Care Webs in Critical Conciliatory Teacher Education

• In Event: "Rolling Up Our Sleeves": Radical Love Consiliency Within the Boundary Work Between Special Education (SPED) and Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

Needs Awareness refers to awareness of and caring for one’s own physiological, psychological, and spiritual needs, in dialogue with critical discourses of love for self and Other (Brooks, 2017; Douglas & Nganga, 2013; Fisher, 2017; Freire, 1972; hooks, 1994, 2000, 2001). I theorize Needs Awareness as a framework that applies across the multiple people within schooling structures, but specifically, examine its contributions towards educators’ self-actualization, and its concomitant potential for expanding social consciousness and responsibility on broader scales. From an Emergent Strategy perspective, such moments of equity in institutional contexts can be microcosms of a more liberated way of being.
Teaching is a socio-emotional profession (Lortie, 1975) exposed to neoliberal systems that disembody and objectify racialized workers (Camp, 2016; Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Incite!, 2007; ). Implications for minoritized learners labeled under medical models of disability (Connor, 2019; Slee, 2014) and other contested mechanisms of tracking (Artiles & Kozleski, 2016; Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2010) are dire. Teacher education perpetuates dysconscious ableism (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017; Lalvani et al., 2015) by not addressing the larger “broken care system,” whereby obscured emotional labor nonetheless requires educators to draw on their subjectivity while practicing “transmutation.” Transmutation is the act of self-regulation according to guidelines imposed through “large organizations, social engineering, and the profit motive” (Hochschild, 2012, pp. 122, 19, 21). Repeated transmutation weakens the signal functions of senses/emotions, and can affect a worker’s capacity to tune into how they feel (Hochschild, 2012; Walker, 2013). Given the primacy of emotions as embodied drivers of cognition (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007; Immordino-Yang, 2011), and the importance of teachers’ metacognitive appraisals of self, other and environment (Rodriguez, 2013; Rodriguez & Solis, 2013), these de-humanizing costs/contexts limit teachers’ agency as subjects by weakening the requisite senses and skills necessary to detect and disrupt (their own roles in) nested intersectional oppression (Collins, 2019; DiAngelo, 2018; Lyiscott, 2019). Needs Awareness is integral to transforming the objectification of teachers and learners, with the aim of developing emancipatory praxis.
I argue that the disenfranchisement of learners in SpecEd interlocks with exploitation of teachers’ emotional labor and the systematic dis-abling of their potential to become self-actualized subjects (Foucault, Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988; Maslow, 1943; Palmer, 1998; Peshkin, 1998). In the wake of the wave of social consciousness about the racism embedded in society and growth in the ways of anti-racism, we must engage in reflection and conversation on the role of teachers–as intersectional individuals, and as a professional class—in replicating or subverting socio-cultural limitations on youths’ potentialities. I propose that within an education system that oppresses based on hierarchies of perfectionistic ableism, moments of equity between educators and students hinge on the cultivation of Need Awareness. I draw on Maslow’s often mis-understood conceptualization of pre-potent needs and “dichotomy transcendence,” as well as Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, Emergent Strategy (Brown, 2017) and a feminist endarkened spiritual striving (Dillard, 2006) to develop Needs Awareness as a framework for teacher education/professional development and to hypothesize its social justice impact.
 

 

Author

• Christina Anderson Bosch, California State University - Fresno