do for enjoyment outside of academia?]] 4. [[What have you been doing during the pandemic?]]

[[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Start]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|I have some more questions...]] 5. [[Mark, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 6. [[Mark, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 7. [[Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 8. [[Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it?]] 9. [[Mark, can you tell us more about your course design?]] 10. [[How have students responded to your care-based teaching?]]

<table class="movie"><tr><td><div class="topleft"></td><td width="480"></td><td><div class="topright"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3" class="video-container" align="center"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hZFwWXb8VnI?si=_KIptsQsCMuIgktc" title="Video of Erin and Mark answering the question Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></td></tr> <tr><td><div class="bottomleft"></td><td></td><td><div class="bottomright"></td></tr></table> [[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Start]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|I have some more questions...]] 5. [[Mark, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 6. [[Mark, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 7. Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health? 8. [[Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it?]] 9. [[Mark, can you tell us more about your course design?]] 10. [[How have students responded to your care-based teaching?]] Transcript Erin: The thing that I've been doing over the past couple of years... I started teaching in fall of 2020, so that was after everything had already moved online. Students had had a chance—or at least some of them—had a chance to have some experience doing online learning, but the reason I ended up creating... so what I did was I created a unit within my professional writing class, an introductory professional writing class at the 200-level, was creating a unit on essentially self-care. I kind of framed it as "self-management," partly I think because there's more literature out there on self-management when you think about it in the context of some of the professional contexts that students will be working in. So students taking this class, they're not just professional writing—I'm sorry, we don't have a professional writing major, actually—they're not all writing majors; they're going to be working in a lot of professional contexts. That unit incorporated mindfulness, and my research for I think over the past 10 years plus, or whatever, has been largely centered on mindfulness. I learned about mindfulness when I was 16, and the practice of changing the nature of your awareness and becoming aware of how your attention to things and how you pay attention to the world around you influences how much you're aware of your prejudices, how open you are when you're talking to other people and coming across new ideas, how open you are to learning, so I've... that's kind of what I've been writing about and was actually writing about for my dissertation as well. I was writing about, also, quite appropriately, how we need to think about our wellbeing in a more interdependent way. I ended up writing a chapter about—influenced by my parents who were American studies scholars who learned a lot about American history—I wrote a chapter about how art throughout history and American history has portrayed our interdependence in a more linear way, and how the individual is responsible for their own wellbeing aside from the wellbeing of other people, and coming up with examples from modern discourses, how if somebody has done something wrong, it's completely on them; it's not a reflection of where our society needs to do something different. So all of that was kind of in my mind more theoretically as I was writing this, and then I moved into teaching that fall semester, and it was a little bit of a coincidence that I was teaching something that was geared towards supporting students, helping them make sense of, on an emotional level as well, what was all happening in the world, including all of the violence that we were seeing and have seen. I was also working from a distance, teaching at IUN [Indiana University Northwest], but from a distance in Minnesota, just an hour south of Minneapolis. Especially seeing the local Minnesota news, the coverage of that, and even hearing helicopters going over... it was very much, the violence towards Black communities from the police was very much on my mind as well as I was developing that unit. Over the past couple of years, I've also been really thinking about my students' positions, because Indiana University Northwest is in Gary, Indiana, and a lot of our students are students of color, Black students; we're a Hispanic-Serving Institution. The realities of what students—their everyday lives— are faced with trying to balance being a student while also, I guess, trying to take in everything that's happening in the news that's violence towards people of color, on top of just the work–life balance needed to sometimes be working a full-time job, sometimes raising kids or caretaking for family, on top of you know, all the other stressors, and being a student—it's a lot. I've been really thinking in terms of like, if I'm trying to help them balance things, like even "work–life balance," work–life balance looks very different depending on your positionality, right? So like, the realities of what you're trying to balance with work looks very different for maybe a lot of students from a predominantly white institution. I guess thinking about my students and getting to know them, and what their stories are, what their realities are, on top of everything happening in the news, made me realize that I need to be more intentional—I've been working on revising my unit on work–life balance to incorporate wellness as a need to also address things that are