Pedagogies of Belonging: Exploring Relational Praxis in Justice-Oriented Educator Communities

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 1
  In Paper Session: Relational Futures: Borderlands, Belonging, and Reimagining Education

Abstract

This presentation explores the experiences of educators committed to culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) (Paris & Alim, 2017) in a virtual collective that prioritized cultivating relationships through their relationships. Grounded in a decolonial intersectional feminist framework, we employed narrative inquiry to examine educators’ experiences through multimodal storytelling. Our findings reveal how centering relationships opens transformative possibilities for educators committed to justice while exposing privilege, supremacy, and performative allyship tensions. By rejecting traditional, hierarchical professional learning models, this work offers an alternative: community-driven, healing-centered engagement as a foundation for educational justice. This paper highlights how collective care, critical storytelling, and relational accountability can foster more sustainable, equity-centered teaching practices—especially in today’s divisive sociopolitical climate.

Authors

• Alycia Elfreich, Montana State University

• Dianne Wellington, SUNY Cortland