The research question that holds the centre of all my work is: how can we live together with a little less murder? I research, write, create, act, react, and interact with curiosity about the ways power, threat, response, and responsibility circulate in our bodies, minds, stories, and ways of being together. I teach about these things, too – often from justice-oriented, critical perspectives with interventionist and liberationist aims, which require both epistemological and axiological awareness, expansion, revision, and alignment. This poses real challenges to being and co-being in classroom and workshop settings, and, by extension, requires immense thoughtfulness and care when engaging in teaching and learning.
Where people congregate, harm circulates. In the classroom, harm is always already present in the space. People in the room will have been or actively be experiencing harm. People in the room will have been or are actively harming others. People in the room will have descended from legacies of harm, domination, and survivorship. People in the room may themselves be in direct relation to descendants who will inherit the legacies of their work. If we take the literature seriously, it is likely that all or many of these experiences will be unfurling in most people most of the time (Haines, 2019; Herman, 1992; Collins & Bilge, 2020). Which is to say the pain, stress, guilt, shame, blame, violence, and oppression that are ever-present parts of human existence and coexistence are part of the classroom experience; and, in my classes, also tend to feature as central subjects of examination.
Perhaps it goes without saying (but, in the interest of clarity, I’m going to say it anyway), teaching about harm and pain, especially for the ways harm and pain are enacted interrelationally, is difficult (Kite, et al., 2021), teaching critique is hard (Willingham, 2007), and teaching in relation to trauma is fraught (Cless & Goff, 2017). Further, teaching these subjects can (and perhaps should) be experienced by students as disorienting (Martin & Rosello, 2016), which, as well (and unfortunately) can be experienced by students as demotivating (Dörnyei & Ushioida, 2021). Any one of these elements (let alone all of them combined) can lead to a profound sense of amotivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2020) in response to any or all of: the specific course, the general subject matter, specific or general skills and methods related to critical inquiry and intervention. In order to respond to (sometimes deeply) uncomfortable felt experiences related to the subject, skills, or course, amotivation can lead students toward efforts to reconsolidate prior understandings – epistemological and axiological fidelities – which may replicate the conditions of harm students initially enrolled in the course to learn about and subvert.
All of that, a fancy way to say: teaching about harm and pain tends to call it forward in ways that can make it worse for learners and for the people those learners encounter in professional contexts.
For the exact same reasons, teaching about harm and pain – especially for the ways they are enacted interrelationally, can be immensely generative (Ritchie, 2023; Tedeschi, et al., 2018).
Precisely because what I teach can have such significant consequences, how I teach it matters a lot. I don’t always (or even often) get it right, but I am deeply committed to the effort of aligning my classroom and workshop practices in ways that are research supported in the literatures of critical equitization (prioritizing CEs justice-oriented in-group-initiated literatures and praxis), trauma (prioritizing sociocultural, and post-pathological approaches to the psychological literature), as well as literature related to sciences of teaching-and-learning (SoTL).
Axiological and Paradigmatic Investments
In classroom, workshop, and collaborative community settings – what I will refer to as “shared learning spaces” – I affirm the following:
- I believe if we find ourselves in a shared learning space, we all belong to that space; and have shared responsibilities for engaging in practices of welcome, equity, and affirmation.
- I believe we all have many roles to play (and practices to inhabit) in relation to personal, familial, community, as well as collective liberation; and that even personal liberation is not an individual nor individualist act.
- I believe in best intentions; and that earnest effort toward practices that support translating intentions into actions (including, interactions, and reactions) is necessary.
- I believe in the innate and inalienable value of all beings; and that it takes immense and ongoing practice to align with this belief.
- I believe it is never too late for anyone to be a little freer, to act a little more kindly, to loosen attachment to strategies that extract and exploit, to find unexpected pockets of connection and joy; that the knowledges, skills, and practices which support this kind of worldbuilding are available to us in immediate-, short-, mid-, and long-term ways; and that those knowledges, skills, and practices are learnable and teachable.
- I believe that conflict is inevitable in shared learning spaces and that there are many ways to turn toward conflict and welcome its teachings to support our collective learning; and that conflict must be welcomed with great care, deep consent, and supportive procedure.
- I believe that all beings in a shared learning space have the capacity and inclination to come to what is most meaningful to them in relation to the content that learning space is organized around and animated by; and that it is the job of accountability-holders in shared learning spaces to support beings in experiencing and expressing what is meaningful to them in a learning encounter.
- I believe that sovereignty is inalienable and agency is essential.
- I believe that we can hold ourselves in integrity as we hold each other in dignity.
- I believe that even if all the above-listed beliefs are wrong, it is helpful to operate as though they are true and possible and real.
References
Cless, J. D., & Goff, B. S. N. (2017). Teaching trauma: A model for introducing traumatic materials in the classroom. Advances in social work, 18(1), pp. 25-38, DOI: 10.18060/21177
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality (2nd Ed.). Polity.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Springer.
Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioida, E. (2021). Teaching and researching motivation (3rd Ed.). Routledge
Haines, S. K. (2019). The politics of trauma: Somatics, healing, and social justice. North Atlantic Books.
Herman, J. (1992, 2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence–from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic.
Kite, M.E., Case, K.A., & Williams, W.R. (Eds.) (2021). Navigating difficult moments in teaching diversity and social justice. APA.
Martin, N. & Rosello, M. (2016). Disorientation: An introduction. Culture, theory and critique, 57(1), pp. 1-16, DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2015.1128675
Ritchie, A. J. (2023). Practicing new worlds: Abolitionist and emergent strategies. AK Press
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary educational psychology, 61, n.p., DOI: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860
Tedeschi, R.G., Shakespeare-Finch, J., Taku, K., & Calhoun, L.G. (2018). Posttraumatic growth: Theory, research, and applications. New York: Routledge.
Willingham, D. T. (2007). Critical thinking: Why is it so hard to teach? American educator. American Federation of Teachers, pp. 8-19.
