Teaching Is an Act of Love: The Ontologies of Women of Color Teachers

• In Event: The Epistemologies of Teachers of Color: Disrupting White-Centered Racial and Linguistic Hierarchies in Schooling

Abstract

Recent research shows that school-age children and young adults are experiencing increased anxiety and depression. For youth of Color, the statistics are even more grievous with racialized policies systematically disregarding their health and wellbeing. Despite this, legislative mandates continue to focus on processes emphasizing academic achievement often at the expense of the social-emotional dimensions of students. Pressure-driven, piecemeal responses to distance learning further evidences a prioritizing and privileging of cognitive over emotional development irregardless of student needs. Schools are simply not teaching students ways of processing emotions generated by stress and trauma (Brandt, 2019).

With personal understandings of systemic injustices, many teachers of Color are more likely to commit to the justice-oriented labor of resisting the schooling inequities that harm students of Color (Pizarro & Kohli, 2018). From a marginalized position and positionality, women of Color educators have shown to possess an even greater capacity to transgress the limitations of mechanistic and dehumanizing logic to center holistic and rehumanizing approaches to learning and teaching (Kohli, Lin, Ha, Jose, & Shini, 2019; Watson, 2018). There is much research in the field of critical pedagogy that explores humanizing approaches to teaching and learning (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2011; Thomas, 2007); however, critical pedagogy tends to disassociate ways of knowing the world from ways of being in that world. Critical pedagogy emerged from the knowledge systems of western frameworks and the lived experiences of cismen (Grande, 2015; hooks, 1994; Patel, 2016; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). While there is an expanding body of knowledge on teachers of Color resisting dehumanizing policies and practices of schooling, the scholarship specifically on women of Color teachers is still emerging (Kohli et al., 2019). This paper extends and bridges existing bodies of literature to explore the ways through which life histories and lived experiences of women of Color educators inform and shape their rehumanizing approach to teaching and learning.

The theory of engaged pedagogy and the work of bell hooks are meant to reimagine education in ways that challenge dominant power structures and transgress dehumanizing boundaries to rehumanize the education process (hooks, 1994). As a praxis, engaged pedagogy not only empowers the students but also the teachers through the humbling process of caring for the minds, bodies, and spirits of the students (hooks, 1994). This liberating paradigm shift is how the students and the teachers become human again. Through engaged pedagogy, this paper argues that women of Color teachers are at the center of socially-just and holistic approaches to learning and teaching.

Through narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2016), this paper explores the epistemologies and ontologies of five women of Color engaged pedagogues serving in disenfranchised communities of Color to demonstrate how they connect the body, mind, and spirit in their teaching. I find that they challenge western paradigms through curriculum and instruction by way of affirming the interconnectedness of peoples, communities, nature through the past, present, and future thus creating loving and empowering spaces of engagement, healing, and actualization not just for their students but also for themselves.

Author

• Yu Chi Micki Lin, University of California - Riverside