By Myles N. Sheehan, S.J.
With students and teachers alike stressed and afraid, you don’t need a doctor to tell you this is a weird time. But as a Jesuit, a physician, and an educator, I may have something to say on these questions: How does cura personalis -- care for the whole person -- fit into our online responsibilities as teachers and scholars? And even though it seems a long way off right now, how can we ensure that we and our students are best prepared for a post-pandemic future?
First, caring for yourself is critical to cura personalis. You are most likely juggling preparation for classes and navigating new online technologies while also worrying about your families and maybe even dealing with illness and death of family members. Take the time to check in on yourself as you do your work.
In this regard, check out Scott Berinato’s recent piece in the Harvard Business Review: “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.” Acknowledging emotions on or under the surface can help you to be more centered, to communicate that centeredness to your students, and to remain healthier when things become more normal.
Second, caring for your students means doing your best to provide an excellent education that balances academic rigor with the recognition that some students are having a very tough time. Yes, keep up standards, but take special care to apply the same empathy, even mercy, you would show students in another more normal time.
Doing these things will ensure students’ post-pandemic readiness to move forward educationally, but can also provide structure and some normalcy when students might otherwise get sucked into fear and anxiety as they navigate the stress that Covid-19 brings to their homes and families.
Remember: You are providing students with worthwhile tasks that allow them to discover there is more to this moment than anxiety and fear. Analyzing a text, working on a problem set, and researching a paper are opportunities both for education to move forward and for students to find themselves intellectually engaged and challenged and reasonably distracted from the news.
Like their faculty, staff, and campus ministry colleagues at Jesuit institutions across the United States, Seattle University campus ministers spent their 2020 spring break discerning innovative ways to deliver cura personalis in an online modality. Photo courtesy of Seattle University Campus Ministry.
Certainly, it would be unwise to turn every online session into a discussion about how everyone is feeling, but it would be strange not to acknowledge the elephant in the virtual room. Some students will have sick family members and will experience the death of those they love. We will have some students who themselves get sick, and some may die.
Amid all this, and depending on your resources, you may want to use your virtual office hours or email connections for students to have the opportunity to reach out and express some of their current experience.
In the context of this pandemic, cura personalis becomes an a fortiori principle, one whose importance will be more obvious than ever and something that will come to have new significance for all of us in the apostolate of Jesuit higher education.
And from this Jesuit educator, thank you for the care you give your students.
Myles N. Sheehan, S.J., is a medical doctor and a lecturer at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, as well as Provincial Delegate for Senior Jesuits, Maryland and USA Northeast Provinces.