I Love You: Centering Critical Love to Disrupt Oppression in Teacher Education

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Abstract

This paper explores the pedagogical potential of critical love in anti-oppressive teacher education. We studied an arts-integrated course that invited teacher candidates (TCs) to navigate identity, responsibility, and structural critique through relational and creative practices. Using critical practitioner inquiry, a faculty instructor, artist-in-residence, and student researcher examined how centering love, play, and abundance disrupted norms of neutrality, hierarchy, and whiteness. We closely attend to the experiences of researchers and TCs as they relate to love in the course. Findings highlight how familiar institutional patterns resurfaced, discomfort was both generative and resisted, and arts-based learning invited both connection and avoidance. This study contributes to literature on anti-oppressive pedagogy by offering a meta-narrative of relational risk, reciprocal learning, and justice-seeking through love.

Authors

• Kristen Schaffer, Mount Royal University

• Daniela Quintero, Mount Royal University

• Kodie Rollan, Chromatic Theatre

• Reggie San Jose, Mount Royal University