Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 565 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, embracing anger to find joyful agency with Jamie Moore.

Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Today marks the first time I’m exclusively focusing on the topic of anger on a teaching and higher ed episode, and I’m thrilled and honored to have doctor Jamie l Moore joining me for this important conversation. Doctor Jamie l Moore is a writer, scholar, and English professor whose work centers storytelling in the black feminist tradition. An equity leader, Jamie advocates for creating classroom spaces that foster liberation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:25]:

As a professional development trainer, she emphasizes anti assimilationist practices that enable healing for both students and educators. Jamie has presented academic and creative work at the National Conference for Race and Ethnicity, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the Strengthening Student Success Conference, and several conferences for the Puente Project. A recent graduate of UC Merced, her doctoral work explores the care work of black and biracial women faculty in community colleges. Her work can be found in the anthology, Joy Centered Pedagogy in Education, Uplifting Teaching and Learning for All, and the forthcoming collection, Black Mother Scholarship Within and Beyond the Academy, reconceptualizing radical futurity. Jamie also reviews books on her Instagram at mixed reader, highlighting contemporary work by black and queer writers. Jamie Moore, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jamie Moore [00:02:36]:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:39]:

I am excited to talk about anger today because we’re not given permission to to go about our our world that way. And I’d love for you to start sharing an experience that I know so many of us can relate to. Tell us about a time you felt anger about all the preparation you put into getting ready for a class and that feeling so many of us have had of just all that preparation coming to a grinding halt.

Jamie Moore [00:03:13]:

Absolutely. One of the things that comes to mind is when I had designed this unit that I thought was flawless and dove into themes around inherited trauma, which I knew a lot of my students could relate to, could connect to. We had two full length books that we were reading in our early composition class. Both of the writers shared identity with my students. I’m like, yes, there’s gonna be so many beautiful connections here. The thing that I forgot is that I had stacked just doom and gloom week after week after week without giving any space to talk about our emotions, to talk about how we move through that experience of trauma. And I was also, like, overprepared. So I was anticipating how students would interact with the text and expecting them to have the same kind of realizations I did.

Jamie Moore [00:04:14]:

And what happened to me in, it was kind of a series of of weeks where we had large assignments coming up is that I felt that all of a sudden I was fighting what was really happening. I was fighting my internal perfectionism. Right. And and feeling like, oh, like they’re not getting it. I did something wrong to not lead them to this to this perfect conclusion. And really, my students were like, this is tiring. Can we talk about how it’s hard to learn about this and it’s hard to accept all of the external pressures and things that we can’t control? So that really changed the way I approached not only teaching, but also connecting with my students, once I was able to kind of confront that that sense of anger and what was actually beneath that anger.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:06]:

When you think about your time teaching in a higher education context, what are some of the messages that you remember socializing you or teaching you that your anger doesn’t really have a place here?

Jamie Moore [00:05:22]:

Well, to be quite frank, a lot of that for me is very intersectional with who I am as a person, as a biracial black woman. I started teaching when I was 22, and I was very lucky to get a tenure track job pretty early. So I had colleagues who were like, you need to gain your students respect by presenting yourself in a certain way from the way that I spoke, which I was raised speaking African American vernacular English in my community. So they were like, no, you need to speak in standard American English. You need to have a certain tone. You need to dress a certain way. So I had all of this, like all these prescriptions really of of how to exist. And in those prescriptions was also that I had to be I had to find this balance between being formal but never being controlling or being angry or expressing really any kind of emotions because I was told that that would be seen as vulnerability, and my students would always be ready to pounce on that vulnerability.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:33]:

That’s so powerful to think about how we frame who our students are Mhmm. And then also even how we frame who we are ourselves and Right. That squash squashing. That’s a word. Right? Right? Squashing

Jamie Moore [00:06:48]:

Squashing it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:50]:

Of trying to get that vulnerability to disappear when kind of a big part of being human. So what we do with it is the question. So the the other thing that you share about not just those challenges and the anger that we carry with us as individuals, but also when we have changes that get inflicted upon us by those who may not understand our unique context. And first, I I’d love to have you share a little bit about this cohort program called the Puente project and then how that relates kind of to a initiative that you didn’t use the word dumped upon, but maybe they just got dropped upon you during that, during that season and what that tells us about your anger.

Jamie Moore [00:07:35]:

Yeah. So the the Puente Project is an incredible program. It’s a transfer readiness program, essentially, that is part of seven I I believe we’re like 77 community colleges now in California. We also have some sites in Texas and one in Washington. Students are placed in a cohort that takes at minimum because we’ve expanded. At minimum, they take composition and a counseling or professional development class together. They’re paired with one on one mentors, and we incorporate different kinds of extracurricular activities into our programming, including college visits and events with the community, connections with their family. Then they also have an opportunity to participate in what is essentially like their first academic conference together.

Jamie Moore [00:08:29]:

We call it the transfer motivational conference where they go and and are able to connect with other across the state and also, learn about the different universities and colleges that that they can transfer to. I was lucky enough that Puente was my first teaching gig, that I came in as a sub to my community college to a Puente cohort. And so I was shaped by Puente from the very beginning, and I’m really excited to continue to be a part of Puente. What’s been interesting over my time teaching for Puente is watching how the class has evolved. So we started out they take two semesters of composition together, and we started out with a pre transfer composition course. And then they moved into their second semester taking a transfer level course like your basic English one, English one hundred type. After assembly bill seven zero five in California, we switched to that. So now we had our transfer course at the beginning, and then we moved to a critical thinking course in the second semester.

Jamie Moore [00:09:40]:

And as folks were as other teachers and and professors were shifting to, like, figure out how do we how do we accommodate that, what I found is that a lot of folks were turning to Puente and looking at our methodologies and our pedagogy to figure out how to actually serve students of color, that there was this interesting stratification, right, that that had happened not only between, like, which students were in what classes, but who was teaching which students in those classes. One of the things that was really frustrating for me initially was this movement towards the student readiness activities and no understanding of how community actually worked in the classroom. So what we found often is that folks were trying to kind of scale up Puente, which was usually a one or two cohort experience. So folks wanted to have us come into their classrooms and explain how to create community, but not actually foster that community. They wanted to be separate still and remain the the educated, the expert professor, and then the students go and make community with each other. So amongst all of these changes and and the messages I was receiving as I explained, you know, who I should be as a professor, It was this balance, right, of, hey, we need your expertise, but also you’re not expert enough. But also how do we get our students to connect to each other, and how do you actually make them like each other and and to show up and to be excited? And how do we pick curriculum that that makes sense to them and engages them? But how do we also maintain rigor? And it was just this dizzying moment for me as as an educator trying to figure out how to kind of reorient my priorities to my students and let my colleagues know, hey. It’s it’s time for a reeducation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:42]:

Oh my gosh. I’m sensing so much of what that might have felt like and especially like the And how does all of that happen without me actually having to do anything or risk anything? And I’ll just be over here, and then you let me know when you’re done fixing everything. But you can’t really fix it that good because, really, I’m the one who could fix it in the first place. But I’m not going to, but I could if I needed to. So that’s so great.

Jamie Moore [00:12:05]:

And that that whole experience is what led me back to grad school and into a doctoral program where I had to, like, take some time to, like, research, like, what what just happened to me? Mhmm. Right? How was I asked to be an expert, but then constantly told that I wasn’t an expert? What does that do to one’s professional identity? So absolutely.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:30]:

One of the people that you quote in your writing is Rendon. And would you share her words with us now and maybe share a little bit about her pedagogical framework as well?

Jamie Moore [00:12:40]:

Absolutely. Yeah. Doctor Rendon’s work is fundamental to pedagogy, and one of her core concepts, which the quote is connected to, is sensei pensante, sensing or thinking pedagogy. And this pedagogy centers student experience of curriculum and how their classroom material works to, like, value and expand their knowledge. Rendon always reminds us to focus on asset based thinking and to also recognize how the traumas that students experience, especially in education stead settings, really stay with them and dictate how they show up in their classrooms. And every talk that I’ve heard her give, she reminds us to encourage healing forms of thought and expression. So her quote that I used in my chapter, Rendon reveals in pedagogy, invisible agreements shadow our classroom interactions and curriculum, capping the potential for connection, feeling, and joy in community with each other. We need to change the agreement that good teaching and learning evolved from a model that distances teachers from students, separates teaching from learning, alienates students from what is to be learned, and is focused on noncollaborative, non disciplinarity.

Jamie Moore [00:14:10]:

An example of a newly constructed agreement, the agreement to embrace connectedness, collaboration, and transdisciplinarity. So for me, that recognition, right, of what those invisible agreements were were really important. The modes of assimilation that were happening on multiple levels. What I was doing to myself, what I was asking my students to do, and recognizing that at least I want my students to feel a sense of a sense of agency. And at best, I wanted them to feel a sense of home place in the classroom. And all of the work that it was taking just for me to stop pretending, to stop giving into or putting on this facade of being the experts that my favorite thing was actually learning with my students and humanizing myself. And then when we were able to be on a learning team together, that was able to dissolve some of that frustration that was so tied up in this performance of expertise and emotional distance from them.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:18]:

You write about these expectations and the ways that we get enculturated into having certain ideas about what it is to teach correctly. And I’m gonna quote from you now. The more I leaned into the external ideas I had been given about what a classroom should look like, the more I not only abandoned my own imagination and potential as a teacher, but I also fed the disconnect from my students. Tell us more about this tension. What should a classroom have looked like in your imagination versus what you were experiencing?

Jamie Moore [00:15:55]:

Yeah. Thank you for that. For me, the the ideal classroom was a space where all of my students could bring their full selves. And this was something that I realized that I never had, especially because of my identities. I remember always wanting to perform being the best student, and that meant sitting in the chair a certain way, having my attention a certain way, responding in a certain way. Right? And I think most of us who are in education, we’ve we’ve read and understand the banking concept of education. And but I I didn’t realize, like, we we all recognize that that’s a thing, but we still practice it. It.

Jamie Moore [00:16:45]:

Right? Because we want to perform for our colleagues. So as soon as I recognized that I would that had that stale classroom, I thought about, like, again, what brings me joy? Right? What is what is actually creating a sense of connection? And the connection for me and the ideal classroom was when I was learning and reading with my students. And then I was able to model that inquiry, that excitement, the experience of changing your mind about something, like, in real time with them. That was so exciting. When I wasn’t doing that, then I was asking them to value things that I didn’t give them a reason to value. I was just banking. I was just saying, hey. By the way, you have inherited trauma.

Jamie Moore [00:17:32]:

Here’s all the reasons you have. Here’s somebody’s experience about it. Rather than discovering new things with them, I want to discover with my students. And I find I’m I’m really bad at teaching the same thing, like, more than a couple of times. Because what I realize is that when I have that discovery moment with a group of students, then the next time I am looking sometimes for the same answers from a new group of students rather than having that process of learning with them. So I’m always changing up my curriculum, which is really a pain. Right? Like, it’s really a pain to, like, re prep a class every couple of semesters. But when I do that, then I get to have the process of discovery with them.

Jamie Moore [00:18:19]:

And that totally changes and creates that sense of community that I was looking for when when I was a student.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:29]:

Oh, it’s so interesting to hear you talk about that resistance to not wanting to teach to the same thing. It’s what what I’m finding fascinating is that I am both the opposite of what you just said and also the same. So I actually really enjoy teaching the same thing. The more that I teach the same thing, the more class the more times I get assigned to teach the same class, the more free that I feel to go into that thicket and to go off the path. I because in in my naivete or in in my maybe I don’t think it’s perfectionism, but just that desire to plan it out and smooth the road. The roads aren’t smooth. Like, so so I I’m I’m what you’re saying is resonating with me, the idea that we’re learning together. I feel more calm and relaxed to learn together when I have that confidence built that it doesn’t have to be a perfectly planned and that, actually, the brambles along the way that people may get stuck in.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:31]:

And even the unexpected ones that it’s just building more resilience to go, it’s okay that it isn’t gonna be controlled or planned or that that we don’t know where we’re even gonna end up at the end. So I kinda I find that that the more that I teach by the way, what we share, I can’t teach the same class twice. I mean, in the sense, I just burned it. The number of times I burned it all to the ground and started new. That’s that’s familiar to me, but then it’s kinda like I can start to have these little Lego pieces and have watched people wrestle with things together. And, of course, I wrestle with them together too. So that’s really interesting.

Jamie Moore [00:20:07]:

I have I have guideposts. Right? Like, I I have a couple of, like, standby articles that, like, I keep them kind of in my mental Rolodex, and we’ll get to a point where I’m like, hold on. Pause everybody. I got something for you. Yeah. But often, like, how we get there, like, we are tumbling through the darkness together, and it’s it’s scary. And, you know, sometimes I’m planning in two week increments, but

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:31]:

Mhmm.

Jamie Moore [00:20:31]:

But that responsiveness is also what kinda keeps me on my toes too.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:35]:

Yeah. It’s so fun. I love when you have those little go tos, though, like, your trusted treasures.

Jamie Moore [00:20:40]:

Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:42]:

So read to us from Owens, specifically from his book, Love and Rage, the Path of liberation through anger, and then tell us about rebellious joy.

Jamie Moore [00:20:54]:

Yes. Lama Rod Owens writes, anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing. It’s not the main event. There’s tension arising from my unwillingness to be with this deep sense of being hurt when I begin to look at that. One of the hardest things I could ever admit to myself was that I wasn’t just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off. This realization just made me feel weak, and never in my life had I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness.

Jamie Moore [00:21:32]:

To sink beneath the anger or move through the anger was to recognize the anger for what it was, an indicator that my heart was broken. When I allowed myself to experience my heartbrokenness, my activism began to change. One of the reasons that Lama Rod Owen’s work speaks to me, especially in the context of higher ed, is that having my teaching career start in Puente gave me a sense of connectedness exclusiveness of that classroom space where I often shared identities with my students that made that classroom feel different. I could enter that classroom and be more of myself than I could with my other students. So to feel any sense of disconnect or anger or frustration with them was a different level of anger. Right? Like, you could be angry with your friends, but if you’re angry with your mom or your sister, like, that’s a different level of hurt that you’re experiencing. Right? So when Owens told me, oh, hold on. It’s not just anger.

Jamie Moore [00:22:36]:

Your heart’s broken. I was like, oh, yeah. My heart is broken because this is the space that I’ve given myself to actually be the teacher I wanna be. I wasn’t being the teacher I wanted to be in every single classroom. I saved that for my safe space because I knew that those students were were in it with me, that we kind of had this unspoken agreement. And then I felt like we had broken that agreement. Right? And part of that heartbrokenness too was that I didn’t when I realized the disconnect, I didn’t want them to be experiencing the kinds of classrooms that I had experienced growing up. I didn’t want them to have that stale banking model experience.

Jamie Moore [00:23:26]:

I didn’t want them to be alone in academia in the way that I felt. So I recognized that my heartbrokenness and my anger was really connected to that question of, like, where can I bring my whole self into the classroom? And, actually, that that is my joy. That is my joy. And and being able to experience that with a group of students brought that to a whole other level. So, yeah, Owens took me back into that internal space of, like, this is not this is not external anger. It’s that internal anger of the barriers you’ve created around yourself and how you’ve allowed yourself to be or not to be in specific classroom spaces.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:17]:

Tell us about student recovery circles and how they can be used to contribute to making space for joy.

Jamie Moore [00:24:26]:

Yes. The, student recovery circles is a practice that I started with my Puente teaching partner, doctor Ambar Alvarez So to. And we got to a point in the semester where we were like, what what is going on? What is going on with all of us? Right? And it wasn’t just a we need to, like, investigate why students are not turning things in. It was really like a pulse check of community of everyone. None of us are here. How do we get back here? So we decided to try to, like, adapt some of our point of practices and just dive deeper. We decided we’re going to pause all of our curriculum plans for the next, like, two days. Her class and my class were stacked together.

Jamie Moore [00:25:17]:

So we did a session in mine and it followed up in her class. We messed up all the class. We pushed all the chairs around. We made this big circle. And then we asked students to firstly, like, breathe with us, to, like, try to bring ourselves back into our bodies. We asked them to write with us and then to go around person by person to share just like what’s going on like that. That was our prompt. What’s going on? What are you feeling? What’s happening for you in this moment? What can you share that will allow you to be with us? And so two things were were really important to me about this.

Jamie Moore [00:25:57]:

Firstly, was like visibility. Right? And and part of that was the actual structure of, like, just facing each other. And then as two instructors of this of this cohort sitting with them, participating with them and sharing the results of our work in real time with them, making sure that we all took the time to really see each other. And the second part is that kind of collective inquiry, right? That how do we all meet each other where we’re at? How do we find each other? And when we do that, can we recognize that we’re not alone? Right. That even in this sense of despair that we were all having for different reasons, that when we see each other, we also belong to each other. And what a relief that was to not be alone.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:49]:

As you’re describing this, and I get to hear your voice, and, of course, I also read your words before today, it sounds so beautiful. And yet I do find myself wanting to remind myself and anyone listening that you wrote about anger and and that it it it isn’t as nice as you just described. I’m picturing coming to being vulnerable, to push the chairs aside, and to come together in one of these student recovery circles, and someone’s just not having any of it. Like, I’m not I’m not doing this. And that rejection that could potentially come your way because of what you’ve had to do to get to that space, how do you deal with that resistance? Because I just want people to know I want myself to know, let alone anybody else. Like, it it doesn’t go like we want it to go. It doesn’t matter how much we’ve shown up, how much we’ve invested. Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:52]:

It doesn’t matter how much others have invested that there there will still often be. We just can’t. Mhmm.

Jamie Moore [00:27:58]:

Yeah. Yeah. The rejection will definitely happen, and it has happened to me multiple times. And I let them go as simple as that. I say, hey, this is what we’re doing today. And and I’ll say I’ll start the class by saying, I’m really frustrated. And I’ve this is this is not everybody’s not everybody’s tea, but, like, I’ve teared up in front of a class before. My my what their partner has too.

Jamie Moore [00:28:22]:

And when we first met each other, she was very, like, emotionally stoic and had been trained in the same way I had been trained. And so we always joke with each other like, oh, yeah. Jamie taught me how to cry in front of students. You know, and it’s it’s not a regular practice. Right? But being in community with each other, doing discovery with each other, and then getting to this point of, like, ah, where are we? I will say, like, hey. Like, I’m I’m really frustrated. And, also, it’s hard for me to do this too. And if you’re not with it today, that’s cool.

Jamie Moore [00:28:53]:

I’ll be here when you are. I’ll be here when you’re ready. The rest of your community will be here when you’re ready. If you need to go take a walk, go take a walk. I’m not gonna force any student to sit there and, like, fake vulnerability because that’s boring. You know, that doesn’t get us anywhere. And I think I’ve only really had that happen directly, like, one time because my own vulnerability is so disarming to students that they’re like, Woah, wait a second. I kind of want to stick around and see what happens.

Jamie Moore [00:29:27]:

And when I ask students to share, they’re always welcome to pass. And the minimum requirement is to witness each other. Like, if you’re gonna stay and you’re not gonna share, then be a witness, and you are supported by being an active listener. If you can’t be an active listener, go somewhere and take care of your feelings. And when you’re ready to be present in the ways we need to be present that day, you’re welcome back.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:50]:

Would you read something from Ross Gay and tell us what it reflects back to us about the power of this activity?

Jamie Moore [00:29:59]:

Ross Gay writes, but what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain or suffering or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak is what effloreces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Oh.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:34]:

Oh, I know. So good. So good. You’ve already been reflecting a bit on this, just just building community, and I so appreciate what you just said about releasing. Like, that that was just a beautiful thing. So talk talk a little bit more about building and defining joyful community. I know you also have some words to share with us from another wonderful author.

Jamie Moore [00:30:58]:

Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Rosgay reminded me it’s similar in in a way to how Lama Rod Owens was like anger is a map to your woundedness. Ross Gay was like, what if pain is a map to your joy? And that just opened up my whole chest. And so offering that to to my students just felt so important to remind them that when we are able to find each other through this despair and heartbreak, and my students were dealing with so much from just the stress of acclimating to what it meant to be a college student to deep pain in their families and their personal lives. What happens when when we recognize that we have community and that other folks have been through it? Right. There’s the famous Baldwin quote that I’ll not do justice to about we think our pain is is only our pain until we see others.