happening in the world, address social justice issues, that type of thing. So the unit on "self-management." There was one part that covered task management, so basically a way to keep your to-do lists organized, how to manage your time, how to balance things out, that kind of thing, more like strategies for that because you know students have limited time. Part of the need to reduce stress is to better manage your time, and so students would also share what their tips and tricks are with one another. So I'd actually start with that, just to kind of help students stay afloat, I guess, to begin with, and then I would move onto self management, which, again, I want to rethink my language on that. I want to actually call it "self-society care" because I think that you want to remember that whenever you doing self care, it should also be care for others and vice versa, but the "self-management" unit would introduce formal mindfulness, so exercises that you could do where you're practicing directing your attention as well as your awareness to eventually try to—or usually try to—open your awareness more, so you think about the opposite of when you're at a red light and you're trying to make it to, you know, an event on time, and you're really in narrow focus and you're just kind of, you know, you're really in your thoughts; you're not much aware of what's happening with the rest of your environment. With a more mindful state of awareness, you're kind of able to be aware of multiple things all happening at the same time. And I've actually... so I wrote an article for <cite>Computers and Composition</cite> about open listening and how that interacts with neurofeedback discourses (Schaefer, 2018). Back in the day, I actually got to take part in neurofeedback sessions where I'd be able to see what's happening with people's brain waves as they were meditating. So neurofeedback is essentially kind of like EEG [electroencephalogram]. When you do an EEG study for a sleep study, you get to see what your brain wave patterns are doing. They indicate whether you're in a sleep cycle, this or that. When you're doing neurofeedback, you're doing it while you're awake, and you can tell, kind of how stressed you are by how much of a certain brain wave frequency you have. If you have a lot of the hi-beta frequency, usually it's an indication that you're either really, really narrow focus, or it can even be an indication, if it's a regular pattern, that you have anxiety or post-traumatic stress, things like that. I could watch even my own brain waves—you get kind of a read-out of it. There's actually—well there's a whole lot interesting, I think, about neurofeedback—but, the main thing was realizing that, "Oh, I really have to be conscious and intentional about shifting my brain state and my state of awareness," and it actually took quite a bit of practice to be able to have a much, much more open type of awareness, where, "Oh, wow. I don't usually have this state of awareness where I can hear the clock ticking, while also being aware of what my body is doing, down to my, you know, toes and fingertips and all that, as well as what other people are saying, alongside of my own thoughts." When you're self-conscious, you know, it's like the opposite of that. You're hyper-conscious of what's happening inside of you, and narrowly focused on the things that are outside of you. I think being aware that, you can... I try to in this unit share enough of that so that students get a sense of... that they can work with that differently, but that it kind of takes sometimes doing those formal exercises, sitting for a while, and just practicing being aware of whatever is happening—whatever your state of mind is—just like bringing you're observation awareness to that. Part of it is just that, like practicing. I have students do a habit tracker where they keep track of trying to do 5 minutes a day at first and working your way up, that type of thing. The other part is the informal mindfulness aspect, where they practice changing how they are aware of maybe objects around them. Kind of learning to look at them with what we call "beginner's mind," as if you haven't seen them before, more like an artist. So if you notice, you know, the light in your water bottle reflecting on the ceiling, learning to be aware of that and appreciate that as well. Mindfulness with animals, like how present you are with them, and mindfulness of nature, so like literally sitting in nature just listening to all the different sounds and things like that. So partly, it's learning to both practice that type of awareness, but also practice bringing curiosity to that awareness. So one of the aspects of the unit that I think makes the most difference for students, and especially relates to what we're talking about here, is practicing mindful listening. So mindful listening is learning to basically be both self aware and empathetic at the same time. Like, I think you can't really be empathetic if you're not self aware, like aware of your own emotions. I've had people, where they think that they're good listeners, and they're completely responding to you, but they're not bringing anything to the table, so to speak. So I think, encouraging students to practice both reflection and self awareness as well as curiosity about others. One of the things that they can reflect on—they have four memos where they reflect on their self-management plan, things like that—is they set an intention, or they have the option to set an intention of practicing mindful listening at work, or with their family, or with their classmates and then reflecting on what did that... what was that experience like? That's kind of the unit in a large nutshell. [Laughter]

