One of the most profound things I have learned in this time of pandemic isolation, malaise, and desolation is the importance of prioritizing human connections in all aspects of my work. This comes somewhat organically to me as a director of community-engaged learning.  My primary responsibilities entail supporting faculty to design community-engaged courses and connecting them with partner organizations to provide meaningful learning experiences for students that also benefit the community. I also oversee public service and community engagement programs for students, intentionally preparing them to build relationships through their community-based praxis. My focus has always been on bridging campus constituencies with community constituencies, but as the effects of the pandemic led us into the dehumanizing world of zoom screens and masked social-distancing, I found myself noticing how people were disconnecting — retreating behind black screens instead of turning on their cameras or missing meetings altogether. In many cases, people felt comfortable sharing that their absence or cursory presence was the result of mental health challenges or being overextended with Zoom fatigue. In fact, I was among those who sometimes took opportunities to check out, experiencing the ambivalence of moving from meeting to meeting where people tried to conduct business as usual while the world was suffering. It felt fraudulent and even violent to pretend that we could still perform with maximum productivity, allowing the pain of our pandemic realities to be unspoken. 

I wondered what alternative spaces could be created to help us feel renewed instead of depleted by these attempts to stay connected, surmising that what we all needed was a way to show up and be held with love and care by others in our community.  I noted which meetings and people I looked forward to joining amidst the marathons of Zoom calls, and what qualities made these meetings enjoyable. It was the spaces where cura personalis was a guiding force: where we took time to check in and really listen to what each of us was experiencing, our struggles and joys, and then responded to each other with compassion. We took the time needed to build connections and used that as a starting point for determining what we could accomplish together. And often that connecting process took most of our meeting time, but there was a sense that the conversation fortified us with renewed purpose for our work. It also created space for us to collectively adjust the scope and direction of our work to account for the challenges of the moment. 

I began to seek opportunities to create these humanizing spaces or join them. I collaborated with colleagues to facilitate a faculty and community podcast discussion series, focusing on podcasts about revolutionary love, creativity and leadership, and fostering social change. Our group met three times for open ended discussions that allowed participants to process how the podcasts were resonating with them in their work and lives. Several participants shared deep reflections, tears, and appreciations for the space. Additionally, I facilitated a staff meeting that guided our staff through the creation of guiding principles for our return to work on campus, drawing on anti-racist, humanist, and feminist resources. The process of developing the principles not only allowed for us to truly hear each other’s concerns, limitations, and anticipations, but also for us to respond by crafting principles that accounted for the intersectional impacts of the pandemic on our staff members.  

In undergraduate classes, I gave over the first third of each session to fostering student connections, offering meaningful check-in questions and giving them time to share with partners or the whole group. Through these processes I was able to take the temperature of the group, get a sense of their struggles and priorities, and then meet them where they were at when we transitioned to engaging the curricular content. In other words, by enacting the first step in the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm-–-to begin an educational experience with a respect for individual context-–-I was individually and collaboratively conducting small scale experiments in creating more just spaces by accounting for the individuals and the dynamics of the moment, and then responding with compassion and care. 

I also experienced humanizing spaces as a participant in particular programs and meetings. As a member of the Lane Center Faculty Fellows program, I was grateful to show up to our biweekly intellectual discussions and be able to connect the content of the program to my experiences as a professional, recently graduated doctoral student, and parent. Our facilitator welcomed us to share from our hearts, as well as our minds, and the other fellows contributed to creating a safe space by demonstrating vulnerability, curiosity, and concern for each other. I don’t know if we had the conversations that the facilitator intended us to have when she planned the program, but we had the conversations we needed in those moments, and it felt good to have the freedom to live and speak our truths. A similar dynamic manifested in the “Humanizing Education Subcommittee” that grew out of the Continuity of Instruction Committee charged with guiding our university through the pandemic with minimal disruption to the quality of the educational experience. Our subcommittee facilitator, an associate dean in our school of education, started every meeting by naming the realities of the moment (new developments in the pandemic, racial injustices, climate crises, etc.) and recognizing the pain and harm that participants might be carrying on any given day. It was reassuring to hear someone name all the dehumanizing forces with which we were grappling, rather than pretending they didn’t exist. And it set the stage for us to speak vulnerably about ourselves and our work while we collectively developed a vision for an institution-wide grant-funded initiative focused on anti-racism. 

The pandemic has wrapped our Jesuit value of cura personalis in a whole new level of urgency. If we cannot be seen and held in our humanness, then we cannot work or learn with meaning and integrity. Instead, we simply go through the motions, hiding out (Zoom cameras off) until we burn out (missing the meeting altogether). I contend that humanizing spaces are the scaffolds for us to rebuild our connections to ourselves, each other, and the meaning of our work. These spaces don’t require a lot of preparation or facilitation, but rather a willingness to face our current historic moment and each other with a desire to recognize our common humanity, shared struggles, and collective capacity to heal ourselves and each other. These refuges of cura personalis have been my saving grace over the past few years, and they are one of few developments that I hope will remain in a post-pandemic era.

Star Plaxton-Moore is the Director of Community-Engaged Learning at the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good at University of San Francisco. Star directs institutional support for community-engaged courses and oversees public service programs for undergraduates. She designed and implements the Community-Engaged Learning and Teaching Fellowship for faculty, a Community Partner Co-Educator Fellowship, and other professional development offerings that bring together faculty and community partners as co-learners. Her scholarship focuses on faculty development for engaged teaching and scholarship, student preparation for community engagement, intersections of feminism and community engagement, assessment of civic learning outcomes, and community engagement in institutional culture and practice. She has co-authored two books, The Student Companion to Community-Engaged Learning and The Craft of Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning. Star also consults with independent K-8 schools on service-learning and community engagement. She holds an Ed.D. in organizational leadership from University of San Francisco and a M.Ed. from George Washington University. Star lives in San Francisco with her spouse, Andrew, and her two fantastic kids.