With World Mental Health Day on October 10, Anne Wilcox, Associate Professor, Program of Dance and Movement, and Solveiga Armoskaite, Assistant Professor, Linguistics Department ask the question, “What is your inner dialogue? How do you speak to yourself in your head?” So often we become so wrapped up in taking care of others and of nature, that we forget to take care of ourselves. Don’t forget, you can’t expect to take care of anybody or anything else without first taking care of yourself.
Anne and Sol work together to teach a course about ecolinguistics. Ecolinguistics is a subfield of linguistics that equates language as a system, similarly to how we understand science to be a system. In their course, they start by asking students to check in with themselves. Unit one includes topics such as memory and forgetting, expertise and evidence, and translation and transformation.
A lot of the conversation in the course is structured around the students’ experiences and their understanding of their required text. Both instructors aim to encourage students to shift their understanding from one thing being better than another to an understanding that things are different from one another. The hope is to dislodge entrenched beliefs, learn that instead of needing to replace that entrenched belief, students can instead dance with doubt.
According to Anne and Sol, there is a need for us all to learn to appreciate the difficulties in breaking our patterns. They remind us the importance of sitting with our silence to learn, “Space is good, space is healing. What happens in that space time is just as important as what you’re giving out.”
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