<table class="movie"><tr><td><div class="topleft"></td><td width="480"></td><td><div class="topright"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3" class="video-container" align="center"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zYGvwbvbDhA?si=IiINuozlX_G8-9cm" title="Video of Erin and Mark answering the question Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it?" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></td></tr> <tr><td><div class="bottomleft"></td><td></td><td><div class="bottomright"></td></tr></table> [[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Start]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|I have some more questions...]] 5. [[Mark, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 6. [[Mark, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 7. [[Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 8. Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it? 9. [[Mark, can you tell us more about your course design?]] 10. [[How have students responded to your care-based teaching?]] Transcript Mark: There's a hypothesis, or an alternative explanation, which was, or which is, we were just completely oblivious when we were undergrads. Like, stuff happening in the world is constant, but for some reason, it feels like it's much more acutely felt now, or everyone's more aware. Erin: Hmmm. Mark: Or maybe just generations of students are more, you know, aware of social issues than previous generations. I've heard that about [Generation] Z before, that Gen Z and millennials before them are, you know, more progressive than previous generations, and also more... Erin: Woke. Mark: ... yeah, more woke, more into activism, more educated in terms of identity politics, and things like that. And, you know, when I read these things, I'm like, "Yeah, that rings true to me. I totally can believe that they are more woke than my generation." And I guess that's comforting in a way, because it means that I wasn't completely oblivious when I was an undergrad, right? But at the same time, it's just like, it's good. I mean, if that's true, then that's hopeful. That's an optimistic interpretation, I think, because it means that these new students, or these new adults, who are going to take charge of their world eventually—I feel like, my values are in line with a lot of progressive values. I feel like, as the generations pass, will go more and more progressive with our values as a country and stuff like that, or society. But, at the same time, I don't know if that's true, right? I'm in Seattle, right? And, it's kind of a bubble here. One of the most progressive cities in the nation. You know, everywhere I turn, my neighbors basically feel the same way as I do, and I know this isn't true if I was somewhere else. And so, you know, I see my students aware of a bunch of issues and everything, but if I was teaching at some other university, would that still be true? I have no idea. Erin: It's interesting for me because I... when I first started teaching, I was teaching at Saint Cloud State University. There was actually a fair amount of diversity, mostly actually from our international students. Saint Cloud actually has one of the largest Somali populations, as well. There's also a lot of Islamophobia and racism in St. Cloud, so it's... and we've had a lot of... we've had representatives who are extremely racist, sexist, homophobic, you name it. So it's like this kind of clash of trying to have more progressive conversations, while also, sometimes you're teaching students who come from very, very small towns who are completely isolated from any of those conversations, so teaching at Saint Cloud State was very, very different from teaching at Indiana University Northwest—kind of similar to Michigan State, where it's a predominantly white institution. It's just very, very different... sometimes it's a little bit scary how many students might say something like, "Oh, I'm not political at all," without realizing what that really means... or how politics affect their lives. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question, I mean. I don't know. When I think about my own undergraduate, I feel like it depends on what your degree was and things like that too, but, in terms of the news, I feel like there's been so much more conversation about these things then there was when I was an undergraduate. When were you an undergraduate? Mark: Early mid-'90s, I'd say. Yeah. Erin: Okay. Mark: So like, you know, there were protests of the Bush Administration, and then we got into the Clintons. My undergrad isn't a good example, I don't think. Or, I mean, so maybe I was oblivious, cuz I feel like when I think about my fellow students when I was an undergrad, a lot of them probably were pretty active, protesters and stuff. I went to Reed College. Reed College is, you know, I would consider it probably, you know, if not the, then one of the most liberal colleges in the country... a sizeable number of atheists and communists going to Reed. Our unofficial school motto was atheism, communism, and free love. Erin: Oh, really? Wow. Mark: Mmhmmm. And it totally shaped me. My undergrad years totally shaped me and my values and everything. Yeah, I don't know. So, at the same time, though, like, we can say all this, but I worry about my students. And I feel like some of them have no idea what's going on, and no sort of natural inclination to stay informed, right? Or to get informed. If you're just living your life, it isn't something that you, like if you haven't been... like if you don't have parents, or whatever, who've been instilling those values in you, or whatever, you're just living your life. It's not like you're making a point to watch news, and stuff like that, right? Yeah, I don't know. This is totally an aside, but I wonder if more people in their 20s these days are more woke now because they get their news from like Facebook and social media and stuff. Whereas when we were in college, you had to deliberately read a newspaper or watch the five o'clock news, you know what I mean? It isn't just like—you're not just inundated with news 24/7... Erin: Sure. Mark: ... like you are now. Now, it's just like you just can't avoid it. If you are on Facebook, then you just can't avoid news. Erin: Yeah. I was thinking—so when I was an undergraduate, which was 2004–2008, somewhere