The Personal Is Political and Pedagogical: A Critical Teacher Testimonio Calling for Healing-Centered Praxis

• In Event: Reimagine to Reclaim: Shifting Teaching and Organizing to Center Healing Justice for Communities of Color

Abstract

In an effort to develop student-centered humanist pedagogy (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012), critical educators often forget “to examine who we are, how we ‘know’, and how we teach” (Prieto & Villenas, 2012, p. 412). I offer my testimonio (Delgado Bernal et. al., 2012), or politically charged narrative, to explore the following questions: How do personal experiences of critical educators shape their understanding of knowledge? How does this understanding of knowledge inform their pedagogical practices? In doing so, I hope to demonstrate how personal explorations can lead to more political clarity (Martinez, Valdez, & Cariaga, 2015) in developing a critical praxis that is better equipped to serve the multi-faceted needs of marginalized students and their communities.

Throughout my testimonio, I draw from Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) and Critical Race Pedagogy (Lynn, Jennings and Hughes, 2013) to situate my life experiences as a woman of color and critical educator working in communities of color. I also integrate Women of Color Feminist Epistemology (Collins, 2000; Calderón et.al., 2012) in my narrative to better recognize dominant ways of knowing, relating, and teaching, and disrupt bifurcated notions of emotional/rational epistemologies and blur the distinctions between the personal/professional work of critical educators.

To uncover my trajectory towards a healing-centered pedagogy, I synthesize my personal experiences with semi-structured interviews and student work from an IRB-approved case study that examined my teaching practices with Black and Latinx students in a year-long 9th grade English class. By sharing my testimonio as a Filipina daughter, mother, student and teacher, I demonstrate how I came to understand an “apartheid of knowledge” (Delgado Bernal & Villapando, 2002) in and out of the classroom and how my desire to disrupt dominant epistemologies led me to center emotionality and healing in my critical teaching praxis. I then share student work and interview data from four focal students in the case study to demonstrate the kinds of rigorous learning and critical consciousness that develops from healing-centered pedagogies.

After sharing those findings, I propose to extend the CRT framework of Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) to include emotional capital as a tool to utilize righteous emotions as fuel for teaching and transformation. I demonstrate how my ability to guide students towards a more holistic, humanizing knowledge of self was made possible by my own daring exploration of self. I conclude by sharing implications for professional development and teacher education spaces to integrate teacher testimonials, radical emotions, and other alternative epistemologies as powerful resources for learning and social change.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, University of California, Los Angeles