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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores ways teachers and organizers navigate local contexts to reclaim raced/gendered/cultural knowledges and identities to enact a healing justice (Ginwright, 2016) praxis for communities of color. Our research examines: 1) emotions as radical pedagogical resources in an English high school classroom; 2) cultural remembrance as a transformative tool for Black women teachers and their students; 3) a critical teacher study group's efforts to heal and support one another’s pedagogies; 4) the work of formerly incarcerated educators to integrate culturally-rooted trauma-informed care in a community organization; and 5) the role of relationship-building between educators and youth in intergenerational organizing. Employing critical, feminist, and decolonizing frameworks, we reimagine public education through healing-centered classrooms, teacher education spaces, and activism.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Micro-analyses of the social contexts of teaching and learning

Chair

• Dolores Delgado Bernal, California State University - Los Angeles

Papers

• The Personal Is Political and Pedagogical: A Critical Teacher Testimonio Calling for Healing-Centered Praxis - Stephanie Cariaga, University of California, Los Angeles

• Black Teachers' Lives Matter: Teaching to Heal, Resist, and (Re)Member - Cynthia B. Dillard, University of Georgia

• Critical Professional Development Toward Healing, Empowerment, Love, Liberation, and Action - Farima Pour-Khorshid, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Intergenerational Healing-Centered Organizing, Participatory Action Research, and a Pedagogy of Love - Emily Borg, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Healing and Critical Youth Praxis in Transformative Organizing - Emily Bautista, Loyola Marymount University

Discussant

• Shawn A. Ginwright, San Francisco State University