| That love has something to do with teaching and learning is a claim that finds its way into numerous, overlapping, and contending theoretical frameworks, including arguments from critical, progressive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structural traditions. However, to date there is very little critical empirical research that seeks to better understand and make solid this claim, to link it to everyday classroom actions and interactions. This multi-site critical ethnographic study asks how love is mobilized in an exploration of powerful, sometimes difficult, moments of connection and learning in two English-Social Studies classrooms---one in a large city high school, and the other in a small charter middle school---with teachers who sought to challenge educational inequities through a critical literacy curriculum and critical instructional practices. Using mediated and critical discourse analysis to examine classroom actions and interactions, the study looks at how students affect and are affected by their social "others" in meaningful and complicated ways. A theory of "cosmopolitan desire" is offered to describe the affective experience of connecting across difference. The study also frames students' aesthetic and resistant projects as expressions of armed love (Freire, 2006); these demands for self and community are necessary rejections of oppressive and damaging discourses, fueled by the desire to envision a more just social reality. Finally, the study explores practices of pedagogical love, finding instantiations of dialogic (Freire, 1996) and nurturing relationships (Noddings, 2013), as well as demonstrations of radical inclusion and love (Greenstein, 2016; hooks, 2003). This work has implications for how we might realize and better understand the stakes in the vague schooling goal of "getting along," bearing in mind the ongoing conundrum in hoping that through public education, "youth [will] accomplish what we haven't been able to accomplish---to establish rich, vibrant, and cooperative interracial relationships, contexts, communities, and projects" (Fine, Weis, & Powell, 1997, p. 248). It also makes plain the scale of a teacher's labor, and considers how to make academic literacy productions meaningful, and potentially transformative. |
