Teaching (toward) the Beloved Community

“Small flat rigid squares of paper”: Books that shaped me in 2024

Several years ago, a friend introduced me to Anne Lamott, and specifically to her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I have given this book to several people over the years, including to a special student this year who served as a teaching assistant for me. And I have re-bought myself the book a few times because I loan it out and it doesn’t come back. (Fortunately, I have a copy now sitting securely in my window sill!) Anyway, the first part of the title of this post comes from that book..the power of small, flat, rigid squares of paper to change the world.

I did more reading this year than I have in the last several years, partly because my kids encouraged me to do the Goodreads reading challenge, and I didn’t want to lose (even to myself). Also I did more reading this year because I finally learned to appreciate audio books. If you are on the side who says “audio books aren’t reading”, then just keep it to yourself. Not every book I tried as an audio was a good fit, and some I put aside in favor of reading it in print, but that was because of how a particular book was structured. That being said, as I type this out, I do think that the books I am going to write about as the ones that shaped me are books I actually read in the traditional sense….but I sure did appreciate the joy of audiobooks in Nashville traffic this year, letting me have some respite from news.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. This is the first book I finished in 2024. It is a realistic look at foster care, having a parent who has an addiction to substances, and life in small towns in Appalachia. This book introduced me to the Melungeon community, which I then learned more about this year through other types of reading and research. Barbara Kingsolver remains one of my favorite authors.
Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination by Stephanie Clare Smith. I read this book in June and I don’t think a week has gone by that I haven’t worked this book into conversation somehow, including holding my two BFFs captive pool side about it at our annual “Girls’ Weekend”. This book could trigger you if you have ever experienced assault, particularly sexual assault, and it could also be triggering if you were abandoned (literally or emotionally) by your family. But this book is the best example of how resilience is dynamic, not static, over the course of a lifetime. When people are given resources (like therapy, stability) and sometimes through time itself (different developmental stages), resilience can manifest even years after experiencing trauma. This author’s story is also a great example of the power of safe, stable nurturing relationships, even just one, in our lives. This is a powerful, powerful memoir.
Clutter, an untidy history, by Jennifer Howard. This book is part memoir, part “how-to” and part history of why we collect “stuff”. It was fascinating. This book shaped me in helping me thing about cleaning, organizing and “keeping”. I have always been the one to want to hold onto tangible things because of memories and have had a hard time letting things go. I wouldn’t say it is super easy for me now, but I have a different perspective on keeping things and letting things go.
The 1619 Project, by Nikole Hannah-Jones. This was a re-read for me, because I assign it in my policy class, but every time I read it (this makes the third time for me) I tune into something that I missed in a previous read. This book stimulates discussion like no other book I have ever assigned in a class. If you want to learn more history, a deeper history of the US, read this book.
The Penderwicks series, by Jeanne Birdsall. This is a series I wish I had read years ago, and I wish I had done a read-aloud with my daughters. They have already read the series, some of them multiple times, and it was through them that I was inspired to read it. Reading these shaped me in the way of remembering that it is good to read books that are just for pure enjoyment, even if they are officially “juvenile” books. For the past several years my “fun” reading has been limited to a couple of weeks in the summer, and this year (and the good old Penderwicks) were a reminder it is fun to read “just because”.
The Kingdom of the Poor by Charles Strobel. Charles Strobel is well known to many Nashvillians, as the founder of the organization Room in the Inn. But this book is a great read even if you have never been to Nashville and don’t know what Room in the Inn is. This is a bit of a cheat to put on here because I haven’t quite finished it, but even half way in I can honestly say this book has shaped me in thinking about what it means to live into the Beatitudes, how we hear our call to service and how we’ve seen it modeled, the importance of being in community, remembering that people are not “cases to be managed”, how, as Charlie says, we are all poor and we are all worthy of love, and more. I have also been challenged to think about my life’s version of holy water and warped floorboards. Who and what do I pray for constantly? Who and what should I be praying for?

Here’s to more reading for fun, for instruction, and for edification in 2025.

Getting out the vote: All kinds of resources related to voting

I haven’t written in awhile, first because of the start of the semester, and then because of general malaise, and then (and most importantly) because I have been doing the work in different ways that I am now writing about. In other words, I have used spare minutes and nights beyond work and family to make sure people know deadlines for voter registration, that they know where they vote, that they understand what the ballot will look like before they get to the poll, and more.

And today is the deadline to register to vote in Tennessee. Fellow Tennesseans, if you read this on Monday October 7th and aren’t registered, you can still register online here

Other states have later voter registration deadlines, so if you live somewhere other than Tennessee and you know you aren’t registered to vote, check the deadline for your state here.

If you aren’t sure whether you are registered or not, you can check your voter registration status here.

Sweaty after knocking on doors for three hours this past Saturday!

One of my favorite resources to understand voting issues is the non-partisan Voting Rights Lab. They track election related legislation and voting issues in all 50 states.

I have written on this site about voting and elections before, once in the summer of 2020, where I outline some of these above resources and also party platforms and the electoral college and how I approach teaching about these concepts with undergrads.

I also wrote here about some of the movement and resistance work that went into the passage of the Voting Rights Act, including the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, and how this could be incorporated into your teaching.

And one more look in the archives of this blog shows me I wrote about RBG and her concerns about voter suppression, and it also has a link to Dr. King’s speech “Give us the Ballot”.

Last week I did a session on campus with a couple of other colleagues as part of diversity week. The focus of our session was on equity and disparities in voting. I can’t figure out how to link the slide deck here, but if you email me (sabrina.sullenberger@belmont.edu), I will be happy to share it with you.

FINALLY…. I hear several students say that they are thinking about not voting because they don’t like any of the candidates. And after some discussion with them, usually what I learn is that they don’t like the presidential candidates. So, it is always good to have a discussion about down ballot voting. I tell students that the farther down the ballot, the closer it impacts their daily lives. (You can argue with me, but whatever…it usually gets them to reconsider not voting.) Related, here is a good discussion on down ballot voting.

Speaking life

When I say this has been a semester….whew. I am not exaggerating. I have missed writing but in the great scheme of survival, writing has taken a back seat. (I have big wrting plans for the summer. We will see if they come to fruition.)

Today I have my last final session of Spring 2024, and it is with our BSW seniors. This cohort has been together for the last two years in core social work classes, and many of them have known each other all 4 years of college. Our final session isn’t an exam; it is more of a final reflection and celebration. They have turned in their portfolios last week and all their other assignments, so here at the end we do some final sharing and then we have our traditional ice cream party and “goodbye for now”.

One of the things I do in this course at some point is have them reflect, in small groups, on their strengths, especially ones they have seen emerge this year in their field placement or personal relationships. I ask each person to name their strengths, and then invite the members of the small group to affirm ways they have seen those strengths play out, as well as share with the person other strengths they have observed about them. We haven’t had a chance to do that this semester so it is one of the things we are doing today. I thought it would be nice to share with them strengths we as faculty have observed in each of them as well. I asked my colleagues to share their ideas and the result is this: 9 strengths for everyone (20 graduating seniors), captured in my best penmanship on cardstock. (I am taking markers to class in case people want to add the strengths named by their peers as well.)

I wanted to take this extra step (putting it on paper) because of seeing the benefits of my Lenten practice this year, which was to speak encouragement to others daily. It is something that I have continued beyond Lent, because I was reminded of the simple grace that speaking life to others brings to them and to me. Speaking encouragement to others also helped me to remember to speak encouragement to myself as well, and this was a very necessary reminder that I needed.

Encouragement is a key part of therapeutic processes.

Encouragement is also just really necessary, and often lacking in this world.

As one of my favorite poems from David Whyte concludes, “People are hungry. And one good word is bread for a thousand.”

Synchronicity in classroom and community

This semester I am teaching in an interdisciplinary learning community (ILC), which is part of our university’s general education curriculum. The ILC is called “Introduction to Trauma Studies” and the two courses are the human behavior across the lifespan course that I teach and a literature/writing course which is taught by a colleague in the English department. In each of these courses, we look at how trauma affects development at different stages in life, and we explore what resilience looks like and how resilience is built. In my class we explore these concepts through social work theories, research and case studies and in the other class students explore these concepts through writing and reading a variety of things: memoirs, poetry, fiction, essays, and more.

Photo by Jessica Lewis ud83eudd8b thepaintedsquare on Pexels.com

This semester I am also continuing my work in the community, and last week we had a “lunch and learn” where the focus was on journaling and self-compassion. This “lunch and learn” happens monthly, though sometimes the attendees are different, and writing/storytelling was one of the things they identified last fall that they would like to do more of in the coming months.

The participants in these events live in a public housing community near campus and I am about two years into relationship building with them. When I was looking for writing prompts to share with them, I wanted to be mindful of their experiences (what I know of them), and have the prompts be as inclusive as possible. Of the stories I know, I know they include some trauma.

I shared with them elements of Chapter 1 from a book Called Writing True. I learned about this book from my colleague who I teach with in the integrated learning community referenced above. She uses this book with students in her course.

This first chapter introduces the style of creative nonfiction. I shared with the women at the lunch and learn that in this writing style, you are opening up about real things, true things that have happened and you are using your personal voice. At the same time, writing in this style doesn’t limit you to “only the facts” that we might associate with good journalism or other forms of nonfiction. There is an emphasis on including strong sensory detail and a subjective interpretation or reflection on the events that happened as you now understand them. I shared with them how one of the prompts, reflecting on a photo that was taken when I was a child, helped me to reflect on some family dynamics in a way I had not consciously thought about before. These women were interested in the brief part of my story that I shared, just as I am always interested in the slices of their lives that they share with me.

