Classroom Cultures of Love, Living, and Learning: A Portraiture of Life-Affirming Pegagogical Rituals in Ethnic Studies Lessons

• In Event: Freedom Dreaming Towards Ethnic Studies in Tumultuous Times: Teacher-and-Researcher Reflections on Race, Pedagogy, and Power

Abstract

Critical education theorist Paulo Freire (1983) once asserted that “reading the world always proceeds reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (p. 5). Similarly, as a middle school teacher exploring the integration of Ethnic Studies into my culture and identity elective course, I contend that at the heart of any curriculum is connection–connection to students’ history; connection to their classroom facilitator and each other; and a humanizing connection to the world. I want to share with other teachers and researchers the classroom culture I have built, which is premised on love, living, and learning. In this paper, I illustrate how I strive to enact this pedagogical commitment through the daily integration of personal greetings, introspective student journaling, life affirmations, culturally relevant artwork, libraries, and teacher-student positionality in the classroom. I seek to answer this question: how do Black cultural repertoires in ephemera, relationality, and pedagogy impact students’ learning, ethics, and sense of belonging?

This paper’s data collection process is embedded in the methodological design of paper #1, and I am offering reflections from my experiences in the classroom. To make sense of my educational praxis during this study, I turn to the methodology of portraiture as a guide to illuminate “the richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural contexts, conveying the perspectives of the people who are negotiating those experiences” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 24). Drawing on ethnographic data (e.g., student journals, personal reflections, classroom observations, and student interviews), I am illustrating a research “portrait” that bridges learning, culture, theory, and art to construct the symbolic meaning of the life-affirming pedagogical rituals I enacted within my class.

With the classroom as our canvas, my learnings for this paper present portraits of life-affirming learning rituals that my students, the research team, and I dared to experiment with in our journey with Ethnic Studies. Every day, students hear our connection ritual, “You are welcome here. You are wanted here. You are seen here, and you are safe here”. Additionally, we used introspective journaling to improve their writing skills, challenge them to think critically, and develop their critical introspection through autoethnography. Our data affirms that these practices are associated with increased and sustained academic engagement, reduced behavioral problems, and deeper student interrogation of social, economic, and political structures. In alignment with recent research on Black pedagogical possibilities (Stovall, 2023; Warren, 2020), these selected examples from my learnings depict grounded pedagogical tools in building life-affirming educational spaces.

Ultimately, this paper argues that life-affirming rituals of teaching that are co-created between students, teachers, and culture in our praxis usher in meaningful educational experiences that encourage deep learning in schools and the social world. This paper has implications for how we approach teaching, teacher education, and critical inquiry through humanizing pedagogical maneuvers to explore identity, value history, enhance learning, and shift the social context of schooling towards empathetic social justice. Our students will become better thinkers, leaders, and humans for it.

Author

• Natalie Hibdon, San Francisco Unified School District