Teaching next to the wound: Pedagogies, curriculum, and engaging racialized trauma through (re)membering

• In Event: (Re)membering, (Re)cognizing, and Responsibility: How Cynthia Dillard’s Work Helps Us Meet the Current Moment

Abstract

Healing begins next to where the wound was made. - Alice Walker

When tasked with teaching difficult histories, especially ones that must reveal the range of human atrocities, educators are limited in their ability to conceptualize teaching as an informed and also healing practice. In particular, when difficult histories are rooted in the Black experience, there is a popular move to engage with the use of simulations, games, and reenactments. These choices, which dramatically limit discussion of the scope and impact of racial traumas over time, rarely moves beyond nostalgia towards cultural memory, the latter being something that continues to make a demand on the present (Busia, 1994; Dillard, 2014; Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Yoshino, 2006)

Dillard’s scholarship on (re)membering (2014) challenges how we can (un)learn these harmful pedagogies by reframing how we can train preservice teachers and classroom teachers to enter into this necessary space with care. Rather than these difficult histories being “acted out” or performed as simulations in classrooms, the concept of (re)membering directs us away from the faulty binary of empathy/pain towards a collective remembering/healing. As part of the healing journey, I consider the following questions:
1. What cultural and heritage knowledge, skills, and dispositions are needed for classroom teachers to teach through sites of racialized trauma in ways relevant to Black students and by extension to all students?
2. What might we do in teacher education to prepare teachers to courageously approach and teach about events and sites of Black racialized trauma in ways meaningful, relevant, and honored in their classrooms and beyond?

Guided by an endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2000; 2006) this study uses critical authoethnographic accounts of my experiences with the collective (re)membering of racialized trauma coupled with other incidents of curriculum violence in schools. Through a collection of personal notes, curriculum activities, school correspondence, and a self-created interactive map of curriculum violence accounts in the US, I grouped, compared, and composed themes related to the data. Influenced by Dillard’s methodology of nkwaethnography (or sacred research) (2012), this approach has multiple purposes of teaching and research that heals through (re)membering.

This process of (re)membering involves several engagements including (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming (Dillard, 2014, 2015). Utilizing these elements of (re)membering in the analysis, these data further provide examples of ways that collective cultural memory of Black trauma can be used for healing in educational spaces. In particular, we find that pre-service teachers’ engagements with racialized sites of trauma and their processes of (re)membering further inform the ways that intention and presence is necessary for healing both Black and White students whether directly or indirectly affected by these sites racialized trauma.

(Re)membering has conceptual foundations with spiritual, and critical feminisms (Cruz 2001, Author 2 & Bell, 2011, Dutro 2008; Dutro & Bien, 2014; and Pérez, 1999). This work is significant in that it reconsiders the impact of both (re)membering and witnessing as both embodied experience for preservice teachers and curricular/pedagogical practice.

Author

• Stephanie P. Jones, Grinnell College