Centering Grief as a Catalyst for Transformative Collective Care Among Critical Educators of Color

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

Abstract

In the words of Audre Lorde (2004), “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it” (p. 16). Exploring grief, particularly from the vantage point of marginalized educators within a predominantly white teaching profession, is an important step toward addressing the teacher diversity gap that continues to grow in almost every state in the country (Boser, 2014). While scholars have documented structural challenges that teachers of color face in the profession (Achinstein, Ogawa, Sexton & Freitas, 2010), few capture how they navigate and heal from the impacts of structural violence perpetuated within and outside of schools (Farmer, 2005; Ginwright, 2015). Oppression, in its myriad forms, is traumatic and Weller (2015) reminds us that, “trauma remains a source of ongoing suffering, eating away at our worth and undermining our ability to step fully into our lives” (p. 39). To this end, this study explores how a critical racial affinity group (CRAF) approach (Author, 2018; Mosley, 2018) rooted in critical healing praxis (Author, 2018) fosters opportunities for educators of color to address and heal from the racialized and gendered forms of grief and trauma that impact their retention, growth, wellbeing and empowerment within the field and beyond.

This three-year ethnographic case study (Yin, 2003) illuminates the context, experiences, perspectives, and practices that unfold within a grassroots CRAF composed of twelve educators of color in California. I employed ethnographic methods through sustained participant observation (Wilson, 1977) as a fellow member, which contributed to my understandings regarding the nature and essence of the group context. I sought to examine the role that grief played in the personal and professional lives of critical educators of color (CEoC) and to explore how the group engaged in collectively healing through their learning overtime.

This study highlight how members cultivated an intersectional healing space for CEoC shaped by the learning tenets: healing, empowerment, love, liberation and action (H.E.L.L.A.).The group’s shared commitment to and engagement with ongoing critical healing praxis played an important role in addressing the grievances that members experience and carry with them in and out of their classrooms. I describe how members individually and collectively reflected on their racial and social identity development, formation and positionalities in the world through humanizing socio-emotional and racial literacy development. These conditions led to their writing and sharing of testimonios addressing intergenerational trauma, internalized oppression and the complex grief associated with their experiences navigating structural violence from their childhood through adulthood.

The findings of this research suggest that while CEoC likely do not experience humanizing or culturally sustaining pedagogies within their professional development in schools, grassroots social justice teacher collectives offer alternative spaces of support in order to fill this gap. A critical racial affinity group approach that bridges critical and healing praxes can offer CEoC a sacred, intersectional space to collectively grieve and heal in solidarity with a range of like-minded practitioners of color in the field.

Author

• Farima Patricia Pour-Khorshid, University of San Francisco