Students & Alumni Work

Within social studies and heritage education, the affective turn has led to an increased interest in sites of difficult history.  Although there is a plethora of cross-disciplinary theoretical research that suggests affect plays a significant role in meaning-making in these spaces, there are few empirical studies that examine this assumption.  Moreover, the empirical studies that do exist tend to focus on student experiences in these spaces, seemingly excluding the important consideration of how teachers construct meaning through affective engagement and practices.  As many teachers seek out heritage sites to better their pedagogical preparation to teach difficult histories, it is necessary to further understand their experiences in these spaces, as this can provide insight into how historical narratives and heritage are constructed and passed on. 

Utilizing semi-structure interviews, photo-elicitation, and sensory ethnographic place-making methodologies, this dissertation conceptualizes the affective meaning-making processes that three teachers engaged in during their encounters with the National September 11th Memorial Museum (NS11MM).  Categorized as emotions, memory, historical proximity, and authenticity, these affective meaning-making processes deeply impacted what three high school social studies teachers took away from their visits to the National September 11th Memorial Museum (NS11MM), resulting in a decentered, patriotic perspective grounded in American exceptionalism, innocence, and unity.  Understanding the affective entanglements of the three teachers in their encounters with the NS11MM provides insight into how meaning, understood as historical understanding and significance, is constructed at sites of difficult history.

The intersection of my lived experiences with chaos theory led me to explore the implications for education as a way to develop creativity using a framework for embodied learning. While chaos theory was originally theorized as a mathematical concept; I looked at chaos theory from the perspective of Native Science (Cajete, 2004) and Ubuntu philosophy (Ramose, 2004). Both philosophies believe order and creativity are the offspring of chaos and the generative forces of the universe. The philosophy of Native Science is rooted in the need to make meaning of life and understand everyone’s life journey. People are co-creators with nature seeking to live in harmony not seeking to control (Cajete, 2004). Ubuntu philosophy is the basic belief that I am because we are. Ubuntu means love, truth, peace, happiness, eternal optimism, and inner goodness. It is the actualization of the search for humanity within others, within our communities, and within the action. Ubuntu values family life, elders, and nature. There is a consistent search for becoming. Most beneficial to the field of pedagogy are its implications for the classroom. Embodied pedagogy involves the role of the body as a locus of learning. Used often in dance education but less often in general education, “embodied learning signifies an epistemological and pedagogic shift and draws attention to bodies as agents of knowledge production” (Wilcox, 2009, as cited in Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 245).

I created a foot book to analyze data and explore my positionality. The image of the foot represents our bodies and how just one part of our body can have a profound effect on our lives. The shape of a foot also represents my transformational leadership style, which builds from the bottom up (Hallinger, 2003). The foot shape also represents interoception as the sense of what is going on inside the body (Shonstrom, 2020). My book transforms into a butterfly which represents chaos theory, the butterfly effect, transformation, and the fragility of research. In chaotic systems, even small things turn out to have large-scale effects over time. Cajete (2021) tells us “Human butterfly power resides in our ability to create” (p. 252). The fragments of pictures represent my positionality and intersections of my identities as a Black woman, educator, liturgical dancer, caretaker, mother, and advocate. These fragments also point to my spiritual self as identified with Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being you knit me together in my mother’s womb” and Romans 10:15, “How can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news” (The Holy Bible, new international version, 1984). As a researcher, I envision an educational system that is equitable. I realize all my research is subject to the delicate changes in our society. I must not only collect and analyze data but be sensitive to it and interact with it to effect change. I recognize and celebrate the practices which have existed in our indigenous and neo-indigenous communities of practice for years (Emdin, 2016). 

As educators, as human beings, we do not need to look for chaos. It exists in our everyday lives; it exists in our classroom. The challenge is to trust ourselves enough to embark on a journey towards being. This journey, filled with “the unpredictability and relative randomness of the creative process” will naturally emerge (Cajete, 2004, p. 48). Even the late congressman John Lewis understood the power of embodiment in times of chaos.

When you pray move your feet (African proverb)

as a nation, if we care for the

beloved community we must move our feet,

our hands, our hearts, our resources to build

a way to tear down to reconcile, not to divide to love

and not to hate to heal and not to kill.

In the final analysis we are one people, one family,

One house, the American house, the American people.

References

Cajete, G. (2004). Philosophy of Native Science. In A. Waters (Author), American Indian Thought: Philosophical essays(pp. 45-57). Blackwell.

Cajete, G. (2021). Western science and the loss of natural creativity. In Unlearning the language of conquest: Scholars expose anti-Indianism in America (pp. 247–259). University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/706545-021

Emdin, C. (2016). For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and The Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Beacon Press. 

Hallinger, P. (2003). Leading educational change: Reflections on the practice of instructional and transformational leadership. Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(3), 329-352.

Ramose, M. B. (2004). Ubuntu Philosophy. In P. H. Coetzee & A. P. Roux (Authors), The African philosophy reader: A text with readings (pp. 270-280). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203493229.

Shonstrom, E. (2020). The wisdom of the body: what embodied cognition can teach us about learning, human development, and ourselves. Rowman & Littlefield. 

The Holy Bible, new international version, (1984), Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. 

Wagner, A. E., & Shahjahan, R. A. (2015). Centering embodied learning in anti-oppressive pedagogy. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(3), 244-254. doi:10.1080/13562517.2014.993963

Each piece was grown by and with mycelium. This snow white and nearly microscopic organism fuses organic matter which can be casted in molds to produce sculptural shapes and textures. Color is obtained by aging the organism, through laser engraving, or by adding layers of bioplastic. 

By blurring the boundaries between the practices of making and growing we are invited to interrogate sharp distinctions and hierarchies between humans and non-humans, culture and nature, artificial and organic. 

I examine the ways in which all material bodies are intertwined and constantly giving form to each other through pressure, friction, breath, growth, decay and ongoing material transformations by which all forms emerge.

Context: Model of nesting dolls

The relationship of this project to my dissertation is like Russian nesting dolls. My dissertation — the largest doll — sparked by our current polarized racial discourse, will investigate the intended, textual, and perceived cultural messages in our national, NYS and NYC dance standards via Interviews with the writers, discussion circles with teachers, and content analysis of the texts using a critical race theory lens.

Last spring, I conducted phase 1 of an IRB-approved pilot study on just 2nd grade creating and performing, testing the text analysis and discussion circle methods — which revealed a Western bias in the standards and divergences from teachers’ core values. That’s the middle size doll. 

This ABR project, approved by the IRB as a phase 2 of my pilot study, is the smallest doll. I narrowed my focus further to the Enduring Understandings in the National Core Arts Standards, inviting four of my TC dance ed colleagues to unpack and reimagine one EU of their choice in individual Zoom dialogues. My research question: If we were to collaboratively as a dance educator community reimagine and rewrite the standards from a social justice perspective, what would that look like?

Embodied Protocol

These duet conversations used arts-based embodied modalities, such as call and response self-identifications to music. We also read all 11 EUs out loud in call and response, engaging sight, hearing, and speaking to deepen meaning; and we collaboratively analyzed and rephrased their chosen EU, taking real-time notes via Zoom screen share.

The Four EUs 

Emergent themes 

As in Phase 1 of the pilot, my dialogue partners’ work products – which I coded in vivo via Quirkos – revealed gaps between their high values and the standards. Their rephrased EUs serve as potential counter-narratives to the current standards text. I plan to shape my Spring 2022 Praxis Project on the modalities used in this project to collect more such teacher-generated counter-narratives.

References