ABSTRACT
There is much to celebrate in joyful and inspirational educational encounters as they can be highlights of human becoming. In this chapter, the author turns toward another opening for human becoming: The traumatic. The fear, anxiety, stress, scarcity, precarity, and chaos of the early pandemic times impacted and changed everyone, including the aspiring teachers the author taught. What remained from the abrupt end to the courses was the sting of hateful comments in course evaluations, with no opportunities for closure. The context of this time is one of many pandemics; COVID-19 has exposed numerous social, political, and ideological maladies lying underneath the surface that have become difficult to ignore. Linking the pandemic of neoliberalism to the pandemics of racism and xenophobia, Giroux notes that neoliberalism has “ravaged the public good and imposed misery and suffering upon the poor and others considered excess, waste or dangerous”.
