Focus on the Positive: How Do We Keep Our Classes From Becoming Too Depressing?

Abstract

This article considers the very real issues many of us face in the classroom when we, and our students, confront difficult or depressing issues, situations, or materials. Working with topics such as human rights abuses, environmental degradation, racism and xenophobia, and poverty among many others, students and faculty can experience compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma. Yet, rarely are these issues addressed in the classroom, or even, as professors, in our own research and practice. Seeking to start a conversation on this issue, this article explores compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma and the effect these can have on student and faculty well-being, and then outlines a number of techniques and actions that can be taken in our classrooms to help us focus on the positive.

Keywords:

• Active learning
• reflection
• vicarious trauma

Notes

1 Human Rights Class Video, Fall 2016, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTjjFFuaCcY.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Zartner

Dana Zartner, JD, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Chair of the International Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. Professor Zartner specializes in international and comparative law, with a focus on the intersection of environmental protections and human rights. Her book Courts, Codes, and Custom: Legal Tradition and State Policy Toward International Human Rights and Environmental Law was released by Oxford University Press in 2014, and she has published articles on human rights and environmental topics in International Politics Science Review, International Studies Perspectives, Human Rights Review, and the Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law & Policy Yearbook. Professor Zartner’s current research focuses on three related issues: understanding indigenous and cultural perspectives of the natural world to create better law and policy that protects both the environment and human rights; creating better mechanisms of corporate social responsibility to ensure corporations act as engaged global citizens; and, utilizing effective methods of multilevel activism at the intersection of the environment and human rights issues.