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Pedagogies of Collective Intersectional Care: Witnessing the Spiritual and Affective Rigor of Carework within Daily Classroom Life
Race Ethnicity and Education
Abstract
In this article, we build upon the ethics of collective intersectional
care (Nyachae & Pham 2024), a concept central to Women of Color feminisms to emphasize the pedagogical rigors of carework in K-12 classrooms. Drawing from a yearlong video ethnography of the racial literacy practices of teachers of Color, we analyze a case study of a Black woman teacher’s (Author 2) pedagogies of collective intersectional care within day-to-day classroom life, illuminating the spiritual and affective dimensions of how she co-created a ‘Black sense of home’ that fortified and (re)centered the lived realities and full personhoods of Black and Brown students despite ‒ and in spite ‒ of racially violent institutions. Contributing to critical affective studies and racial literacy teacher education, we discuss the significance of how mutual embodiments of care are interwoven with co-creating, witnessing, and replenishing racially just learning spaces.
The purpose of the study reported on in this chapter is to explore pedagogical practices in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) among pre-service and in-service teachers in Ghana. Against the background of pedagogies of compassion and care in education, the chapter will e.g., discuss the theoretical foundations of compassionate and caring pedagogies, evidence-based practices and considerations, inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility in pedagogies of care, ethics and values in teaching with care, as well as the challenges and opportunities in implementing pedagogies of care.
There is growing agreement among educators about the need to move toward more democratic, just, and equitable approaches to building positive classroom communities and learning environments. Yet, there is less clarity about how, toward what, and for/with whom these learning spaces are fostered within schools imbued in and reflective of broader societal contexts (Philip & Sengupta, 2021; Philip et al., 2018). In this chapter, we discuss how racism embedded in teaching and the teaching profession reifies white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, and cishet-eropatriarchal normativity in schooling contexts. We then consider the power of Women of Color (WOC) feminisms as an alternative theoretical, ontological, and pedagogical approach in conversation with equity-centered frameworks (e.g., culturally responsive/relevant/sustain-ing pedagogy and ethnic studies) for realizing and co-creating collective and radical learning spaces. In turn, we build upon arguments to dismantle dominant ideologies and normative approaches for organizing learning spaces by offering the concept of collective intersectional care as a more liberatory approach to teacher practice, embodiment, and enactment.
Background/Context
In recent years, youth agency has become more prevalent in education research, with many scholars agreeing that youth agency is highly contextual, reliant on multiple forces, and inextricably connected to social identity. However, relatively few studies have explored the agency of Black LGBTQ+ youth and how these youth understand their own agency. This fact connects to the reality that although there is a growing body of research around the educational experiences of LGBTQ+ youth of color, it is often centered on their victimhood and rarely explores how they practice agency to respond to the challenges they face.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
Recognizing the importance of context and social identity with regard to youth agency, this study extends the literature on youth agency and LGBTQ+ youth of color by exploring the following research question: How do eight Black LGBTQ+ youth who are active members in New York City’s ballroom culture make sense of their agency in school and in out-of-school ballroom spaces?
Data Collection and Analysis
Following Seidman’s (2013) interview process, three separate interviews were conducted with all eight youth. In addition, all eight youth participated in two focus groups. The data analysis was informed by a queer of color critique theoretical framework and focused on specific occurrences in the data in which the young people articulated understandings of their agentive practices that worked toward responding to, resisting, or subverting racial and anti-LGBTQ+ marginalization across schooling and ballroom contexts.
Findings
Findings indicate that the youth regarded school as a confining space in which they were fearful of anti-LGBTQ+ rejection and abuse. Thus, they used their agency to suppress their LGBTQ+ identities in order to minimize their experiences with discrimination. Suppressing their identities resulted in the youth feeling disconnected from school and isolated, and increased their risk for depression and anxiety. Contrastingly, the youth understood ballroom as a liberatory space in which they felt able to confidently explore and express their LGBTQ+ identities and create alternatives for themselves outside socially constructed expectations of their identities.
Conclusions/Recommendations
Results suggest that Black LGBTQ+ youth are always practicing agency, albeit to work toward different ends, such as occulting or exploring their LGBTQ+ identities. Findings suggest that schools can learn from ballroom spaces how to better invite Black LGBTQ+ youth into schools in humane and educative ways, encourage their agentive imaginations within education spaces, and promote liberatory school environments that recognize and embrace these youth’s racial, gender, and sexual identities.
Despite developing curriculum for a youth organization with which I have a long history, it was not until a 7-hour videocall that it occurred to me that “witnessing” might be part of its pedagogy. Something important about bearing witness to the members and their baring witness (confessing their thoughts to us), seemed to be afoot, and I wanted to contemplate with staff what intentional witnessing asks of and offers youth and facilitators. What tools and techniques are being employed? What can we learn from witnessing as pedagogy about nurturing the educational excellence of BIPOC and LGBTQ youth in an out-of-school space? This article lifts up ideas about witnessing as pedagogy explored during gatherings with Black and Latinx women staff working directly with youth through theorizing bearing/baring witness and by describing how educational excellence is cultivated by the organization.
At a time when schools are destroying the minds and spirits of Black and Brown students, as educators, we must work differently to make sure our children’s souls are not claimed by those who refuse to acknowledge their brilliance. The purpose of this essay is to explore the educational activism and scholarship of three Black women educators in an effort to help readers understand how and why they should inform our teacher education and teaching practices today. The authors highlight the lives of Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McCloud Bethune, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, influential women whose work and theories have shaped the field of teacher education. Through a brief historical analysis of their scholarship and practice, the authors examine how these women ignited educational progress for Black children. This piece is written to honor their lives, center their theories on education, and bring them out of obscurity.
Using an ecological approach to trauma-informed care and radical healing, this case study explores how one Title I public middle school mathematics classroom offered students opportunities to engage in healing practices through the use of Social Justice Mathematics. Findings indicate that students identified their emotions, engaged in structural analyses of local social issues, and expressed plans to take action. This study suggests the possibility of using a Healing-Informed Social Justice Mathematics approach to support development of students’ sociopolitical consciousness, mathematics learning, and well-being.
In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, “Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that influences holistic teaching? How might we utilize a pedagogy of love to include Black youths’ racialized and gendered life histories and experiences and their language and literacy practices? We outline and discuss five types of violence in schools (physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricula/pedagogical, and systemic school violence) which interfere with the creation and sustainability of revolutionary love in urban schools. We present examples of ‘fake’and provide the current backdrop for these. We operationalize revolutionary love and offer Afrocentric praxis and African Diaspora Literacy as antidotes to anti-Black types of violence that many students experience in urban schools.
Seeking to meet Freire’s (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, South End Press, Boston, 1989, Sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, Routledge, New York, 2015) calls self-recovery. Set in an elective class for young women in a Los Angeles middle school, I examine my process as teacher/researcher to understand the experiences of a student named Chelsea, and develop curriculum to serve her arising needs. I integrate critical pedagogy with embodied pedagogies and women of color feminist epistemology to critique dominant ways of knowing and teaching in urban schools. Then, I use auto-ethnography and portraiture to craft three blended portraits: exploring how Chelsea’s sense of self is influenced by her life experiences; how interventions like meditation, dialogue and vulnerability, or what I call pedagogies of bodymindspirit, helped Chelsea to unpack her distrust of others and a longing for wholeness; and how a final project supported Chelsea’s path towards self-recovery. I conclude with ways to cultivate love in the face of material and epistemological violence in schools, and offer implications and tensions for teachers seeking to utilize a bodymindspirit praxis to serve all marginalized students.
