How Past Pain Can Inspire Self-Determination: An Embodied Collective Counterstory

• In Event: "Never-Finished Justice Situations": New Directions for Critical Race Praxis in Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives and Research Questions
The concept of Racial Realism (Bell, 1991) admonishes that racial oppression is a permanent feature of American society. Thus, trauma can be considered a permanent symptom of teaching when working in institutions that center and perpetuate whiteness. Moreover, race scholars (Coates, 2015) underscore how disembodiment – the inability to feel, control, and employ the power of one’s body – is essential to understanding and dismantling racial oppression. This paper discusses the need to reflect on the impacts that racialized trauma and disembodiment have on critical educators of color (CEoC). Two authors, both former K-12 CeoC who are now teacher educators, interrogate how an embodied sense of knowing has brought healing from various forms of harm in their teaching and personal experiences. They explore the following questions: How does our embodied wisdom protect, heal, and guide us in our work as educators and scholars? How can our embodied wisdom help us create spaces of autonomy and self determination?

Theory
This study expands upon the literature about trauma-informed care (Ko, et. al., 2008) with critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), critical race praxis (Yamamoto, 1997), and women of color feminist epistemology (Calderon et al, 2012) to contextualize the ways CEoC face, and have faced, violence in schools. The study also synthesizes frameworks about embodied wisdom that can combat stress (Mate, 2011), complex trauma (Van der Kolk, 2014), and racial trauma (Kohli, 2016).

Methods/Data Sources
This study utilizes a counter-story approach (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), drawing from personal and professional experience, literature from the field, and the research process to demonstrate the intersections between structural violence and embodied wisdom in the researchers’ personal, cultural, and professional lives. Delgado’s (1989) plea for narrative highlights the urgency for counter-stories because this approach engages the conscience and imagination in ways that conventional discourses cannot. Author 1 of this study makes connections between traumas experienced as a mother of color navigating the medical industrial complex and a teacher of color who was pushed out of toxic schools, and how both experiences highlight the need for healing and autonomy for marginalized peoples. Author 2 examines the ways in which grief from multiple forms of loss catalyzed her pursuit to heal, teach and research as an educator and organizer of color committed to Healing Centered Engagement (Ginwright, 2018).

Findings and Significance
This study expands the foundational critical race framework of community cultural wealth by theorizing emotional capital, the critical race praxis of utilizing grief and other emotions as powerful resources for learning, healing, and social change. The authors also extend Love’s (2019) idea of spirit murdering in schools, in which structures of racism in schools deny young people of safety and nurturance, by interrogating the use of counter-stories to not only subvert deficit ideologies, but also reclaim and revive the bodymindspirit (Calderon et al., 2012) of critical educators themselves. The study concludes with implications for teacher-of-color sustainability, by tending to CEoC soul care and pedagogical growth within and outside of schools.

Authors

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Farima Pour-Khorshid, University of San Francisco