Cultivating a Pedagogy of Love: A Portrait of Trauma and Healing in an English Classroom

• In Event: Revisiting and Reinventing a Feminist Freire: Woman of Color Pedagogies of Love

Abstract

Emerging research shows that more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances—and 35 percent of children have experienced more than one type of traumatic event (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). In the midst of such pervasive trauma, teachers generally—and particularly in urban schools—must be equipped with a language and paradigm that prepares and allows them to intervene in the traumatic stressors impacting the lives of students of color. In this study I draw from, blend, and synthesize existing research in the fields of public health, social epidemiology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, Ethnic Studies, and education to achieve a more robust understanding of trauma, its effects, and existing interventions. I then draw from these aforementioned fields to highlight a grotesquely under-theorized, but widely agreed upon intervention to child trauma: loving relationships (Ginwright, 2016; Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Perry, 2007; Siegel & Solomon, 2003, Van Der Kolk, 2014). The aforementioned fields are joined by educational theorists Freire (1970) and Darder (2002) and women of color feminists (Ahmed, 2003; Combahee River Collective; 1974; Garcia-Rojas, 2016; Nash 2011) who posit that love in education is a political commitment necessary for a world in which freedom and equity exist. Despite love being widely agreed upon, there exists no understanding of what love looks in the day-to-day of classroom teaching.

This gap in the literature serves as the impetus for returning to the students I taught for four years to understand how we conceptualize love—as both teacher and student(s)—, as well as how love was made visible in the context of our English classroom (Gibran, 1923) . By drawing on a corpus of data collected throughout my tenure as a teacher-researcher (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008) and utilizing student work and video as a generative code (Freire, 1970), I engage in focus groups and interviews with students to collectively theorize what a practice of love looks like in the classroom. The objectives of this paper are two-fold; (1) to provide a theoretical framework that defines love and (2) flush out that framework by relaying ethnographic and auto-ethnographic examples of what love looks like in the classroom day-to-day.

Given the detrimental impacts of trauma on the bodies and brains of young people, there is a moral and pedagogical imperative that we intervene, that we truly learn how to love. This study serves as a catalyst for a much needed conversation around how educators and schools in urban neighborhoods can better love and serve young people, ultimately, offering a teacher and student oriented analysis of love as an empowering tool for teachers to create loving classrooms that examine issues of self/community, power/privilege, and the importance of a critical educacion (Valenzuela, 1999).

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan