Humanizing Pedagogies 

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Since 2016, I have designed and taught online and onsite courses for preservice and practicing special educators grounded in a strength-based anti-racist approach. I name the settler-colonial, racist, transphobic, and otherwise oppressive systems of domination that govern the lives of myself and my students to build anti-racist classrooms for preservice and practicing teachers that can heal as much as they educate. This is key as a heteronormative eurocentric lens often permeates the literature about students with disabilities and forms the basis of prejudice, victimization, and discrimination toward groups including but not limited to BIPOC and LGBTQI+, leading to population-specific mental health challenges and the over and under-representation of groups in special education. It is also important for educators to know that various forms of systemic oppression lead to or heighten the impact of trauma (e.g., racialized, gender-based, the trauma of poverty, etc.) and ensuing mental health for caregivers and children. For example, anti-trans/homophobic attacks/laws in the media, regular school shootings, the ongoing state/police violence against Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian Pacific Islander community members, etc.

To illustrate, based on race and ethnicity, youth experience differences in the severity of mental health symptoms: Black teens have disproportionately higher rates of suicide than white teens (Price & Khubchandani, 2019), and students of color who are also LGBTQI+ often have significantly more severe mental health needs (Themindclan.com, 2022). Further, there are differences among communities, by race and ethnicity, in how individuals seek, access, and use mental health services (DeFreitas et al., 2018). Therefore, it should not be surprising that according to federal data, students of color are over-represented in the Emotional Behavioral Disabilities (EBD) population yet underrepresented in the Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) disability area. Further, Black girls are suspended at a rate six times higher than their white female peers. Based on these experiences, children and youth of color often have poorer outcomes than white peers (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). These disparaging outcomes are largely due to systems of oppression (systemic racism/white supremacy, patriarchy, systematized homophobia, capitalism, etc.) of persistent systemic inequalities manifesting in our society and trickling into our schools.

In a time when it is trendy to talk about equity, I do more than that as I create equitable learning experiences for my students to nurture their learning and growth as anti-racist educators. This is particularly important for me as my students are not only learning, but they are learning to teach, and the pedagogical experiences I provide are likely ones they will take to their K-12 classrooms. My pedagogical practice is guided by the understanding that all students bring their unique lived experiences and identities into learning spaces—drawing on the scholarship of Gloria Langston Billings, Felicia Rose Chavez, Lorena Escoto German, bell hooks, Bettina Love, and Ghouldy Muhammad. Rather than seeking to construct a safe, conflict-free zone, I focus on generating a dialogue open to tension and disagreement–what Ludlow calls a “contested space,” a classroom supports rather than staves off conflict (Ludlow 40; McIntyre 88). The critical engagement of different and even conflicting experiences and perspectives results in richer knowledge, so a classroom goal is communicating [across] differences. With that, I view my students as individuals with nuanced worldviews and ways of knowing, and emotions are also acknowledged as part of what it means to know and how we learn.

With this pedagogical outlook, I strive to make every element of my courses engaging, accessible, and challenging for each student, with the formation and nurturing of the community as the core leading to engagement and deep learning. My students and I learn with and from one another, co-constructing knowledge–communal and contingent–together. Regardless of the course, I aim to design authentic project-based experiences that allow students to collaborate, be reflexive, discuss tensions in the field, all while sharing their lived experiences (I call this "adding texture.")