Counter-mapping School Wellbeing with Youth in Alternative Education Programs: Love Notes to Liminal Space

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining the Holders of Knowledge: Teachers and Youth as (Co)llaborators and (Co)creators in the Pursuit of Educational Justice and Renewal

Abstract

This paper shares results from a study that explored barriers and supports to educational wellbeing with students from an alternative education program using critical spatial methods. Participants counter-mapped safe spaces, educational relationships, and school tensions by annotating diagrams of the school; erasing, drawing, colour-coding, and adding post-it notes. The paper foregrounds student-identified tensions within educational wellbeing. It then examines the ways that participants’ counter-maps, notes, and omissions address these tensions by highlighting elements of respite, hope, and repair within the school. These emerge in map work through students’ small love notes for the programming, staff, portable trailers and other liminal school spaces in which they feel visible and supported to be themselves on school grounds.

Author

• Auralia Brooke, University of New Brunswick