Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Moving from Self-Care to Self/Society Care: A Pedagogical Unit

Erin Schaefer

Abstract: This article offers “Self/Society Care,” a pedagogical unit originally developed for a Professional Writing Skills course. The unit aims to have students reconceptualize “self-care” as “self/society care,” a reframing that requires recognizing our interconnectedness with others. It centers on care- and listening-based versions of mindfulness—distinct from neoliberal ones—and thus offers both a holistic and embodied approach to care. Following a personal reflection on prejudice, isolation, and care, I discuss four components of the unit: 1) Mindfulness Media Literacy, 2) Beginner’s Mind and Listening, 3) Beginner’s Mind of Inner-Rhetorics and Emotions, and 4) Brain/Body Literacy.

Introduction

Perhaps the most important purpose of a liberal education is to expand students’ minds to what is happening in the world and inspire them to care about making it better. As educators, we are challenged to support the self-care students need to be successful in the classroom while also providing them with that education. Practicing societal care requires that students not only expose themselves to the many problems that call for their attention, but also regularly practice the habits of mind [1] necessary for caring: openness, curiosity, empathy, and self-awareness. Acquiring these habits, in turn, depends on students’ learning the kind of self-care that helps them raise open self-awareness. Listening to others and trying to understand their perspective necessitates first being aware of one’s own inner rhetorics and biases. I contend that practicing a holistic, mindfulness-based kind of self-care, which I call self/society care, nurtures students’ openness to receiving a truly diverse liberal education.

I present a pedagogical unit that incorporates one such holistic approach to self-care, a mindfulness and listening-based unit designed to help students reconceptualize “self-management” or “self-care” as “self/society care.” I define self/society care as caring that recognizes our relationality, [2] our interconnectedness with others and the planet. A key component of self/society care is mindful self-awareness, which is the foundation of the mindful, empathetic listening necessary to nurture ourselves and the world. Self/society care is thus central to the underlying purpose of a liberal education: to help expand students’ and instructors’ world and enrich their relationship to it.

Whereas self/society care opens us up and allows us to care for others and society, more individualistic types of self-care, including neoliberal versions of mindfulness, are likely to close us down. They can make us feel even more isolated and less able to connect to others. Practicing self-care in those ways tends to raise self-consciousness rather than self-awareness. Often, they can also attempt to suppress, or even eliminate, difficult emotions. On the other hand, caring in a holistic way requires, among other things, mental and interpersonal fluidity, a willingness to look at and update our prejudices, and an ability to account for and respond to difficult emotions. Such a holistic approach to caring must take into account how these emotions affect our ability to be open. This is especially true of fear, which causes stress, and stress changes our physiology, even our brain wave frequencies, making it difficult to be calm and open our focus.

Stress thus inhibits the self-awareness that opens us up, and today’s students (and instructors) have a lot of stress. From political divisiveness to economic inequities, the pandemic has spotlighted the stressors people in our society are exposed to daily. As an assistant professor at a university with a highly diverse student body, I see many students under stress and in need of self-care. In addition to their schoolwork, they strive to balance multiple jobs, financial strain, family obligations, and their own mental health. These struggles are often compounded by the trauma of living in a culture of violence, such as racism and other forms of prejudice-based violence. This is especially concerning since being closed down by all of this stress makes it extremely difficult for them to find and maintain the openness necessary for learning and growth.

Many instructors are also heavily stressed. In addition to dealing with the problems mentioned above, it can be overwhelming for instructors to add care for their students' problems to their own to-do lists. Having to support students who are often in high-stress situations (including COVID), as well as preparing to teach online or create other formats for distance education, has added to professors’ burden. Understandably, for instructors coming from an individualistic perspective, care for students might be framed as emotional labor, one that depletes their already over-taxed mental resources. Tending to students’ mental health may be seen as belonging solely to the realm of therapists, [3] perhaps supplemented with additional tools that students might use on their own, such as “me time” stress-reduction techniques.

From a linear perspective, instructors may conclude that teaching self-care adds to their stress instead of alleviating it because it’s extra work, and it consumes precious class time. In this mindset, teaching students self-care may also appear to be separate from teaching them to care about societal issues. Both students and instructors, however, need to understand on an experiential level that self-care, when practiced and taught mindfully, is also care for the society. Holistic, mindfulness-based self-care is, in fact, the necessary basis for teaching learning objectives about societal care. The habits of mind associated with the openness taught in the Self/Society Care Unit are also conducive to all kinds of learning. Thus, by helping students learn more efficiently, this kind of self-care actually saves time because they are more open to new ideas and perspectives.

Students and instructors need an environment that nurtures them, rather than increases their stress. By making the classroom a respectful space for learning, self/society care nurtures all involved, including the instructor. It creates this respect by encouraging both students and instructors to practice empathetic listening. Students thus share responsibility for creating a classroom that is non-violent and compassionate. Bringing self/society care into the classroom, then, gives students a place to apply the mindful communication skills they’re learning. This not only strengthens those skills, but also prepares students to put them to work in the larger community.

Background and My Story

My own story demonstrates that holistic self-care helps us to practice societal care. From a young age, I wanted to practice societal care through activism. In childhood and throughout my adolescent and teenage years, I regularly witnessed bullies attacking my friends (typically motivated by racism, ableism, and homophobia). Having two moms and being bisexual in a largely rural, conservative area made it difficult to connect with many of my classmates and the larger community, influenced as it was by local churches that were not LGBTQ+-friendly. I frequently expressed my care by speaking up, outing my parents with pride despite the consequences, and writing about social justice issues.

My ability to practice societal care, however, was often hampered by my own relationship with what Paula Mathieu calls “inner rhetorics,” our “deep unspoken stories” about ourselves and the world (174). Inner rhetorics are always embodied and are often tied to feelings of anger, fear, and bitterness. Often excluded or bullied as a result of homophobia, I felt less-than and left-out, akin to what I recently discovered is called “rejection sensitivity,” which took a serious toll on my mental health. As I know now, psychological research has confirmed that belongingness is critical for our social, psychological, biological, and neurological health and development (A. Banks 170-174).

Feeling left out started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as well as a vicious cycle of loneliness, as it inevitably affected my interpersonal relations: I would feel sad and lonely, which made it difficult to trust and be myself around others; people would often respond in kind, and I would feel even more left out. Self-aware enough to recognize that my own emotions and inner rhetorics were exacerbating the problem, I started to hate myself. [4] Thus, I felt not only disconnected from others, but disconnected from myself as well.

The inner rhetorics of self-doubt, as well as my inner rhetorics about people’s refusal to listen to or empathize with me or my family and friends, inhibited my ability to practice society care. For example, I remember being involved in a phone bank with one of my moms. We were lobbying for the “Vote No” Campaign in Minnesota against a proposed state amendment that would define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. I had a couple of calls in a row with supporters of the amendment. I remember looking around at the other volunteers, who were able to engage in conversation with their opponents, and thinking, I can’t do this. My overwhelming emotion called up a prejudice in which those supporting the amendment looked like my past bullies, making meaningful dialogue impossible. As a result, I felt that I had let myself and my family and friends down. I had had this chance to make a difference but was unable to overcome my emotional reactions. I felt angry, and, worse yet, despairing and disempowered.

I first discovered mindfulness through a mindfulness-based stress reduction class that I took alongside my mothers when I was sixteen. As I began to practice grounded, open, and fluid awareness, I (and we) discovered a tool that allowed me to interrupt this vicious cycle of isolation. I began to feel more connected with myself [5] and with others. And, as I kept practicing, I felt a more profound shift away from feeling completely self-conscious and toward a self-awareness of how my own actions may have been alienating or prejudging others. I started to notice, with self-compassion, how I often saw people, including those who wished me no harm, in a negative light. I created these prejudices out of unacknowledged fear, bitterness, and doubts about my own self-worth. By practicing compassionate, open (i.e., mindful) awareness of my emotions, I was able to transform many of my limiting inner rhetorics.

The organic byproduct of my changed relationship to my inner rhetorics was an increased ability to make space for better listening to and understanding of myself and others. Mindfulness, as a personal practice, makes it easier to recognize that we are part of something larger and that we are interconnected with our community. However, we need more than just an awareness that we are interconnected with others. Along with raising our self-awareness and calming our body-mind, we need to also practice tuning into and listening to others. Going beyond such personal interactions, we also need a care-centered culture free from systemic oppression and prejudice. This culture would help enable us to relate to and interact with the larger community. This is why I chose to teach Rhetoric and Writing.

Self/Society Care in the Classroom

The writing classroom can play a vital role in preparing students to understand the connection between caring for ourselves and our inner rhetorics and our capacity to listen to and care for others. The discipline of Rhetoric and Writing values both listening and care, and scholarship in these areas has grown to include trauma-informed, listening-based, and mental health-conscious pedagogies (e.g., Baker-Bell et al.; Bonilla-Silva; Clark et al.; hooks; Royster and Kirsch; Tayles). [6] Furthermore, when students write, they write about the world and their place in it. Their instructors often prompt them to use writing as a form of activism through genres like blog posts, video narratives, and letters to the editor. Instructors can thus encourage their students to be not only critical thinkers, but also, as the influential “Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Education” suggests, to cultivate those habits of mind necessary for care: openness, curiosity, engagement, responsibility, and metacognition (Council of Writing Program Administrators, et al. 1).

The Self/Society Care Unit presented below, comprised of four components, is designed to help students and instructors alike practice “self/society care” as a habit of mind. These components are based on holistic, “non-neoliberal” versions of mindfulness. My hope is that those who teach writing at any level, perhaps even as early as primary school, can use these basic components to create their own “self/society care” units:

• Mindfulness Media Literacy: Students need to be able to distinguish holistic forms of mindfulness from neo-liberal ones.

• Mindful Listening: Mindfulness aids empathic listening by helping us let go of substituting our own constructions of others’ voices/perspectives for theirs.

• Inner-Rhetorics and Emotions: Listening to others with care and empathy often requires being aware of the emotions connected to our own inner rhetorics. Separating the emotions from the stories allows us to see both clearly and tend to them.

• Brain/Body Literacy: In this component, students learn that, although our brains and bodies are built for connection, our automatic responses to fear can work against connection by closing us down into a prejudicial body-mind⁷ state.

Self/Society Care Component #1: Mindfulness Media Literacy:

Mindfulness is foundational to self-society care, but only a particular kind: care- or listening-based mindfulness. Understanding the difference between care- or listening-based mindfulness and neoliberal versions of mindfulness requires developing “mindfulness media literacy.” Mindfulness has become a buzzword, as well as a multibillion-dollar industry (Wieczner). Unfortunately, many proponents of mindfulness, perhaps particularly in popular markets and the corporate world, are practicing and/or encouraging neoliberal versions of it. These versions reflect individualistic and capitalistic values, while traditional Buddhist [8] meta meditations, for instance, emphasize kind thoughts and wishes towards others. Neoliberal meditations are marketed as a tool to help individuals reach “peak brain performance,” perform better at sports, or practice “me time.”

Neoliberal versions of mindfulness and mindfulness meditations are antithetical to self/society care. As Pitts-Taylor argues, they ignore our interdependence, and they frame wellness as an individual responsibility that, when not achieved, should be considered a personal shortcoming (639-640). A quick search for free mindfulness videos on Google and/or YouTube yields numerous neoliberal meditations, with catchy titles like “Me Time,” “Positive Vibes Only,” or “Getting Rid of Negativity.”

Care- and listening-based pedagogies, in contrast, are seldom exclusive or judgmental. Thoughts and emotions, rather than being labeled “positive” or “negative,” are met with curiosity, for care- and listening-based mindfulness incorporates beginner’s mind: [9] observing things with curiosity as if we have never observed them before. Ideally, these mindfulness meditations remind listeners to direct their beginner’s mind outward, as well, fostering curiosity about other people’s perspectives and the environment.

Students need to be able to evaluate both formal and informal mindfulness practices that they may encounter in popular media, and/or in their own search for supplemental resources. Formal meditations are structured, often timed, mindfulness exercises in which the meditator directs their attention based on a narrator’s instructions. Mindfulness also includes informal practices. Since mindfulness is a way of paying attention and directing our awareness, it can be practiced at any moment in our everyday lives. There are informal practices and techniques as well, such as being aware of the texture of our food as we eat, tuning into the sounds of our environment at work, or feeling the sensation of the earth beneath our feet as we walk. How we pay attention, and what we pay attention to, in both formal and informal practices, is influenced by our exposure to those different forms of mindfulness (i.e., neoliberal, care- or listening- based) that we often encounter in the media.

Since my goal in this unit is to teach a version of mindfulness that supports self/society care, I am careful to curate meditations and activities oriented toward a beginner’s mind and care. Beyond the class, however, students must choose their own mindfulness materials, including literature, podcasts, classes, meditation apps, and guided meditations/exercises. [10] They will need to be discerning in navigating pervasive advertisements by companies selling neoliberal “mindfulness.” Helping students successfully locate mindfulness materials that support self/society care is essential to success in this unit, beginning with the next component on mindfulness-based listening.

Self/Society Care Component #2: Mindful Listening

Listening is the essential basis of caring. This component focuses on laying a foundation for listening to others by (re)framing it as a complex, dialectical process. In this concept, there is what is said, and there is also what is happening in each person’s mind. All of it matters. Understanding this complexity, I hope, deepens students’ appreciation for what is involved in mindful listening, which requires that we hold both others and ourselves within our awareness.

Common definitions of listening include “putting aside what you want to say in order to hear what someone else has to say,” and “when you listen, you focus on understanding the other person’s perspective.” [11] Listening is thus commonly thought of as “taking turns”: one person speaks, while the other person listens, and then the listener and speaker switch roles. Such limiting conceptions of listening ignore the simultaneous roles that communicators take on.

In mindful listening, both people are at once listeners and speakers. We ultimately connect with others by bringing our own thoughts, stories, and viewpoints to the conversation (Goodson and Gill 78). As we listen to others, we are at the same time listening to ourselves, observing what comes up in our minds. Cultivating mindful self-awareness allows us to know that we have our own thoughts and assumptions and that we can choose to suspend them rather than substitute them for the other person’s.

Without mindfulness, however, tuning into ourselves as we listen can create a major barrier to empathetic listening. Lacking awareness of our thinking may cause us to mistake it for the other person’s. This is what I call “straw person listening.” I base this concept on the “straw person fallacy,” an alternative to the gendered term, “straw man fallacy.” The straw person fallacy is considered a common type of logical fallacy. It occurs when a writer or speaker argues with their own construction of another person’s argument, rather than that person’s actual argument. Students who have taken an introductory writing course may already be familiar with it, as it’s often included in the rhetorical analysis section of writing textbooks.

I use the concept of “straw person listening” to refer to listeners responding almost solely to their constructed “straw person” versions of others, rather than to the real person. To help illustrate this concept, we turn to Amal Kassir’s TEDx talk: “The Muslim on the Airplane.” Kassir explains that when people choose to interact with their stereotype of her, the one who is “oppressed” or perhaps an “extremist,” rather than letting her author her own complex identity, they are engaging in straw person listening (2:06-2:18).

When I introduce this concept, I am careful to emphasize that to some degree all listening is straw person listening. [12] As Rhetoric and Writing scholars have pointed out (Cooper 370-373; Burke), we cannot ever fully know another person’s complexity, and our understanding of others is always a subjective construction. We can, however, try to make our straw person constructions of others much more fully informed and co-constructed by them by practicing mindful listening, beginner’s mind, and what Amal Kassir and others call “courageous curiosity.” [13]

As the next component will show, courageous curiosity in listening is important to self/society care. Listening to others requires humility and a willingness to respond mindfully to the discomfort of hearing perspectives that challenge our prejudiced straw person constructions. It requires the courage to acknowledge those constructions without reacting to them or fueling defensive inner rhetorics and their associated emotions. Anyone who has tried this has experienced how scary it can be, for it can bring up a wealth of emotions that have the power to close us down.

Self/Society Care Component #3: Inner Rhetorics and Emotion:

For this component, I use Paula Mathieu’s concept of “inner rhetorics” and frame it as the constellation of our thoughts, underlying storylines, and prejudices which constantly come up in, and are worked on by, our minds. Alongside these storyline threads are emotions that are tethered to the stories. Difficulties can arise when these emotions, in turn, then cause us to attach to those stories and to our straw figures.

Without beginner’s mind our emotions cause us to become more deeply immersed in our constructed thoughts of who we and others are, to the point where we perceive only our straw person dialogues. This is the result of the narrow-focus attention associated with fear or stress, which can be calmed by using simple mindfulness exercises. It is critical that we calm ourselves before attempting to look at what has come up. If we don’t, the stress will cause us to attach to it and further close us down. Once the stress is calmed, we can more clearly see the storylines and emotions that are up in us.

Open-focus awareness, on the other hand, affords us an opportunity to unhitch the emotion from the story, creating space around both. This allows us to see both the story and the emotion more clearly. By this means, we can properly tend to the emotion and choose to change the story if we desire. As Sharon Salzberg suggests, “Mindfulness practice isn’t meant to eliminate thinking but aims rather to help us know what we’re thinking when we’re thinking it, just as we want to know what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it.”

