Prepared to Be Nowhere Else: Her Voice at the Table Launches a New School Year
Be here; be prepared to be nowhere else.
We began Her Voice at the Table nearly four years ago with the mission to consider how we can teach writing and reading in ways that not only build our student writers’ critical thinking and communication skills but also support their overall wellness. What, we asked ourselves, are the intersections of writing and well-being? We knew our colleagues both in and out of the English Department had been doing intentional, innovative work in this area, and we wanted to create a space to spotlight their ideas. Featuring voices outside our department was of particular importance to us because writing is not and should never be the sole province of English; this line of thinking limits not only what writing is but also students’ perspectives on where, when, or why we write.
In Kate’s opening piece for this blog back in December 2020, “The Promise of Writing,” she frames our purpose, recalling her epiphany that there must be a connection between writing and student well-being: “our students,” she writes, “need their academic pursuits to have meaning and support their growth as people, not just students in various content-areas.” The classroom skills they develop should of course help them to think more deeply, to analyze more closely, and to write with more clarity, but they should also help students navigate obstacles, cultivate voice and agency, build community, and, as Xiomara in the Poet X might say, exercise “volition.” So “how,” Kate poses, “do you take a nebulous and vague term like ‘wellness’ and make it tangible and explicitly linked to instruction?” How can reading and writing help build the well-being competencies of resiliency, empathy, self-expression, and a growth mindset?
Four years later, we are still asking ourselves similar kinds of questions, but our context has shifted from the immediacy of the pandemic to its lingering aftereffects, a cultural context where cellphones and social media still loom large and where research on their negative consequences has grown more extensive and even more dire. In May 2023, for example, the US Surgeon General released a rather alarming report on loneliness and isolation in the United States, indicating that half of adults and nearly 73% of young people ages 16-24 struggle with loneliness. Add to this conversation Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, a study that emphasizes just how dramatically social media and online gaming have shifted how we—and young people in particular—think and experience the world. Haidt reminds us that girls have been more affected than boys but that both suffer from increasing amounts of sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and loneliness. Our anecdotal experiences in the classroom echo much of Haidt’s and others’ research, particularly our students’ shortened attention spans.
Four years later, we are still asking ourselves similar kinds of questions, but our context has shifted from the immediacy of the pandemic to its lingering aftereffects, a cultural context where cellphones and social media still loom large and where research on their negative consequences has grown more extensive and even more dire.
But, like Haidt, we are not going to wallow in the gloom and doom of it all because we also know that young people are resilient and that with intentional action, our classrooms and curriculum can play a role in countering some of these effects. Over the course of this year, we hope to continue playing with and sharing some of the specific ways we are putting these ideas into action and to continue featuring student voices, giving them a space to speak for themselves about the roles of reading and writing.
Walking into in-service a few weeks ago, our school’s word of the year–Encounter–was writ large, a nod to how our school, too, is aware of this research and our students’ lived experiences. So, for our first post of the new academic year, we each want to reflect on how words like encounter but also attention, listening, and presence are guiding us as we enter our classrooms.
For me, these focus words perhaps couldn’t have come at a better time. While Covid may have been a temporary pause or reset in terms of our distracted attention spans, a few years later, many of us are back to a schedule that has somehow been amplified by all of the apps that theoretically emerged to help us stay connected. In a single day, for example, I receive notifications from at least seven different communications and sports apps—not including the countless email, text, or social media pings. I know I am not alone in this sea of binary code; my students—even more so than me—are overloaded. In just the past week, I have heard repeated variations of: “I hate having my laptop open for every class—it gives me a headache,” “I appreciate Ms. ____’s class because she gives us space to be quiet and think," “Can I just write my answers in my journal and not the laptop?” and “I love that most of my classes have journals this year; I think better on paper.” Out of the mouths of babes.
I am grateful to be surrounded by colleagues, including the Her Voice at the Table team, who not only model how I can be more present but who also have an endless supply of creative ways to help our students practice being more present too. Their reflections below offer additional context for why and how the desire to be here–in this moment, nowhere else–are so essential to us this school year.
– Megan
Kate:
This summer I got my butt kicked.
Maybe this sounds a little punchy for a teaching blog, but I don’t know how else to say it.