in there Facebook came along, but I don't remember, and I joined it pretty early as it was kind of becoming popular, but I don't remember seeing... the nature of what people was posting was mainly like pictures of themselves doing the duck lips and all that, you know; there wasn't as much even posts of political nature or as much news, but maybe I wasn't following them, I don't know. So, yeah. Mark: Now, I feel like, if you have a friend who is really informed, then you yourself are probably going to be informed as well because... Erin: Yeah, yeah. Mark: ... you're their friend, right? Whereas, back then—so a little bit with your time, but especially with time in the '90s—news came from specific news sources at specific times during the day. Erin: Mmhmm. Mark: I think that meant just a lot of people were disengaged, and just not consuming that news, you know? Unless they had cable, but if you had cable, you were probably watching Comedy Central rather than CNN, or whatever. Erin: Yeah. I think teaching mindfulness and teaching awareness of your emotional reactions to things, and also even learning to respond rather than react sometimes, could be a skill that could be taught in conjunction with, and I actually try to teach in conjunction with, digital literacies. So how we... understanding that fake news happens, but fake news is kind of fed by emotion, you know, as well as sometimes some of the conflicts that you see happening on social media, that type of thing. That's something that I think that I want to do more research on and work towards: bringing mindfulness and emotional literacy with digital literacy because fake news is a huge, huge problem. Mark: Yeah. Erin: Our culture right now—and I see this a lot whenever I go back to visit my parents in Minnesota—I'm in an area where I see a lot of rhetoric with signs like, "F— your feelings." [Mark changes his virtual background to the "This Is Fine" meme.] As well as, I see things on social media where people are mocking people as weak for having emotions, sorry what was that? Mark: Snowflakes. Erin: Yeah, snowflakes. Exactly. So, I think that teaching... again, mindfulness is a really powerful tool, particularly non-neoliberal versions of mindfulness, where you work with difficult emotions; you're curious about them. You're curious about the wisdom that they can have in them, including anger towards injustice or sadness about somebody who is suffering. So I think that at the same time, if you're going to teach students how to work with their emotions differently, you also then need to talk about the rhetoric of emotions and how—particularly with narratives around masculinity, where emotions are a sign of weakness or whatever, or shame—is going to take more than a unit on mindfulness to change some of those narratives about emotions, and where do those happen? Where... if you think about what classes kind of cover rhetorics of emotions, I don't really know. I don't think it's very common, but I think it needs to be, because it's a huge part of how we communicate about things, as well as how open we are to other people's ideas. If you're not aware of your own emotions when you're listening to someone who you disagree with, or, if you come from a place of a lot of privilege and you're listening to stories of people who experience racism or other forms of discrimination or violence, and you're uncomfortable with those, you're going to be resistant towards that. So there's a lot of literature about the pedagogy of discomfort, where it's like teaching people to be with emotions as a way of growing and learning and expanding our perspectives.

<table class="movie"><tr><td><div class="topleft"></td><td width="480"></td><td><div class="topright"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3" class="video-container" align="center"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ws5vJub9zJk?si=EQ2y94v4Cs7Gu2gs" title="Video of Erin and Mark answering the question How have students responded to your care-based teaching?" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></td></tr> <tr><td><div class="bottomleft"></td><td></td><td><div class="bottomright"></td></tr></table> [[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Start]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|I have some more questions...]] 5. [[Mark, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 6. [[Mark, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 7. [[Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 8. [[Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it?]] 9. [[Mark, can you tell us more about your course design?]] 10. How have students responded to your care-based teaching? Transcript Mark: So I teach about maybe a hundred students per quarter. I'll get maybe 10% of them, in a quarter, really, like one or two, who really, really let me know that they really appreciate how I set up the classes and everything, right? So I'm assuming that it's true for all these other students, for the 90 of them who don't tell me, you know? Because like, students generally just don't say anything. Erin: Yeah. Mark: It's not that they're apathetic, it's just that they don't feel, I don't know, there are various reasons, right? Like you could feel not agentive, or you could feel like it doesn't matter, or you could, like, whatever, right? But my course evaluations have been good, and there's a reflection that each student has to do at the end of the quarter, and those have been pretty good. But then, yeah, every quarter I have maybe two letters from students who get it, who really thank me because they totally get it; they're like, "I understand now. I understand that being supportive of people is why we're here," and things like that, right? So, you know, I teach in this design program. One of the letters I got this year with from this design student, who's like, "I get it now. I get the whole—you have to empathize with other people in order to be able to design for them, and I understand that step of the process better now" because apparently I opened their eyes in terms of considering the position, I guess, of other people, and not just focusing on your own thing. Erin: I've been thinking about, in terms of students' responses to my unit, one of the most exciting responses that I've seen is when students who were prompted to practice mindful listening, so being present with other people, being more empathetic, being curious, that type of thing, was seeing when they would describe doing that, like in their workplace, for instance. So a lot of my students are healthcare workers, so hearing about how they were interacting and a more mindful way with people who were going through really difficult times, but also how they got a reward from that, you know, that there's a reward from being empathetic, which I think helps reinforce the idea that our happiness is always interconnected with other people's happiness, too. So it's, I think, really heartening—it's been really heartening, I think—seeing those responses. Mark: Absolutely. It's like, the quickest way to happiness is to attend to the happiness of others, I think. Erin: Yeah. Mark: When you first started teaching, you already basically added that unit in, right? Has it changed over the last 2 years? Erin: Yeah, so I ended up actually doing a conference presentation where I reflected on how I realized—and partly I think it was a result of realizing, or remembering the things I'd written about with my dissertation about the interconnectedness of other people's happiness with your own happiness—I realized that even the term "self management" doesn't encourage a mindset of attending to your own emotions, attention, awareness, things like that in a more holistic way. So I think that, on top of, again, thinking about the realities of everything that was happening in the world and how we need to attend to those, I guess there's a lot out there with mindfulness; there's the term of "neoliberal mindfulness," or "neoliberal self care," where it's like, "positive vibes only" is the one that I see a lot. Or even, one of my students came up with at the end of the semester, one of the semesters, was like, "Oh, I found this really great meditation," and the meditation had sayings and it wasn't really even much of a meditation... with just like, "I imagine myself as wealthy," and "I imagine myself as this," you know, that kind of more individualistic version of self care. It treats even uncomfortable emotions that I think we should be feeling in response to things that are happening around the world as things to avoid or distract yourself [from]. So you have to be very, very careful of how you frame mindfulness, as well as which version of mindfulness you're going to adopt. So, I think there's some versions of mindfulness out there that are very, again, individualistic and not concerned with social justice issues, violence, things like that. I realize how much more I need to be intentional about not only not presenting that type of mindfulness, which I think I've always tried to do, but also literally calling up and pointing out to people, "Hey, there are these other versions of mindfulness that you're going to come across." So, if you didn't like the mindfulness exercises that I've offered, and you go exploring on your own, you almost need to practice a type of literacy with that to understand how these types of mindfulness are not supportive of a type of wellness that is holistic and is caring, based in kindness—kindness and compassion for other people. Mark: I think I kind of mirror that a little bit. In the last couple of years, the design courses I've been teaching have been more and more about... I guess designing for social justice type of ideas. Although it's probably too subtle. They are things I believe in, but I don't think I've been explicit enough in getting my students to think specifically about how you design for marginalized groups, or for accessibility, or something like that, or for fighting oppressive systems, or whatever. I think this past year, or this summer, I mean it's only been a month or so for summer, but I've done a lot of sort of thinking already, and talking to other colleagues and everything. I think next year, it's going to be the stuff that I teach, that I'm going to cover in my design courses are going to be much more explicit in terms of, how do you design for... Erin: Mmhmmm. Mark: ... people who don't have the power to express themselves or have their voices heard? How do you design for their voices? Yeah, it's just something... it's weird, because like, I feel like in academia, if you're not in a school that's about multicultural education, or like critical race theory, or something like that, you're not explicitly in one of those labels... Erin: Yeah, yeah. Mark: ... then it's hard to find space for that in some disciplines. Because you're just in charge of teaching a particular discipline or professional discipline, right? Erin: Yeah. Mark: I just need to cover this is how you make a mock-up of a web app. Erin: Right, yeah. Mark: It's not like they are inherently about social justice things, right? Erin: Yeah. Mark: The more I sort of have been teaching, the more I realize, that's not true. We should be injecting these things into everything. Erin: Mmhmm. Mark: And especially if we as people really believe these things, then we should try to get our beliefs into our curriculum so that at the end of the day you feel good about yourself because to be an educator means not just to pass knowledge on, but also to pass values on, I feel like. We have opinions, you know, about like, these are the values we should be having as a society, as a democratic society and everything. I think we have a duty to try and pass those values on. And there's this tension in U.S. schools, at least, that it's sort of downplayed because universities are more and more about trade schools, about like, we are just training people to go off and work at Amazon after they graduate, right? Instead of like, no, that's not what we should be concentrating