To raise open, mindful awareness, students and instructors should practice formal and informal mindfulness exercises that focus on things that are actually happening in the present moment, such as the breath, bodily sensations, and sounds. To be able to bring our awareness to these, we must continually practice interrupting our thinking and letting it go. If you try this for five minutes, you will see how difficult it can be. Although it can seem impossible, this is an excellent chance to practice cultivating kindness and patience for yourself. Begin by bringing awareness to your breath. When your mind wanders, simply bring it back to your breath and begin again, and again. [14]

Repeatedly bringing our attention back to our breath provides a grounding anchor that keeps us from becoming too attached to our imagined storylines. As our narrow-focus opens, we can carefully bring our awareness back to those stories to observe them rather than immerse ourselves in them. Just as it’s important to let go of our stories, it’s equally important to come back to them in an open state so that we can update them. Mindful awareness helps us do this so that we don’t miss the opportunity to make conscious choices about them, but it can be a challenging process.

It’s often difficult to look at our own stories and know when they’re a problem or what about them is a problem. For that reason, it is important that students learn to recognize when inner rhetorics are closed and antithetical to self/society care. To illustrate this, I have them look at examples of neoliberal inner rhetorics, ones that frame ourselves or others in narrow or fixed ways, as well as ones that demonstrate how defensive we can get in the process of self-reflection. These examples [15] are taken from popular culture, such as TV or movie clips that include voiceovers of inner rhetorics. They dramatize how easy it is to respond to our harsh forms of inner rhetorics, including prejudicial thoughts about others or ourselves, with more harsh thoughts, creating a vicious cycle similar to what I described in my own story earlier.

Our capacity to care for both ourselves and others is compromised when we are in a vicious cycle of anger, guilt, and shame. Writing scholars, as well as those across the disciplines, have discussed how easy it is to become not only self-conscious about our inner rhetorics, but self-absorbed (e.g., Stevenson; Swiencicki; Trainor; Winans). Especially in the context of a culture that views emotions as something to be avoided, the unpleasantness of noticing that we have limiting prejudices can quickly turn to anger. This anger can bring up self-incrimination, but it is often directed towards others, perhaps those who have pointed out our prejudices. [16] Without mindfulness skills, then, paying attention to our inner rhetorics and these powerful emotions can inadvertently result in fueling not only self-hate, but even violence towards others. This is why compassion is such an important aspect of mindfulness.

Compassion is critical for interrupting the self-absorbed cycle of guilt, shame, and self/other hate. In the Self/Society Care Unit, we do this by approaching our emotions with kindness, and consciously speaking to ourselves in a way that is both curious and compassionate. As Thich Nhat Hanh suggests: “Mindfulness is not there to suppress. Mindfulness is there to welcome, to recognize: ‘Hello, my little anger, I know you are there. My old friend.’ Mindfulness is the energy that helps us be aware of what is there” (118). Using compassion in this way gives us the courage to look at both ourselves and our stories.

I encourage students to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s compassionate approach to their inner rhetorics as a way of fostering courageous curiosity. First, it takes courage to feel (and stay with) the discomfort that’s associated with bringing our awareness to often unpleasant emotions, like fear, sadness, or guilt. Second, we must use compassion, courage, and curiosity to see, and accept, when our current way of looking at things is limited and that our actions may be incongruent with our values. As Megan Boler writes in “A Pedagogy of Discomfort: Witnessing the Politics of Anger and Fear,” transforming systems of oppression and prejudice requires reflecting on our prejudicial thoughts and our emotional investment in them. Doing this requires a willingness to experience discomfort (180-181). And finally, we must use compassion and courage to open ourselves to change, and in so doing, invite others to change, as well.

Self/Society Care Component #4: Brain/Body Literacy:

This fourth component is essential to the Self/Society Care Unit because it helps students understand how what is happening in their bodies and minds can determine and be determined by how open they are. This knowledge helps them in all aspects of the unit: choosing the right meditations, avoiding straw person listening, raising self-awareness, and even practicing compassion and courageous curiosity.

