Intimate Inquiry: Embodied Learning and Leadership Cultivated in a Wellness Inquiry Group of Critical Educators of Color

• In Event: Education for the People: Centering Grassroots, Self-Determination, and Justice in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed multiple crises in education: youth of color, who were already suffering from disengagement and punitive school policies, are increasingly impacted by various social economic traumas (Jones et al 2021); educators, especially educators of color, are considering leaving the field at unprecedented rates as they navigate compound burnout, grief, and demoralization (Everett & Dunn, 2021; Zamarro et al, 2021). Concurrently, critical educator wellness and trauma-informed care are separate but not quite intersecting bodies in educational scholarship (Howard et al, 2019; Venet, 2021). In addition, teacher development, scholarship and research largely avoid a phenomenon that can address healing, learning, and transformation: the body.

To unravel the hegemonic Cartesian split of mind/body in teacher development, this study draws from the public health sciences to look at embodiment as a merging of sensations, emotions, pain, and desires of students and educators that can be suppressed and engaged in learning spaces (Author, 2019; Haines, 2019). This project analyzes disembodiment – the practices and ideologies of schools and the academy designed to silence and delegitimize embodied ways of knowing that help young people and critical educators meet their needs, make sense of the world, and advocate for justice (Author, 2021; Reynolds, Botts, & Pour-Khorshid, 2021). Here, I examine how I, as a teacher educator of color, engage in an intimate inquiry of the self alongside student teachers and fellow educators in a wellness inquiry group (WIG). The WIG is a model of educator development shaped by critical teacher inquiry groups and a historical lineage of grassroots organizing (Martinez, Valdez & Cariaga, 2016; Navarro, 2020). I examine these questions: What do educators and students of color learn about themselves and others while engaging in a WIG? How do ideologies of disembodiment, if at all, constrain learning and wellness in and beyond these spaces? How does an embodied praxis, if at all, shift ways of knowing, learning, and teaching in and beyond the WIG?

Methods and Data Collection
I combine Auto-Ethnography (Chang, 2016) with Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to craft a blended portrait that synthesizes my process as a teacher educator/researcher working alongside fellow educators and student teachers as part of a wellness inquiry group, which was resourced by a teacher education program at a State university in Southern California. I analyze ways we reimagined teaching praxis and engaged in self/collective care, drawing from analytic memos, WIG recordings, participant interviews, and curricular artifacts.

Findings and Significance
Building upon the legacy of teacher inquiry and survival groups documented by the Black Panther Party and other grassroots liberatory organizations, this study highlights how embodied wellness is integral to surviving the toxic spirit-murdering of K-12 schools and teacher education (Love, 2019). Findings underscore the necessary interplay between the ways educators developed a felt sense of safety, belonging, and dignity amongst themselves, the impact of such care on their development of embodied pedagogies, and the shifts in relationships and praxis that disrupted several institutions’ denial of the epistemic and pedagogical value of embodiment.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills