The Ways Rest Heals The Matrix Of Oppressions: How Silence, Stillness, and Silliness Function As Extraordinary Literacies

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Rest as an Extraordinary Literacy: Black Women Educators Reclaiming Power Through Stillness, Silence, Silliness, and Refusal

Abstract

This paper explores how silence, stillness, and silliness function as extraordinary literacies that help Black girls and women heal the matrix of oppressions embedded within their interior lives. Drawing on Staples-Dixon’s (2023, 2024) theory of extraordinary literacies and Hersey’s (2022) framing of rest as resistance, the author names the five interlocking components of the matrix: limiting belief systems, hypervigilant defense mechanisms, persistent survival programs, toxic narrative structures, and exaggerated somatic pain and tolerance. These toxic patterns emerge as internalized responses to white supremacist patriarchal ideologies encountered in schools and society, ultimately compromising a person’s ability to think expansively, trust intimacy, plan for the future, speak in liberatory ways, and sustain embodied wellness.

Through a peculiar autoethnographic inquiry, whimsy inquiries, and embodied celestial analysis, this paper explores how these interior wounds are revealed and transformed when approached through the extraordinary literacies of silence, stillness, and silliness. These praxes of rest intervene in the terrorized interior landscape by disrupting compulsive activity, regulating reactive defenses, softening the grip of scarcity narratives, and releasing toxic emotional build-up. Each literacy enacts emotional justice by making space for the sacred, the playful, and the expansive within one’s self.
The author presents insights from reviews of narrative, decolonial literatures of pain, harm, violence, and healing. She shares how patterns of internal fragmentation translate into predictable behaviors in external contexts. These revelations are used to advocate for Black girls and women, and to advance pedagogical frameworks for preservice teachers—particularly those preparing to work in urban schools. This includes building capacity in new educators to recognize and regard the interior literacies of their students with curiosity, compassion, and radical belief.

Ultimately, this paper argues that extraordinary pedagogies must begin by honoring the sacred and socio-spiritual depths of human interiority. When our pedagogical practices make room for interior rest as a mode of literacy—alongside reading, writing, speaking, and listening—they become more dynamically intuitive, critical, creative, and just. This paper explains how emotional justice meets social justice: not only as a public response to pain, but as a quiet, sustained, and radical excavation of the Big Strong Deep of one’s Personhood.

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.

Hersey, T. (2024). The Nap Ministry Guide to Restorative Living.

Staples-Dixon, J. M. (2023). Extraordinary literacies & empyreal logics: regarding the everyday praxises of Black girls and women in schools and society. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(7), 1207–1211.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2203100

Staples-Dixon, J., Sealey-Ruiz, Y., Griffin, A., & Price-Dennis, D. (2023). Exploring extraordinary literacies and empyreal logics through the t/terror narratives of three Black women in the academy: a roundtable transcript, study notes, and guiding questions. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(7), 1285–1297.

https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2214983
Staples-Dixon, J. M. (2023). How Black girls hurt: noticing and naming the t/terror narratives accumulated in schools and society [or, a call for a third wave new literacies education for all people, based on the dynamic, triumphant literate lives of Black girls and women]. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(7), 1298–1318. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2203106

Author

• Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon, Pennsylvania State University