Interactional Vulnerabilities and Contingencies of Dignity-ing Work in an After-School Program for Immigrant Youth’s Wellbeing

• In Event: Dignity-ing: Magnifying the Social Construction and Consequences of Dignity-Affirming or Dignity-Denying Micro-Interactional Moments

Abstract

Overview: Because of their ethical-epistemological significance (Hansen 1989), the design of instructional beginnings (Marin and Bang 2015) is consequential for how a shared stance towards teaching, learning, and relationality emerges in pedagogical environments. Utilizing Espinoza et. al.’s (2020) notion of dignity-ing as a precarious social accomplishment, this paper examines the interactional contingencies and moral vulnerabilities of dignity-ing in the lesson launches, we called “anchoring activities,” of an after-school program for immigrant youth.

Theoretically, this paper is anchored in contemporary approaches to dignity in ethical philosophy that treat dignity as foundational to justice (e.g. Nussbaum 2008): social justice, economic justice, and, for our purposes, educational justice. Specifically, we build on Levinas’s (2000) notion of “face” as a manifestation of human vulnerability in relationships, and the ethical demand to welcome others in their uniqueness, as rooted in the recognition of others’ inherent dignity in face-to-face encounters. Epistemologically, our analysis is rooted in language socialization in classrooms (Burdelski and Howard 2020), offering processual accounts of how emotions, values, and identities are (en/dis-)couraged, or contested through seemingly inconsequential interactions among teachers and students.

Methods: The data comes from community-engaged work in Southern California with Latinx youth of immigrant origin (7-11 years old). Informed by community members, we developed a pilot after-school program to strengthen children’s bi-literacy and emotional wellbeing, grounded in storytelling, theater-based, and art-based methodologies (Boal, 2022; Enciso, 2017; Johnson et al., 2013). We understood emotional wellbeing as having a political dimension, inextricably linked with community wellbeing.

Within this pedagogical framework, dignity-ing work was key in encouraging children to become vulnerable in the learning space by sharing about themselves. This pedagogical ask was particularly salient during the instructional beginnings that framed the sessions, which were designed to foster emotional self-awareness and empathy. Using ethnographic approaches to video and classroom discourse analysis (Erickson 2006; Rymes 2016), a subcorpus of video-recorded data focusing on the anchoring activities at the beginning of each session was analyzed.

Findings: Analysis shows how the work of dignity-ing happens at two levels: first, we consider how the design features of these anchoring activities were purposefully implemented to encourage the recognition of participants’ “faces.” Second, and despite this intentional design, children’s vulnerability in inviting others to see them in particular ways often led to interactional contingencies (García-Sánchez 2020) when the moral imperative of acknowledging others conflicted with other social interests. Following García-Sánchez’s (2020) analytic framework of attending to the moral and political dimensions of classroom interactional contingencies, we show how in these contingent interactions, anchoring activities become a space of ethical, political, and social discerning, experimentation, and personal transformation with diverse outcomes.

Significance: As school-based promotion of students’ emotional wellbeing becomes widespread through the implementation of socio-emotional learning (SEL) curricula, and as educators are increasingly expected to know and implement SEL curriculum (e.g Schonert-Reichl et al. 2015), our dual analysis underscores that intentional pedagogy that takes children’s agency seriously must also consider how dignity-ing is always an interactional accomplishment that is ongoing, contingent, and never finished.

Authors

• Inmaculada Maria García Sánchez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Amanda Giuliano, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jocelyn Meza, University of California - Los Angeles

• Kristi Westphaln, University of California - Los Angeles