Teaching Manifesto for Times of Crisis
The Teaching Manifesto for Times of Crisis was written in 2020 and 2021 by Bengi Sulu. She wrote this manifesto for her students at New York City College of Technology while teaching Developmental Psychology. She used the manifesto as a way to express turn in the meaning of classroom into a space of care and mindfulness during the peak of the pandemic.
In her own words, “it was ironic to teach developmental psychology during the pandemic considering a line of emphasis in the field on development as a linear growth process and psychosocial crises that the individual needs to overcome to be able to make it successfully to the next stage of development” while her students were constantly feeling “stuck or stagnant in stages that were supposed to have been left behind months or a year ago.”
According to her, she couldn’t continue teaching without addressing that unprecedented experience. As she remembered: “whenever we started the discussion sessions, there was a pervasive feeling that we were frozen in time and space, not ever able to row with the current but float against”.
Instead of only continuing to address the discipline content, she decided to use the classroom as a caring space and the manifesto was her idea to make explicitly her pedagogical and personal values.
In her own words, “it was ironic to teach developmental psychology during the pandemic considering a line of emphasis in the field on development as a linear growth process and psychosocial crises that the individual needs to overcome to be able to make it successfully to the next stage of development” while her students were constantly feeling “stuck or stagnant in stages that were supposed to have been left behind months or a year ago.”
According to her, she couldn’t continue teaching without addressing that unprecedented experience. As she remembered: “whenever we started the discussion sessions, there was a pervasive feeling that we were frozen in time and space, not ever able to row with the current but float against”.
Instead of only continuing to address the discipline content, she decided to use the classroom as a caring space and the manifesto was her idea to make explicitly her pedagogical and personal values.