Background/Context
The link between care and teaching is well accepted, and positive teacher-student relationships are known to benefit students’ in-school experiences and academic success. Yet, positive teacher-student relationships are not the norm for African American males and African American male students’ experiences and performance in schools remains an issue.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
What characterizes the teacher–student relationships within the all-Black, all-male classes of this district-sponsored program? Moreover, how do the instructors for the program enact these characteristics in their classrooms?
Setting
This study examines a project of the Office of African American Male Achievement in Oakland, CA. The Manhood Development Program was an elective class in the high schools and an after school program at the middle schools that sought to improve Black male students’ academic success and school experiences, and teach students about their cultural and community histories. MDP classes were offered to Black male students and taught by Black male educators.
Population/Participants/Subjects
Based on support from and communication with the MDP facilitators and school administrators, the participants in this study include MDP instructors and their students at three high schools and one middle school within an urban school district where there are persistent, racialized disparities in rates of discipline and in levels of academic success.
Research Design
This article reports on a qualitative case study of the teacher–student relationships within four classrooms that were part of a program for African American male adolescents within an urban school district.
Data Collection and Analysis
During one academic year, four of the MDP classes were observed at least four times and videotaped at least twice. Interviews were completed with three of the class instructors and with 41% of students across the four classes. The observations and videos were analyzed for instances when teacher–student relationships were leveraged towards specific pedagogical ends. Micro-ethnographic analyses were conducted of the video instances to highlight the dimensions of caring exhibited in the teacher–student interactions. From these analyses, one interactional segment was chosen to illustrate the existence and nuances of a politically intentional form of caring.
Findings/Results
The MDP instructors’ sociopolitical consciousness impacts and shapes their relationships with their MDP students. MDP instructors articulate and enact specific goals around how to construct caring teacher–student relationships that stem from their intention to positively influence the lives of Black children, push back against the racialized and hegemonic institutional structure of schools. MDP instructors teach in a way that is fundamentally connected to the local community in Oakland and make a concerted effort to know, rather than stereotype, each student and to develop each students’ full potential. These relationships are intentional, political, and visible acts of care by MDP instructors that are interactionally coconstructed within their classrooms.
Conclusions/Recommendations
This case of politicized caring questions the premise that education and schools are, and should be, narrowly focused on developing test preparation, career-readiness, or content-specific practices. Instead, this case illustrates the alternative educational ideologies and practices of four Black educators that allow them to reclaim their social and political responsibilities and create effective, nurturing, antiracist schooling environments for Black students. This microanalysis of one of these classes offers an example of a type of caring and pedagogy that currently exists and that could be more widely available to Black students.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
Drawing on one of the author's experiences of teaching white teacher candidates in an urban university, this paper argues for the importance of interrogating the ways that benign emotions (e.g., pity and caring) are sometimes hidden expressions of disgust for the Other. Using critical race theory, whiteness studies, and critical emotion studies, it is shown how whiteness ideology erroneously translates disgust for people of color to false professions of pity or caring. This phenomenon is particularly interesting because care, sympathy, and love are emotions that are routinely performed by teacher candidates (who are predominantly white females) and embedded in teacher education. Yet not much literature theorizes how these performative emotions are not exempt of whiteness ideology. To engage in a genuine process of antiracism, we argue that the emotions that undergird teachers' dispositions need to be critically and sensitively unpacked. We end with implications for teacher education, particularly in relation to pedagogical ways of identifying and interrogating narratives of caring-as-hidden disgust and cultivating critical compassion.
In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered" research—research that intends to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultane-ously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damage-centered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities. Dear Readers, Greetings! I write to you from a little desk in my light-filled house in New York State, my new home after living in Brooklyn for the past eleven years. Today, New York does not seem so far from St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of the Aleutian chain in Alaska, where my family is from and where my relations continue to live. Something about writing this letter closes the gap between these disparate places I call home. I write to you about home, about our communities. I write to identify a per-sistent trend in research on Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities—what I call damage-centered research. I invite you to join me in re-visioning research in our communities not only to recog-nize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken. This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and practi-tioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research strategy that frames entire communi-ties as depleted.
In this article I take seriously the call for recruiting and retaining more preservice teachers of color by critically considering some of the pressing challenges they might encounter in teacher preparation programs. I draw from critical race theory (CRT) in education to review the extant literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US. I excavate how the dominant, (dis)embodied and normalized culture of Whiteness, White privilege and White hegemony pervades contemporary teacher education, and presents a formidable challenge to the goal of preparing teachers (of color) to teach in a manner that is relevant, critical and humanizing while also socially and individually transformative. I conclude by envisioning how teacher education programs might address these challenges in such a way that more effectively meets the needs of preservice teachers.
In this paper, I use feminist and poststructuralist discourses to suggest that the politicization of anger in education is not only inevitable but also desirable. In particular, an analysis of anger in education may offer certain critical advantages, including a better understanding of the importance of being angry in political terms. As various educational approaches nowadays seek indiscriminately to silence anger in the name of ‘emotional intelligence’—and thus, de‐politicizing it—an attention to the political aspects of emotions in education is extremely valuable. Thus, I argue that emotions, and particularly anger, are central to the exercise of power relations in the classroom, and challenge the dominance of instrumental/rational accounts about anger replacing them with the recognition of anger as political. Also, I clarify some of the conditions that generate angry feelings as ambivalence and explore the transformative possibilities that this ambivalence creates. This work is important because there has been little attention to anger in relation to educational politics and social justice education.
Growing research evidence on the ethic of care suggests that caring should be an integral part of the pedagogical methods implemented in schools. However, the colour blind ‘community of care’ often described in the literature does not disaggregate lines of ethnicity or race and much of this existing literature concerns elementary‐ and middle‐school students. This phenomenological study examined teacher care for African American secondary students, through a theoretical lens of critical race and care theory, as it was represented through the counter stories of eight ‘successful’ African American teachers. Findings revealed that teachers’ definitions and perceptions of care reflected a blend of traditional care literature, critical race theory and the literature on African American teachers before and after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decision on integration. Findings also reveal the possibility of a pedagogy that I refer to as ‘culturally relevant critical teacher care’.
Understanding how emotion circulates in classrooms and what emotion does to signs is central to teachers and researchers of critical literacy and literary response.
This article critiques a classroom encounter between a Black student, Richard, and a white student, Nick, that complicated the white English teacher, Mr. Turner’s, attempt to facilitate a discussion about racial progress in America. Students positioned their bodies on a continuum between 1, no racial progress since the 1930s, and 10, full racial equity. When Richard positioned himself at the low end of the continuum and Nick located himself on the high end, a disruption occurred after Mr. Turner moved his body toward Nick while verbally validating Richard’s perspective. I argue that the classroom’s affective register was altered by racial melancholia, reopening racial wounds and reproducing whiteness, evoking emotions I call “melancholic affects.”
Critical literacies theory is a useful construct for examining language, power, and social context. However, it may take a rationalist approach that obscures the socio-emotional and spiritual impact of oppressions. This study seeks to address the call for critical literacies studies to take an affective turn to investigate the relationships between power, social context and “interior lives.” Therefore, I conducted a qualitative study framed by Black feminist thought to examine how two Black women educators experienced privilege and resisted oppression through their uses of “extraordinary literacies.” I used narrative methods and Black feminist theorizing to investigate and analyze Black women teachers’ stories of literacy practices in personal and professional settings. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of examining literacy practices using more inclusive methodologies, and the promise that it holds for revealing more expansive iterations of social justice work, which is necessary to truly work towards equity and liberation.
