Healing through Geography: A Spatial-Learning Analysis and Praxis

Learning takes place in and across settings. In this conceptual piece, a spatial-learning praxis is presented to understand geographic trauma to invoke healing from trauma through. I begin by providing a context of the links between oppression and trauma. I then highlight how it persists for learners and the consequences trauma has for students of color. I then build off of critical pedagogy, learning theory, Black feminism, Black geographies, and Indigenous studies to describe a form of learning and transformation that is dedicated to elements of healing centered learning. I briefly review these conceptual foundations as a preface to introducing a framework of healing centered learning and its components grounded in four anchors including (in no particular order): (a) learning and identity (b) geography (c) and oppression and trauma. Understanding geo-onto-epistemologies allows for mechanisms for learning to move past resilience and into healing, sustaining change over time. I conclude with learning and the applications to heal identities through the design of learning environments and spatial analysis.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor 

You Just Need More Resilience: Racial Gaslighting as “Othering”

This work de-familiarizes notions of resilience by theorizing the way racial gaslighting operates in teacher education. By focusing on the racial gaslighting of  BIPOC faculty, this paper shows how whiteness functions as a dominant process in anti-racist teacher education programs through the recentering of White feelings and interests. Ultimately this work calls for a  new approach, one that situates resilience within a non-Euro-centered context of resistance to oppression. This could provide a catalyst for a more humane resilience.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

“We Want Spanish Songs!”: Resilience in Latinx Students’ Making of Counterspaces

As the Latinx student population in the U.S. continues to grow, LatCrit is a crucial lens to understand students’ experience and resilience in the face of White supremacy and English hegemony. This paper explores Latinx students’ critical resilience in their making counterspaces with their peers of other races. I conduct individual interviews and focus group discussions with 21 fourth graders. Through thematic analysis, I find racism manifests in the Latinx and the other students’ attitudes towards Spanish songs. But in focus group discussions Latinx students create counterspaces with non-Latinx students as they disrupt English dominance and deficit-based narratives about the Latinxs. I call for researchers and educators to recognize Latinx students’ critical resilience and create peer dialogue opportunities that allow diverse students to create racially exclusive and inclusive counterspaces.

Resilience and Resistance in the Campus Sexual Assault Literature

Many researchers have focused on documenting the consequences of campus sexual assault (CSA), but there is a dearth of research on students' post-assault lived experiences. Specifically, there is a lack of scholarship exploring how student victim-survivors of CSA may view, understand, resist, or experience resilience as they navigate their post-assault life on campus. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the question, "How is resilience described and defined in the literature of CSA?" To respond to this question, I explore other related but distinct concepts that appear in the literature around resilience, including posttraumatic growth, meaning-making, and recovery. Although the focus is on CSA literature, I also include scholarship broadly related to trauma, as well as related populations and topics, given the limited research specific to resilience and CSA. Finally, I briefly introduce two theoretical perspective that have informed and guided the conceptualization of this paper, including socio-ecological and intersectional feminist theoretical perspectives. This conceptual paper and discussion of resilience was a result of preparation for my doctoral dissertation study in social work that aimed to explore the phenomenon of resilience among undergraduate students who had experienced CSA, through a qualitative inquiry that used post-intentional phenomenological methods.

Resilience Despite “Integration:” Black Men Educators' Perceptions About and Responsibility to Equitable Representation in K-12 Education

Almost seven decades after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision, African American/Black men are still vastly underrepresented in the K-12 public education profession. In this qualitative, phenomenological research study, a small sample of Black men educators who chose to enter and remain in the profession, shared their lived experiences. Three research questions informed this study: (1) What are African American/Black men’s perceptions of their representation in the K-12 public education profession? (2) What are African American/Black men’s perceptions regarding their entrance and retention in the K-12 public education profession? and (3)What are African American/Black men’s perceptions regarding the responsibilities African American men have to and within the K-12 public education profession? Findings show that while Black men are still underrepresented in K-12 public education, they have been resilient in remaining in the field and defining their roles, commitments, and responsibilities despite feelings of isolation, tokenism, and stereotypes.

A letter to my abusers

A letter to my abusers conveys feelings about secondary abuse and psychological and emotional trauma in addition to incest, rape, and sexual abuse during my childhood. The content in the letters refers to how my mother and sister inflicted secondary trauma by refusing to listen to my narrative on my abusive father. Using excerpts and examples from my twenty-year-old dissertation, I lovingly and sorrowfully say goodbye to my family as I make my way to the next chapter in my life.

Resiliency Redefined: We Never Understood Why

This is a poem aiming to redefine what resiliency has meant to the Latina/o/x families whose children were detained upon entering the United States.

The Myth of Resilience

This poem discusses resilience as an adaption to circumstances children cannot control. It comes from the viewpoint that resilience assumes that there is something to which one can bounce back. However, children who are placed in the foster care system and/or adopted, especially from birth, are born into spaces to which there is no return, yet they are labeled resilient. Children who experience these traumatic circumstances are not resilient, they are adaptable and learn how to thrive and move forward. 

Converting Limitations into Resilience: Plight of an International Student

This poetry is a critical reflection of the author's personal life as an international student in the United States for over a decade, during which the personal, social, educational, and professional aspects of his life were, in a variety of ways, at the mercy of the political and socio-economical culture of the country.