Jamie Moore was angry.
It was 2019, and students in her composition course at the College of the Sequoias, where she is a professor of English, had stopped handing in their assignments once they’d gotten through midterms.
“Everyone seemed just gone,” Moore says, recalling the moment. “Like all the lights had turned off. Bodies were in the room, but no papers were in hand. Folks were not talking to each other.”
The situation was especially troubling for Moore because the course was part of a cohort program for students who intended to transfer. Knowing that the students — many of them first-generation and underrepresented minorities — often encountered obstacles on their path to a bachelor’s degree, she had made an effort to build in extra support, particularly around mental health.
Moore and the instructor teaching the same students in a paired course had also arranged team-building activities before the semester began. They asked students to set class goals and made themselves available for office hours in the student center.
Perhaps, she thought, other work in the course had fallen to the wayside because of a bigger deadline coming up later. But when that deadline came, some three-quarters of the students still didn’t hand in anything.
The course meant a lot to Moore personally; it was where she felt like her best self as an instructor. And now it was broken.
The story of how Moore responded to that brokenness, included in a recent book on teaching that centers joy, is a reminder of the hard and human work that goes into helping students learn. It’s a part of the job that professors are rarely prepared for in their graduate training or rewarded for down the road. But for students, it might make all the difference.
Moore realized her students weren’t the only ones struggling. She was burnt out, too, from trying to support her students in all the ways she’d been encouraged to and not getting results. In some ways, she realized, she’d been performing a part, pushing students to conform to college expectations and keeping them on track.
To put the course back together, Moore realized that she’d have to do something different. Something uncomfortable. Instead of muscling through, she let go.
She decided to be vulnerable with her students, to talk about what wasn’t working — and how it made her feel. So she rethought her plan for the rest of the semester. And she asked for students’ help rebuilding.
Moore went back to the foundational work she’d done in the course. One of the ways she had sought to build classroom community earlier in the semester was something called a “recovery circle,” in which students would start class with a brief check-in about what was going on in their lives. At first, the whole class shared together. But as the semester grew busier, the activity moved instead to small groups, where it became less focused.
Moore and her teaching partner brought the activity back to the whole class, and used an entire period. Moore told the students that she was angry they weren’t handing in their work, that she felt like a failure, that she was burnt out. Her teaching partner shared her perspective. They gave the students time to write about how they were feeling and how what was happening in their lives outside of class followed them back into it. Then, she invited students to share the crux of what they’d written, providing whatever context was needed to understand it.
The students shared their challenges, both academic and personal. Some of them cried. They started to reconnect. And they remembered they were not alone.
Moore’s changes helped her class become the kind of space she knew it could be. At its best, a college classroom allows students and their professors to set aside their other cares for a time and build a learning community. In this setting, students not only gain knowledge and skills — they also improve their well-being as they experience belonging and connection. Professors, for their part, fulfill their vocation: Teaching, surveys have found, is considered by many the best part of their job. For everyone involved, there’s a sense of intellectual engagement and the satisfaction of meeting a challenge.
The classroom, in other words, can be a place where students and professors experience joy.
That word might not be in frequent use in faculty circles. But Eileen Kogl Camfield, a teaching professor in writing studies and interdisciplinary humanities at the University of California at Merced who has a background in faculty development and student success, has become convinced that joy is the thread that runs through all effective teaching practices and that it can be the antidote to much of what makes students and professors miserable.
An activity like the recovery circles might strike some professors as being touchy-feely, Camfield says. But it’s really rooted in neuroscience. “In higher education, so often, we expect students to show up with their prefrontal cortex ready to learn,” she says. There’s a common misperception that “learning only ishappening in this one area of the brain, and that it’s all about cognition, and it’s an infinite resource.”
But stress and anxiety can consume a lot of that bandwidth, Camfield says. Trust and connection and joy can ease those fears, allowing students to learn.
“If our classrooms can help us feel connected, not just with people who are like us, but with all of humanity,” Camfield says, “if we have a sense of solidarity, of common human purpose, then I think we uplift our students and we position them to engage the world in the way that they want to be engaging the world.”
That doesn’t mean it’s easy, as Moore found. Camfield and Moore first met when Moore took Camfield’s pedagogy course while pursuing her doctorate at Merced. Camfield went on to co-advise Moore’s dissertation and brought her into an interdisciplinary research group she leads. And she invited Moore to write a chapter for the book Joy-Centered Pedagogy in Higher Education: Uplifting Teaching and Learning for All, which she edited.
In her chapter, Moore describes how she next had students revisit some of the readings they’d done earlier in the semester, excerpts from bell hooks’s Teaching Community and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/Luz En El Oscuro. In small groups, students discussed how the ideas about community in the readings connected to their work together in the classroom, and then wrote principles or a description for the kind of community they wanted to build together.
And she added in some community-building touches, like playing music at the start of class and designating days for sharing food.
Exercises like the ones Moore used invite joy. In the book, she lays them out as standalone activities that professors can try in their own courses.
Being vulnerable with her students, and asking for their help recharting the course, allowed them to reconnect not as students and professors, but simply as people, Moore says. When they gathered, she says, it was “kind of like when you come home at the end of the day, and you open your front door, and it’s like, all right, I can rest now. And there was joy in that sense of rest, relief, and community we had with each other.”
Years later, being vulnerable with the other students in her cohort in that class of Moore’s remains a vivid memory for Julissa Lucila Zaragoza Rios, who is now in a master’s-degree program and planning to become a Spanish teacher or professor. “Learning is not about just facts,” she says. “It is more about building trust, belonging, and a community where everybody feels safe to be themselves.”
That, she added, is something she intends to carry forward into her own future classrooms.
