Metabolizing the Pain: Pedagogies From the Wound

• In Event: What’s Love Got to Do With It? Shifting Womanist Pedagogies and Praxes

Abstract

This paper follows the clashing journeys of both college students and myself (as co-teacher) exposing private wounds in a “Race, Class, and Culture in Education” course across two academic terms. While part of the course objective was to study how schools reproduce social inequalities, what surfaced were stories of internalized oppression for each human being in the classroom. The challenge became not only to investigate the lived realities of underserved students, but also to see our own intersecting positions of subjugation and privilege (how we feel pain and cause pain), understand the historical trauma in which we sit, and build forms of social and emotional learning towards a renewed empathy. This deep study of conflicting life experiences against course materials urged me to draw from a foundation of spiritual, mindful practice in order to recognize the “unmetabolized pain” (Lorde, 1984) across privileged and oppressed lives. Only in this way could I truly stay present as “teacher" in the daily crafting of a critical pedagogy examining the “master’s house” (p. 110); whereby I can use the “knowledge of students and the context in which they operate to help them interpret, make sense of, and reconceptualize the world around them and their relation to it” (Kincheloe, 2007).

Drawing from an assembled, unorthodox framework of urban education research, decolonized feminist methodologies, and Buddhist philosophy, this paper offers pedagogies from the wound: ways of teaching through and with the various shades of pain in our work, reconnecting to the collective struggle with an audacious hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009), and facilitating a “radical healing” (Ginwright, 2010) on our path back to love.

Author

• Melissa-Ann Nielo Nievera-Lozano, University of California - Santa Cruz