It’s not unusual for me to write about my anxiety in Her Voice at the Table, but I have rarely delved into my health anxiety. Chronic anxiety manifests differently for all of us and mine often shows up as hyper-vigilance about potential threats to my health. So when I got the news that my social work graduate program assigned me to a pediatric orthopedic hospital for 480 hours of advanced internship over the summer semester, it was news I needed to hear sitting down. The great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, once said that the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek. Well, this English teacher, who has quoted Mr. Campbell many times while studying the hero’s journey in a safe and cozy classroom, was about to get her chance at some treasure: the hospital was my cave, and I was totally afraid.
On my first day I shadowed a colleague in the pediatric spina bifida clinic, which as a social work intern meant shadowing my supervisor and going room to room to counsel with patients and their families about their needs, ranging from medical transportation to catheter assistance. I met about ten people in the first five minutes, from the lead doctor to nurses to child life specialists. I think my supervisor saw the look on my face and said, “Now you know how our families feel.”
At one point, midway through my internship, I sat with my mom at dinner. My nerves were on edge and I was drained, probably in part because my internship was challenging me on so many emotional levels. Health care work is not easy in any possible way. Patients are real people navigating complicated medical diagnoses, often while uninsured and in their non-native language. I looked at my mom and just said, my anxiety is so high that I feel scared. And my mom, whom I have only seen cry maybe five times in my life, said some simple and important words to me: well, I don’t blame you. You have every reason to feel that way. We are all a little scared.
This graceful extension of empathy changed the course of my summer because I finally started giving myself a break. But this was only possible because of my community–my mom. I would not have arrived at this peace without her. She didn’t say, don’t be afraid, which would have also been acceptable and welcome advice. Instead, she stood beside me in my fear, which is the textbook definition of empathy. I am not, as it turns out, my own strange island. Other people are afraid sometimes, just like me.
So as I begin a new school year I am focusing on community and all the strength we bring to each other as an antidote for my anxiety, and even my fear. Most educators would tell you they are always thinking of their students’ experiences in their classrooms and maybe also tell you that focusing on classroom community is obvious. But I actually contend it is not; we are all lulled into patterns of thinking and comfort quite easily, and it’s refreshing to reconsider what community looks like now. What do our students need in 2024? What does connection in a digital age look like? How did the pandemic change us?
In May, I changed up my student feedback surveys a bit by asking my students one thing they wish adults on our campus would know. Many of the answers including reference to attention and technology:
I wish all adults understood how much stress we are really put under. In school and especially in society. I feel like every day the stress of matching the perfect societal image gets worse and worse, especially for girls, and it takes a toll on you.
I think adults should be aware of the fragile mental state of most teenagers, and I think it is important that they try to understand and accept that there will be good and bad days for people.
It takes a lot of effort to get us to focus but once you grab our attention you have it.
I think adults should know that we care about learning. Oftentimes, the reason why we may be unenthusiastic is because we are experiencing burnout or we do not feel like we are in a healthy learning environment.
We are really hooked with technology so it’s fun to do things that don't involve a computer.
After some meditation I realized that the comments my students made on their surveys apply to me as well. Adults spend a lot of time talking about what social media is doing to children, but gosh, what is it doing to us? Lately I have felt scattered mentally, and I frequently refer to a “brain fog” that I didn’t used to have. I feel like I can’t really pay attention and listening to others feels more strained than I would like. In other words, I am as addicted to distraction as my students are.
This year, my goal is to look closely at my own patterns of attention and make a few changes in my habits and my rituals. I want to spend far less time on social media and have more in-person conversations instead. I want to listen when someone is speaking to me, put my phone away when I am driving, read some books I have always wanted to read, and generally consume less of other people’s thoughts and lives and more of my own. And as I make these changes, perhaps I will open up space in my mind and imagination to think about belonging in my classroom. So often in the past I have thought of myself as separate, and that community-building is something I do for my students. But maybe it’s time to see myself in this equation as well.
Caitlin:
We are four classes into this school year and for lack of a better phrase, I feel like a chicken running around with my head cut off. Most mornings, I send a quick video update to two of my teacher friends, and I find this message often devolves into a list of the things on my plate for the day, and then me closing saying I don’t only want to talk about how busy I am. I’m sick of being busy! However–if I, an adult, with a fully formed brain–am having a hard time being present, I cannot imagine the challenges for today’s young people. Many have after-school and/or weekend jobs, school sports, traveling club sports, volunteering, outside tutoring (both being tutored and being the tutor), participating in clubs, the constant draw of social media, ACT/ SAT prep, keeping up with the it reality tv show (Love Island now, I think?), and I haven’t even gotten to classes and homework yet!
