Teaching Through the Ill Body: A Spiritual and Aesthetic Approach to Pedagogy and Illness

This book raises questions around pedagogy and illness. Morris explores two large issues that run through the text. What does the ill body teach? What does the teacher do through the ill body? The body has something to teach while teaching through the ill body. This book is theoretically framed by connections between spirituality and aesthetics. As the great spiritual traditions teach, our responsibility as teachers is to help others, especially those who are marginalized. What is lacking in our educational discourse is a discussion of the responsibility we all have to help those who get sick and not marginalize them. More specifically, pedagogical and curricular questions are fleshed out through working in the area of curriculum studies, depth psychology and the medical humanities. These three disciplines have something in common: autobiography. But in the field of curriculum studies autobiographies/ pathographies of sickness are few and far between. This book is meant to fill that gap in the educational literature. This pathography is a study that explores the mysteries of suffering, storytelling, memory, and poesis. Compassion, woundedness, vulnerability, testimony and authenticity are all issues Morris raises here. Teachers, scholars, depth psychologists and medical educators might be particularly interested in this intensely felt narrative about what it is like for teachers to teach while suffering from chronic illness.