Fostering Community and Self-Care Practices Through Centering Teacher Desires: Navigating a Pedagogical and Curricular Pivot in Education Post-2020

• In Event: Drugs, Poetry, Music, and Care: Illuminating While Reimagining Possibilities Using Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares findings from a five-month-long practitioner inquiry of nine middle and high school teachers in Toronto and New York City who came together bi-weekly in a virtual workshop to engage in a creative writing practice and explore, theorize, and enact care during Covid19. This study explores the implications for teachers’ curriculum, pedagogy, and lives when they consistently enter into community to intentionally engage in care and center their desires.

Theoretical framework
I look to queer theory and draw on the scholarship of Britzman (1995), Sedgewick (1993; 1997; 2003), Ahmed (2006) and others. Queer theory lends itself meaningfully to care scholarship; it offers an opening for desire and reclaiming spaces (Berlant and Freeman, 1992) as it bridges teacher participants’ practices of care in classrooms and their lives outside of schools. I use a participant-formulated definition of care inspired by political scientist Joan Tronto (1993; 2005; 2017) and others who emphasize community care that recognizes the different identities, experiences, histories, and proximities to power of those in relation at any given moment. I also draw on theoretical insights of critical literacy (e.g. Freire, 1970; Janks et al., 2013; Morrell, 2008), which mobilizes this work and locates it in larger contexts and conversations in teacher education.

Methods and data sources
Two methodologies guide this inquiry: critical practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Ballenger, 2009), which emphasizes collaborative inquiry and focuses on classroom and real-world lives of teachers and students, and poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2019; Owton, 2017; Galvin & Prendergast, 2016), which offers a rigorous, art-based alternative to the generation of data. Data are drawn from one-on-one semi-structured interviews; facilitated group practitioner inquiry; fieldnote writing, including analytic memos and poetry writing and inquiry towards sense-making; and analysis of artifacts such as poems, written responses, and reflections.

Results
Our recurrent discussions and interrogating definitions and practices of care surfaced difficult emotions and histories; however, teachers found centring desires and practices of care had positive impacts. As teacher participants became more attuned to self-care and community care through reading, writing, reflections, and discussions (Janks et al., 2013), their desires for connection and compassion for themselves and others seemed to increase. Teachers said they felt hopeful and safe in their risk-taking in community, which influenced pedagogical transformations and curricular alterations for many.

Scholarly significance
This research explores what many educators and scholars request - a reimagining of education that focuses on compassion, community, and relational accountability (Pinar, 2021; Ladson-Billings, 2021; UNESCO, 2021). While care mandates have been made more visible and urgent, the individualization of care continues to be favoured over structural interventions for community care when both are necessary. Interpretations of these data provide original exemplars and pathways for in-service and pre-service teacher education as this community models a mode and practice of care that actively disrupts the frames, intentions, and outcomes of traditional teacher communities. This inquiry is pressing as the world, and so education, copes with a pandemic, climate crisis, and social and political unrest stemming, in part, from a lack of care.

Author

• Ashleigh A. Allen, University of Toronto - OISE