Sacred Vibes: Unraveling and Protecting that which is Sacred in Learning

• In Event: It’s a Whole Vibe!: Exploring Agency, Labor, and Power in the Felt Dimensions of Learning

Abstract

This conceptual paper weaves together multiple, compelling frameworks to honor what scholars and educators have yet to fully articulate: the sacred stories of students as they navigate, contest, (re)imagine, and safeguard their humanity inside sometimes oppressive educational institutions. This paper offers a loving challenge to education scholars and practitioners. Borrowing from Trauma-Responsive Pedagogy (TRP) (Casimir & Baker, 2023), we head Eve Tuck’s call (2009) to suspend damage by honoring the humanity of the subjects of education research as we work to excavate that which is often relegated to ‘undefinable’ emotional experiences. This paper brings together the cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2014) with storying as a method of meaning-making (Gravett, 2019) for a more just educational experience for youth.

Drawing on our combined teaching experiences in public schools, we developed a fictionalized, composite case of Trinity, a middle school Latine youth. Trinity is presented with an assignment where she is asked to write about a cherished memory. Trinity writing centers around being in the hospital with a family member that is preparing to transition away from this life. Whereas TRP may invite us to “turn wounds into wisdom” (Casimir & Baker, 2023), we leverage Ahmed’s consideration of social-structural aspects of emotions to meditate on the space between people that confer potential wisdom through the sacred vibes that take residence. Further, storying (Gravette, 2019) pushes us to consider the sacred vibe that is constructed and negotiated between Trinity and her teacher. Bringing these frameworks together offers tools to safeguard sacred vibes of certain emotional experiences that may be shaped, (re)imagined, and inscribed between space, time, and personhood through the practice of storying (Gravette, 2019).

In leveraging these multiple frameworks, we position an epistemological and ontological orientation that honors the full complexity of youth as they unfurl into their whole selves inside contexts that might be otherwise labeled as traumatic. We invite the use of new analytical tools that move beyond excavating meaning from within stories (Clarke et al., 2017). Consequently, the resulting cross-cutting axiology compels researchers to invite the authors of stories themselves to excavate and honor the variability and complexity of discourses (Foucault, 1969) that confer meaning and inscribe complex cognition. Such analytical tools draw strength and guidance from Tuck’s “moratorium on damage-centered research” (2009) by offering discursive and humanizing means to highlight culturally mediated meaning-making processes (Ahmed, 2014), constituting sacred vibes of the most human order.

In the emotional world of Black and Brown youth, Trinity’s case creates space to position youth and educators themselves as leaders in the quest to right that which is wrong in education—namely, the defacto practice of either exploiting or hiding the stories of pain and joy of Black and Brown youth. Consequently, education scholarship might honor the storying of the sacred vibes that take residence between bodies, space, and time towards a deep remedy and repair of long-standing turn away from the complexity and beauty of that which we may not fully understand about the experiences of Black and Brown youth in schools.

Authors

• Aukeem A. Ballard, University of California - Berkeley

• Nallely Beulah Aceves Romero, Stanford University