As Maya Angelou said, “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. I shared this quote with them, and we talked about how even though “memoir” is a fancy sounding word, the fact is, we all have a story and there is power, and hopefully community, in sharing them.

Toward the end of our time together, I scattered lists of writing prompts and pens on the tables and invited people to pick a journal from a selection of journals on a table. I told them I hoped they each found one that “spoke to them”. We had some time to write before having our lunch, and a couple of the women asked if we could get together another time as a group and share some of what we had written. Another person asked if she could bring some poetry that she had written, to share. I am hopeful for our future times together.

In the past times that we have taught this ILC, my colleague and I have seen the same community building processes unfold. Students take risks with their writing and sharing their voices, and they encourage others to do the same. By their example, they have also encouraged me to do this. It has been a long time since I have done anything other than academic writing or academic adjacent writing, and I am excited (and curious) to see what unfolds!

Creatively applied learning

Every fall semester for the past 10 years I have taught a social welfare policy course. This is a course where social work majors and occasionally some social justice minors take a dive into a broad array of policy topics. This is a class where we discuss so many policy topics (child welfare, housing, food and nutrition, education, health and mental health, etc) that we are really just surveying the major policies that shape social work practice and life in the US today. Throughout the semester students identify a policy that they want to write their individual analysis papers on, so they do get a chance to take a deeper look at a particular issue that is interesting to them.

For every issue, I try to have students do some sort of application to practice translating policy language into real-world understanding. This can include things like having conversations with older family members about Social Security, talking with co-workers about finding insurance on the marketplace, planning a meal that fits the financial parameters of SNAP benefits, and more.

Toward the end of the semester is when we discuss policies related to housing and homelessness, including redlining, gentrification, vouchers, etc. In the fall semester, for the application part of this, I asked students to do a social media post or graphic that could be used to tell their friends/followers what they had learned. There were so many awesome responses to this mini-assignment, and I loved seeing how they were translating this information to others. We also had good discussion in the sense that doing these had raised additional questions for many of the students about things they didn’t fully understand, and also because they were getting questions and comments from their posts about them.

I asked one of my students for permission to share hers in a more public way, and she graciously agreed. This assignment was a good reminder for me that it is worth it to stress over the assignments, even the “little” ones, to make them as authentic and engaging as possible.

Preventative Maintenance: Tangible self-care

Last semester felt very long, as I discussed in my last post. I have friends who teach in various institutions across the country and so many of them expressed these same feelings about last semester. Whew.

One day in a particular class, when I could tell that people were stressed, I shifted gears early on into the class session. I crossed off the agenda items we had planned for the day and gave them some exercises/questions to do to help them think about their final paper. After that, we talked some about an upcoming holiday and listened to a bit of a podcast episode that had connections to the class.

I told them it is like preventative maintenance on your car, you have to be intentional to take care of it when it isn’t broken, so that you don’t find yourself in danger on the side of the road someday. I didn’t want them to be even more stressed in a few weeks when they realized this assignment was looming over them.

That little “re-set” in the second half of the semester didn’t work a miracle, but it did give us a chance to breathe a bit on a day we all seemed to need it. It was also a day that my students, most of whom I had not had in class before, deepened their trust in me because they could see I cared. That was a gentle but palpable shift.

As we finished last semester and then moved into the break, I continued to reflect on that day. For a social worker, I have always been not great at what we call “self-care”. Self-care has always seemed abstract to me. But in the past couple of years I have gotten better, finally, at what some people call “boring self-care” or what I referred to as “preventative maintenance” for my students. Taking care of things, and me, before breaking down is the very least I can do. (I still have room to grow.)

Hopefully you have some planned “preventative maintenance” days for yourself, and if not, I hope you consider it. Whether in your work or in your personal life, some space to breathe and the message to yourself that you are worth the rest is invaluable.

Longest semester ever.

Woof. This is feeling like the longest semester ever. It has been feeling like that for several weeks now. A few weeks ago I broke a bone in my right foot. Boot life doesn’t lend itself well to campus life, even on a relatively compact campus. This past week I have had bronchitis…still have it. I don’t feel inspirational in any sense of the word. I barely even feel articulate enough to teach.

College students are struggling nationwide. I know this, and I want to be there for my students. This also hits closer to home these days as I have a high school senior who will be leaving for college next fall. How will she do? How can I support her?

Though there isn’t as much data (that I can find) on faculty mental health compared to student mental health, this is an interesting article on fostering mental health and well-being among university faculty.

It is hard to feel like I am complaining or whining about work when truly, it is a job I love. I have really amazing and supportive coworkers. I just can’t figure out why this semester seems so long and like an uphill slog because nothing is qualitatively different than other semesters with similar challenges (except for the age of my own child).

Some semesters just be like that, I guess. I have just never felt one so profoundly hard (and for that I am grateful). If you are feeling the same way, know that you are not alone. If you are having a great semester….send encouragement!