Unsettling Calm and Order: Resisting While Reinforcing White Supremacy in a Humanizing Social Emotional Praxis

• In Event: Commitments Across Contexts: Working Through the Politics of Whiteness With Educators

Abstract

Context and Purpose
Social emotional learning (SEL) frequently teaches abilities and skills (i.e., self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) to preserve the functionality of schools, which tend to reproduce structural harm (Bartolomé, 1994; Love, 2019). SEL, then, serves as surveillance to teach students, particularly those most intimately familiar with structural harm, to police themselves in alignment with white supremacy (Simmons, 2021) by delegitimizing their social relationships and distancing them from their emotions. In this paper, I draw from a larger qualitative case study that took place in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature and executive branch that, like many states, had recently passed legislation aiming to restrict teachers’ truth-telling about systemic racism. Specifically, I explore how one white teacher, Staci, who identified as committed to antiracism, pedagogically and structurally enacted what I call a humanizing social emotional praxis, an approach to centering the social worlds and expansive emotions of students most marginalized. Notably, I deeply interrogate Staci’s paradoxical instantiations of her praxis, at times both reinforcing and resisting white supremacy.

Methodology and Theoretical Framing
This qualitative case study used observations, interviews, and artifacts to understand the contextual features rooted in a critical participatory action research project. I sought to make meaning of the data from my conceptualization of a humanizing social emotional praxis, which is inextricably connected to critical whiteness studies. In particular, I aimed to make visible even those seemingly inconsequential enactments of white supremacy (Gillborn, 2006, 2019; Leonardo, 2009). In order to understand the particularities of white supremacy in everyday interactions and structures, and identify the strategies that maintain it, I draw specifically from the characteristics of white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021). To highlight Staci’s reflexivity and subsequent resistance to white supremacy, I situate Staci’s motivations, emotions, and decisions in conversation with literature exploring white identities in education (Jupp & Lensmire, 2016; Matias, 2016).

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The findings of this study indicate that teachers who practice humanizing social emotional praxes must center process to attend to the wisdom of students’ expansive emotions and social realities. Notably, during lessons as part of her humanizing social emotional praxis, Staci’s use of classroom management strategies to surveil and police students’ behaviors circumvented her resistance to white supremacy and realigned her with the white supremacy of schooling, and the state’s own processes of silencing truth-telling for purposes of domination. Staci was forced to reckon with process, and sought to explore the ways in which white supremacy lived within her. Through her own destabilization of her sense of self, Staci became motivated by the urgency of justice (Okun, 2021). This suggests that teacher education and K-12 professional development settings committed to justice should actualize such commitments by interrogating purpose and questioning how white supremacy is thriving within bodies and systems. Critically, I argue for centering process as purpose in order to get in right relationship with resistance to white supremacy for even those (and perhaps especially those) teachers committed to justice.

Author

• Riley Drake, University of Wisconsin - Stout
  Presenting Author