Main description:

Foregrounding diverse lived experiences and non-dominant forms of knowledge, this edited volume showcases ways in which narrating and sharing stories of pain and suffering can be engaged as critical pedagogy to challenge oppression and inequity in educational contexts.

The volume illustrates the need to consider both the act of narrating and the experience of bearing witness to narration to harness the full transformative potentials of counternarratives in disrupting oppressive practices. Chapters are divided into three parts - "Telling and Reliving Trauma as Pedagogy," "Pedagogies of Overcoming Silence," and "Forgetting as Pedagogy" - illustrating a range of relational pedagogical and methodological approaches, including journaling, poetry, and arts-based narrative inquiry.

The authors make the argument that the language of pain and suffering is universal, hence its potential as critical pedagogy for transformative and therapeutic teaching and learning. Readers are encouraged to reflect on their own lived experiences to constructively engage with their pain, suffering, and trauma. Focusing on trauma-informed non-hegemonic storytelling and transformative pedagogies, this volume will be of interest to students, faculty, scholars, and community members with an interest in advancing anti-oppressive and social justice education.

Contents:

1. Centering Pedagogies of Pain and Suffering by Embracing our Wounds and Scars Part 1: Telling and Reliving Trauma as Pedagogy 2. Cultivating Brave Spaces to Take Risks to Challenge Systemic Oppression 3. Moving from Oppression to Opportunity: Bringing Light to Educational and Historical Contexts in Critical Pedagogy 4. Storying Vulnerability: Creating Conditions for Generative Relationality in International Experiential Service Learning Part 2: Pedagogies of Overcoming Silence 5. Co-Composing Poetic and Arts-Based Narratives: Un-Silencing and Honouring Our Voices as Women Academics 6. Self-Location as a Disruptive Counternarrative in Teaching and Learning 7. Engaging in Ethical Discourse: An Autoethnography of a Black Student's Journey to Self-Identity 8. Passing the Grade: Experiences of Black Males in Secondary Schools in Ontario, Canada Part 3: Forgetting as Pedagogy 9. Sacred Tears: Indigenous Women's Healing Journey of Mobilization for Educational Systemic Change 10. Remembering Other Ways to Live: The Healing Energy that Flows from Sacred Ecology 11. Easing Anxiety for Adults in Higher Education: Regaining Self within Subversive, Interdisciplinary Bibliotherapy, and Visual Journaling 12. Poetic Justice: Healing and Disrupting Systemic Oppression in Education through Critical Pedagogy