So, I’m grateful for this blog and community where we can pause for a moment and think about how to construct classrooms, curricula, and cultures that support well-being. And like Kate mentioned, not just for students, let’s include teachers in the equation, too!
Writing is such a powerful well-being tool. In each of my history classes this year, I ask students to bring a journal so we can start each class with a handwritten freewrite. Mostly they are to think through the skills of history or reflect on prior class learning. But yesterday all of my classes (and me!) wrote about what we are grateful for as we start the year together. Additionally this year, I want to work with students to get them to realize the people who write history are just that–people. By humanizing the authors of their textbook and the authors of articles we’ll read, I hope I can help them be more attentive and present to material that feels otherwise distant. History teachers talk a lot about historical empathy for the characters of the past–I want to bring this into the present to include the folks who produce the history we read. I guess in short my goal this year is to humanize history. Stay tuned for future, more logical musings on what this means.
For now, though, I’m home with a sick baby, moved four meetings this morning to stay home with said kiddo, am behind on lesson planning, and need to review the 60 student responses to my start of year getting to know you survey. But–I don’t want to only talk about how busy I am! So I’m looking forward to being part of the fourth year here at Her Voice at the Table, and creating the space and time to slow down and be more attentive and present through writing.
Jess:
As I sit down to write this post, the irony is not lost on me that it took me over a week and multiple deadline reminders to find the time and space to actually get it done. “Write HVaTT draft” prominently appears on my collection of To-Do lists, from a hot pink Post-It to the Reminders app prioritized in date order and color-coded on my phone, among a myriad of other things, many of which are scratched off, and yet here I am, post-deadline, finally making some time–office blinds drawn, door closed, Teams chats muted–to write.
As I hunker down, I start to think about writing in and of itself and why I have such a love-hate relationship with it; like why isn’t this blog post the first thing I ticked off the list as I scour the other mundane items enthusiastically checked, like “complete Safe Environment training + quiz” (for the eighteenth time in my life)?? There is so much to love about writing–the creative process, the word play, the coming together of ideas, the immense satisfaction of a piece reaching the reader. But there’s a flipside to all of this, which makes it so hard for me, and many others I imagine. Writing requires presence, an energy that blocks out “the noise,” both external and internal, to just be with the thoughts and the words to make sense of it all; hence, the proverbial isolation tank necessary for me to get the job done.
Writing requires presence, an energy that blocks out “the noise,” both external and internal, to just be with the thoughts and the words to make sense of it all; hence, the proverbial isolation tank necessary for me to get the job done.
It’s no secret that we are all engulfed by the “noise” of life–family, jobs, bills, social media, the nightly news, the list goes on…and there are times when the noise is undoubtedly louder than others. I think most educators will agree that the beginning of a school year is many wonderful things, and also very, very noisy…like deafening.
So when we started the school year with the theme of Encounter, a call for our community to come together and truly be with one another, to pay attention to the small moments where we are in communion and being our most human, fostering and nurturing connection, whether that be with others, or with ourselves, or with our faith, the noise got a little a softer. I was drawn in and inspired; this idea of encounter was offering me the power to be in control of the volume, rather than the volume controlling me. And I had such good intentions leaving that in-service session, ready to be present, until I got sucked right back into the busyness, the urgency, the various roles and the responsibilities of life.
Yet once again, I find myself grateful for this passion project and creative outlet that Her Voice at the Table is for me and my fellow Voicers, because its very existence over the last four years has provided us with over eighty true encounters with ourselves, our colleagues, and our students to bring each post to the table and offer it to the reader as another opportunity for communion. And I am struck by the fact that, while I beat myself up for struggling to mute the noise of life on most days, perhaps being present isn’t only about being “in the moment,” but it’s also carving out other opportunities to pause, reflect, and make sense of it all; a revelation that became evident to me by scrolling through the immense body of work that is Her Voice at the Table.
Cheers to four years!! In this moment, I set the intention to relish the encounters with the Her Voice at the Table team and the other voices that pull up a chair this school year. I think it’s easy to prioritize the noise as it bullies its way to the top of all of our To Do lists, but it’s these moments, hidden away in the office with a cup of tea and my thoughts, that truly give life meaning.
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