Counternarratives of Pain and Suffering as Critical Pedagogy

Disrupting Oppression in Educational Contexts

Ardavan Eizadirad, Andrew Campbell, Steve Sider, Ardavan Eizadirad, Andrew B. Campbell, Steve Sider

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000602692
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Pedagogía
• Thema: Educación multicultural

Foregrounding diverse lived experiences and non-dominant forms of knowledge, this edited volume showcases ways in which narrating and sharing stories of pain and suffering can be engaged as critical pedagogy to challenge oppression and inequity in educational contexts.

The volume illustrates the need to consider both the act of narrating and the experience of bearing witness to narration to harness the full transformative potentials of counternarratives in disrupting oppressive practices. Chapters are divided into three parts - "Telling and Reliving Trauma as Pedagogy, " "Pedagogies of Overcoming Silence, " and "Forgetting as Pedagogy" - illustrating a range of relational pedagogical and methodological approaches, including journaling, poetry, and arts-based narrative inquiry.

The authors make the argument that the language of pain and suffering is universal, hence its potential as critical pedagogy for transformative and therapeutic teaching and learning. Readers are encouraged to reflect on their own lived experiences to constructively engage with their pain, suffering, and trauma. Focusing on trauma-informed non-hegemonic storytelling and transformative pedagogies, this volume will be of interest to students, faculty, scholars, and community members with an interest in advancing anti-oppressive and social justice education.

1 Centring Pedagogies of Pain and Suffering by Embracing Our Wounds and Scars

Ardavan Eizadirad, Andrew B. Campbell, and Steve Sider

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205296-1

We began planning for this book in 2020 after we received a high number of article submissions for a special issue of the journal Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education (https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=hdim20) with the title “Visibilizing Systemic Wounds of Oppression in Education via Pedagogy of Engaging with Pain & Suffering.” From the submissions, it was evident that there was a strong interest in engaging in this work. Therefore, we began exploring multiple platforms to create dialogue and conversations about pedagogies of engaging pain and suffering. The special issue of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education was published in September 2021, and this book supplements the themes in the issue, which is the first of its kind!

We begin this chapter by discussing how the idea for this book further developed based on formal and informal conversations about willing to be uncomfortable by opening up about our vulnerabilities, including past and present experiences of pain, suffering, and trauma. Next, our positionalities as co-editors are outlined in terms of our identities, and lived and professional experiences. As part of creating a brave space with readers, we also share personal things that you may not know about us. We encourage you to reflect on your own life and experiences to begin constructively engaging with your own pain, suffering, and trauma. Building on this, the chapter then situates the collective work in this book by providing an overview of the three themes (parts), which demonstrate pedagogies of pain and suffering in various contexts, and their impact as therapeutic and transformative as a form of critical pedagogy. We make the argument that the language of pain and suffering is universal, hence its potential as a medium and pedagogy for transformative teaching and learning.

Overall, the book builds on key aspects of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Grioux & McLaren, 1989; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Noddings, 2013) across different contexts identifying the process of engaging with pain and suffering, and sharing it with others as therapeutic and transformative. This can offer both personal and systemic liberation. Engaging with pedagogies of pain and suffering is timely given that representations of oppression, often captured via images and videos and shared on social media platforms and news outlets, are hypervisibilized as part of discussions about inequitable practices within educational institutions. Recent examples would be the public trial of the police officer for the murder of George Floyd in the United States and the discovery of more than 5,000 and counting unmarked grave sites of Indigenous children in various parts of Canada.

This edited volume is a synthesis of storytelling about pain and trauma and the act of telling, narrating, and sharing experiences with intentionality as a form of critical pedagogy. It is important to discuss both the act of narrating and how it is told as a pedagogy to simultaneously understand the complexities and nuances involved in its processes, hence the potential for transformative change both for the narrator and the audience. Engaging with (re)telling of pain and suffering involves revisiting traumatic experiences which can evoke a range of emotions including anger, sadness, anxiety, and frustration amongst many others emotions and feelings. Yet, as Audre Lorde (2017) reminds us:

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy.

(p. 23)

The act of storytelling as a medium allows for the harnessing of negative emotions and feelings to inform intentional pedagogy. This is a dialogical process (Freire, 1970; Ennser-Kananen, 2016) which impacts the narrator by opening up and sharing painful experiences, while simultaneously impacting the audience based on what is told, how it is told, and through what medium. As hooks (2000) points out:

[T]he place of suffering – the place where we are broken in spirit, when accepted and embraced, is also a place of peace and possibility. Our sufferings do not magically end; instead we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible … Learning to embrace our suffering is one of the gifts offered by spiritual life and practice. (pp. 80–81)

Hence, on one level this book is about centring marginalized voices, sharing their experiences of pain and oppression, and on another level, emphasizing how their stories are told with intentionality, “alchemically recycled,” to learn, unlearn, and disrupt normalizing practices that have and continue to enact harm in education.

A Framework for Engaging with Pain and Suffering as Critical Pedagogy

The collection of chapters in this volume draws on diverse experiences, auto-ethnographies, and case studies situated in a number of intersecting theoretical and methodological frameworks, including culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), lived experience and hermeneutic phenomenology (van Manen, 2017), and narrative inquiry and autoethnography (Clandinin, 2016) to showcase non-hegemonic ways of engaging pain and suffering as critical pedagogy. As the co-editors, through multiple meetings and ongoing discussions, we have outlined three themes serving as parts of the book. The three themes are:

1. Telling and reliving trauma as pedagogy.
2. Pedagogies of overcoming silence.
3. Forgetting pedagogy.

These themes are further explained in detail at the start of each part of the book. The themes as a collective serve as a framework for the different ways we can engage with pain and suffering. These pedagogies are not exclusive in nature nor do they operate in silos. A typical trajectory could be going from forgetting to overcoming silence and finally telling and sharing your trauma with intentionality, but there are multiple ways people can process trauma and this involves entry from various points and stages. There is no prescribed trajectory. How we have deconstructed these pedagogies, and in what order, is one way to map them amongst many other possible trajectories.

