Caring for the student body

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Caring for the student body
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Overview

• In the college classroom, nobody is allowed to
  care too much.
• And our bodies should be left at the door.
• But which is the first prohibition?
• caring for the other
• being embodied in the presence of the Idea?

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Three stories about them a method

• Teacher-student relationships written
  through/by/on the body.
• Learning through hunger and need, pain and
  comfort, desire, passion, inebriation.
• The problems of caring too much and caring too
  little and caring at all.
• The ends of teaching and learning.

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Theres no place like home Anorexia and the
separations
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Living in a bubble To find comfort in a world
of pain
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Why we dont like the ballet The politics of
strong drink and heavy petting
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My own story Historical and personal dimensions
of hygiene
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Caring in the academy a method

• The presumption of normal learning goals
  directed toward content, ideas, theories
  proscribes taking seriously those personal goals
  related to caring.
• The play of bodies, and teacher and student
  participation in this play, proscribes taking
  seriously learning goals related to content,
  ideas, theories.
• The meaning of the content is always embodied,
  though not necessarily in individual persons, but
  in the nexus of their bodily/ethereal/transitory
  relationships. That is, meaning is the touch
  itself.
• Caring for the student body in the academy is
  normally (though not always) a sort of one night
  stand insofar as relationships do not persist
  outside the constraints of the academic calendar.
• Where development is an aim of education,
  embodied relatedness can be understood as a
  worthwhile (and not altogether) transgressive
  purpose we see this in the case of Lauren, for
  whom the personal experience of being cared for
  is translated into a personal theory of being
  there and of a persons relationship to the pain
  of others.