on—we should be concentrating on let's make sure these are whole people... Erin: Right. Mark: ... by the time they graduate, so they can be participants in making the world better in terms of how we govern ourselves, and all that stuff. You can't do that if you only focus on math problems, right? Have the math problems for something. Erin: Because the purpose of a liberal education is to—I see it as a way of—there's a thing in rhetoric and writing that was written in 2011 that talks about habits of mind that was written by the Writing Program Administration, where it talks about things like curiosity, openness, metacognition, that type of thing (Council of Writing Program Administrators et al., 2011). And I think that it's partly... it's encouraging students to have those habits, where it's a way of responding and thinking about the world as well as the content that needs to come along with that, which I think happens over a lot of courses, which is getting exposure to different viewpoints, diverse scholars, diverse readings, that type of thing. But I think, too, when I think about what have I changed, and what do I want to change, I think that—I was thinking about—recently I've been revising my course in terms of its learning objectives, and I thought... could some of those be reframed to also incorporate the things that we're talking about here, as well as diversity and things like decolonialism, antiracism, that type of thing. As well as, I'm always trying to think about stories, like what stories are they exposed to? But also like you said, audiences, like who are they.... In that same professional writing skills class, I have a unit on redesigning a website. Well, I realized after you said that I could do something very similar, where it's like, be more intentional about who your audiences are, and seeking out audiences that you don't typically think about. But to do that, you also have to be empathetic, so you have to teach these things at the same time. Mark: [Mark changes his background to an office sitting room with "Welcome! Everything is fine" written on the wall.] Yeah, yeah. That makes me think of in my classes during the Zoom era, I would start each class basically asking... like, we would just do check-ins. So it's a little bit different because it's not the mindfulness or meditation or anything like that, but it's more like, just like, "Hey, how is your week? Is there anything that you want—anyone wants—to talk about before I start recording?" Erin: Mmhmm. That's a good idea. Mark: And, like, for a couple of quarters, or a couple of classes it worked really well, and there are some students who are willing to share, or just talk about stuff. And for some of them, we just talked like about whatever, like we watched a cool movie or whatever, right? There are a couple of times when a student would really take the time to just share something super vulnerable, I feel like. And I'm kind of amazed when that happened because what would compel a student to share that and be vulnerable? And all the other classes that didn't happen in, and I think it doesn't happen because why would you open up to a whole bunch of strangers, right? So it's hit or miss, I guess is what I'm saying, but I've been thinking about that and thinking about, "How can I make it more hit than miss? Or how can I make it more seen as an opportunity for students to take advantage of?" I guess. But I haven't really pushed it or explored other things I could be doing because part of me is also like, "Well, they know it's there, and if they ever need it, they can do something, but they don't have to, right? And maybe none of the students in this particular class need that space." Right? So I just haven't really done anything with it, oh, other than just say, "Hey, does anyone want to talk about anything?" But maybe I should be a little bit more intentional; maybe I should be more like, you know, incorporate it more explicitly with the things I'm trying to do with good teamwork, and frame things like, okay, "One of the things that I think is going to make our society—our world—better, is if we have more people caring about each other, and so, what I'm going to do at the beginning of every class is set aside at least 5 minutes where we just take a moment and calm down and just reflect on the past week, and share anything that you want." Right? Like maybe I need to frame it that way to make it much more of an explicit, like, "We're doing this deliberately." And then hearing about what you do is making me think that, maybe I should do this. Erin: I think it's interesting because I have a friend who, we've kind of talked about how to improve both of our listening skills, and I was trying to explain that sometimes you have to keep being curious when you're in a conversation with someone, but that it's—you have to keep going with the flow and how that doesn't feel comfortable at first, and it can be scary, almost. But, also, it takes practice, I think, and so I'm thinking about, "How can I create exercises for students to practice being in that mode of being the curious one?" Almost like you're interviewing someone, but you're kind of exercising your curiosity of what they're saying to kind of keep conversation going. And I'm wondering what that might be like for students to practice that. I know some of them would probably get super anxious to do that, but at the same time, I think it's a really, really important—listening in general is really, really important skill, and I think one that we can practice in the writing classroom.

[[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Move on...]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|More questions!]] 11. [[Erin, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 12. [[What's challenging about the university disciplines in teaching about self-society care?]] 13. [[How can you maximize your touchpoint with students beyond just one course?]] 14. [[Mark, how many people read your emails?]] 15. [[How do you foster community with your students?]]