We invite you as the reader to find yourself and your story in the midst of your pain and trauma. Even institutions have tried to regulate how pain and suffering should be shared, in what spaces, and through what mediums. Although we have placed the various chapters in this book within a theme, the experiences discussed by the authors overlap across the themes from different angles and to varying degrees. Rather, the themes are outlined to help us theorize critical pedagogy and to advance concepts related to engaging with pain and suffering. For example, tears, blood, and sweat can symbolize emotions for different occasions ranging from joy and happiness to sadness and anger. Therefore, context matters! Also, we experience emotions individually and as a collective impacted by power dynamics within spaces. Hence, the three themes provide a framework to help readers contextualize and understand the pain and suffering outlined by the authors, while also making connections to our collective humanity. As Lorde (1984) eloquently put it, “There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives” (p. 147).

By centring lived experiences of racialized and minoritized identities as counternarratives, the book identifies and challenges systemic forms of oppression and inequities across multiple contexts in education which continue to dehumanize individuals and social groups in relation to normalized ideas, policies, and institutional practices. Chapter contributors share personal and collective experiences of pain and suffering with others as a therapeutic, instructive, and powerfully transformative process. Chapters further foreground narratives which represent non-dominant forms of knowledge and lived experiences in education, historically dismissed as “less valuable.”

We argue that the act of telling, narrating, or sharing experiences of pain and suffering is a pedagogy in its own right. Ennser-Kananen (2016) offers three ways in which pain can serve as pedagogy: becoming vulnerable while planning painful lessons, maintaining painful conversations, and promoting transformation (pp. 561–562). Similarly, this book emphasizes transformation through narration. As Iaquinta (2019) emphasizes:

The commitment of pedagogy, and specifically of a pedagogy of pain, is therefore to recognize and accept the dimension of pain in the educational experience and imagine, hypothesize, build, modalities and practices that allow the subject to give name and voice to the pain to go through it. (p. 106)

Overall, this book explores processes of narrating pain and how pain is shared pedagogically. This means being conscious of who is doing the narrating, to whom, and for what purposes. As a collective, the chapters seek to shift the conversations towards understanding inequities in education on a systemic level, where hierarchical power relations often discourage dissent, dismiss stories of suffering as exceptions, and mute narratives of oppression told by racialized and minoritized voices (Abawi et al., 2021; Eizadirad & Campbell, 2021; hooks, 2003; Matias, 2013; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). In centring counternarratives, as part of accepting chapters for this volume, author positionalities were assessed to ensure representation in terms of identity, lived and professional experiences, and the range of issues discussed. Chapters include contributions from scholars, community activists, practitioners, and graduate students who offer powerful illustrations of the way in which narratives of pain and suffering can be transformed into valuable teachable opportunities. This, in turn, can challenge inequitable and unjust educational policies and practices that have historically been normalized and often unquestioned.

Trust and Calculated Risk-Taking in Embracing Vulnerabilities

Trust is essential in cultivating brave spaces that promote socio-emotional intelligence and sharing of vulnerabilities with others. How often do we conform as scholars and educators to amplify our professional duties and experiences at the expense of marginalizing our lived experiences and vulnerabilities? We are often told by educational institutions that only selective spaces are appropriate for expression of emotions and vulnerabilities. Why is this? Which institutional policies, practices, and processes have contributed to perpetuating this as the norm? Who is going to share their pain and vulnerabilities as part of their professional profile and for what purposes? We highly encourage you to start doing this as educators! As Miller (2018) explains in his book Love and Compassion: Exploring Their Role in Education, “By accepting pain in ourselves, we learn to be present to pain in others” (p. 131). Hopefully, by the end of reading this book we have convinced you as a reader of the benefits of this approach and as a key component of engaging pain and suffering constructively.

As co-editors we have learned to become comfortable in our vulnerable experiences as a means to build trust and grow as a collective, because “[t]he inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain” (hooks, 2000, p. 39). As individuals with different identities from walks of life across various geographical locations, including Iran, India, and Jamaica, with varying lived and professional experiences, we took time to learn about one another beyond our academic duties. This involved being honest with ourselves and each other. We started all meetings planning this book with life check-ins where we shared the highs, lows, and ugly experiences we were going through. Whereas often we supported one another, there were also times when we disagreed and made each other upset and angry. Yet, the trust we built by willing to be vulnerable and openly share our pain and suffering was foundational in allowing us to work through the negative emotions to advance our larger goal of challenging inequities and social injustices in education. Trust allows for vulnerabilities to be shared. The vulnerability allows for more of the authentic self to be expressed. The more we express our authentic self allows for opportunities for transformative teaching and learning.

Disrupting oppression in educational contexts also involves calculated risk-taking where one chooses to be brave in the face of fears and anxieties (Donald, 2013; Eizadirad & Portelli, 2018; Hanna, 2019). As Albert Woodfox (2019), a Black man who spent 40 years in solitary confinement in the United States, shares in his autobiography titled Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope, “[C]ourage doesn’t mean that you aren’t afraid. Courage means that you master that fear and act in spite of being afraid” (p. 15). Therefore, it is not that fear or anxiety is non-existent,...