Amy Winans: The "Contemplative" Approach
"Cultivating a critical emotional literacy entails not only engaging with emotions cognitively, but also engaging with them experientially, contemplatively, in a way that recognizes their embodied nature." |
Amy E. Winans is an associate professor of english who teaches in the English and Women's Studies Departments at Susquehanna University in central Pennsylvania. Her pedagogy of emotion is articulated most comprehensively in her 2012 article "Cultivating Critical Emotional Literacy: Cognitive and Contemplative Approaches to Engaging Difference." Winans is deeply committed to teaching students about difference, identity, and inequitable social norms.
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To do so, Winans turns to cultivating in her students a critical awareness of their own emotions and embodiment as insightful clues to their subject positions in cultural systems. Similar to Stenberg's two-step pedagogy, Winans describes a pedagogy that not only teaches about emotion, but prepares students to experientially engage with it as a form of meaning-making.
An Emotional Education
Drawing from Worsham's claim (quoted on the homepage) that emotion binds the individual to the social, Winans explores “how emotions and emotional rules operate” to reflect and inform “identities and social norms” (152). The course Winans draws upon for her pedagogical theory is a multicultural literature class she taught composed of mainly white, middle class students. She designs her reading list (Nella Larsson's Passing and Junot Diaz's Drown to name a few) around questions of how emotions function socially and culturally, especially with respect to identity formation.
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Discussion Questions for No Man's Land
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She strategically begins her course with Eula Biss' memoir No Man's Land, which foregrounds discussion of whiteness as a construction and models one woman's striving to critically engage with difference. Winans heavily relies on this text to lay the analytical groundwork for students' eventual engagement with emotion and difference. Some discussion questions are bracketed out in the bulleted list. She argues that this text, when taught to a white audience, gives students a chance to connect with Biss' struggles with whiteness as a racial category and to "vicariously examine their own experiences of racial identity and emotion" (158). Through her course materials, Winans gets students thinking about their identities and the emotional attachments from which they're derived.
Contemplation and Embodiment
"Contemplative pedagogy seeks to cultivate mindfulness by helping us to attend to our awareness, attention, and embodied experiences of emotions, beliefs, and thoughts." |
The ultimate goal of her pedagogy is to help students "develop a more conscious and embodied awareness of how they see and interpret the world” (151). She agrees with Laura Micciche that teaching emotion becomes most salient when it cultivates an understanding of identity construction as an embodied and relational process. She describes an activity, which she describes as contemplative, that requires students to deliberately experience and reflect on "how they saw, how they and others constructed identity, and how emotions were bound up with these processes" (160).
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Winans' contemplative activity requires students to spend ten minutes standing in a public place outside of class without doing anything. They were told to actively do nothing, meaning they should not people watch or check their phones or even pretend to do any of these activities. After their experience, students are assigned a brief paper in which they reflect on the challenges of the activity and how they felt during their ten minutes of nothingness. This paper naturally progresses into a class discussion.
Winans reports that most of the students papers focused on the emotional discomfort--the worrying--her contemplative activity engendered. Without the shelter of phones, reading materials, and other performative behaviors, doing nothing in public "disrupted their habit of performing the identity of a busy, connected person," and drew attention to the instability and constructed nature of this identity (161). In this way, the contemplative activity pushes students to become more aware and detached from the "emotions and habitual thoughts" that limit or shape their identities (161). The exercise results in a deeper self-knowledge only accessible through an embodied awareness of the ways in which identities are performed and constructed relationally. This work is essential for "meaningful engagement with difference and inequality" (167).
Winans argues that both the analytical discussion of emotion and identity and the contemplative experience of emotion and embodiment lay the necessary groundwork for students to better "interrogate experiences of difference" in their readings and in their own lives (162). Winans approach to teaching emotion is similar to that of Micciche and Stenberg in that emotion appears in her classroom as both something to be understood and something to be accessed as a form of knowledge production.
Winans reports that most of the students papers focused on the emotional discomfort--the worrying--her contemplative activity engendered. Without the shelter of phones, reading materials, and other performative behaviors, doing nothing in public "disrupted their habit of performing the identity of a busy, connected person," and drew attention to the instability and constructed nature of this identity (161). In this way, the contemplative activity pushes students to become more aware and detached from the "emotions and habitual thoughts" that limit or shape their identities (161). The exercise results in a deeper self-knowledge only accessible through an embodied awareness of the ways in which identities are performed and constructed relationally. This work is essential for "meaningful engagement with difference and inequality" (167).
Winans argues that both the analytical discussion of emotion and identity and the contemplative experience of emotion and embodiment lay the necessary groundwork for students to better "interrogate experiences of difference" in their readings and in their own lives (162). Winans approach to teaching emotion is similar to that of Micciche and Stenberg in that emotion appears in her classroom as both something to be understood and something to be accessed as a form of knowledge production.