[[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|I have some more questions...]] [[NEXT QUESTION SET ↣|Final questions...]] 16. [[What is the importance of community for mental health?]] 17. [[Erin, do you repeat the same anecdotes across different classes?]] 18. [[Erin, how do you help students manage the stress and suffering that comes from impermanence?]] 19. [[Mark, how have you helped students manage the stress and suffering that comes from impermanence?]] 20. [[Who do you write the letters for, and what is your writing process?]]

[[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|More questions!]] [[THANKS FOR THE INTERVIEW! ↣|Thanks for the interview!]] 21. [[Erin, how many and which classes do you teach with the mindfulness unit?]] 22. [[How do you encourage students to be curious and caring about one another?]] 23. [[What is the relationship between self-awareness, awareness of others, and care?]]

Thanks for taking the time to surf through our interactive interview videos! :) <table class="movie"><tr><td><div class="topleft"></td><td width="480"></td><td><div class="topright"></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3" class="video-container" align="center"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OeDhd4mDsYY?si=ezwDe1Fmxn-bo4Z5" title="Video of Erin and Mark giving thanks!" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></td></tr> <tr><td><div class="bottomleft"></td><td></td><td><div class="bottomright"></td></tr></table> [[↢ PREV QUESTION SET|Final questions...]] [[GO BACK TO START ↣|init]] Transcript Mark: Thanks for listening to us. We are, you know, really happy to share these things that we've been doing. I think the common thing is that we feel, as people, we feel compelled to get these things off our chest, and I think it's because somehow we feel like we have a responsibility to other people, and we're trying to get more people like us. Erin: I feel very privileged and honored to be in this space of <cite>Kairos</cite>, as well, so thank you, to the editors as well, and anyone else involved in creating that space for us, because I think even having this space for interviews and conversations like these is important, perhaps especially during these times, so yeah, thank you, and thank you everyone for listening, too. Ahhhhh. [Jazz hands and chuckles]

<div class="head"><table> <tr> <td colspan="4" style="background-color: #1f3864;"><h1>Care-Based Pedagogies During the Pandemic: Letters, Meditations, and Reflections</h1><style="background-color: #1f3864;"><h2>By Erin Schaefer and Mark Chen</h2> </tr> <tr class="menu"> <td>[[About]]</td> <td>[[Project Home|init]]</td> <td>[[View All Interview Questions]]</td> <td>[[Thanks]]</td> </tr> </table> </div>

<h2>About</h2> We (Erin Schaefer and Mark Chen), met at the 2018 Meaningful Play Conference at Michigan State University, after which we friended one another on Facebook, where Mark started sharing <a href="https://markdangerchen.net/letters/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">letters to his students</a> in spring 2020. Erin was inspired by Mark's letters; they reflected on important issues like the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Capitol Insurrection, and Asian hate, all while expressing and calling for collective care. In spring 2020, when Mark sent his first letter to students, Erin was writing her dissertation on how mind–body state literacies could support more relational thinking, which she finished during her first semester of teaching at Indiana University Northwest in fall 2020. This research helped her develop a unit on self-management in her professional writing skills course, a course open to all majors. Largely inspired by her students' stories about social justice, Erin continued to revise her unit to more fully incorporate relationality and society care, ultimately transforming the unit from one centered on self-management to one of self-society care. Erin reached out to Mark in spring 2022 to discuss possibly doing a co-interview for <cite>Kairos</cite>. Erin wanted to learn the background of Mark's letters, as well as how students received them. In what was meant to be an informal discussion about the possibility of a co-interview, we ended up having a rather meaningful conversation, finding several points of commonality, as well as inspiration, from one another's pedagogies. Out of this initial conversation, we developed a series of questions about our teaching, our students, current events, technology, social justice, and mental health. The recurring themes throughout our interview are ones of care, social awareness, and social justice. Both proponents of mental health, we advocate for pedagogies and practices that view individual and collective well-being as interconnected. <h3>Erin Schaefer</h3> <img src="images/erin.png" class="biopic" alt="Erin Schaefer" />Erin Schaefer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University Northwest. She does interdisciplinary research on listening, mindfulness, narrative, pedagogy, and multimodal composition. While earning her doctorate at Michigan State University, she was a University Distinguished Fellow and Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Teaching Fellow. Her article, "Using Neurofeedback and Mindfulness Pedagogies to Teach Open Listening," received an honorable mention for the Ellen Nold Award for Best Article in <cite>Computers in Composition</cite> in 2019. <h3>Mark Chen</h3> <img src="images/mark.png" class="biopic" alt="Mark Chen" />Mark Chen is an independent games scholar and part-time professor of interactive media, qualitative research, and games for social good, most recently at the University of Washington Bothell. He oversees <a href="https://esotericgaming.