Abstract
Seeking to meet Freire’s (Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1987) call to enact a critical pedagogy of love, this article explores how one urban teacher/researcher engages in pedagogy that supports students to heal from internalized oppression towards what bell hooks (Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, South End Press, Boston, 1989, Sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, Routledge, New York, 2015) calls self-recovery. Set in an elective class for young women in a Los Angeles middle school, I examine my process as teacher/researcher to understand the experiences of a student named Chelsea, and develop curriculum to serve her arising needs. I integrate critical pedagogy with embodied pedagogies and women of color feminist epistemology to critique dominant ways of knowing and teaching in urban schools. Then, I use auto-ethnography and portraiture to craft three blended portraits: exploring how Chelsea’s sense of self is influenced by her life experiences; how interventions like meditation, dialogue and vulnerability, or what I call pedagogies of bodymindspirit, helped Chelsea to unpack her distrust of others and a longing for wholeness; and how a final project supported Chelsea’s path towards self-recovery. I conclude with ways to cultivate love in the face of material and epistemological violence in schools, and offer implications and tensions for teachers seeking to utilize a bodymindspirit praxis to serve all marginalized students.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
10 April 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-024-00692-x
Notes
Name has been changed to protect student’s identity.
The name of the school has been changed to protect confidentiality.
References
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: La frontera (Vol. 3). San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Anzaldúa, G. (2002). Now let us shift… the path of conocimiento… inner work, public acts. In G. E. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation (pp. 530–538). New York: Routledge.
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. Duke University Press.
Berila, B. (2015). Integrating mindfulness into anti-oppression pedagogy: Social justice in higher education. New York: Routledge.
Calderón, D., Delgado Bernal, D., Velez, V. N., Perez Huber, L., & Malagon, M. C. (2012). A Chicana feminist epistemology revisited: Cultivating ideas a generation later. Harvard Educational Review, 82(4), 513–539.
Camangian, P., & Cariaga, S. (under review). Towards a humanizing social and emotional learning: Teaching through contradictions. Race Ethnicity and Education.
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ youth of color video making as radical curriculum: A brother mourning his brother and a theory in the flesh. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 441–460.
Darder, A. (2017). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. New York: Routledge.
Delgado Bernal, D., & Villalpando, O. (2002). An apartheid of knowledge in academia: The struggle over the” legitimate” knowledge of faculty of color. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 169–180.
Descartes, R. (1901). Second meditation. In J. Veitch (Ed.), The method, meditations and philosophy of descartes. Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne Publisher.
Duncan-Andrade, J. (2009). Note to educators: Hope required when growing roses in concrete. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 9.
Freire, P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey Publishers.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hanh, T. (2012). A handful of quiet: Happiness in four pebbles. Berkeley, CA: Plum Blossom Books.
hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston, MA: South End Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. (2015). Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery. New York: Routledge.
Jaggar, A. (1989). Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 32(2), 151–176.
Jordan, J. (2003). Some of us did not die: New and selected essays.
Lara, I. (2002). Healing sueños for academia. In G. E. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home (pp. 433–438). New York: Routledge.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Davis, J. H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco, CA: Wiley.
Lorde, A. (1988). Burst of light: Essays. New York: Firebrand Books.
Lorde, A. (2012). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Mate, G. (2003). When the body says no: Exploring the stress-disease connection. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Morrell, E. (2007). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation (pp. 167–176). New York: Routledge.
Saldana, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed.). London: SAGE Publications Inc.
Seidman, I. (2013). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
Solorzano, D. G., & Bernal, D. D. (2001). Examining transformational resistance through a critical race and LatCrit theory framework: Chicana and Chicano students in an urban context. Urban education, 36(3), 308–342.
Strobel, L. M. (Ed.). (2010). Babaylan: Filipinos and the call of the indigenous. Davao: Ateneo de Davao University, Research and Publications Office.
Tatum, B. D. (2017). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? And other conversations about race. New York: Basic Books.
Thompson, B. (2017). Teaching with tenderness: Toward an embodied practice. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Tuck, E., & Yang, W. (2014). R-words: Refusal in Research. In D. Paris & M. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitiatve inquiry with youth and communities. Michigan: SAGE Publications Inc.
Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling. Albany: Suny Press.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The original online version of this article was revised: the third affiliation has been corrected.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Cariaga, S. Towards Self-Recovery: Cultivating Love with Young Women of Color Through Pedagogies of Bodymindspirit. Urban Rev 51, 101–122 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-018-0482-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-018-0482-9