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The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

ISSN: 2472-7318

Multimodality and Carework: Meaning Making About Loss and Grief

Genie Giaimo 


Keywords: grief; death of a student; multimodality

 

Categories: As If the Pandemic Wasn’t Enough: Tales of Loss and Grief; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work; Queer Responses to the Apocalypse

 

Content warning: death of a student

 


As a first-generation working-class queer person who administers writing centers, carework has always been a large part of my work. Listening, planning, responding, worrying over crises both large and small—local and global. During the pandemic, this work has come to the fore of our cultural zeitgeist because everyone, it seems, has been doing more carework. But, in our heart of hearts, I think we know that carework is shot through writing administration and pedagogical work. And while now more folks outside our profession are realizing just how much carework falls to educators (particularly women, people of color, queer and trans people, etc.), I am not totally convinced that we writing center directors and program administrators and teachers of writing are doing so much more carework than we did before the pandemic. The carework that we are doing might just be more visible because folks are standing up and paying attention to it. This is sort of like the tree falling in the woods conundrum. Pragmatist that I am, the sounds happen if we are there or not to hear it. Sometimes, all it takes for us to hear is to stop and listen more intently for the crash. . . 

I wasn’t going to submit to this call. As a childfree person with fewer carework obligations than many who are pressed between caring for their children and caring for their older relatives, I wondered what I could contribute that would be of value. And then, yesterday, something happened that made me not only want to contribute but need to contribute. A former student of mine passed away from complications related to cancer and its treatments. While my student was diagnosed in the spring, the events unfolded for me in a matter of days between when I heard that they were sick and when they passed away. It was a feeling of whiplash that I know we have all been feeling globally, as we say our last goodbyes through plastic shields, glass windows, and phones, or, worse, are unable to say goodbye at all.

And while I have known grief during the pandemic, this loss hits differently. Perhaps it is because the student and I started at the same time at our institution. Perhaps it is because I have kept in touch with them over the past couple of years. Perhaps it is because I have never, to my knowledge, lost a student so young and so suddenly.

I guess I have to say that again because either I am misremembering, or I am wrong, or I am right: I have never lost a student so young and so suddenly in my 13-plus years as an educator.  

Yet loss has surrounded me. My students have lost parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. They have lost siblings, and best friends, and intimate partners. They have struggled with addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, homelessness, and food insecurity. They have been the sole earners in their large families even while going to school full time. They have dropped out, come back, or not come back.

Each student has a bright future of blazing potential. Each student, even the ones who dropped my class, even the ones who didn’t hand in work, even the ones who gave me crappy evaluations, yes, even the ones who disliked me. Every one of them a shooting star.

And here I am, amid all this loss, about to start a new semester, and one of these students is gone. Their memory will burn brightly, but their future is extinguished, and I have no idea how to grapple with this loss.

I also have absolutely no one to talk to about this. I have no way to write about this, except in this confessional memoir style, because there have been no official announcements, no planned memorials, no nothing.

All I can think, as I try to process this alone, is that I am just one of millions who has experienced loss this past year and a half, and it seems to be that there are just so few places for us to confront, think about, and engage with our loss and our grief. There are so few spaces where trauma is being addressed, or even mentioned, in our educational spaces.

In graduate school, I was very much into multimodal pedagogy. I asked my students to create photo essays, videos, comics, and more. I shared the NCTE multimodal literacy statement and talked about how language was all around us—in dance, in computer codes, in music, in video games. I talked about the generic distinctions and rhetorical impact of multimodality. I asked students to reach out beyond written text to identify “languaging,” to find meaning.

Yet it was only after my first toxic job that I asked students to engage with affect and wellbeing and care. Now, I realize, I was still asking my students to explore and examine multimodality that is part of a “meaning-making system” that encourages “multiple ways of knowing.”

In this instance, I was asking students to unlearn specific ways of making knowledge and engage in ones otherwise unsupported or dismissed. In other words: I was asking them to create a meaning-making system through writing and representing feeling, care, and wellness.

This is what I feel has been missing from the past year and a half: where are the spaces to work through feeling our feelings and examining how they interact and impose upon our daily lives? Working through and understanding trauma is notability absent from our return to campus guide.

On a visceral level, I am grieving and sad and angry and frustrated that our loss and trauma and sadness have no outlet. Our administrators, for the most part, want us to jump back in without much looking backward. Our country seems split between a before and an after COVID-19 way of being. Our journals, it seems, are focused on a pandemic post-mortem. And in between, each one of those bright burning stars is burning brightly and too hot. Students, by the way, aren’t the only stars. Faculty and staff and administrators are also bright burning stars struggling not to explode.

So, when we talk about carework and writing, I hope we also talk about the things that are being left unsaid, unwritten, unrepresented. How the pandemic has reshaped loss, what spaces seem to foreclose discussion of the ongoing trauma that we are experiencing, and what spaces open up exploration and meaning-making around affect and trauma. As I said to begin with, carework is deeply enmeshed in teaching writing and writing program administration. What isn’t as enmeshed is a multimodal approach to writing (scholarly output) that accounts for the feelings alongside the facts.

 


Bio

Genie Nicole Giaimo is Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Center at Middlebury College. Their current research utilizes quantitative and qualitative models to answer a range of questions about behaviors and practices in and around writing centers. Their scholarly and programmatic interest in fair and "well" workplace practices have profoundly influenced their approach to writing administration to be inclusive, intentionally anti-racist, and focused on the wellness of both workers and students.

 The author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and chapters, their forthcoming book, Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond comes out winter 2023.