I have been teaching in higher education for 25 years this year. During that time, I have worked with students who increasingly report anxieties about life that feel overwhelming and insurmountable. During that same time frame, I have gently teased my own children and students in my classes about their rising anxieties, assuring them that nothing bad has ever really happened to them. And while this was technically true considering the last 30 years from the frame of all of human history, I have now been proven very wrong.
During the last two semesters, I have had the opportunity to eat my words and to wrestle with my own concerns about the future while also holding the learning opportunities of students in balance with their legitimate anxieties and concerns. Thank goodness Jennie Erdle prepared me for this! A couple of years ago, well before we thought we’d need it, Jennie sent out a link to an episode of a podcast called “On Purpose.” The episode featured an interview with cognitive scientist Laurie Santos. I have been following Santos’ work ever since.
Santos now has her own podcast – “Happiness Lab” – and in the introduction, she gets to the heart of what I find most useful about her work in terms of maintaining balance for myself and encouraging learning for the students in my classes. Our minds lie to us. When we are in stressful situations, the default ways our brains work often make it more difficult to thrive, and yet exploring this human reality is one pathway out of the problem. The explorations Santos offers come from disciplines across the curriculum: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and more. The work even ventures occasionally into spiritual and religious traditions. Each discipline and tradition, though, coalesces around a similar idea. The starting point is recognition of where we actually are and getting curious about how we might respond.
As we struggle through a series of colliding crises that most of us have not been well-prepared for, I recommend the work of Laurie Santos to you as a set of tools for offering students a way into the uncomfortable experience of learning precisely when we are all trying so hard to find anything that feels comfortable and stable. And if you are interested in discussing Santos’ work, please reach out! We can meet on Webex and start our conversation by marveling at the fact that we are meeting on Webex. Then we can get curious together about where we might go next.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
