Embodiment, emotions, belonging, becoming: Whole human pedagogy for education abroad programs

• In Event: Journeys of Transformation and Strategy: An Insightful Exploration of Educational Approaches, International Higher Education, and EA Perspectives in a Global Context

Proposal

Summary:
This paper presents a novel conceptual framework, “Whole Human Pedagogy,” which draws on Thompson’s tenderness pedagogy (2017) and hooks’ engaged pedagogy (1994; 2010) to increase well-being and justice through the development and implementation of education abroad programs.

Relevance:
Education abroad presents a unique opportunity to intentionally emphasize human learning in praxis. Walking between a guesthouse and a metro station, breathlessly hiking high-altitude grasslands, sharing the presence of host siblings, or making and eating traditional foods are all examples of human learning. These experiences are, perhaps, profoundly meaningful, spiritual, intellectual, or analytic; they have the potential to lead students to live a knowing life in ways more expansive than the prescriptive standards of the dominant academic culture. This paper argues that education abroad has the potential to epitomize transformative education if the field continues to imagine new ways of being and learning. To do so, this paper presents a novel framework for analyzing pedagogical practices based on whole human learning.

Theory/Context:
Freire (1970) names dehumanization, “a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human,” as a primary facet of oppression that affects both marginalized and privileged populations (p. 44). Additionally, decolonial scholars like Stein (2022) critique the hegemony of modern, Western higher education for maintaining colonized, dehumanized conceptions of knowing, relating, and being. Thus, reimagining epistemological, relational, and ontological learning in ways that center humanness constitutes a strategy for emphasizing equity beyond just inclusion and decolonizing education abroad praxis.

Inquiry:
In Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Teaching Critical Thinking (2010), bell hooks describes her own “engaged pedagogy,” a progressive, holistic education that emphasizes student wellbeing and critical thinking as it “aims to restore students’ will to think, and their will to be fully self-actualized” (2010, p. 8). A core emphasis on the wellbeing of both students and teachers distinguishes hooks’ engaged pedagogy from other forms of critical or feminist pedagogies.
Thompson’s Teaching with Tenderness (2017) presents a justice-engaged pedagogy that incorporates bodily awareness and spirituality. Thompson’s (2017) writing illustrates an intersection between contemplative practice, multiracial feminism, and trauma studies, and emphasizes that intellectual, spiritual, and political growth all start in the body. Inviting bodies to learning, thus, becomes the emphasis of Thompson’s approach.
There are several areas where tenderness pedagogy and engaged pedagogy overlap: most importantly, both understand teachers and students as whole human beings. This takeaway has the potential to change the way we think about education abroad.

Findings:
Whole human pedagogy asks: How might educators imagine a pedagogy that centers integrated humanness instead of compartmentalization? And how might education abroad be an opportune place to make that shift? To address these questions, whole human pedagogy articulates four tenets of whole human learning practice: embodiment, emotions, belonging, and becoming.

Embodiment
Embodiment asserts that bodies can play significant roles in learning, wellbeing, and justice, and seeks to reclaim embodied epistemologies as valuable. Additionally, embodiment attends to the positionality of bodies and the knowledge that different bodies—queer, disabled, Black bodies, etc.—hold different levels of institutionalized “acceptability” and trauma of disembodiment. In the context of education abroad, embodiment includes themes of immersion, physical (dis)comfort zones, classroom organization, and place-based presence, and might include practices such as breathing exercises or embodied writing.

Emotions
Learning can be driven by emotions such as excitement, curiosity, and pleasure; conversely, learning about war, suffering, and death shouldn’t exist without difficult emotional reactions. Emotions naturally arise on immersive international programs as participants find themselves experiencing unfamiliar contexts and practices. These emotions may come as a surprise to students—who expect programs to always be “fun,” who anticipate they will acclimatize easily, who assume they already know host cultures, who witness global injustice firsthand, who come to poignant realizations about their homelands. Learning how to identify and process emotions, without judgment or dismissal, merits learning space. Creating that space is simultaneously an act of both deep intellectual learning and student care. For education abroad programs, the area of emotions includes themes of emotional discomfort, culture shock, and personal reflection and may include practices such as reflective writing and group processing.

Belonging
Belonging in whole human learning constitutes a multi-faceted approach to relationality. First and foremost, belonging refers to the intentional creation of a learning community. Belonging strives to decrease the felt power differential between students and teachers, include student identities and reflections, and increase student participation in learning. This theme emphasizes creating communities that exhibit trust, vulnerability, engagement, and inclusion, which might be enhanced through classroom rituals. In group-based education abroad programs, the notion of a community is built in, given that a particular group is formed to learn, live, and travel together for a set period. Cultivating these communities intentionally can deeply influence program experiences.

Becoming
The culminating area of whole human pedagogy is becoming, after hooks’ (1994) description of a “vision of liberatory education that connects the will to know with the will to become” (p. 18-19). Becoming is the idea that learning isn’t a compartmentalized collection of facts, but a process that can and should deeply inform the ways that learners as humans exist in the world.
The word “transformative” is commonly associated with education abroad: if transformation is the selling point, the defining feature, or the goal, designing for transformation, in the many facets that entails, should be the norm. Education abroad is learning in the world outside of the classroom; an emphasis on becoming ensures it is also learning for the world outside the classroom.

Contribution:
While formal learning and student care may be departmentalized on university campuses, those responsibilities are blended on immersive education abroad programs. Whole human pedagogy, as described here, calls practitioners to reimagine both learning and wellbeing, invites a radical embodiment of community care, and centers justice locally and globally. Education abroad has been reinventing itself for the duration of its existence—from no-credit study tours to junior year abroad to short-term programs (Hoffa, 2007) to virtual exchange programs during the Covid-19 era. A whole human approach to pedagogy in education abroad is a fitting next reimagination.

Author

• Anna Kelly, SIT Graduate Institute