Reciprocating Care and Vulnerability in English Language Arts Classrooms Through a Pedagogy of Tenderness

• In Event: Subverting the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
Across K-12, students and educators continue to reel from anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, gun violence, and anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, all coupled with political efforts across the U.S. and the world that work to dictate how educators may teach, what texts we may provide, and even what language that we and students might use in our classrooms (Council of Europe, 2022; FL HB 1557, 2022). This presentation shares a pedagogical approach that, within these political contexts, centers the vulnerability, kindness, and joy that these mandates have worked to erase and prohibit. Within these new legislative efforts to presumably depoliticize, and thereby dehumanize, education, we instead centered reciprocal care and vulnerability through a Pedagogy of Tenderness, which emphasizes educators’ and students’ humanity and works to reshape class content and interactions.


Theoretical Framework
bell hooks (1994/2020) has shaped our teacher identities and work through her insistence that social justice and humanity are essential to effective teaching. Ranges of educational mandates now demand that teachers and students excise themselves and discussions of difficult and controversial topics from learning. hooks, however, emphasized that “education […is] fundamentally political because,” when it is framed within care and reciprocity, it has the potential to “resist every strategy of white racist [cisgenderist] colonization” (p. 2). Informed by hooks’ work, a “pedagogy of tenderness” (Schulz et al., 2011) proved integral to our efforts to transform classrooms and to resist oppressive forces, as students and teachers learned to humanize themselves, others, and the controversies that they explored. A pedagogy of tenderness fostered “an environment open to dialogue and active participation” that established “positive personal relationships with and among students, extending caring relationships” alongside the everyday “high expectations for quality academic performance” (Schulz et al., 2011, p. 56).


Methods and Data Sources and Analysis
The data for this presentation explore a Pedagogy of Tenderness within two ELA classrooms, one 7th grade and one 12th grade, both within an International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) that emphasized interdisciplinary and global interconnectedness. As an example, the 7th grade class explored the differences between “conversation” and “discussion” during a social justice unit, including when a student referred to the LGBTQIA+ acronym as “strange.” Tamara’s pedagogy of tenderness emphasized shared exploration, accountability, and care, in which students shifted from what to the why of this student’s words and their reactions:
How did peers feel about his response, both immediately and after reflection?
Why was the acronym strange, to him and possibly others?
Students worked to actively listen—not just talk—and fostered a community of care that enabled students to broach topics of concern to them, and to explore questions with openness and compassion.
Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
As hooks (1994/2020) notes, there is little more meaningfully subversive in educational contexts than disrupting a “classroom’s politics of domination” and having “space to interrogate,” without the teacher as “traditional authoritarian, and the students conform[ing]” (p. 148). This presentation explores the impacts of, and possibilities for, pedagogies of tenderness amid the current sociopolitical climate.

Authors

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Tamara Brooks, The American School of Belo Horizonte