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">EsotericGaming.com</a>, an alternative publication outlet that celebrates gaming diversity through detailed accounts of arcane and marginal gaming practices. Mark also wrote <cite>Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft</cite>, an ethnographic account of how a new team learned to excel through the use of game mods and then died in a fiery meltdown catalyzed by the same mods. In a previous life, Mark was a webmaster and game designer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

1. [[Can you tell me a bit about yourselves?]] 2. [[How do you two know each other?]] 3. [[What do you do for enjoyment outside of academia?]] 4. [[What have you been doing during the pandemic?]] 5. [[Mark, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 6. [[Mark, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 7. [[Erin, what have you done during the pandemic to support your students' mental health?]] 8. [[Are students more aware now than they were in previous generations, and how has tech affected it?]] 9. [[Mark, can you tell us more about your course design?]] 10. [[How have students responded to your care-based teaching?]] 11. [[Erin, how has your teaching changed as a result of the pandemic?]] 12. [[What's challenging about the university disciplines in teaching about self-society care?]] 13. [[How can you maximize your touchpoint with students beyond just one course?]] 14. [[Mark, how many people read your emails?]] 15. [[How do you foster community with your students?]] 16. [[What is the importance of community for mental health?]] 17. [[Erin, do you repeat the same anecdotes across different classes?]] 18. [[Erin, how do you help students manage the stress and suffering that comes from impermanence?]] 19. [[Mark, how have you helped students manage the stress and suffering that comes from impermanence?]] 20. [[Who do you write the letters for, and what is your writing process?]] 21. [[Erin, how many and which classes do you teach with the mindfulness unit?]] 22. [[How do you encourage students to be curious and caring about one another?]] 23. [[What is the relationship between self-awareness, awareness of others, and care?]] 24. [[Thanks for the interview!]]

this is wip for prev and next question set buttons <table style="background-color: #dbd7b4; width: 60%;"><tr><td style="background-color: #3c5f76; width: 33%; text-align: center;"><div class="qbutton"> <-- Previous Question Set</div></td><td style="background-color: #dbd7b4; width: 33%;"> </td><td style="background-color: #3c5f76; width: 33%; text-align: center;"><div class="qbutton">Next Question Set --> </div></td></tr> </table>

<h2>Acknowledgments</h2> <h3>From Erin</h3> I am grateful, first and foremost, to Mark Chen for making this project possible. I have realized during the pandemic and in my academic and personal work on mindfulness that connection is critical to my mental health as well as my capacity to care. As I conveyed in the interview, I found connection difficult to achieve while growing up, largely as a result of the self-doubt and lack of trust that resulted from my encounters with prejudice and aggression. This conversation allowed me to talk about my personal experiences and desire for connection in a space where I felt listened to and validated. Our conversations, along with Mark's letters, will continue to inspire me for a long time. I am also grateful for the creativity and work that he has put into this project, which has surmounted numerous bumps in the road. Thank you, Mark. I am also grateful for my colleagues at Indiana University Northwest, particularly those in my department, who have made me feel at home. Their support during my transition there has been unbelievable. To my mentors at Michigan State University, thank you for your support during my time there and beyond; you've opened many doors necessary to achieving my dream job. To my friends—new and old—thank you for loving me as I am and supporting me through difficult times. To my family—you are my heart. A special thanks to Mom and Eleanor, my best friends for life. <h3>From Mark</h3> I am eternally grateful for my collaborator, Erin Schaefer, who saw my unusual emails and thought that they had value and could be used to enable reflection and learning for our teaching practice. Erin's thoughtful eye and mind bolstered my nascent ideas that this was something that could support students and others in academia. Her ability to connect our two separate practices was insightful and extremely helpful to me in understanding my own practice and how I could improve it. This came at a time that was enormously supportive for me since I was receiving some pushback from my then-home institution. Without Erin, this project never would have come to be, and I am thankful that she made time for it even during her ongoing health issues. Erin, we gotta support each other and recognize that we're all human and doing our best. Sometimes that best is really, really awesome, too, you know? Also, huge appreciation and love for all my students past and present, and I'm looking forward to the future!