Breath Journals and Ungrading

A Duke cultural anthropologist on navigating a very unusual school year

Editor’s note: This is the first of two diary entries by this author addressing teaching during the pandemic. The second is available here.

By Katya Wesolowski

Before the start of our Covid year, Duke Student Government wrote a letter to The Chronicle encouraging faculty to be flexible in schedules, assignments and grading so as to help alleviate the academic and mental health stress of the pandemic. Taking their request seriously, I experimented with a new exercise and a new approach to evaluation in my fall Medical Anthropology course.

The Breath Journals was a Zoom activity that introduced students to a practice — meditation — that can help reduce anxiety and stress. As an anthropologist and dancer who researches and teaches about and with the body, I have long felt that I should utilize embodied practices in all my classes, not just my studio ones. But how to do this in a comfortable, non-intimidating way for students who might not be expecting such a thing in a seminar/lecture course? Zoom offered a perfect platform. Once a week we began class with a five-minute focused-breath meditation followed by a 10-minute free-write during which students were encouraged to write about anything they wanted. It was the one time I allowed students to turn off their cameras, and while they were encouraged to share some of what they wrote with the class, it was not required. My screen displayed basic instructions and suggested journal prompts that tied into the particular meditation technique and class topic that week.

Along with allowing students to explore a possibly stress-reducing practice, the Breath Journals addressed one of my main objectives in teaching Medical Anthropology: to disrupt students’ assumptions about the body, health and healing, and de-naturalize processes that are taken for granted as biological, but which are also cultural and social. As it happened, this work had been done in part already over the summer as Americans witnessed a pandemic and inhumane policing tactics that denied breath. For many people, what before was assumed to be a natural, automatic and invisible human universal, suddenly had medical, social and political dimensions. In a week in which we read about the labor and sociality of breathing with ventilators in a Mumbai Emergency Room and the ways in which Black people and others from the U.S. “viral underclass” are more susceptible to Covid due to structural racism, poverty and policing that deny them adequate health care and even the right to breathe, the Breath Journal involved a guided meditation and reflection on sharing breath.

And in a week when we discussed faith and healing in various cultural contexts, I invited them to utilize a simple mantra or an element from their own spiritual practice — several shared that they turned to Christian and Muslim prayer — in coordination with their breathing.

End-of-semester evaluations of the Breath Journals were generally positive: while some students wrote that they didn’t really do the meditation and journaling but appreciated the extra few minutes at the start of class to gather themselves and slow down from their busy schedules (which was the point anyway!), others wrote that they hoped to continue a daily meditation practice on their own.

Along with the low-stakes, embodied Breath Journals exercise, I experimented with a new form of evaluation: ungrading. Wanting to give students as much control over their time and effort as possible, I employed a work-based system in which students were guaranteed a certain grade if they completed (within designated standards) a certain number of assignments and expectations. In their end-of-semester evaluations, students corroborated what other educators have found with ungrading: not only did students feel less anxious, they also felt more motivated to learn. On my end, I felt less pressure to justify the grade at the top of assignments in my feedback comments and more freedom to really engage the work and push the students in their ideas.

I know I was not the only Duke faculty to turn to meditation and ungrading in their courses this year. And many professors have been utilizing such methods for years. But perhaps this exceptional Covid year will give more of us more license to experiment with innovations that center student learning and experience in ways that may even move beyond the classroom.

Katya Wesolowski is a lecturing fellow in Duke’s cultural anthropology department.