Through an exploration of an afterschool writing club for middle school girls of Color (GOC), this article puts forth the argument that GOC consistently leverage incisive critiques of schooling through multiple literacies, including embodied and experiential ways of knowing and communicating. However, oftentimes, these critiques are ignored because their literacies are marginalized, ignored, and misread. As informed by their lived and felt experiences, it becomes apparent how school has failed them and how they continue to persist in their learning, their work, and their building toward the futures they deserve and desire, sometimes in ways that are recognized by schools, sometimes in resistance to school standards. Further, the article puts forth a model of what education can look like when GOC multiple literacies are centered and celebrated. Educators, researchers, and policy makers must understand GOC as hopeful and desiring learners and create spaces that honor and respect their multifaceted literacies.
This research explored an intersectional pedagogy framework through a yearlong inquiry as a 6th grade English teacher in a charter school for racially and economically marginalized and first-generation students. My study revealed that an intersectional(ity) pedagogy means doing soul work which involves an analysis of self and society toward solidarity and healing in response to the systemic oppression and dehumanization in educational communities, classrooms, and curriculum. Engaging in soul work can build solidarity and community for humanization and resistance.
Much of Black student life, understandably, is seen through a lens of resistance. Black people, given their societal position, are resistant in context. Yet, one cannot use resistance, by itself, to understand the expansive, dynamic nature of Black student life – even in otherwise constricting contexts. In this paper, I wrestle with the central question of how might we understand Black life beyond resistance? This is not to suggest that racism somehow does not exist or has less of a grasp on society. Rather, I argue that to understand Black students’ lives primarily through resistance is limited. As such, in this paper, I elaborate upon three tensions to meditate upon that may provide a reorientation for how stakeholders go about their work and provide pathways for a more expansive analysis of Black students’ experiences.
All activism is science fiction, for envisioning a world without oppression requires the active creation of socially just societies formed from innovative ideas and visionary possibilities. Black girls have historically engaged in science fiction by using their voices and written words to construct socially just worlds in hopes that their dreams of the future can become realities. Still, there is scant research centering how Black girls use fiction writing, generally, and science fiction writing , specifically, as a social justice practice. Drawing from a larger narrative inquiry project with the objective of determining how Black girls might use written and oral storytelling to discuss, critique, and subvert experiences with social in/justice, this article connects the Black Radical Imagination and Critical Race English Education to consider the science fiction short stories of three Black girls. In focusing on these stories, I explore how Black girls' science fiction writing is grounded in their ways of being and knowing, but also how this writing foregrounds their freedom dreams. Further, I provide insight into how English teachers and literacy researchers can alter pedagogical practices to make space for Black girls' dreams.
Racial literacy was introduced in the early twenty-first century and has proliferated as a research framework and methodology. In education research specifically, racial literacy has been used as a foundation for empirical research and as a broader concept informing education practices. Mindful of this wide-ranging approach, a multidisciplinary team conducted a summative content analysis of extant education research explicitly drawing on racial literacy to survey the landscape of its applications and effects. We wanted to catalogue the ways racial literacy informs research in teaching and learning and how racial literacy might be used in 2020 and beyond. Evidence from this analysis illustrated varying ways researchers have viewed and appropriated racial literacy. From these findings, we consider implications of using racial literacy in education research and present an approach that moves towards a more unified and critical embodiment of racial literacy guided by the fact that Black lives and literacies matter.
Through the conception of Black desire, a Black-specific rendering of Eve Tuck’s researching for desire, I argue that educational research lacking critiques of antiblackness can cultivate damage-centered narratives that misguidedly identify brokenness in Black youth, rather than brokenness in society. Drawing from a yearlong critical race ethnography, rooted in BlackCrit, I demonstrate how four Black high school students’ critical engagements with literacy reveal the ways antiblackness operationalizes in their lives and how they compose counter structures to this oppressive regime. Through critical literacy artifacts and interview data, I analyze the utility of centering a critique of antiblackness in researching for Black desire as revealed through the voices of the Black youth. Through the findings, I contend that Black students asserting ownership over their reality demonstrates the ways Black desire, through a pointed critique of antiblackness, can function as a tool for critical race educational praxis.
