"I GOT NEW FEELINGS COMING IN": DRAWN EMOTIONS AND REFUSING SECONDLY ACROSS ANTI-RACIST ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS PEDAGOGIES By Mary Lefere Neville A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education - Doctor of Philosophy 2020 ABSTRACT "I GOT NEW FEELINGS COMING IN": DRAWN EMOTIONS AND REFUSING SECONDLY ACROSS ANTI-RACIST ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS PEDAGOGIES By Mary Lefere Neville Given the current and historical context of power and oppression in the United States, English language arts (ELA) scholars have called for pedagogies that directly respond to the racialized violence present across texts, schooling, and society (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017; Baker-Bell, 2020; Butler, 2018; Johnson, 2018). Scholars have long critiqued the ELA curriculum for its dearth of perspectives across race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and especially have called upon ELA teachers and researchers to center literature written by Black and Brown authors (Thomas, 2016, 2019). In this call for anti-racist ELA curriculum, scholars have also encouraged an attention to emotion, highlighting the necessity of not only including texts by authors of Color in classrooms but also the importance of the emotional and affective resonances through which students and teachers respond to literary texts for racial and social justice (Dutro, 2019; Grinage, 2019). This qualitative research project, then, explores the emotional responses of secondary ELA students and pre-service literacy teachers to literature that addresses race and racism. This dissertation builds upon critical (post)qualitative and visual arts-based methodologies centering the emotional and affective resonances present across our socially constructed identities as students and teachers work to deconstruct whiteness and anti-Blackness using anti-racist pedagogies (Sousanis, 2015; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). In particular, this project explores how objects of feeling are drawn across space and time (Ahmed, 2010, 2014) and how readers refuse "secondly" (Adichie, 2009) within two research contexts: (1) a 12th critical media literacy course and (2) a critical young adult literature course for pre-service teachers. Findings from this study demonstrate how secondary ELA students and pre-service teachers might center the already present emotion traced across objects of feeling in literature classrooms committed to anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies. Copyright by MARY LEFERE NEVILLE 2020 For Ben. There is nothing I am more grateful for than the trampoline I met you on in 1995. It’s been you, right down the line. For my students in Detroit and Jacksonville. For the children from whom I've learned - Joshua, Brandon, Anthony, Natalie, Andrew, and Kathryn. In particular, for my godchildren - Daniel Richmond, Norah Constance, Trudy Ellen, and Audrey Rianne. For my Dad for loving us fiercely, for my Mom for teaching me the beauty of words. For my And, finally, for Shaner. One of the greatest gifts of my life has been being your little sister siblings - Corey, Angie, Ryan, Jude. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Something that I was not ready for was how difficult it would be to write the acknowledgements section of the dissertation, not because I have few people to acknowledge, but because I have so many. I would not be at this point in the life of a doctoral student without the incredible help of so many people and communities. Here is my attempt at acknowledgement and gratitude for all of you. First, I want to thank the community of Swanson High School, Ms. Granger in the critical media literacy course, Ms. Evans in the general English course, and all of the students in both courses for welcoming me into your community for a full semester. Your kindness and warmth were overwhelming. Ms. Granger and Ms. Evans, your willingness in particular to allow me space to research and teach in the midst of your plans was so meaningful for me and was a model for me in understanding how teaching is a collaborative art. The students in each of these courses were so brilliant, compassionate, and welcoming, and I am so grateful to each of you. I also want to thank my course community for the Spring 2018 Young Adult Literature course, which I focus on in the third article of this dissertation. I learned a great deal from being your instructor in that course and I am grateful for our time together. Thank you to Ben, my best friend of 23 years. Spouses deserve a graduation of their own when their partners achieve a PhD. You have endured and supported me in ways that I cannot begin to name here. Thank you for calming my anxieties, buying me a puppy, incorporating weekly movie nights, quoting Leslie Knope and Michael Scott, cooking for me like a five star chef, bike rides, wolf shirts, living room forts, playing basketball with Shane in high school, playing guitar for me at the park, Jerry Lapish, throwing Christmas trees out the window in the hopefulness of an ND victory, vi getting lost that one time in Chicago, being willing to quarantine with me