Review the pedagogical and technical information below to inform your progress in Week Eight. Have questions about what you learned here or ideas for future tips? Join Coffee & Answers (open support Zoom sessions with the Academic Technology Team) or email the Office of Teaching and Learning.
Pedagogical
How do you practice self-care?
Colleagues from OIT and OTL recently attended Lancaster Learns, an annual conference on teaching and learning hosted by SJU-Lancaster for colleges in the Lancaster area. Shout out to the Lancaster Learns Conference Committee for putting together such a thoughtful and rejuvenating conference! Several of us attended a round table on Self Care where we shared what we do to obtain work-life balance. With this in mind, we write to you over spring break and hope that you are, indeed, spending time rejuvenating in anticipation of the second half of the semester.
When African-American lesbian feminist Audre Lorde was dying from breast cancer, she wrote: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” What is sometimes lost in thinking about self care, is that–for Black women and other minoritized people–self care is also community care. For teachers, too, self care is necessary so we can effectively continue to teach students and support colleagues.
In the literature about self care, there are a few consistent helps:
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Setting boundaries between work and personal life;
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Engaging in mindfulness;
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Acknowledging that your physical being needs to be nurtured so you can keep doing emotional and intellectual labor.
For those of you familiar with Ignatian Pedagogy, this sounds a lot like cura personalis, care of the whole person, and that is true (and coming next week). As we think about teaching with cura personalis, we should also be aware that we should care for our emotional, intellectual, spiritual selves the same way we care for students.
At the “Incorporating Self-Care While Teaching in Higher Education” roundtable at Lancaster Learns, Ms. Yanina Marti-Ramírez de Arellano and Dr. Bertha Saldaña DeJesús offered us a number of helpful apps to assist with our self-care. We offer them below for your consideration. But the short version of all of this is that in order to be most effective and to be able to continue the work in the long-term, you need to be mindful of what keeps you going. Please prioritize your rest!
Technical
What are some helpful apps for self-care practices?
There are tons of self-care apps on the market, but you might find the following list to be a good place to start:
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Pzizz (relaxing music for sleep)
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Breethe or Calm (tools for sleep, meditation and relaxation)
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Headspace (mental health and mindfulness exercises)
Are these tips helpful? Do you have a topic we should include in future weeks? Please let us know by emailing otl@sju.edu!
Additional Resources