Teaching While Anxious: The Pedagogy of Anxiety in 2024
In a 2019 special issue of Pedagogy, Shawna Ross and Douglass Dowland coined the term “Anxious Pedagogies” to encourage approaches that would theorize the complex functions of anxiety in the classroom. Ross and Dowland posit the composition classroom as “a site of a seldom-described but sensorially palpable risk for both student and instructor” (510). Today, in the wake of a pandemic and skyrocketing rates of student and instructor anxiety, the humanities classroom has become an even riskier space in many ways, as global, local, political, and discipline-specific factors pose ever more explicit threats to the process of teaching and learning.