Neuroscientific [17] studies show how fear, particularly unacknowledged fear, affects our capacity to care. Les Fehmi’s Open Focus Brain is helpful here because he describes how narrow-focus styles of attention associated with fear cause us to see things linearly, which is far more conducive to straw person listening than to empathetic listening. As Fehmi points out, “it is not what we attend to; far more critical is how we attend, how we form our awareness, and how we adhere, rigidly or flexibly, to a chosen style of attention” (Fehmi & Robbins 13). [18] Fear and stress affect not only our brain but our body as well, such as the release of stress hormones and the body’s instinctual survival reactions: fight, flight, or freeze (Tayles 102). As a result, our brains can become stuck in “self-referential processing… constructing mental models to guide future behavior” and “self-related preoccupation and mind-wandering” (Sood and Jones 138). In other words, we’re stuck in self-consciousness and straw person listening.

One way in which our brains become stuck is because they are good at doing things the same way that we have already been doing them. If we have practiced attaching to our thoughts, our brains will try to continue doing this. This stasis aspect of our brains helps us function better by stabilizing us in brain states that are suited for how we are using them. Still, we need our brains to be able to adapt as these uses change over time, and scientists have recently discovered that they do just that. This ability of the brain to functionally and physically adapt to its required uses is called neuroplasticity. For those new to meditation, the stability of our brains can seem frustrating because they try to keep us narrow-focused. However, neuroplasticity allows us the possibility to retrain our brains not to attach and to be more open and aware.

Scientific studies of mindfulness and its effect on the mind, brain, and body also offer hope that we can retrain our habitual attention styles and wiring in the brain to those that support care. Kirk Brown et al. explain:

The fact that mindfulness is associated with enhanced executive functioning, better self-regulation, greater autonomy, and enhanced relationship capacities, all attests to the fact that when individuals are more mindful they are more capable of acting in ways that are more choiceful [sic] and more openly attentive to and aware of themselves and the situations in which they find themselves, 'all things considered.’ (227)

Similarly, in The Mindful Brain, Daniel Siegel argues that mindfulness, using the COAL approach (curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love), can in fact allow us to “cultivate love for ourselves” and “interpersonal attunement” (16).

In order to learn how to change their attention styles, students need to have some understanding of how brain waves work. Brain waves are oscillating electrical impulses that fire at varying speeds, or frequencies. Frequency ranges are assigned names to denote the different types of brain waves, each associated with particular functions (Abhang et al. 20-22). For instance, gamma, the fastest brain wave frequency, “helps with attention, focus,… consciousness, mental processing, and perception" (Abhang et al. 52). Hi-beta is narrow-focus attention, used for concentration, but also associated with fear, anxiety, and even anger (Fehmi and Robbins 16). Lo-beta (a slower frequency range) is somewhat more open-focused and is associated with relaxed, calm attention (15). Alpha is neutral, open-focused and associated with meditation, while the slower brain waves, theta and delta, are associated with the subconscious, the unconscious, memory, and deep sleep (White and Richards 149).

The two frequency ranges most important to self/society care are alpha and gamma. Both have characteristics important for mindfulness practice. Numerous studies have linked alpha to mindfulness meditation (e.g., Rubia 3; Keune 246-250). The ability to raise alpha (in certain portions of the brain) has been shown to produce a host of benefits, including a mindset that is curious and open (Uusberg et al. 95). Alpha is also the bridge between our awareness of the external world (betas) and the internal world (theta and delta) (White and Richards 149). Thus, when students practice raising alpha, they strengthen the connection between themselves and society. On the other hand, gamma is associated with “the performance of higher mental activities and perceptual tasks” and “enhanced attention” (De and Mondal 34). This is essential to mindfulness practice because it helps us use self-awareness to direct our attention and change which brain waves we are utilizing. For example, we can use gamma to direct our brains [19] to raise alpha (open-focus) rather than hi-beta (narrow-focus) when we are working with our stories.

To illustrate how brain waves work in relation to the self/society care concepts, we can examine brain wave read-outs from neurofeedback sessions. Neurofeedback is a type of brain wave training that allows users to view and shift their brain waves in real time. [20] As argued in “Using Neurofeedback and Mindfulness Discourses to Teach Open Listening,” neurofeedback session read-outs can be a powerful way to teach students what happens inside their brains and bodies both under stress and during mindfulness meditation (Schaefer). For example, neurofeedback session readouts show how, in a single 30-minute mindfulness meditation, a person can dramatically shift their brain wave patterns by cultivating what neurofeedback practitioners call alpha-theta crossovers (Johnson et al. 3; White and Richards 148). These alpha-theta brain wave states are especially conducive to self-care because they update our stories and are associated with healing traumatic events (White and Richards 149). While this deeper state associated with mindfulness may not happen in the classroom, students may experience it outside the classroom, even as they are falling asleep or waking.

