Love as a Critical Race Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

• In Event: Sophisticated Racial Tools: Expanding the Explanatory Power of Critical Race Praxis

Abstract

Objectives and Research Questions:
Current research indicates that two thirds of children have experienced a traumatic event by the age of 16 (National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative, 2023). In response to this health crisis, over the last decade there has been burgeoning research on social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogies and practices in schools (e.g., Alvarez, 2020; Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Hannegan-Martinez, 2019; Simmons, 2021; Shevrin Venet, 2021). While emerging research has made significant contributions to our understandings of trauma, a significant portion of trauma research is race-evasive (Annamma et al, 2017) and has (re)produced “damage-centered narratives” (Tuck, 2009) that serve to further obfuscate pathways to healing. In this paper, I utilize Critical Race Theory as a framework for helping us to more robustly understand trauma and its effects within the context of education. I then offer Pedagogies of Love as a Critical Race Pedagogy for centering healing and overall well-being.

Theory:
In line with CRT’s commitments to centering racism and to interdisciplinarity, in this paper I engage critical race scholarship spanning the fields of public health, medicine, social epidemiology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, ethnic studies, and education to arrive at a more robust understanding of trauma and healing. Utilizing CRT allows us to understand trauma as more than a singular event, but rather as a protective and embodied response to events, conditions, and systems (such as racism) that threaten individual or collective safety, dignity, and belonging (Haines, 2019; Menakem, 2021). Trauma then, is systemic and endemic, historical and intergenerational, and deeply tied the apparatus of schooling. At the nexus of these fields of research also sits a poignant but underexplored facet of healing: loving relationships (e.g., Combahee River Collective, 1974; Ginwright, 2015; hooks, 2001, Perry, 2007).

Methods/Sources:
The above literature served as the impetus for returning to the students I taught for four years to understand how we conceptualize love—as both teacher and student(s)—, as well as how love was made visible in the context of our English classroom. By drawing on a corpus of data collected throughout my tenure as a teacher-researcher), I engaged in three different iterations of Chicana Feminist Pláticas (individual, peer, communal) (Hannegan-Martinez, 2023) with students to collectively theorize what a practice of love looks like in the classroom.

Findings/Significance:
I offer Pedagogies of Love as a critical race trauma-informed pedagogy (CRP) for addressing trauma and centering healing within the context of education. In line with CRP, this framework both accounts for and works to challenge the effects of race and racism. As the rates of child trauma continue to catapult across the country and globe, and there is an imminent need that we become more “trauma-wise” (Soriano, 2023) by extending our theorization and application of both trauma-informed pedagogies and critical race pedagogies to account for healing and restoring.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan