Teaching With Tenderness

the displacement of the body into sex effectively silences the potential of the body on other grounds.”

both living bodies and those of our ancestors since our DNA and memories live in each other.

What if our work as teachers is to find our own tenderness and then help create sacred spaces so students can feel tenderness, too?

Tenderness asks us to consider big things—our relationship to technology, to space, to time.

is a way of living that requires self-study at every juncture—how

Teaching with tenderness, it turns out, involves a promise we make to each other, and a way of living, requiring consistent and radical acts of self-care.

What kind of teaching do we need to do so that students feel that deeply connected to each other, so that we know that if you poison one person, you poison all of us?

When I am most likely to feel tenderness in the classroom, and outside of it, is when there is no speech, when silence has taken over, when fear or awe or simplicity or death or birth has reduced us to a shared quiet.

“When I teach Black Intellectual History, I understand that I am teaching to the students in the room and all of their ancestors. We are all there. On tender ground.”