during a pandemic, laughing so hard that we cry, marrying me. To my family. To Grandpa Ike, Grandma O’Meara, Grandma Dobie, and Grandpa Dobie, thank you for teaching all of us about hard work and limitless love. To my Mom and Dad for supporting my love of reading and writing and going to school and for teaching me the importance of family and showing up for those you love. Thank you, Dad, for approving of Ben’s St. Vinny’s prom suit and for movie nights, and thank you Mom for candles and granola and rock painting and loving good music and good words. To Corey and Kerry, thank you for COR13Radio and the late- night bonfires on Northern Michigan lakes. To Shaner, thank you for your drawings and strength and laughter when you watch Dumb and Dumber. To Angie and Todd, thank you for more than I can say but specifically – skiing, cooking, and the chance to be an aunt to your kids. Angie, thank you for being my best friend, for running with me all those times, for being my sister. Ry and Evagelia, thank you for always being ready for laughter and Festivus and good music and for your sweet babies, Anthony, Andrew, and Kathryn. Jude and Alissa, thank you for always being there for us whenever we need it and for our countless memories and laughter growing up. Thank you for that sweet goddaughter of mine, Norah. Thank you to Amy and Pat for your limitless support and guidance during my time in high school, college, in Jacksonville, Detroit, and now in Lansing for my PhD. Thank you for painting our house, for gifting us meals, and for loving us. Thank you for the chicken divan. Thank you to Kerry and Patrick for always checking in on me during this process and for the laughter. Thank you Kerry for the “you’re a badass, Mary Martha” texts and to Patrick for enduring the Reese’s pieces Christmas situation of 2015. Thank you to all of my nieces and nephews – Joshua, Brandon, Daniel, Anthony, Natalie, Andrew, Norah, Trudy, and Kathryn. I didn’t know I could love a human so much until I met each of you. vii Dr. Alyssa Dunn, I’m not sure where to begin in acknowledging and thanking you for your commitment to me and my scholarship, my growth, and myself as a human being. You have been a model for me not only of what it means to be a scholar in this work, but also what it means to be a human seeking critical justice for our communities and our world. I will always remember asking you to be my advisor at Grand Traverse Pie Co., as you were expecting baby Owen, and I am still floored at your taking a chance on me and saying yes. From the countless advisee barbeques, support meetings, Strange Matter coffee writing sessions, rounds and rounds of late night feedback, job interview phone calls, letters of recommendation, gifts of books and Shane scarves, and Leslie Knope memes, I truly cannot say enough how you have changed my life. I am forever in gratitude to you. I am also deeply grateful to each member of my dissertation committee. To Dr. April Baker- Bell, I do not have enough words to thank you for the support and kindness you have shown me over the years. Your willingness to take a chance on me as a research assistant in my first year allowed me the opportunity to learn the skills of a researcher and to hone in my scholarly interests. Your commitment to me in providing feedback on program milestones and publications and in offering letters of support for opportunities is well and beyond what was necessary and I am so grateful. To Dr. Lynn Fendler, I am grateful for your encouragement of my scholarship from my first days in TE 901. I am thankful for the meetings in your office when I was unsure of whether I was writing something worthwhile and for your end-of-course dinners at your home. Thank you for all of your encouragement over the years. To Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, thank you for your willingness to take such a huge leap of faith on me and for your constant support in the form of scholarly feedback, letters of recommendation, and our equal love of The Office. Thank you also for your book, Cultivating Genius, and the way it changed my thinking in this dissertation. To Dr. Vaughn Watson, I cannot thank you enough for the kindness and encouragement you have modeled for me viii throughout my entire time as a doctoral student. Your spirit of generosity is one that I will continue to seek to achieve and the way that you notice “how the world interests us” is something I hope to model with my own students in the future. Thank you for your willingness to teach me how to be a better teacher and writer in this work. Most of all, thank you for letting me know about the importance of the rivalry between Pennsylvania convenience stores Wawa and Sheetz. Thank you to the coaches and teachers who changed the way I think about education: to Aunt Nancy, Fr. Rose, Mr. Woolsey, Mr. Neville, Mrs. Miller, and Cathy Sykes. To the professors who taught me about schooling and justice: Dr. Kevin Burke, Dr. Laura Apol, Dr. Niral Shah, Dr. Tonya Wright, Dr. Django Paris, Dr. Mary Juzwik, Dr. Terah Venzant Chambers, Dr. Tamara Butler, Dr. Jen VanDerHeide, Dr. Joanne Mariciano, Dr. Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Dr. Sandra Crespo, and Dr. Amelia Gotwals. I want to especially thank our department chair Dr. Dorinda Carter Andrews and my critical race theory class community for a course that changed my thinking and my life. Thank you also to Terry Edwards for all of your support of each of us on the third floor – you mean so much to each of us. Thank you to Dean Floden, Dr. Carter Andrews, Dr. Richmond, Dr. Bartell, and Jeff Cole for all of the many lessons I learned as a graduate assistant for JTE. Thank you to my CITE/PhD friends. To Katie, Vivek, and Tashal for loving fun, for thinking deeply, and for fondueing with me for five years. I can’t wait for the rest of our friendship in the many years to come. To Scottie, thank you for nerding out about books with me and for listening to Ben talk about Notre Dame football for many more minutes than I can muster. To Alecia, thank you for writing with me, for loving Gilmore Girls and romantic comedies, for helping me prepare for job interviews, for your kindness, and for sharing Pittsburgh with me. To my CITE cohort 2015 – thank you for the encouragement and strength. To Dr. Cassie Brownell, thank you for all of your guidance and mentorship. To Dr. Ashley Johnson, thank you for talking about books with me for the better part of most of our writing meetings and for being a sounding board. LJ, ix Chim, Molade, Missy, Emily, Hannah, Eliana, Greg, Julene, Manasi, Amit, Kaitlin, Blythe, Cierra, and Lance, thank you for your friendship and support. Leah, how do I even begin to thank you for accidentally putting t-shirts in microwaves and hiding them in couches, for laughing when Ben somehow used his key and started your car in high school, for being there for me when Shane has been sick, for the calls and texts, for “what no blankets?”, for loving so many of the things I love, for loving so many of the people I love, for trusting me that one day in that aisle in Meijer in 200?, for agreeing to be my friend even after witnessing 7th grade me tear up a picture of a boy I would one day marry. Most of all of these things, truly, thank you for telling me to watch Schitt’s Creek. Casey, thank you for being the most outdoorsy of all of us. Thank you for your writing, for your humor, for being the daughter of a person who used to send us April Phuule mail on Beech street, for your politeness when first living with me, for eventually getting over that politeness so we could actually be friends, for your support and grace and prayers, for being the type of Catholic I want to be, for following your gut, for the weird notes from you I find ten years later in old copies of novels, for your beautiful babies Molly and Charlie, and for Trask. Kaitlin, thank you for being on this journey with me from TE 250 all the way through to our PhDs. I knew when we first started this together that we would rely on one another and support one another as we went through the ups and downs of doctoral work. This year, though, your support has been life giving; I could not have been through this chaos without your love and guidance. Thank you, you “beautiful, talented powerful, musk ox.” To my godmother Aunt Lovely Linda and my godfather Uncle Jeff. To all of my aunts and uncles, to all of my Dobie cousins, and to THE FORTY - #30 loves all of you. To Jeff, #8, for discussions of teaching and the family and most importantly for your God-given gift of driving a boat on Mullett Lake like nobody else. x To my Jacksonville community - to Tony, Rachel, and James, Ellen, and Ben, thank you for helping me to see the joy of teaching in our first years in Jacksonville and for the laughter of Tour de Conveys, Jax the kitten, and E street lunches. To my cross-country girls: Kelly, Hilary, Spon, Lindsay, and Leah but I already said you, Leah. Thanks for teaching me to be a runner when I was 16 because I would not have finished a PhD without attempting to outrun the stress. Finally, thank you to my puppy Jack for listening to me rant as I wrote this dissertation! Steinbeck (1952) wrote: Dear Pat, You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, ‘Why don’t you make something for me?’ I asked you what you wanted, and you said, ‘A box.’ ‘What for?’ ‘To put things in.’ ‘What things?’ ‘Whatever you have,’ you said. Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasures of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full. The box is still not full. Thank you for everything. Love, Mary. xi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ……………………………………………………..……………………….. xv LIST OF FIGURES ………………………………………………………………....…………..xvi PROLOGUE……………………………………………………….....…………….................... xvii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………........................ 2 Emotion and Literature Instruction for Anti-Oppressive Aims …………………...…….... 6 Anti-oppressive and Anti-racist ELA Pedagogies ………………………………......6 Whiteness and Anti-Blackness in Literature Instruction ……………………….…...8 Emotion, Affect, and Objects of Feeling ……………………………………….....11 Methods & Modes of Inquiry…………………………………………...……......................13 12th Grade Critical Media Literacy Course ……..………………………..………. 