Z Nicolazzo, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Arizona
Throughout the past two years, I have found myself periodically returning to a piece Alexander Chee (2020) wrote for The New York Times. In it, Chee discusses the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS epidemic. When the piece was first published, I remember taking a long walk with a friend and talking about it. We both had vivid memories and personal connections to AIDS and were both trying to make sense of what was happening globally as COVID-19 ripped through communities. In one especially heart-rending moment in the column, Chee recounts a conversation with a friend who, in response to the rising death toll, shared, “‘I’m acknowledging them [the deaths], but I’m not feeling them, just like the old days. …That comes later’” (para. 8).
That conversation between Chee and his friend was two months into the pandemic. We’re now over two years in, which would seem to signal we are in that “later” period. And yet, I am still unsure whether education—as a broader field as well as at individual institutions—has made much of an effort to feel the grief wrought by the pandemic.
Less than six months after the national lockdowns brought on by the initial wave of COVID cases, my mother passed away. She did not die from COVID, but her loss provided a terrifying example of what a dear friend described to me as the unmetabolizability of grief. Less than a month before she passed, my mother had told me she had cancer and was engaging in palliative care. Us being on opposite sides of the country, her being 70, and our being in what we thought at the time was the “height of the pandemic” meant fast travel was complicated. Although we planned for me to travel to the Northeast, quarantine, and then spend a couple of weeks with her as soon as we could, my trip home ended up being one to settle her affairs and spread her ashes.
This morning, when I returned again to Chee’s commentary in the Times, I thought across these waves of grief. AIDS, COVID, and the loss of my mother continue to be as ever-present as they are unmetabolizable. And yet, in the rush to find and herald cures, or “go back to normal,” or not feel devastated, so many of us—myself included—have refused to feel the continually rising death toll. So many of us—myself included—have been unable to reconcile the ghosts moving through our educational spaces. So many of us—myself included—continue to be unsettled by how unsettling our collective grief may make us. So many of us acknowledge the deaths, but do not feel them. After all, that will come later.
I’m trying hard, though, to feel that later now. As a faculty member, I keep wondering: how can the unmetabolizable grief I am experiencing—indeed, that we are experiencing collectively—tell us about what we need here? How can our being broken through grief and loss be a signal for modes of educational praxis? How can grief usher in a sense of softness, both toward ourselves and others, that has long been missing in a field that continues to turn more fully toward an objective, standards-based practice?
As I look toward the next academic year, I am realizing I need to reset toward a grief-based pedagogy. Not only do I need to be gentler with the students I am in learning partnership with (Baxter Magolda & King, 2004), but I need to be gentler with myself, too. And here, I do not mean to suggest gentleness as an antonym of intellectual depth. Instead, I want to keep thinking about how I live a pedagogical practice of focusing on education as a blending of content and process. And, in being gentle, and not feeding into the crushingly inhuman(e) consequences of a more, more, more mentality, I want to invite students to sit with how they are feeling. Not only do I want them to do this feeling work in relation to the work we are engaging together, but I also want to be in feeling community with students. How is what is swirling around us, the barrage of rhetorical and actualized violence and harm, creating an affective field with which we must stay present? What, too, might it mean to invite students to take grief days? Similar to how we encourage students to stay home when they are sick, I am recognizing there are days during which the weight of my grief makes me inconsolable. When I have tried to “push through”—because I’ve learned to think about “dealing” with grief as always something that happens in the future, that happens “later”—it rarely ends up well for me or the people with whom I am in community.
I’m far from concrete answers to what a pedagogy of grief may fully mean…and also, I am uncertain that certainty is the “point.” Just as grief is unmetabolizable and requires one to rest with its altering nature, I am realizing the same needs to be the case with what grief means for our work in education (Nicolazzo, In press). That is, I am more compelled by resting gently with grief, thinking and feeling what it may mean for my own practice in and beyond the classrooms I am in, and being open to the ebbs, flows, and changes grief provides, often unexpectedly. And, most importantly, I want (all of us) to start now rather than wait for later.
References
Baxter Magolda, M., & King, P. M. (Eds.). (2004). Learning partnerships: Theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship. Stylus.
Chee, A. (2020, June 18). In this pandemic, personal echoes of the AIDS crisis. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/us/coronavirus-aids-epidemic-lessons.html?searchResultPosition=2.
Nicolazzo, Z. (In press). Sitting shiva with grief. About Campus.
About the Author
Z Nicolazzo (she/her) is an associate professor of Trans* Studies in Education in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. Her scholarship engages discourses on gender in education, the enduring reality of transmisogyny as central to the project of the University, and qualitative methodological practice. Her book-length scholarly contributions include Trans in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion (Stylus, 2017), Weaving an Otherwise: In-Relations Methodological Practice (co-edited with Amanda Tachine; Stylus, 2022), and Digital Me: Trans Students Exploring Future Possible Selves Online (co-authored with Alden C. Jones and Sy Simms; Rutgers University Press, 2023). Following the death of her mother in late 2020, her work has shifted to explore the affective contours of grief and loss.
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