Purpose
This paper aims to trace how emotion shapes the sense that is made of politics and how politicization can remake and re-mark emotion, giving it new meaning in context. This paper brings together theories of politicization and emotional configurations in learning to interrogate the role emotion plays in the learning of social justice activists.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on sociocultural learning perspectives, the paper traces politicization processes across the youth climate movement (using video-based interaction analysis) and the animal rights movement (using ethnographic interviews and participant observation).
Findings
Emotional configurations significantly impacted activists’ politicization in terms of what was learned conceptually, the kinds of practices – including emotional practices – that were taken up collectively, the epistemologies that framed social justice work, and the identities that were made salient in collective action. In turn, politicization reshaped how social justice activists made sense of emotion in the course of activist practice.
Social implications
This study is valuable for theorizing social justice learning, so social movement facilitators and educators might design spaces where learning about gender, racialization, colonialism and/or human/more-than-human relations can thrive. By attending to emotional configurations, this study can help facilitate a design that supports and sustains learning for justice.
Originality/value
Emotion remains under-theorized and under-analyzed in the learning sciences, despite indications that emotion enables and constrains particular learning opportunities. This paper proposes new ways of understanding emotion and politicization as co-constitutive processes for learning scientists interested in politics and social justice.
Many Black educators in the United States demonstrate a political clarity about white supremacy and the racialized harm it cultivates in and out of schools. We highlight the perspectives of some of these educators and ask, (1) How do they articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their classrooms and schools? Through further elaborating the politicized caring framework, our analyses show how Black educators disrupt the racialized harm produced within schools to instead (re)position Black students as children worthy of protection via caring relationships, alternative discipline policies, and other interpersonal and institutional mechanisms. This study has implications for teaching, teacher education, and how the “work” of teachers is conceptualized and researched.
The main objective of this article is to discuss the affective dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy in a way that would recognize neoliberalism’s affective repercussions. The point is not merely to show that affect is involved in the emergence of resistance in critical pedagogy, but rather to expand the articulation of resistance in neoliberal education through the lens of affect theory. Specifically, the paper theorizes how critical pedagogy can cultivate ‘everyday’ or ‘invisible’ acts of resistance that constitute forms of ‘counter-conduct’ in ways that acknowledge, engage with, and further enhance teachers’ and students’ critical engagement with the affective aspects of resistance and neoliberalism. It is argued that the call for a critical pedagogy to acknowledge the affective dimension of resistance marks an important and necessary moment that allows critical pedagogy to be further enriched in attempts to address the challenges faced by teachers and students in neoliberal education.
In this critical case study, I draw on endarkened feminist epistemology and a legacy of politicized womanist care to explore how three contemporary black women educators in New York City public schools enact a spiritual and politicized care rooted in their understandings of the sociopolitical contexts where their students live and learn. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed to reveal a praxis of politicized care characterized by three main components: (1) Soulful and politicized purpose driving high expectations; (2) Building relationships through vulnerability, encouragement, communication, and recognition; and (3) Redefining success and envisioning paths for the future. Examining such praxis provides insight into approaches educators can take to create connections with students that are responsive to their material lives and helps them feel grounded in their educational and professional pursuits.
Despite repeated pleas for diversifying the U.S. teacher force, teachers of color who are committed to social justice are often unsupported and even pushed out via structural, interpersonal, and pedagogical obstacles within the profession. In response to neoliberal, colorblind, and apolitical approaches to teacher development and support, educators and organizers have reclaimed and reframed their pedagogies through critical professional development and grassroots activism to center healing from the impacts of oppression in its myriad forms . The ethnographic case study in this article examines how, over the course of three years, a grassroots racial affinity group became an important space for learning and healing for its members. I explain how the group explicitly centered twelve members’ voices, needs, and collective knowledge, and in so doing: (a) collectively cultivated a critical, humanizing, and healing space for their sustainability; and (b) navigated various positions within socially toxic education institutions and organizations. I conclude by discussing how and why critical racial affinity spaces for educators of color are necessary in order to support their personal, political, relational, and pedagogical growth, which has implications on their retention and leadership within the field.
