Teaching with Tenderness

Becky Thompson is a professor of sociology at Simmons College. Her books include Survivors on the Yoga Mat: Stories for Those Healing from Trauma and A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism.

"In bold and lyrical prose, Becky Thompson offers a practical model for embodied teaching, for a classroom where painful realities like genocide, slavery, colonization, and rape culture can become the subject of fearless-or fear transcending-study. The word 'tenderness' . . . may soften the lens of inquiry. Thompson retrieves its etymology for a pedagogy of silent witness, contemplation, attention, presence, patience, skillful confrontation, and perseverance of heroic proportions. This is how the word is used in my own (Quaker) tradition, as (to paraphrase Adrienne Rich) an 'instrument to touch the wound beyond the wound.' And, as an experienced yoga teacher, she invites the body and its stories into the classroom, using both asana and Vedic philosophy to help students awaken, rest, cool off, even nap. Thompson's experience is deep and her exposition infinitely subtle. I love this radical book down to its tiniest footnote."-Mary Rose O'Reilley, author of The Peaceable Classroom "Drawing on women-of-colors theories, multiracial feminist pedagogy, contemplative practices, trauma studies, yoga, and a wide array of additional scholarship from diverse disciplines, Thompson develops innovative pedagogies of tenderness-radically inclusive, relational, generous, visionary modes of interacting with others."-AnaLouise Keating, author of Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues "This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the challenge and promise of interdisciplinary work that takes the whole person into account as part of envisioning a pedagogy where all things are done as if everyone mattered -- body, mind, and all."--Reflective Teaching