Literacy, Grieving, and Healing: Weeping as an Act of Literacy

• In Event: 79.021 - Grief as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Reclaiming a Humanizing Praxis for Ourselves and the Students We Serve

Abstract

Research over the last decade has demonstrated that trauma is one of the greatest socioemotional needs facing Students of Color (Clough, 2015). Given that every traumatic event signifies a loss, a fissure — of safety, self, health, loved ones, land—this requires that teachers be able to facilitate a space, a container (Weller, 2015, p. 13). and process for grieving. Current trauma discourse does little to account for grieving processes, focusing instead on the act of remembrance in which a person transforms their often worldless traumatic memory into words, recounting the horrors in as much detail as possible (Herman, 1992). However, given that trauma is preverbal (Van Der Kolk, 2014, p. 43)—what about the students who cannot yet put to words their experiences? The right side of the brain is responsible for emotions and non-verbal communications; when young people experience persistent or prolonged trauma they are exercising the right side of the brain at the expense of the left, the side responsible for verbal communication (Van Der Kolk, 2014). Current understandings of literacy do little to account for how that child might communicate their anguish.

In this paper, I will use trauma scholarship to challenge and extend current definitions of literacy which largely include reading, writing, and speaking to include the notion of weeping. Kirkland (2009) argues that “it’s important to reconceptualize literacy as a human practice” (p.389), reminding us that literacy must always be understood and conceptualized within the context of human struggle.” Similarly, Freire & Macedo (1987) argue that literacy is the ability to read the word and the world. As such, I argue that for young people who cannot or choose not to verbalize their trauma, it is important to recognize their non-verbal communication as a form of literacy. Specifically, I posit that crying, or weeping is a form of reading and responding to the actual and experienced world of young people and should therefore be considered an act of literacy. To do so is to honor the true linguistic pluralism (Paris & Alim, 2017) of the students in our classroom.

I turn to a corpus of data collected over my tenure as a high school English teacher (Camangian, 2011; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Gutstein, 2006; Stovall & Doyle Morales, 2010; Tan, 2008) to answer the poet Rumi’s question “is weeping speech?”. By using video-recorded instances as a generative code (Freire, 1970) in interviews with former students, I argue that weeping is an act of literacy, with varied functions and meanings. Findings illustrate that weeping serves as an important part of catharsis in the grieving project, but simultaneously lends itself to empathy, solidarity, and loving relationship. By imagining and constructing a new act of literacy—weeping— I hope to extend literacy discourse and culturally sustaining pedagogies towards a political project that is more trauma-informed, and that will ultimately guide understanding of how literacy can be used to foster grieving and healing in the classroom.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Kentucky