This article examines the concept of a politicized ethic of care, a teaching philosophy that is commonly rooted in the pedagogies of exemplary Black female teachers. Data from a larger study of a girls' empowerment program at a public high school are used to argue in favor of this pedagogical tradition, which has been proven to facilitate the development of positive social identities and schooling behaviors among African American female students. The author challenges Western and gender-neutral approaches to caring for urban Black girls through an inductive analysis of curricula, in-class video footage, student artifacts, and interviews with former participants. Implications for teacher education research are presented.
This reprint of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's introduction to How We Get Free—Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective serves as an introduction to both the Combahee River Collective and their seminal statement on black feminism.
In this column, the author raises and explores questions about new teacher diversity initiatives and the call for more teachers of color. Such questions include, why is there now a heightened awareness and focus on the need for more teachers of color? How are these new initiatives different than those that came before? How has the context-politically, socially, and economically-shifted and evolved to warrant successful teacher diversity reform? Or has it? The author examines the historical conditions that influence the presence and lack thereof of teachers of color and the policy reforms that both support and undercut teacher diversity initiatives.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate how women of color feminism predates and disrupts dominant dialogues in the field of White affect studies. I introduce the concept of White affect studies as an arena of inquiry that draws from Western-European theories and literatures and architects a sociopolitical structure of affect that positions White affects as universal. Scholars contributing to the field of White affect studies posit theories of affect, embodiment, subjectivity, phenomenology, violence, war, and more, while disregarding the theoretical contributions made by women of color feminism in thinking through these notions and social issues. This is done by engaging in a citational practice that results in an epistemic erasure of women of color feminist thought. The voices of women of color feminists are thus disqualified, and their theoretical contributions are not acknowledged as significant or relevant in conceptualizing affect, affective economies, and the social. By turning to the writings of women of color feminists, I demonstrate how their theories on embodiment, subjectivity, and social structures predate the institutionalization of White affect studies. Feminists of color from the past and present have and continue to theorize through a language of self their experiences as subjects embedded within matrices of violence, power, and pleasure. Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla write about the ways in which lesbian and queer women of color institute different affects that counter dominant structures of emotion, systems of power, and heterosexual modes of being. In developing conceptual methodologies, Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla are able to weave into the dominant discursive logic a language of self that both introduces new queer subjectivities, while reinterpreting existing forms of thought, thereby contesting mainstream economies of White affects and White affect studies. It is through a language of self that Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla develop an ethic of survival that countermobilizes against White hegemonic apparatuses.
This Chicana Critical Feminist Testimonio reveals a Mexican/Mexican-American Ethic of Care and Testimonios of struggle and survival informing curriculum and pedagogy of one Mexican/Mexican-American female educator of predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American students. This work is part of a larger ethnographic study conducted through multiple methods. Findings here reveal Diana’s Ethic of Care, a (re)framing of social justice revolution/Revolución at the intersection of race, class, gender, language, and immigration status. As Diana (re)constructs and (re)claims her Mexican/Mexican-American identity, she likewise endeavors toward her students’ dignity and academic access. Findings have curricular, pedagogical implications for all educators serving marginalized youth and youth of color.
The authors put forward a theorization of a Black Critical Theory, or what might be called BlackCrit, within, and in response to, Critical Race Theory, and then outline ways that BlackCrit in education helps us to more incisively analyze how the specificity of (anti)blackness matters in explaining how Black bodies become marginalized, disregarded, and disdained in schools and other spaces of education.
This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.
Please note that I cannot provide a full text for this publication as it is a book, published by Sage (London).
