“I Just Love Black People!”: Love,Pleasure, and Critical Pedagogy in Urban Teacher Education

With concern to critical pedagogy, the concept of love is fairly frequently (ab)used, yet under-theorized. In this exploratory study, I ask: How does a critical pedagogy of love—or critical pedagogical love—look, sound, and feel? Regarding feeling, how does a critical pedagogue engage the sensations of pleasure attendant to love? Lastly, how does the pedagogue invite love and pleasure into the pain-filled field of urban teacher education? Using Black feminist theorizing of love as an analytic filter, I investigate a university-based urban teacher educator’s navigation of the nexus of love, pleasure, and critical (specifically, antiracist) pedagogy. Extrapolating from the resultant narrative portrait, I consider the affordances of a critical pedagogy of love that accesses embodied pleasure, emphasizing how such a pedagogy might present racially marginalized persons—particularly urban teacher educators of Color—with opportunities for reprieve from the suffering that characterizes many of our experiences with/in teacher education.

     

A Review of “Fields of Green: Restorying Culture,Environment, and Education”

This essay describes an educational initiative that used environmentally themed (green) hip-hop to stimulate learning in an environmental science classroom. Students were then challenged to compose their own green hip-hop and their lyrics demonstrated skills that have thematic consistency around what is called a Critical Ecological Literacy (CEL). An analysis of more than 200 creative pieces collected from eight runs of this curriculum over four years shows that CEL can be used as a guiding concept for the creation of curriculum targeting urban areas and racially diverse learners. Several examples of this student-produced green hip-hop are shared to delineate elements of CEL that can help educators evaluate student learning as well as their own teaching materials.