“Unstickiness and Emotions in the Classroom”
“historically, the U.S. classroom privileges rationality over emotion and, as we bring students into our courses, we implicitly and sometimes explicitly ask them to learn how to “gain distance” in order to learn. But this move –one I’d taken for granted for years– means that students who feel particularly affected by a topic like the physical and epistemic violence against people of color in the U.S. must do much more work to manage their emotions while other students skate easily into “rationality.” Or as Dian Million puts it, speaking of indigenous feminist scholarship, “academia repetitively produces gatekeepers to our entry into important social discourses because we feel our histories as well as think them” (her emphasis). Million makes the vital case that, to decolonize our knowledge production, we cannot divorce understanding from feeling.”
Yes yes yes yes yes. I have become very good at gliding past my feelings. Sometimes I have serious, emotional conversations with friends and they get confused and upset because I don’t seem affected (if the conversation is about their emotions), or come off as super clinical and disinterested (if it is about my emotions).
I would love to see a study about POC who grew up and went to school with mostly white people, and our ability to communicate emotion in the moment.
