A pedagogy of care
[Image description: Screenshot of a map of Vanderbilt University’s campus with colorful pins dropped to indicate specific locations. Green pins indicate where students feel cared for, purple pins indicate where students feel well, orange pins indicate where students feel unwell, and red pins indicate where students do not feel cared for. Some pins are densely congregated in one area of campus while others are spread across.]
Maggie Mang’s project on care politics and a pedagogy of care involves developing pedagogical components that actively center notions of care and unwellness inside the classroom. These pedagogical components take inspiration from Mimi Khúc’s Open in Emergency (OiE), a special issue of the Asian-American Literary Review. OiE is an arts- and humanities-based intervention into mental health, manifest in dozens of collaborations from artists and scholars contributing work relating to Asian-American mental health. OiE also includes a teaching component; these pedagogical components are designed to work with the materials found within OiE, but to also to use OiE as a springboard for rethinking ways that an engagement with care can be attentively introduced into the classroom. Current ideas involve a ‘Map of Unwellness / Care’, which asks students to map out locations on campus where they feel unwell / well, and cared for / not cared for on campus; forthcoming blog posts on the process of pedagogical and curriculum design; and activities that work with notions of unwellness using arts-, humanities-, and design-based approaches. This project begins with, but does not end with, the materials found within OiE. Beyond the materials designed to teach OiE to undergraduate students, this project also begins to theorize the place of care (and what forms this care takes on) within academic walls and the classroom space, and what an attention to care could look like for students.