Examining the body as a site and product of various ongoing discursive processes can provide insight about how identity impacts students' learning and understanding of their classroom experiences. This qualitative case study investigates how two, urban, eighth-grade students responded to being identified as struggling readers, concentrating specifically on their embodiment of those responses while reading. Drawing upon socio-cultural theories of literacy, performance theories of education, and psychosocial qualities of identity, I argue that the struggling reader identity - which often labels and positions students through deficit lenses rather than recognises and builds upon the strengths or multiple ways students make meaning of printed text - is felt, lived, and embodied as part of students' daily interactions in schools. Findings show that the embodied performances of both students revealed a deep, internalised sense of loss, grief, and exclusion in the classroom while reading. Yet, both students also attempted continuously to rewrite their identities as readers through a variety of other embodied performances with texts.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
Utilizing a cultural ideology and an explicit discourse of spirituality, this paper seeks to answer three questions. First, what does spirituality mean for the ways in which African-American women educate and research? Second, how does the enactment and embodiment of a spiritually centered paradigm impact the learning of both teacher and student in the context of the classroom? Finally, what might such work imply in terms of theory and praxis, particularly in teacher education? Arising from a case study of an exemplar African-American female professor at a large Midwestern university, three narrative tales are shared which explicate the power and influence of a spiritual pedagogy in the lives of three African-American scholar/teachers and that challenge taken-for-granted assumptions of singularity in epistemology and representation in teaching and research.
Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these black subjects reflect on the historical trajectory of racial desegregation policies and practices, they offer us a unique view of the confluence of racial melancholia, a heavy, deeply-felt awareness of the history and persistence of racial disregard and subjugation, and school malaise, a form of what Pierre Bourdieu has called la petite misère, or ordinary suffering. The author’s analysis of these narratives highlights how these school and community leaders reflect on the meaning of black suffering in schools, what they understand as the source of that suffering, and how they imagine that suffering might be alleviated. The article concludes with recommendations for research at the nexus of race, education and social suffering.
The complexities of black geographies—shaped by histories of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, contemporary practices of racism, and resistances to white supremacy—shed light on how slave and post-slave struggles in the Americas form a unique sense of place. Rather than simply identifying black suffering and naming racism (and opposition to it) as the sole conceptual schemas through which to ‘understand’ or ‘know’ blackness or race, it is emphasized that a black sense of place, black histories, and communities are not only integral to production of space, but also that the analytical interconnectedness of race, practices of domination, and geography undoubtedly put pressure on how we presently study and assess racial violence.
This article explores the cultural genesis and meanings of the lives of three African-American women leaders/researchers and disrupts and unsettles the taken-for-granted notions surrounding the very goals and purposes of educational research. By examining the life notes of these women, the author develops an endarkened feminist epistemology, which embodies a distinguishably different cultural standpoint, located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance for African-American women.
In recent years, a compelling discussion in education has centered on caring. In this paper, I contribute to this dialogue by suggesting that there is a particular form of caring exhibited in the pedagogy of exemplary black women teachers. It is the purpose of this paper to illuminate central aspects of their pedagogy as facets of womanism, an epistemological perspective based on the collective experiences of black women. As educators who exhibit womanist caring, such teachers demonstrate the following three characteristics: an embrace of the maternal, political clarity, and an ethic of risk. In describing each characteristic, I provide both contemporary and historical evidence to demonstrate that womanism is part of a long-standing tradition among African-American women teachers. I conclude the paper by suggesting that we can better inform pre- and in-service educators about the types of teachers that our students need from an understanding of how and why exemplary teachers exhibit their womanist caring.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics
- Lynn Fujiwara
- Shireen Roshanravan
- Fujiwara Lynn
Learning to (Re)member the Things We’ve Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms, Spirituality, and the Sacred Nature of (Re)search and Teaching
- Cynthia B Dillard
- Dillard Cynthia B.