From Punk Love to Compa (Comrade Love): Building

• In Event: 49.071 - Reinventing a Feminist Freire: Woman of Color Critical Pedagogies of Love

Abstract

This paper explores the need for love in urban schools. It begins by exploring some of the ways in which schools and teachers often engage in loveless interactions with students (Punk Love) and explains how/why those interactions are socially toxic for learning and further traumatize young people of color. The need for a framework about love was derived out of a mix of psychiatric, feminist, and educational research that indicated that in order for young people to heal from trauma and develop higher levels of resiliency they must be around loving adults (Duncan-Andrade, 2009; hooks, 2000; Perry & Szalavitz, 2007; Siegel & Solomon, 2003). The framework of Compa/Comrade love creates a set of criteria around what love should look like in the context of an urban classroom, while simultaneously acknowledging the challenges and nuances of everyday classroom teachers. Compa Love is grounded in historical research of organizational structures and cultures that have been self-sustainable in the face of a colonial threat; and I argue, were able to do so because of the ways they manifested love in the form of true generosity (Freire, 1970). The framework was developed over a year long ethnographic case study (Stake, 2005) while working as an early career teacher in the East Oakland Step-to-College program, then further implemented and theorized over the following four years while teaching at the neighboring high school. The paper follows the trajectory of two different classroom case studies that had many students who displayed symptoms of complex traumas or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and as a result, were struggling inside of the classroom. The paper follows these students as I attempted to implement the framework of Compa Love; it discusses the promises, challenges, and tensions of engaging, and attempting to engage in deep, loving relationships that can alter young people’s experiences with traumatic events, and ultimately, their trajectory within urban public schools.

The method by which I acquired data was through the practice of critical ethnographic classroom action research (Morrell, 2006), which requires that teachers engage in a process of critical ethnographic inquiry of practice in a way that helps to take theoretical research and make it accessible for practitioners in a way that is beneficial for young people in urban schools. To analyze data, it uses qualitative case study methodology. According to Stake (2005), “Case study concentrates on experiential knowledge of the case and close attention to the influence of its social, political, and other contexts” (p. 444). Through two focal class cases across two East Oakland high schools, I offer a grounded understanding of Comrade Love applied in community and school settings this critical qualitative study hoped to impact positively. This study serves as a catalyst for a much needed conversation around how educators and schools in urban neighborhoods can better love and serve young people, ultimately, offering a teacher-oriented analysis of using Compa Love as an empowering tool for teachers to help students examine issues of self/community, power/privilege, and the importance of a critical educación (Valenzuela, 1999).

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez