I recently met with my summer research students to discuss their project findings. During our check-in, nearly every student expressed anxiety about the upcoming semester and how worried they were about deadlines and exams and becoming overwhelmed quickly. Their unease resonated with me deeply; I felt their anxiety viscerally, even joking that while I wasn’t anxious before, their concerns had transferred to me! Acknowledging their fears, I recalled and shared with them one of bell hooks’s insights from Teaching to Transgress: “The classroom remains the most radical place of possibility in the academy.” I asked them to reflect on what hooks’s idea of radical possibility meant to them. Overwhelmingly, their reflections connected to the notion of well-being––for themselves and their peers.
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