An Introduction: Caring for the Self
- lewiscq
- Feb 10, 2021
- 5 min read
An in-depth look on the mission and purpose of Dr. Courtney Dorroll's research and the grant that made it possible.
In a culture of workism, achievement, and rising rates of anxiety, the need for self-care is more vital than ever. With this in mind, Wofford College professor of Religion and MENA studies, Dr. Courtney Dorroll, has set out to implement self-care pedagogy into the academy of higher education.
“We can't expect care to begin and end in the Wellness Center.”
When meeting with Dr. Dorroll to discuss the motivation and goals for her self-care research, her passion for the project was glaringly obvious. Having started her own self-care journey only very recently, Dr. Dorroll advocates the difference that has been manifested in her life through her sustained self-care practices. For Dr. Dorroll, self-care might look like yoga, meditation, or listening to podcasts.
To help propagate these beliefs, Dr. Dorroll positioned herself as the principal investigator for a grant that would allow her to extend her self-care pedagogy across the incoming student curriculum at Wofford College. This NetVUE Program Development grant allows her the potential to expand her mission by providing funding for workshops, self-care retreats, a Caring for the Self class for academic credit, and new self-care activities for Wofford students. Through these self-care practices and in partnership with her grant, Dr. Dorroll hopes students gain vocational discernment
The Backlash
One of the first steps in instilling self-care into the academy was convincing its participants (faculty, staff, and students) that this mission was not only beneficial to the Wofford community, but also necessary.
From the beginning, this project was met with backlash from faculty and staff who felt that self-care practices infringed on academic procedures. This counterculture effectively presents the stigma behind self-care as being something superfluous, rather than being supplementary to regular scholastics.
Yet Dr. Dorroll continued her mission, which was only amplified by the many external factors of 2020. With the global pandemic sending Wofford students virtual for a semester, cancelling sports seasons, and postponing graduation, the need for sustained attention to internal forces was larger than ever. These added anxieties have contributed to weeks long wait times for a school counselor, feelings of isolation, and overall student burnout. As a result, more individuals, be it faculty, staff, or students, are supporting the idea of resources that promote mental health, such as self-care pedagogy.
The Plan
The summer of 2020, Dr. Dorroll led a group of professors in a self-care workshop funded by her NetVUE grant. This workshop was a three-day retreat-style workshop held via Zoom where faculty and staff were encouraged to focus on caring for themselves in an effort to learn techniques that could then be translated into the classroom.
The majority of individuals at this workshop teach First Year Inquiry courses at Wofford College, a course designed to help acquaint new students to collegiate life. Because of this, many of the techniques and activities created at this workshop have been directly implemented into activities promoting student achievement. For example, Kellie Buckner, a Wellness Center Counselor, created a questionnaire that allows students to better determine if they are in need of changes to their routine in promotion of self-care and mental health. Curt McPhail, a Career Center Executive Director, created a personal board of directors aimed at self-development and promoting sustained self-care in students.
Outside of this workshop, in the fall of 2020, Dr. Dorroll taught a class of roughly 20 students in a course labeled "A Global Guide to Caring for the Self". I had the pleasure of being part of this body of students who took this class as an elective credit. Having completed six semesters of undergraduate studies, I can tell you that this class was a unlike any class I have taken previously. For one, this class did not operate on a traditional grading scale. Instead, Dr. Dorroll implemented a grading contract in which students could aim for their desired letter grade, be it an A+ or a C-, based on the amount of time and effort they were able to dedicate to the class. If I was aiming for a B range, I was well aware of the assignments that I was to complete to achieve so. As a result, it left the students to decide their desired engagement, de-stressing the value usually placed on grades. Additionally, rather than grading on if one student outperformed another, you were simply graded on adequate completion of the assignment.
Just as unique as the grading of assignments were the assignments themselves. Dr. Dorroll encouraged experiential learning days in which students engaged with a unique form of self-care they felt a connection to. This could include a trip to a religious place of worship, meditation, coloring, walks in nature, or other more experimental practices. For one of my experiential learning days I smashed plates, purchased from a local thrift store, with a bat. This was a practice that I saw on social media for letting go of stress and anger, and which I eventually wrote a lengthy reflection on. Other assignments included weekly blog posts that reflected our time of self-care, and also allowed the students to generate discourse surrounding self-care literature and digital media. At the end of the class, one of Dr. Dorroll's main goals for us as students was to adopt our own ethos of self-care. What does self-care mean to us? How has our childhood development contributed to our view of self-care? What are our goals for our relationship with self-care in the future?
After completing this course, I had a greater understanding of caring for myself that was driven by my own investigation. I had tools to recognize when I had shifted to moments of unhealthy mental and physical burnout. I now have a broader understanding of what exactly classifies as self-care, a cultural understanding of global self-care practices, as well as a religious understanding of self-care in various scripture.
Dr. Dorroll's plans for the future of self-care pedagogy include giving more lectures and webinars on the impact of self-care on classroom and individual achievement. She hopes to spread the word of the efficacy of exploring a growth mindset through self-care and critical reasoning. Longterm, she hopes that self-care classes will be implemented as general education requirements for all majors. She continues to work alongside Wofford's Wellness Center staff, Wofford professors, and Wofford administration to spread resources for self-improvement and care that extend well beyond the classroom.
Other projects that support this mission for the future include her self-care monograph called "Radical Care", thinking through offering a new Humanities course at Wofford College called "The Mindfulness Semester", and continuing her work with her career coach, Melissa Walker, to create an authentic leadership style geared in self-care.
Sources and Additional Links:
Dr. Dorroll's Blog
NetVUE Council for Independent Colleges
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