Stumbling Upon Wellness: Hurricanes, Pickup Trucks, and Hijabs – Is Curriculum Implicated?

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies of Healing: Curriculum for Human Thriving in Times of Struggle

Abstract

Referring to myself as a critical pedagogy widow would not be hyperbolizing…neither would be the fact that both my critical pedagogical husbands died within 9 years of one another. This narrative paper will revisit my unexpected first and subsequent journeys to wellness and self-care through my own theoretical and personal notions of radical love and incorporation of currere. In my work on post-formal thinking, it was insisted that criticalizing our work was always tentative, ever-changing, and encouched in humility, noting that the personal was intimately entwined with the pedagogical. My own embodiment of wellness began through personal loss taking me to the public, to community.
Deborah Britzman incants the notion of “difficult knowledge” as on looks at the managing of trauma and representations of trauma (Britzman, 2000). In this paper I look at the juxtaposition of personal and public trauma through a narrative of personal events. Reflecting on Paulo Freire’s concept of radical love, I move from the deeply personal arena of trauma into the way of community, all tied within the idea of this difficult knowledge. Ironically noting that the death of several theorists who helped solidify my own critical pedagogy while, at the same time, commanded and incanted the very trauma in which I analyze.
Bringing trauma to the public insists that we, educators and researchers, note the inherent effects and affects within the way in which trauma is represented and taught. Ever conscious of Pinar’s currere, we place our own stories within the historical and public stories allowing our pedagogical selves to create authentic ways in which to make meaning. Most definitely: difficult knowledges.

Author

• Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary