Toward Pedagogies of Wholeness: Centering Intimacy, Interdependence, and Healing in an Aspiring-Abolitionist English Classroom

• In Event: Lessons in Liberation: Growing Movements Through Abolitionist Praxis

Abstract

Trauma has a significant impact on marginalized communities (Ginwright, 2016) and schools (Ko et al., 2008), even as youth continue to demonstrate resilience in the face of adversity. Love (2019) calls educators to become abolitionist teachers to disrupt structural trauma in and out of schools, while Winn (2013) calls for a restorative English education to utilize literacy as a platform for healing. This study therefore asks: how can a teacher utilize the subject matter of English Language Arts to support Students of Color to heal from trauma, both individually and collectively?

Theoretically, I synthesize frameworks of abolition (Love, 2019), healing justice (Hemphill, 2017; Ginwright, 2015) and embodied pedagogies (Thompson, 2017; meenadchi, 2019) to define and analyze healing in classrooms as a structural, care-centered, and embodied intervention. Focusing on both the structural and holistic aspects of teaching, this study considers how English teachers can “begin to value care, emotional labor, and resilience, not as add-ons but as central components of sustainability” (Hemphill, 2017) of teaching.

Methodologically, I combine Auto-Ethnography (Chang, 2016) with Portraiture (Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to craft a blended portrait that synthesizes my process as a teacher/researcher with student lived realities that emerge throughout one semester teaching 11th–grade English at a high school in Los Angeles. I draw from interviews and interactions with student participants who identify as Black or Latin@, alongside curriculum analysis and reflections from an introductory unit called “Healing Schools.” There, we begin the semester building community, discussing past schooling experiences, sharing collective needs, and re-imagining schools as emotionally supportive spaces.

This blended portrait sifts through the relational, epistemological, and pedagogical shifts needed to create safety, bravery, and belonging in a place that students deem inherently unsafe. I uncover a dialectical process, where we use our bodies and classroom texts to explore the tensions between safety and risk in schools. I discuss classroom structures used to identify collective and individual needs, where a focal student named David learned to befriend his own body, analyze texts about students navigating trauma in school, and eventually bear witness to his own violent schooling experiences and transform perceptions of self-worth and agency.

Findings reveal a need for pedagogies of wholeness, defined as a willingness to dive into an intimate inquiry that uncovers pain and needs and to build deep relationship with others to uncover individual and collective power. An interdependent kind of teaching and learning that makes space for the needs of students and teacher, pedagogies of wholeness are founded on a critical compassion that holds concern for young people’s suffering, while holding a critique of the systems of oppression that lies at the root of their pain. The study concludes with implications for educators, teacher educators, and schools interested in meeting the complex needs of marginalized youth through an aspiring-abolitionist praxis even amongst the confines of working within violent institutions.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills