Out of the Vortex and Into Myself: The Self-Work of Unearthing Knowledge

• In Event: The Answers We Seek Are Within Communities We Research: Reimagining Schooling Through Black Communal Knowledge

Abstract

Here is my invitation for you to bend toward justice. My arc of self bends in favor of love-Asking hard questions & waiting for answers that don't offer conclusions, just more wonderings about how to live a life worthy of the children who come after us. (Author, 2022)

In this paper and poetry performance, I describe “my arc of self” and how my scholarship has evolved throughout my career. The purpose of this work is to personalize and openly assess how my and other scholarship has attempted to dismantle racial injustice in education while cultivating loving environments where freedom dreaming is possible.
As a scholar, teacher educator, poet, activist, mother, Black woman, I am committed to a process of self-examination that can lead to more justice ways of being in the world and in community; we cannot expect students in our courses or participants in our research to delve deeper into themselves and their pasts that we are willing to do for and within ourselves. Black feminist traditions, personal life history, and critical self-reflection undergird this presentation that revolves around developing critical love which I define as a profound ethical commitment to caring for the communities we live in. Through my previous scholarship, the scholarship of other Black women in the academy, and my poetry, I excavate how my upbringing and my love for writing have both buffered and propelled me along my journey in the academy. While I have written about racial literacy and love from a personal need and commitment, I have learned that when I write, I create a path for myself; and when I share my writing, I open that path to others. My work as an academic and activist seeks to help all educators learn to love and teach Black students at all levels of education. In this presentation, I acknowledge and share my self-work of learning to stand in my truth, speak truth to power, and challenge others to examine the truths and myths about racism.
Because this presentation is a storying of my life, I substantiate my conclusions with what has most influenced me: my faith, my personal relationships, writings from poets like Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, and scholars who have shaped my understanding of a Black imagination. These writers and my interactions in the world have shaped my belief that it is possible to eradicate racist beliefs and return to love which then allow us, collectively, to restore our humanity.
This presentation responds to the 2023 AERA call for proposals by addressing the question, “What is required to imagine educational spaces free of racial injustice?” Using scholarship as examples, I suggest that freeing educational spaces of racial injustice involves increasing educators’ racial literacy, and that process begins with self-work and love.

Author

• Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College, Columbia University