Navigating Tensions and Solidarity in the Classroom

• In Event: Dreaming of Solidarities Through Collaborative Learning

Abstract

The classroom is a space of conflicts and difficult conversations, but it also has the potential for fostering solidarity and empathy for the world at large. Students come from different walks of life—including various cultural, political and religious backgrounds. Some are recent high school graduates, while others have been out of the formal education system for decades. They constitute new immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, and different sexual and gender identities. Therefore, students can have opposing views about some of the problems discussed in the classroom, such as abortion rights, incarceration, or social and economic inequality. At the same time, students can be empathetic, open to learning, or deeply committed to making the world a better place.

We draw on a critical autoethnography of our pedagogy to explore the challenges and joys of collaborative learning in the classroom. We expand on Vygotsky’s understanding of solidarity as “our dependency upon each other for our very existence and development” based on an ethical-political commitment to equality (Stetsenko, 2015, p. 111) to conceptualize teaching-learning as a tool for fostering solidarity. Importantly, we challenge common understandings of solidarity through emphasizing the role of crises and drama in creating conditions that enable individual and collective development (Vygotsky, 1999 as cited in Cripps Clark et al., 2020). Solidarity thus requires the emotional and intellectual capacity to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2018) in the classroom, while simultaneously disavowing dehumanizing rhetoric or discourses that may be traumatic to students that encompass a minority within minorities (e.g., queer students of color).

We wonder what approaches to teaching-learning might open up the possibility for solidarities in the classroom, particularly in a time of political and social polarization? In this first part, we invite participants to reflect on their teaching-learning as educators vis-à-vis decolonial educational theories concerned with developing the stamina, rigor, and capacity to face complexities, paradoxes, and complicities in systemic harms (de Oliveira, 2021), including the exploitation of people in the Global South and the destruction of ecologies.

We invite participants to collectively and collaboratively wonder about how the classroom can become a site for teaching-learning together about our codependency on each other for our very existence, including with nature? How might navigating difficult conversations and opposing views with compassion open up new possibilities for solidarity while also maintaining ethical lines and accountability? What is difficult about solidarity in the classroom (e.g., what gets in the way? What role can sociocultural theory play in the development of solidarities in the classroom?

Author

• Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice