The Potential for Connection Within Solitary Pain: Critical Affective Perspectives and Teachers' Experiences Modeling Vulnerability

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Eighteen
  In Roundtable Session: Finding Our People: Mentoring, Sharing, and Connecting (Table 10)

Abstract

After sharing his experience with anxiety, NBA basketball player Kevin Love received hundreds of letters from young people describing difficult life experiences. Moved by these letters he funded the development of a curriculum to support 6th -12th grade students in telling their own stories. Based on Dutro’s (2019a) pedagogy of “critical witnessing” this program supports teachers in creating visual and narrative art and in sharing their art with their students. Drawing from our pilot semester with 70 educators, we explore teachers’ experiences with the affective dimension of modeling vulnerability, and we highlight the crucial need to bring the critical affective lens to programs that welcome and acknowledge the difficult stories and affective intensities that are already present in schools.

Author

• Ellie Foster, Kevin Love Fund
  Presenting Author