Showcasing the expertise of
Board of Trustees Awards Educators of the Year
Minnesota State is filled with incredible faculty who are doing amazing work focused on their teaching craft. The purpose of the Network for Educational Development (NED) Excellence in Teaching Series is to continue honoring and showcasing the experience and expertise of the Board of Trustees Awards for Excellence Educators of the Year through the opportunity to present, share, or teach about teaching and learning topics that have contributed to their recognition as excellent educators.
Deep Work in a Burnout Society:
Manifesting Contemplative Focus
Join three active learning sessions to explore undoing unproductive behaviors and mindsets, integrating lessons with a focus on anti-racism and dismantling oppression. Participants will collaboratively generate new approaches for well-being, contemplative immersion, and achieving what truly matters. Don’t miss this transformative journey.
Guided by Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance manifesto, these three-part working sessions navigate the tensions of “being productive” in a distracted world while feeling “burnt out” by sedimented pressures.
Session One
Session one explores Hersey’s antiracist and profound statements to center rest and refuse work that exploits and fails to recognize systems that undermine the health and wellbeing of people we disable or minoritize. We unpack Hersey’s claim that academia particularly exploits people of color and communities formerly enslaved. To practice what Hersey advocates, participants will take time to rest in this session. We will use rest to explore the embodied reflections of Hersey’s manifesto and how this can alter the horizon of what we imagine for ourselves and our students who are caught in the same academic grind we perpetuate.
February 15 @ 3:00 PMÂ –Â 4:00 PM
Session Two
Session two explores practical steps to be productive, balancing the constraints of teaching/service/research as exemplified by Cal Newport’s Deep Work with the criticism of work that perpetuates an achievement society. We explore the positionality of Newport’s work in relation to Hersey’s manifesto and consider why and for whom we should be focused and productive and which communities this ultimately serves. We then introduce Byung Chul Han’s argument that while academics used to fear a repressive and disciplinary society, our current regime perpetuates an “I can” achievement society of excess positivity that relies on neuroenhancements to insist that any failure to achieve is our fault.
February 22 @ 3:00 PMÂ –Â 4:00 PM
Session Three
In session three, we will explore the dopamine addiction that Dr. Anna Lembke describes and the burnt-out experience that writers Amelia Nagoski and Emily Nagoski and Byung Chul Han narrate. This session helps participants frame decisions about professional development that go beyond survival and instead asks larger questions about addiction, wellness, self-care, and community.
February 29 @ 10:00 AMÂ –Â 11:00 AM
This fourth installment of the NED Excellence in Teaching Series, “Deep Work in a Burnout Society” is facilitated by:
Ruthanne Soohee Kim, Ph.D.
2020 Educator of the Year
St. Cloud State University
The Board of Trustees Awards for Excellence acknowledge and provide system-wide recognition for consistently superior commitment to student learning of our college and university teaching and service faculty.
Questions?
Contact facilitator Ruthanne Soohee Kim, Ph.D.
View videos and programs from previous Board of Trustees Awards at MinnState.edu/BOTawards.
