Description:

• Comfy Cozy Community (CCC) teaching and learning is connected to disability justice tenet #8 of INTERDEPENDENCE: We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.

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Prior knowledge reflection:

• How does traditional teaching and learning systems promote individual success over community success?

• What does community well-being and success consist of?

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Essential questions:

• How can CCC teaching and learning model community care, well-being, and success?

• How can educators continuously educate themselves and others to further support community success ensuring all work together to thrive within their classroom and community?

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Objectives:

• To identify ways to model and practice community care, well-being, and success.

• To name ways educators can continue to learn about and support community collaboration and success.

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Content:

• Educators can learn from Mimi Khúc’s Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency which centers multiply marginalized transgender, queer, sick, neurodivergent, and disabled BIPOC naming the unwellness in our lives and proactively working as an interdependent community who needs each other to survive and thrive in order to name and minimize systems of unwellness. Naming unwellness within our education and societal systems allows all to become aware of how we are not alone in our unwellness, and how we need to build supportive community systems of care which support all. To learn more, read Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency by Mimi Khúc.

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Effective classroom strategies:

• Educators can model and support community care, well-being, and success by building in routine activities where educators and students are taught to check in with themselves on how they are feeling physically and emotionally at the beginning, middle, and end of the day. This practice will invite students to share their full authentic selves and reach out for support when needed. Educators can model how they may be feeling unwell, showing students how it is okay to feel unwell and to reach out for support when needed. An interdependent classroom is where all are invited to express themselves, what they need, and offer ways to support each other.

• Educators can engage in continuous learning of CCC teaching and learning which centers community care, well-being, and success when facilitating interactive activities which allow students to name their strengths and areas of improvement. Students with strengths in a certain area can support students who seek improvement. Students with areas of improvement can seek support from students who thrive in that area. This activity of creating a strengths and areas of improvement bank and map will permit educators and students to witness how all have strengths and all have areas of improvement. All experience unwellness in different aspects of their lives. By allowing students to name strengths and areas of improvement, all can be invited to offer proactive support. Educators can continue to educate themselves and others by following Mimi Khúc and more scholars and activists who name unwellness and ways to navigate and together take down these systems of unwellness.

 

References:

• khúc, mimi. “Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency: A Journey and Manifesto.” South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 120 no. 2, 2021