Pedagogies of collective intersectional care: witnessing the spiritual and affective rigor of carework within daily classroom life

ABSTRACT

In this article, we build upon the ethics of collective intersectional care (Nyachae & Pham 2024), a concept central to Women of Color feminisms to emphasize the pedagogical rigors of carework in K-12 classrooms. Drawing from a yearlong video ethnography of the racial literacy practices of teachers of Color, we analyze a case study of a Black woman teacher’s (Author 2) pedagogies of collective intersectional care within day-to-day classroom life, illuminating the spiritual and affective dimensions of how she co-created a ‘Black sense of home’ that fortified and (re)centered the lived realities and full personhoods of Black and Brown students despite ‒ and in spite ‒ of racially violent institutions. Contributing to critical affective studies and racial literacy teacher education, we discuss the significance of how mutual embodiments of care are interwoven with co-creating, witnessing, and replenishing racially just learning spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• Black woman teacher
• embodiment
• racial literacy
• teachers of Color
• Women of Color feminism

Acknowledgments

We thank Esther Sing-Yu Ho for co-creating the figures used to represent our multimodal analysis in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).