DEAR ELIA Teaching Program
Interested in teaching dear elia?
Join the DEAR ELIA Teaching Program: Transforming the University through a Pedagogy of Unwellness just launched Fall 2024. Register here and join instructors across the world in co-creating resources and engaging cross-classroom learning.
What is the DEAR ELIA Teaching Program?
The DEAR ELIA Teaching Program is an evolving, co-created space with resources for engaging Mimi Khúc’s dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. It’s also an experiment in building care-focused classrooms. We cannot teach any subject or discipline without acknowledging–and taking on the responsibility of addressing–the reality of our collective unwellness, and most especially student unwellness.
The teaching program is grounded in Mimi’s framework of a pedagogy of unwellness: the recognition that we are all differentially unwell in relation to enabling and disabling structures around us. Our students are unwell, and dear elia asks us to transform our spaces of learning by approaching teaching from that starting point. The teaching program is a space to collectively engage that transformation, with resources including discussion guides, sample projects, opportunities for interactions with Mimi, cross-classroom learning, and access to collective archives of unwellness and wellness.
How do I participate? Does it cost money?
The program is completely free to be as accessible as possible, created and moderated by an entirely volunteer team (including Mimi!) who just wants to get dear elia into the hands of those who need it most (everyone!). All we ask for is a commitment to course adopt or bulk purchase dear elia.
One exception: if you’re an adjunct, you do not need to confirm commitment to assign dear elia since your teaching appointments are likely unstable and, for lack of a better word, fucked. Adjuncts are welcome to join the teaching program at any time!
Here's a preview of what the teaching program will include:
* introducing a shared framework: the theory and method of a pedagogy of unwellness
* recognizing how we are all differentially unwell
* examining the university's role in that unwellness
* making the classroom a transformative space of diagnosing structural unwellness and building structures of care
* interactive elements such as:
live Q&A sessions with Mimi
discussion guides and sample projects
critical arts approaches to self-care and contributing to an ongoing Instagram archive of self-care reflections
collective annotation projects: asynchronous conversations across participating classrooms via annotation of excerpts of dear elia
multi-classroom discussions
co-creation of living archive of unwellness: tracking student unwellness and university "wellness" across the country
co-creation of living archive of wellness: student-created models for structures of mental health and care