March 20, 2024—Where is your elsewhere? The place you go to renew your educator spirit and rest your teaching body? The physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual demands of teaching are numerous and often threaten to dissolve the basic humanity of educators. Where is your elsewhere, the place you can reconnect your heart to your work?
I started thinking about my elsewheres while reading Begin again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for today, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (2022). James Baldwin, writer, poet, and advocate for Black selfhood, empowerment, gay rights, and witness to the many ways that racism blunts the American commitment to freedom and liberation for all. Baldwin’s constant struggle for personal self-determination and advocacy for the American ideal of justice for all, often left him tired, disappointed, marginalized, and brokenhearted. His elsewhere was Istanbul where he could rest away from the limelight, regather his spirit, work on writing projects, and see from a distance, insights on the American experiment that were less evident when mired in debilitating social norms.
Glaude describes the importance of elsewhere as, “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe, to refuse adjustments and accommodation to the demands of society, and to live apart, if just for a time, from the deadly assumptions that threaten to smother” (p. 130). The many ways that educators are marginalized and embattled by neo-liberal policies and practices have some resonance with Baldwin’s lived experience with dehumanizing social norms of race and sexuality. Their experiences are not equivalent, yet they share similarities of personal impact, limits on self-determination, broken heartedness in the face of what is promised, and the continuous struggle to seek a better, more life-giving vision of humanizing spaces. In a 2022 Gallup poll, 44% of teachers felt burned out, often or always. A significant contributor to burnout are feelings of isolation, abandonment, loss of autonomy, and social condemnation when seeking to create more holistic and welcoming spaces for students who are marginalized because of racial, linguistic, cultural, or LGBTQ identities. It is not a stretch to say that many teachers feel embattled and constantly struggle to remain connected to the heart of their passion to care for learners.
To survive and even perhaps to thrive, these activist educators who witness the inequities of schooling, desperately need an elsewhere to regain their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual footing. As Claude notes, “Living elsewhere can offer you a moment of rest, to catch your breath and yourself to enter the fray once again, not so much whole and healed, but battle-scarred and prepared for yet another round” (p. 130). In this case, Claude is referencing Baldwin’s time in Paris and Istanbul where he wrote many of his essays and books on American racism and Black liberation. Travel can be more difficult for many educators, but “living elsewhere” can take the form of a sabbatical, a mental health day, a retreat, an inspirational poem, or a cup of coffee/tea and heart-forward conversation with a trusted colleague. The monthly conversations I host for faculty and staff, I hope, are a form of elsewhere where we gather, reconnect with our call to heal/serve. And to be present to each other’s joys, celebrations, and disappointments in our university that often commodifies our labor instead of centering its transformative potential for students and professors alike.
Where is your elsewhere? I have several personal elsewheres. The first one that comes to mind is my university office. It is decorated with pictures of natural places that have soul-significance. A favorite ski area and teaching awards hang in prominent locations. Soft lighting and plants round out the sense that this is my elsewhere. A place I can retreat to and seek renewal when I’m feeling overwhelmed and challenged by administrative tasks or institutional decisions that I experience as dehumanizing. A place where I can reframe the institutional norms that seem distant from the stated beliefs of the university to be a place of liberation and empowerment. Any natural space, whether it is the gardens I walk past on my way to the office, or sweeping mountain scapes can evoke a sense of elsewhere. If I still my internal chatter and relax into the presence of nature I can experience an element of affirmation that the challenges I face when inviting the university to be a better version of itself are worth enduring. Once renewed I’m better able to foster and sustain spaces of wholeness for both me and my students.
As a teacher another important elsewhere is the classroom, a sanctuary where I’m less encumbered by the social norms of academia and the institutional imperatives of productivity and efficiency. When I’m at my best as a professor I’m teaching from elsewhere, “that place that affords the space to breathe, to refuse adjustments and accommodation to the demands of society”. And it seems the same is true for many of my students. When the classroom becomes an elsewhere place, apart from the constraining dictates of academia or the dehumanizing social norms they live with on a daily basis, students can experience moments of flourishing and affirmation of their humanity.
Where is your elsewhere? Where is the place you seek out in order to rest your weary heart before reentering the fray, “not so much whole and healed, but battle-scarred and prepared for yet another round”?