Intimate Inquiry in an English Classroom: Being in Right Relationship to Sorrow

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

Abstract

Trauma has a significant impact on marginalized communities (Ginwright, 2016) and schools (Ko et al., 2008). However, schools are places where young people become disembodied from righteous grief that lies underneath such trauma (Duncan-Andrade, 2009), while teachers silence their needs to fully serve students (Hydon et al., 2015). Instead of silencing emotions, Herman (1997) calls for trauma-informed practitioners to reframe grief as an act of courage. Literature also calls for critical educators to integrate healing into their own teacher inquiry (Pour-Khorshid, 2016) to sharpen political clarity (Martinez, Valdez & Cariaga, 2016) in their praxis. This study explores ways to develop a culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2014) praxis that utilizes emotion to inspire individual and collective healing, considering the needs of marginalized students and the teachers who serve them.

Focused on the context of an English classroom, this study examines:
How do Students of Color describe the impact of trauma on their lives and learning?
How can a teacher create and implement healing pedagogies in an English classroom?
How can a teacher maintain a sustainable healing pedagogy practice?

I combine Auto-Ethnography (Chang, 2016) with Portraiture (Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to craft a blended portrait that synthesizes my process as a teacher/researcher with student lived realities that emerge throughout one semester teaching 11th–grade English at a public high school in Los Angeles. I draw from interviews and interactions with two student participants, alongside curriculum analysis and personal reflections from a unit called “Healing Grief”, where students participate in a research project that discusses culturally-responsive ways to support People of Color to heal from grief.

Theoretically and pedagogically, I combine the concept of critical literacy as self-care (Morrell, 2008) with Weller’s (2015) idea of being “in right relationship” with our sorrow “to turn our grief into something vital and life-serving (p. 24). Students unpack the needs of characters of color from films and ways to guide these characters to bear witness to their grief -- all while unpacking and healing from their own experiences of loss.

This study reveals the burdens and strengths students carry while navigating grief, and the tensions and epiphanies that arise when cultivating bravery, belonging, and critical understanding in the classroom. I lay out components of intimate inquiry, which builds off of Freire’s (1987) problem-posing pedagogy by taking critical analysis to an embodied level. I discuss the vulnerability it takes for students and I to be “in right relationship” with our pain and each other, and the courage necessary to do so in an institution that promotes disembodiment and isolation. I share strategies for re-anchoring while carrying the compound weight of students’ sadness and my own grief as a teacher and woman of color.
Integrating the body, multimedia, and the written word as text, I expand what we understand as culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014), as I demonstrate holistic and reciprocal ways to uncover the complex needs of marginalized students. I extend caring for students (Howard & Milner, 2014) to include caring for ourselves, especially when sustaining a healing-centered praxis.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills