The Vulnerable Heart of Social Justice Pedagogies: Trauma, Affect, and Emotion in a Preservice Literacy Methods Course

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Vulnerability and Care in Teacher Education

Abstract

Our paper examines what happened when we enacted pedagogies centrally engaging vulnerability, affect, and emotion with the aim of fostering and supporting social justice commitments and tools of critical analysis in a teacher education course. Within the theoretical terrain of critical and poststructuralist theories of affect and emotion, particularly the field of trauma studies, we examine how sharing “the difficult” in life experiences functioned across a semester in students’ 1) engagements with literacy content, children, ideas of power and positioning, and each other; and 2) critical analysis of the material consequences of poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia that students bring to and have inflicted on them by schools.

Authors

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado

• Ashley Cartun, University of Colorado - Boulder