Healing and Resistance: (Re)Imaging a Classroom Community Through Critical Care

• In Event: Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: Social and Cultural Processes in Motivation Research

Abstract

This study explores how a classroom community in an alternative public high school strived to enact critical caring practices that centered lived experiences and privileged cultural diversity. Enactment of critical caring practices were analyzed and coded from data sources that included student compositions, student interviews, curriculum, and teacher interviews. Findings highlight how this classroom community, specifically through student-centered project-based learning compositions, created space for healing and resistance that was bidirectional and non-hierarchical — care was not “given” and there was no central authority in enacting, or naming spaces of, critical care. This study has implications for how critical caring practices can support humanizing relationships, value student out-of-school expertise, and provide opportunity for students to re-organize their relationship to public school.

Author

• Aaron Micah Guggenheim, University of Colorado - Boulder