Practices of Critical Love: Exploring the Confluence of Justice, Oppression, and Love in Material Pedagogies

• In Event: Anti-Oppressive Social Studies: Pursuing Justice Through an Ethic of Incommensurability

Abstract

The pervasiveness of neoliberal multiculturalism in schools affords teachers whose identity politics align with U.S. society’s culture of power (Delpit, 2006) ideological space to claim they are against oppression while maintaining oppressive procedures and policies in their classrooms (Grinage, 2020). This contradiction in practice and belief speaks to the pressure for teachers to fit into the culture of the school, thereby avoiding concerns of social isolation and overwhelmedness (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Chikkatur, 2013). This decision affords opportunities for compliance-based education to usurp the liberatory possibilities of education (Kumashiro, 2002; Freire, 2000). Unsurprisingly, such decisions disproportionately affect students who identify with socially and historically minoritized groups, facing higher rates of punishment (Khalifa, Gooden, et al., 2016), and fewer opportunities to learn in classrooms (Love, 2019).
Consequently, the routine exclusionary practices minoritized youth face undermine the role schools play in fostering civic purpose and engagement in broader social communities (Biesta, Lawly, et al., 2009; Schmidt, 2013; Rubin, 2007). In turn, formal schools and classrooms are rarely places minoritized youth feel like they belong (hooks, 1994; Jones & Eubanks, 2014; Love, 2019), a foundational element of community engagement and democracy that remains absent from social studies research. This paper attempts to address this gap by asserting the possibilities to develop senses of belonging in formal educational spaces using a framework of critical love, which subverts the notion of social change from taking power and overthrowing hegemonic institutions, instead seeking to transform power in its forms and functions to arrive at a space that is co-constructed by youth and adults to be one of reciprocal belonging (Freire, 2000; Lanas & Zembylas, 2014; Matias & Allen, 2016).
While theorizing critical love troubles the ways we conceptualize power in schools, little in social studies describes what it looks and feels like to teach from a position of critical love. Drawing on a larger participant action research study that I conducted with four teachers’ enacting pedagogies grounded in critical love at a public urban secondary school, this paper explores the challenges and transformations we encountered throughout the school year using data collected from our conversations, observations, and reflections of our experiences and actions we took. For example, one of the earliest and ongoing challenges we faced was understanding ourselves as oppressors and liberating ourselves. Situated in critical love, our conversations and concomitant actions challenged us to transform power in its normative form to afford youth spaces to practice freedom (e.g., letting students build their own daily schedules, replacing classroom send-outs with restorative justice circles). By refusing to be disciplined by colleagues who told us we were failing at teaching, we found ourselves aligning our sense of belonging more closely with the youth we taught than the adults we worked alongside. The implications shifting our sense of belonging toward youth and away from the school destabilized the common sense of power in schooling and offered new possibilities of what anti-oppressive teaching might look and feel like.

Author

• Ryan Oto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities