"I'm So Afraid for My Family": Creating Healing Classroom Spaces in a Post-Truth Era

• In Event: 66.060 - Survival, Resistance, and Resiliency: Problematizing Diverse Experience of Women in Academia in a Post-Truth World

Abstract

On Tuesday November 8, 2016 at seven in the evening, I finished teaching class and went home. The next day, after a sleepless night, still shaken, and astounded I went to my office when I came across one of my students. She looked at me and just sobbed. All she kept saying was “I can’t believe this. I am so afraid for my family.” This paper relates the experiences of a graduate student instructor navigating the aftermath of the general elections and the impact in her classroom’s educational space.
Objectives or purposes
This paper explores the classroom as a space of humanizing love and resistance. Educational space is defined as the space of interaction where social dynamics come into play. In particular, the author looks at issues of power in the classroom. Power is at the center of everything including educational spaces from the language we use to the ideas we discuss with our students. In the current post truth era, “critical optimism requires a strong sense of social responsibility and of engagement in the task of transforming society; it cannot mean simply letting things run on.” (Freire, 2014, p.11) The way we engage our students matters. In what ways can the classroom serve as a space for healing? What are some strategies that can be used to minimize the impact of outside influences inside of the classroom?
Framework
Critical spatial theory analyzes the re/production of spaces. What happens in them? Who is allowed in or excluded from them? It helps us examine issues of power inside of the classroom while at the same time allowing educators to examine their own biases, prejudices, and intolerance. Adapting Velez and Solorzano’s (2017) definition of Critical Race Spatial Theory, for the purpose of this paper the author analyzes how societal structures and the social environment at large impact the interactions within the classroom.

Methodology
Utilizing critical autoethnography, the author narrates and deconstructs her experiences as an instructor of preservice teachers. This method which records and analyzes personal experience is effective in this analysis as it helps in the understanding of how the classroom experience impacts the personal sphere of those who share it and “can expose myths about power.” (Motha and Varghese, 2018, p. 504)
Data Collection and Analysis
This paper uses the instructor’s reflective journals, lessons and correspondence throughout the course as data sources. This data was open coded and narrative analysis was used.
Findings
As a result of this analysis and self-reflection, the instructor revamped her course syllabus. She also examined her own academic persona and enacted changes in her teaching methods while implementing new strategies in order to facilitate the co-creation of a renewed classroom space.
Significance
All human interaction happens within spaces which can either dehumanize or humanize those who engage in them and are part of their creation. As a graduate student of color teaching a course which critically examines society, it is important to co-create educational spaces which are responsive to the needs of both instructors and students.

Author

• Neritza Diaz-Cruz, The University of New Mexico