Critical Pedagogy for Healing

Paths Beyond "Wellness," Toward a Soul Revival of Teaching and Learning

Tricia Kress, Christopher Emdin, Robert Lake, Tricia Kress, Christopher Emdin, Robert Lake

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350192683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350192706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This is the first book to explicitly link healing and wellness practices with critical pedagogy. Bringing together scholars from Brazil, Canada, Malta and the USA, the chapters combine critical pedagogy and social justice education to reorient the conversation around wellness in teaching and learning. Working against white Eurocentric narratives of wellness in schools which focus on the symptoms, not the causes, of society's sickness, the authors argues for a "soul revival" of education which tackles, head on, the causes of dis-ease in society, from institutional racism, colonialism, xenophobia and patriarchy. The contributors provide fresh perspectives that address short-term goals of wellness alongside long-term goals of healing in schools and society by attending to underlying causes of social sickness. The chapters bridge theory and practice, bringing diverse historical and contemporary philosophical discussions around wellness into contact with concrete examples of the interconnections between wellness, education, and social justice. Examples of topics covered include: Buddhist practices for healing, Black liberation theology, hip hop pedagogy, anxiety and vulnerability, art therapy and story-telling.

Part I Spirituality, Faith, and Hope

1 And Let the Church Say “Amen”: Racio-spiritual Re-membering as a Pedagogy of Healing

Jamila J. Lyiscott

The Spirit of the Thing

A Black. Woman. Christian. Scholar. Activist. All of these I carried with me as we emerged from the dungeons of the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana during the month of January 2020. And perched atop the male dungeon of the slave castle, our tour guide gestured, was a small church for the slave traders to worship between the catching, shipping, starving, beating, stacking. A church. And a small opening in the ground at the door of the church to overhear any unwanted contestation below them. My body stiffened. The faces around me distorted in disgust. The “hmph” of a Black mother holding her baby girl close was enough for us to all know. My own motherland ravaged by the “white man’s religion,” as they say. They named the slave ships after Jesus, Mary, and every clichéd Christian phrase the mind could think of, the tour guide told us. My throat dried. Black. Woman. Christian. Scholar. Activist. A cluster of social identities that coexist courageously and with contradiction. I stood in the auction hall of the castle. In the very steps where my ancestors were betrayed by the terror of white “Christian” men. I knew in that moment, more deeply than ever before, that the work of contending with my interrelated spiritual and racial identities has long played a salient, but silenced role in my pedagogy of liberation for Black lives. While religion and spirituality are indeed different, it is through the religious construct of Christianity that my personal navigation of the metaphysical and spiritual takes place. And it is here, at this here crossroad, that I am perpetually faced with what it means “to be both unapologetically black and Christian at the same time” (National Public Radio, 2008) in my commitment to Black liberation within and beyond education.

This chapter explores how, in my work that prepares both classroom and community educators to forward the disruption of anti-Blackness in their praxes, my pedagogical choices emerge out of what I call a racio-spiritual re-membering that creates room for navigating the contradictions of being Black within predominantly white contexts, broadly. Racio-spiritual re-membering acknowledges that racial oppression does not just operate at the material level of systemic disenfranchisement and individual harm, but it seeks to break the very spirits of the racially oppressed. It also acknowledges that our holistic healing is found in the (re)turn to who we have always powerfully been. The unlearning of white supremacist and colonial conditioning. Finally, racio-spiritual re-membering is grounded in the fact that Black history and identity are marked by an unapologetic assertion of transcendent spiritual fortitude that has operated in the service of our individual and collective healing. This assertion operates in the vein of the of Dillard’s work, which explores the intersections of spirituality and education. She writes,

Given the reward structure and cultural milieu of the academy, spiritually minded academicians have often received the implicit message to hang their spirituality outside the doors of the university and to pick it up again … on the way out … While this might work for those who view spirituality as optional, it is an act of violence against us and those like us whose cultural norms dictate the centrality of spirituality in our lives.

(Dillard, 2000, p. 449)

My refusal to abandon my Blackness or my Christianity within the Eurocentric ethos of the institutions that I navigate as a scholar-activist has come to function as an orientation of resistance. Beholden to this, when I work with educators to cultivate critical pedagogies—pedagogies which question systems of power and act to disrupt the status quo—I do not fall prey to the desire for a one-sheet. A set of bullet points. A slide show of tactics and thinly veiled tricks for sounding woke in the classroom. Rather, through the evocation of my own racio-spiritual re-membering, with my Black Christian woman self, I invite the spirit of the thing. My classroom is an experiential embarkment on the very essence of the thing. Yes, the spirit of the thing.

The spirit of the thing cannot be taught in the rigid and finite ways that we are used to in traditional educational contexts. It sways you at the level of the soul and invites a holistic approach to the work of teaching and learning. It is always amusing how unnerved and excited students are when we create space for this work. It is the dissonance of engaging in new ways of knowing and being within a space where we have only been taught to operate, think, and feel in ways that are still beholden to white colonial logics. The dissonance is felt across the room. When I do hip-hop cyphers with teachers, I watch as they work to calculate how to participate in the cultural tradition correctly. I invite emotion, they work toward efficiency. I invite rhythm, they get stuck in rigidity. I invite spirit, they feel haunted by the standard. But the spirit of the thing is what moves through the hip-hop cypher as freestyle and the rocking of bodies and ancestral rhythm flows through the people. It is the extemporaneity of worship in the Black church. The freeness of scat and jazz. The mass influence that Black culture has on the popular realm of our world.

When we extend our material understanding of structural inequity to understand how social diseases operate in the spheres of spiritual and psychic violences, we find that evoking and attending to the “spirit of the thing” has been an enduring strategy for Black people to engage in individual, collective, and systemic healing. Through a critical analysis of my own life notes (Bell-Scott, 1994), I examine the spiritual ethos, racial hauntings, and liberatory consciousness that frame my identities as a Black Christian scholar-activist committed to healing the social disease of racism and the myriad contradictions navigating psychic, bodily, and spiritual racial violence imposes. To do this, I utilize racio-spiritual re-membering as an analytic, theoretical, and pedagogical tool for unearthing how my commitments to being unapologetically Christian and unapologetically Black have informed my duty to healing, disruption, and re-membering in both the classroom and the community. My own racio-spiritual re-membering illuminates how navigating the tensions between my Blackness and my Christianity equips me to challenge the systems of power that I navigate daily while sustaining my own commitments to wholeness and wellness. I take up the life notes to establish how re-membering through a racio-spiritual lens informs how I navigate, transcend, and dream beyond the racial trauma imbued in our society against Black lives.

Communion

I sit in communion and fellowship with the work of several scholar activists to conceptualize racio-spiritual re-membering. I break from the bread of this comm(unity) as a source of nourishment and connection. I share also in the life blood of our collective commitment toward racial healing.

It is no surprise that DuBois’s most seminal work takes up issues of racial hatred, alienation, and structural oppression in ode to the very souls of Black folks (Dubois, 1968). Speaking of the impact of racial oppression in America, DuBois laments, “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois, 1903). This metaphysical wounding speaks to an undertheorized realm of resistance that Black people have engaged in for centuries. It is what Patricia Williams calls “spirit-murder,” effected by the ongoing systemic racial violences that play out on the very spirits of the racially oppressed in myriad ways. It is “a slow death, a death of the spirit, a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color” (Love, 2019).

Spirit-murder operates in the realm of what the world witnessed in the final eight minutes and forty-six seconds of George Floyd’s life on May 25, 2020, when the murderous officer, Derek Chauvin, stole the very breath from Floyd’s body for us all to see. For Black people to see. For everyone to see. And to know what we have already known. We have known this, because its psychic violence has deep historical resonance so much so that Williams in her 1987 theorization of spirit-murdering evokes a similar violence. She writes,

Taking the example of the man who was stabbed thirty-nine times out of the context of our compartmentalized legal system, and considering it in the hypothetical framework of a legal system that encompasses and recognizes morality, religion, and psychology, I am moved to see this act as not merely body murder but spirit-murder as well. I see it as spirit-murder, only one of whose manifestations is racism-cultural obliteration … I see spirit-murder as no less than the equivalent of body murder (p. 151).

For the field of education, attention to spirit-murder and the two-ness imposed on souls of Black folks is an acknowledgment of the education system’s complicity in perpetuating harm against Black lives. The kinds of harms that necessitate critical pedagogies so that we are held accountable for how education and schooling enact Black suffering. Love (2019) tells us,

Physical and psychological attacks on Black and Brown children’s bodies and culture are more than just racist acts by misguided school educators; they are the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children. This type of violence toward children of color is less visceral and seemingly less tragic than physical acts of murder at the hands of White mobs and White self-appointed vigilantes, the shooting of unarmed people of color by police officers in their own homes and communities, or the senseless violence in some Black communities, which are all conditions of racism.

How then do we attend to the “spirit of the thing” in education? That tabooed realm that sustains such woundings, and at the same time is a realm of resistance and possibility for Black people across the world?

In a “spiritual offering” that refuses the hegemony of Eurocentricity in the academy and its tyranny over what ways of knowing and being should be centered, Dillard asserts, “many scholars and activists involved in the reformation of the academy have worldviews deeply embedded in the spiritual” (Dillard, 2000, p. 448). Her work then puts forth “alternative offerings of ‘truth,’ ” which calls for attention to the spiritual in African-centeredness and to the myriad ways that spirituality and education already function in the lives of Black educators. As one of her research participants shares, “Spirituality in education is education with purpose, education that is liberatory work, education that is emancipation” (p. 447).

While I join this line of scholarship that calls for attention and attending to the spirit of the thing in addressing racial healing, I am faced with the reality that my own spiritual orientations shape me as unapologetically Christian in a society where Christianity has been weaponized against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color through a heinous history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. I am faced with the fact that right here in my communion, my brother DuBois makes plain, “I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war” (Du Bois, 1968). My racio-spiritual re-membering, then, begins in the crosshairs of this contention, which then frames my pedagogical and methodological approaches to enacting individual and systemic resistance as a scholar-activist.

For making sense of this invitation to attend the spiritual alongside my personal Christian orientations as a Black woman scholar-activist, I turn to the work of the late James Cone. In his seminal work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011), the theologian contends with the symbolic and material violences of both the lynching tree and the burning cross to expose the Christianization of racial oppression against Black lives. As the father of Black liberation theology (BLT), Cone’s taking up of these charged symbols has opened up powerful possibilities for the tensions of being both Black and Christian by disrupting the violent white hegemonic history of Christianity and prioritizing the liberation and healing of the oppressed, as Christ did throughout scripture. These possibilities hold deep implications for Black realities broadly, since the tensions and inherent contradictions of being both Black and *insert white-dominated institutional affiliation here* saturate Black experiences daily. At its core, BLT rejects the white-dominated construction of Christianity and works to heal the violences of this history by repositioning Christianity through the lens of the oppressed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Pathways toward a Soul Revival (Tricia M. Kress, Christopher Emdin, and Robert Lake)
• Part I Spirituality, Faith, and Hope
• Part II Physical and Mental Well-Being
• Part III Arts and Creativity
• Part IV Community and Connection
• Part V Space, Place, and Land
• Afterword: Healing the Soft Tissue of Critical Pedagogues with a Radical Love
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page