Once they’ve studied brain wave read-outs, I have them analyze them in relation to some of the mindfulness exercises from component #1. We call up a few of the neoliberal mindfulness exercises from the first module, and I ask students to guess which brain waves they are likely to raise. For example, meditations that ask participants to consciously control their thoughts are probably not calling up alpha, which is associated with an open, curious mind state. Similarly, meditations designed to tap into or retrain the subconscious will probably move us toward a brain wave state dominated by theta rather than alpha. Knowing the difference between what brain waves do and how they act shows students how to practice as well as why it’s important to practice in ways conducive to care.

Brain/body literacy helps us to be kinder and less judgmental to ourselves and others by showing us that closing down is what we are wired to do in order to deal with stress. We are able to see that being closed down is not a character flaw, but rather a way for our bodies and brains to protect us. However, although narrow-focused attention is useful if we are being chased by a tiger, it does not help us understand the world. Stress in our lives may cause us to close down, but if we know how to practice stress reduction and mindfulness, it doesn’t need to become a permanent state. We are compassionate to ourselves and to others when we recognize that being closed down is where we are, not who we are.

One of my goals in encouraging students to develop brain/body literacy is to help them understand that making beneficial changes in our brains and bodies, while possible, takes consistent intention and practice. Without regular practice, a state of stress, the constant repetition of our inner rhetorics, and straw person listening can easily come to be the norm. When students are stuck in this closed, linear state, it may be difficult for them to let go of well-worn habits or addictions, such as scrolling on their phones, and take time to practice. [21] It is my hope that this component provides them the incentive to make the effort to do the formal practice, not only in the classroom, but outside it as well, including after they graduate.

Conclusion

The purpose of the Self/Society Care Unit is to help students move from self-consciousness towards self-awareness, which includes an awareness of their relationality with the people and the world around them. It teaches students new ways of seeing that can help them update their inner rhetorics to better reflect the diverse world as it really is, rather than being confined to their stories about it. This includes updating the stories students tell themselves about themselves and others (our straw figures), as well as how they characterize their experiences. They learn how to practice a kind of self-care that reduces their stress, allowing them to see things in a more open way.

Ultimately, the Self/Society Care Unit is about achieving some of the goals of a liberal education, especially compassion for society and the courage to act on that compassion. The concepts involved can’t be taught in isolation, however. They need ongoing reinforcement if they are to instill the habits of mind the unit focuses on (care, openness, and listening). These habits complement learning objectives from a variety of disciplines and are necessary for learning in general.

Therefore, it is my hope that this unit and its components offer an approach that can be used not only in a variety of writing classrooms but also in a variety of departments. I have offered this unit, which is based on many years of interdisciplinary research on the subject, in my professional writing skills course for the last three years. Listening to my students and reading what they report in their self/society care plan memos has been very encouraging. I am excited to further explore the efficacy of the unit by performing a pedagogical study of it in the near future.

In closing, I would like to reiterate that learning mindfulness and reflecting individually on how we are connected with those around us is not enough. Inclusiveness and care are everyone’s responsibility; it takes a caring culture to help people feel truly connected. If they have the courage and discipline to practice it, self/society care can provide students the understanding of how and why care- and listening-based mindfulness can help them be more empathetic, curious, and self-aware community members. These habits of mind are particularly critical at a time when there is so much political and social divisiveness, often exacerbated by social media platforms that, in some ways, limit our capacity to have meaningful dialogues. My hope is that students and instructors will carry these qualities beyond the university to support the development of a more caring and compassionate culture.

Notes

[1] I draw on “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” in this paper, which makes a compelling case for focusing on habits of mind in the writing classroom. Unlike this publication’s list, however, I include self-awareness and empathy.

[2] Indigenous scholars and communities, including those in Rhetoric and Writing, understand relationality as our interconnectedness and interdependence with one another and the planet. Relationality has been a cornerstone of many Indigenous tribes for thousands of years (King; Powell; Riley-Mukavetz; Wilson).

[3] To be clear: individual counseling is an important and valuable resource for many students and instructors. As part of a holistic approach to mental wellness, however, I am highlighting the need to not limit our mental health support to individual counseling.

[4] For any of my readers struggling with the cycle of self-hate often coupled with rejection sensitivity, I am sorry it can feel so painful; I empathize with you, and I wish you self-love and meaningful connection with others.

[5] In my experience, feeling disconnected from the various parts of ourselves, including those parts that have humor and playfulness, is at the core of loneliness; not being able to access these parts, simply put, feels extremely isolating and terrible.

[6] Numerous books have been published on care in the writing classroom as well as K-12 and higher education classrooms, such as Adam Wolfsdorf et al.’s Navigating Trauma in the Classroom, Janice Carello and Phyllis Thompson’s Lessons from the Pandemic: Trauma Informed Approaches to College, Crisis, Change, Jerod Quinn et al.’s Designing for Care, as well as a special issue in NCTE, Special Issues, Volume 1: Trauma-Informed Teaching: Cultivating Healing-Centered ELA Classroom.

[7] This pedagogical unit presents the body and mind as interconnected (e.g., W. Banks; Fleckenstein), part of a holistic understanding of students as whole human beings (e.g., hooks; Johnson and Sullivan). Thus, I am using “body-mind” in this paper to refer to this interconnection. In-line with self/society care, it’s important to frame the body-mind as inseparable from the social contexts in which they exist (e.g., Davis and Morris; Schaefer). Whenever possible, then, studies about the brain and mind should ideally come from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as social-neuroscience, social psychology, etc. that recognize the co-mediation between an individual's body-mind and social and environmental contexts.

[8] I do not identify as Buddhist, nor do I use Buddhist meditations or religious texts into the classroom. Nonetheless, I would like to acknowledge that the Western, secular forms of mindfulness have their roots in and draw wisdom from Buddhist traditions.

[9] “Beginner’s mind” is a term coined by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The term has also been written about in Composition Studies, such as Sheryl I. Fontaine’s “Teaching with Beginner’s Mind: Notes from My Karate Journal.”

[10] Students who take this class often plan to enter (or have already entered) a variety of professions, including the “caring professions.” In such professions, some of which incorporate mindfulness into the workplace environment (e.g., nursing, mental health, and social work), mindfulness media literacy is especially important to help students guide management in choosing readings, meditations, and other professional development training materials that will support empathetic care of patients/clients/residents.

[11] It’s useful to have students write their definitions on the board, prompting them to reflect on sometimes taken-for-granted definitions of listening.

[12] Notice that changing straw person “fallacy” to straw person “listening” allows people to recognize that this isn’t an error to avoid or even be ashamed of, necessarily; it validates that we all do this in varying degrees, allowing us to recognize the limits of our constructions of others.

[13] This term is not original to Amal Kassir. Kassir should be credited, however, for her powerful use of storytelling to help her audience empathize with the harmful effects of straw person listening as well as how much courageous curiosity is a gift for those who practice it.

[14] I recommend that those beginning a mindfulness practice review Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living?: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, which provides a clear and useful definition of mindfulness as well as guided formal and informal mindfulness exercises.

[15] For instance, an Apple TV+ mini-series released in 2021, Physical, offers useful examples of how our relationship to our inner rhetoric can be harmful rather than caregiving. Set in the 1980s, when aerobic exercise soared in popularity, Physical portrays a woman who is emotionally invested and immersed in her inner rhetoric. This rhetoric is driven by a limiting storyline, one that values economic success, thinness, and fame.

[16] In Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, Nora Samaran, for instance, describes how those who are privileged as well as men tend to get caught in a cycle of anger and guilt that turns to violence against women.

[17] As much as possible, I try to draw on interdisciplinary neuroscientific studies that understand the complexity of mindfulness and the inseparability of human beings from their social contexts.

[18] Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins’s book, The Open Focus Brain, offers a useful explanation of what different types of attention and awareness look like in the brain. They furthermore point out that such styles are influenced by cultural values. For example, they highlight the ways in which Western culture privileges a narrow-focus style of attention.

[19] Gamma is a challenging brain wave to study because its signal is contaminated by eye movements, and thus its exact role is controversial. For a more detailed discussion of gamma, especially in relation to mindfulness meditation, see Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson’s “How Meditation Changes Your Brain–and Your Life,” and Davidson’s “Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation,” and Claire Braboszcz et al.’s “Increased Gamma Amplitude Compared to Control in Three Different Meditation Traditions.”

[20] Neurofeedback is usually with the aid of a visual or auditory reward that lets them know when their brain has produced a certain brain wave.

[21] Practicing mindfulness meditation requires compassionate self-discipline–choosing to do things that do not give us immediate gratification, based on a bigger picture understanding of what is kind to ourselves and others.

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