Letters From Those Who Dare to Love: Generative Autoethnographic Love Letters From Black Educators

• In Event: Love Yourz: Critical Race Love Letters to Community

Abstract

Objectives
This paper argues that love is central to identifying, healing, and transforming spiritual violence in our schools. In particular, the author centers the voices of Black educators to highlight the critical role they serve in combating race-based trauma and violence. This work shares the multitude of ways that Black educators demonstrate the love of community in spaces they occupy. Through critical race letters as powerful counterstories to dominant narratives, this work reveals what love can look like in education. This research seeks to normalize speaking of and investing in love within our relationships and educational structures.

Theoretical Framework
A Critical Theory of Love (Brooks, 2017) is used to explicitly center love that is informed by an analysis of systemic oppression. Critical Theory of Love (CTL) reframes love as critically humanizing and centers wholeness–the whole personhood of how we experience the world in relation to historical and contemporary contexts. In doing so, CTL confronts the dehumanizing ways that love is commonly understood and aims to restore dignity and justice.

Methods
This study applies generative autoethnography (Camangian et al., 2021) to invite counterstories as critical race methodology (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Generative autoethnography counter-storytelling creates a communal writing and reflecting process in which ideas come together to resist majoritarian narratives while uplifting stories that are collective as well as individually unique. In this study, generative autoethnographies are written as critical race love letters, which invite Black educators to be vulnerable and make visible the transformational love for community.

Data sources include individual interviews with five Black educators to build relationships and connections. From there, the group participated in generative autoethnographic love letter writing. Once drafted, the group came together to share their letters, responses, and hopes for the future. The author collected this data through video, field notes, and written participant reflections.

Results
Emerging results show that Black educators define their love as critical and deeply tied to their personhood. Themes that arose from the preliminary analyses are: Place and Community, Centrality of Love, Spirit Murder, and Silencing. Participants describe how their love is in alignment with the identities of their place and communities. Critical love, as demonstrated by participants, is grown alongside their personal roots. As participants wrote, they stayed true to the form, centering love throughout the letters. Their depictions of love represent a spectrum of experiences from joyful to dispiriting. A key component of their critical love is resistance in the face of oppression. Black educators demonstrated their love by fighting for liberatory and loving spaces for youth.

Significance
The love that Black youth need from educators is missing from the mainstream discourse. As demonstrated by the results, Black educators often feel silenced, however, the generative autoethnographic love letters offered an opportunity for full expression without inspection by the white gaze. Black educators define love in action that nurtures the wholeness of Black youth. The stories represented in the love letters provide ways to reflect, analyze, and push educational environments with a love-forward lens.

Author

• Alizabeth McGowan, College Track
  Presenting Author