Jamie Moore [00:31:58]:

One of my favorite, musical artists, Jamila Woods, has a line that says, if I know my blood went through it, I can do it. So there’s there’s this sense of community and joy when when we recognize and name the pains that we’re going through and we can see reflected in others the the path forward. And that happened on one of the the days that we had these student recovery circles, a day when our classroom time spilled from the actual structured classroom time we had into our student community center because we weren’t done every everyone decided to share that day. And there were tissue boxes being passed around and laughter being shared of like, oh, yeah, me too. Like, I have a big test coming up and I got so stressed. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, we know. And then making plans together of of how to get through that moment. So that for me, like, the the recognition and seeing how we were all entangled in that pain together is part of what helped us figure out how to define community and joyful community with each other.

Jamie Moore [00:33:07]:

So paired with the student recovery circles, I often have students kind of write new community agreements. And this was particularly important in Puente where we have kind of a set of agreements that we already start out with. And with that class, it was like, we need to revisit those, so we need to rewrite them. We need to put them in the context of what is happening for us right now and all the pain that we’re experiencing. So I gave them a couple of quotes to wrestle with from bell hooks and from a couple other writers. And I asked them essentially to make, like, semantic maps. So let’s look at this quote and let’s circle the most powerful words in those quotes, and let’s define those. And not just Webster define.

Jamie Moore [00:33:52]:

Define them by what does this mean for us? What does this mean in action for us? And then I also asked them after that, kind of both after and before we did a little bit of this personal writing to reflect on how our community values and how we were showing up in that classroom space reflected what we wanted for each other. And that’s where I turn to Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. And she gives this list of questions. Are you a living realization of your values and beliefs? Is your group a living realization of your collective values and beliefs? What are you embodying in your daily life, in your work? Who do you lean on? Who leans on you? How do you feel? And what do you do when you witness anger, when you witness joy? Are you living a life that honors all of your gifts? So students were able to incorporate some of those answers into a new set of collective agreements for our class and what we really wanted to be, how we were going to be a realization of what the best classroom community could look like. And I had them make posters of it. We put it up in our student space, and they had the opportunity to reflect on them and sometimes use them as as affirmations. Right. When when we were approaching another struggle, it’s like, hold on.

Jamie Moore [00:35:21]:

Let’s let’s go back to these community agreements. Should we revise them? Are we going through something that that means that we need to make a new map? Like, let’s let’s figure that out together.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:33]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. And when I heard that Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson were coming out with a podcast, that was one of those quickly that’s going in what I call my priority queue. And the fir it wasn’t the first episode that released, but the first one that I listened to is titled caretakers need to care for themselves with Seth and Lauren Rogan. And I will say that I am not super familiar with Seth Rogan’s work except enough to say that I don’t think he’s quite my genre of like, I I know who he is. I could pick him out of a lineup, but but I don’t, like, run toward his his movies the way that I ran toward in my mind Michelle Obama’s forthcoming podcast. So but still, I mean, it was enough to to really get me curious. I had no idea what I was in store for. And I’m just gonna read from the episode description.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:31]:

Filmmakers Seth and Lauren Rogan join the show to answer a listener’s question about family upheaval caused by caring for an aging parent. Seth and Lauren open up about caring for Lauren’s mother after she received an early Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and Michelle and Craig share stories about the family caretaking that shaped their childhoods. And when I kept thinking about you, Jamie, and our conversation, because in more than a decade of podcasting, all these episodes, we’ve never had an episode dedicated to anger until you gave us this gift today. And similarly, in my own experiences of taking on various aspects of a caregiving role, specifically around Alzheimer’s, and there was definitely a shared responsibility, by the way, and I love my husband so much who takes the brunt of all of this still even though the person’s no longer with us. But I love him so much and so grateful for all that he has poured into my family in that way. But I also just loved that so, I mean, we get angry. There’s this tension of making health care decisions and, you know, how do you do all that? I’ve shared about it on previous episodes, but it just feels like this rat’s nest of emotions, fear, anger, sorrow, all of it, and yet it was so fun to hear them laugh about parts of it. Seth Rogen does have a particularly, identifiable way that he laughs.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:07]:

And so it just kinda just I felt myself thinking that, oh, gosh. I didn’t know what I was in for, and this could could really bump up to a lot of emotion for me. But then I just I’d find myself laughing. And and but some of them had nothing to do with anything I’ve ever experienced, but they because the person who called in or wrote in, they had experiences where the person with Alzheimer’s wants to, like, start dating someone that’s in the home with them and how hurtful that was to their spouse, you know, and all the things. So but they’re, I mean, they’re making jokes about it, and so it just felt so good to release Mhmm. And and join them in their laughter even if it wasn’t something. So you just getting to read your words and and to hear you share about the intersections of anger and joy was of anger and joy was just so fun for me to do. And I just wanna encourage people to listen, especially if your life has been touched by Alzheimer’s or you play a role as a caregiver, which is to say almost all of us probably, I would really recommend it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:12]:

And, again, even if those are not celebrities that you’re familiar with their work or you follow them closely, it felt very universal to me and very nourishing to me as well. So, Jamie, I’m gonna pass it over to you for whatever you’d like to share.

Jamie Moore [00:39:26]:

Thank you for that recommendation. I’m excited to check that out, and I think it’s a really good tee up to my recommendation, which kind of asked the question of what’s next. When we release that grief, that joy, that anger, when we have that space, what do we do with that? My recommendation, my current obsession is the book Imagination, a Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, which is her and this is kind of coming from the the book text, proclamation, her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression. Paired with the book, doctor Benjamin worked with another graduate student. I believe her name is Ariana Brazier, who created the Imagination Playbook. So you can go to imaginationplaybook.com. And I’ve been experimenting with incorporating play into the classroom. One of the activities that really resonated with me was, like, hand clapping games as a way to, like, disarm emotions and to, like, introduce vulnerability and fun and laughter.

Jamie Moore [00:40:36]:

And at first, students are like, what are we doing? And I’m like, just go with it. Just go with it. I know you remember one of those elementary school games and why you know, let’s think about why the words were that way or what made us giggle back then. And it’s just been fun. It’s a way to make space for deep thought and engagement in a world that really wants to steal away all of our attention.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:03]:

I got to hear Ruha Benjamin speak about it. The publisher Yes. Interviewed her, and what a special thing. And you’re talking about it makes me realize I sort of have lost the follow through that I had intended on having to go play more with the Imagination Playbook. So thank you for revisiting this with, me personally. That that’s that’s so exciting to think about because it can oh my gosh. Especially the point in time when we’re talking can be a certainly a joy sucking time of the year for many of us. This is this is a point.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:41:39]:

There there’s these stages of team formation, which researchers have put together, And I always have been fascinated with just the stages of there are some factors such as how long your term is or how long your semester that I think affects this. But, boy, if those of you teaching in sixteen week semesters, I can feel real long. At certain

Jamie Moore [00:42:01]:

points. Weeks. So

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:02]:

Are you kidding me? I didn’t even know such a thing exists, but, of course, it does. It does. Oh, so I can’t even imagine. Wow.

Jamie Moore [00:42:12]:

The the end can get really unimaginative. So we we definitely need to take breaks for the play. And and also asking students to share and develop their own additions to that playbook is really fun.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:27]:

Jamie Moore, it’s been so wonderful getting to speak with you today. And today, we’re airing episode five sixty five. But I’m gonna give you just a minute, if you would, to tell the listeners what they’re gonna get next week on episode five sixty six because the way that these are airing is kind of, I think it’s exactly the way it should have been. But but tell us tell us what listeners can expect to hear next week from your collaborator.

Jamie Moore [00:42:58]:

Oh, next week, you get to hear from doctor Eileen Camfield who is an incredible educator and now editor of the book, Joy Centered Pedagogy in Higher Education. She’s going to share with you the work of our resilience work group and what we mean by bringing joy into higher ed spaces and all the different ways that the folks of our work group make that happen across different disciplines. She is a very dear mentor of mine and is the kind of person who, when she put out a call for articles about joy and I responded, I’m gonna write about anger. She said, I trust you, and I know that you’ll get us there. So I’m so excited for her to share more about her journey from the other side.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:43]:

Jamie Moore, thank you so much for being a guest today on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Jamie Moore [00:43:48]:

Thank you so much.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:51]:

Thanks once again to doctor Jamie Moore for joining me for this important conversation about embracing anger to find joyful agency. If you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly teaching and higher ed update, you are missing the opportunity to get the most recent episodes, show notes, and also some other resources that don’t show up in the show notes. So head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe to sign up. And thank you for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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