Comprehensive and Holistic

 Tomorrow is my first day back at work after a week’s vacation and I am feeling more rested and grounded than I have since this pandemic started. This time away was very much an indication of how important it is to find out what you need and make it happen for yourself, because you cannot be anything for anyone if you are not something for yourself first.

I am still working through all the thoughts I had while having some time away from a busy inbox. I know there are 200 emails of varying priority awaiting me and a schedule that is pretty much filled to the brim from M-Th. A pedagogy of care framing requires both care of self but also an awareness of the care that your colleagues and students may need. It is as I try to figure out the praxis of care in our remote educational environments that is supported by a trauma-informed theory, that I keep bumping into two words that come up a lot in my writing and research- comprehensive and holistic. Both of these terms have a lot to give an exploration of a pedagogy of care, in different ways.

The etymology of comprehensive is from the Latin and has many possible connotative origins such as “to unite,” “to include,” and  “to seize” (etymology online). Thus, comprehensive is not only about understanding or comprehending, but it is about a bringing together, an inclusivity, and also a sensory component that brings things together. 

Holistic, is a much more recent term. The term was coined in the 1920s by a South African scholar in a book about evolution and it was used to denote unifying separate parts (etymology online). 

Both terms suggest unification, but only comprehensive refers back to an inclusive principle. It is this inclusivity that we would like to model in our pedagogy of care. So our pedagogy of care can be holistic in that it brings different parts and different groups together, but it should more importantly be comprehensive in its ability to include and to seize a particular situation (like remote teaching) in order to make sure all in the learning environment feel valued, heard, and respected.

I am still working through these thoughts and how they connect to what happens in learning management system design and classes of different sizes through video conferencing. Just because my vacation is technically over in a few hours doesn’t necessarily mean that my brain will switch back at the stroke of midnight. I need to be fair to myself and move back into that work space with care, with intentionality, and with an awareness of limits and boundaries. 

So many of us in higher education at the moment are working many many hours, 7 days a week, to ensure that courses and material will be ready for students. We are attempting to be holistic in curating resources and practices we have previously used, encountered during professional development webinars, and researched. But we also need to be comprehensive and include ourselves in this preparation. How do you feel? Are you tired? Do you feel anxious? Do you feel uncertain? All of these feelings are important to acknowledge and to include in your prep.

This cannot and should not be perfect. There is no magic gloss that we can apply to make everything seamless always. Tech issues will arise, people will feel ill, socio-political events will happen that are out of our control. All of this is part of that process. All of this can be part of the development and context of your course (depending on your discipline).

So maybe we try to not erase ourselves in the process and give ourselves the same kind of care and empathy we would show students. It’s a “physician, heal thyself” kind of moment, and that awareness can only make our pedagogy more truthful to who we are as educators.