14 Undergraduate Pre-service Teaching YA Literature Course …………………….....15 Researcher Positionality …………………………………………………………..16 Chapter-by-Chapter Overview ……….…………………...………………………………19 REFERENCES ……….………………………………………………………..…………...….....22 CHAPTER 2: ARTICLE 1 Drawn Emotions: A Conceptualization of Anti-Oppressive ELA Classrooms through Shane's Drawings …………..………………………………………….......... 27 Introduction ……….……………………………...……………………………………... 27 Literature Review ……….……………………………...………………………………....32 Anti-oppressive ELA Spaces ……………………………………………………. 32 Emotion and Anti-Oppressive ELA Spaces …………………………………..…..34 Positionality ……….………………....…………………………………………………....37 Layers and Ruptures: Conceptually Framing Drawn Emotions through Shane's Artwork .. 39 On Objects and Bodies of Feeling ………………………………………............ 40 Shane Peter: Emotions as Drawn ………………………………………………. 42 Drawn Emotions ……………………………………………………………….. 46 Drawn Emotions: Implications for Anti-Oppressive ELA Pedagogies ……………...….... 50 APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................................... 58 REFERENCES ………..……………………………………………..…………………………. 61 CHAPTER 3: ARTICLE 2 "I got new feelings coming in": Cyclical emotional literary events in an anti-racist critical media literacy course ………………...……………………………………….....68 Introduction ……….…………………………………………...……………………...….68 Literature Review ………………………………………………...…………………...…. 71 xii Anti-racist ELA Pedagogies …………………………………………………........ 71 Anti-racism and Literature: The Hate U Give ……………………………….........…74 Emotion in ELA Classrooms …………………………………………………..... 76 Theoretical Framework ………………….……………………………...……………........79 Methods …………………….…………………...…………………………………..……84 Study Context ………………………………………………………………….....84 Participants …………………………………………………………………….....85 Data Generation and Analysis ………………………………………………….....86 Researcher Positionality …………………………….………………………….... 90 Findings ……………..……………...………………………………………………….... 91 Cyclical Emotional Literary Events ……..…………………………………............91 The Promise and Warning of Rupture: The Four Corners Activity ….……............ 92 Drawn Emotions as the Shadows of an Event .............................................................103 Discussion and Conclusion ………...……..…………………………………………...... 110 APPENDIX ..................................................................................................................................................116 REFERENCES ………………..……………………………..……………………..………..... 127 CHAPTER 4: ARTICLE 3 “I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Learn this in School”: Whiteness, Anti- Blackness, and Refusing ‘Secondly’ in a Young Adult Literature Course ……...........……..….........134 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………......... 134 Some Defining Terms ………………………………………………….……..…………137 Theoretical Perspectives …………………………………………….……………...……138 Refusing "Secondly” through Literature Instruction ……………………….....….138 Whiteness and Anti-Blackness in the Midst of Refusing Secondly …………........ 141 Methods …………………...………………………………………………….………... 145 Data Analysis …………………………………………………………………....146 Researcher Positionality ………………………………………………....………147 Findings: 13th, All American Boys, Anti-Blackness, and Refusing Secondly …………......…147 Connecting the Historical with the Contemporary ………………………........…150 Implicating Institutions when Responding to 13th …………….…….……….........151 Anti-Blackness in the Midst of Refusing Secondly ………………………........…152 Discussion and Conclusion …………………...…………..………………………….......155 APPENDICES ………………..………………………..………………………………...............159 APPENDIX A: TABLE 6. SYNOPSES OF ALL AMERICAN BOYS AND 13TH….. 160 APPENDIX B: TABLE 7. TITLES OF TEXTS READ BY THE WHOLE CLASS (SANS “CHOICE” TEXT WEEKS) .......................................................................................... 161 REFERENCES ………………………………………………..………………………..…….....162 CHAPTER 5: DRAWING CONCLUSIONS/REFUSING CONCLUSIONS ………….............168 Introduction ……………………….............................................................................................168 Summary and Implications …………………………………….…………………….…. 171 Article 1: Drawn emotions ……………………………………………………... 171 xiii Article 2: Cyclical emotional literary events and rupture …………………………173 Article 3: Refusing secondly …………………………………………………….175 Drawing Forward: Plans for Future Teaching and Research …………………………….177 REFERENCES ………………………………………………..………………………..…….....179 xiv LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Characteristics of Drawn Emotions ……………………………………………………. 48 Table 2. Typology of Drawn Emotions: Richard's Question ……………………………………. 52 Table 3. Typology of Drawn Emotions …………………………………………………………. 83 Table 4. Study Participants ………………………………………………………………………. 85 Table 5. Coding Scheme: Young Adult Literature Course ……………………………………….148 Table 6. Synopses of All American Boys and 13th ………………………………………………….160 Table 7. Titles of Texts Read by the Whole Class (Sans “Choice” Text Weeks) ………...……......161 xv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Photograph with Grandma and Grandpa at Torch Lake ……………………………... xviii Figure 2. Shane's drawing A …………………………………………………………………… 43 Figure 3. Shane's drawing A, with drawn emotions framework ………………………………….. 48 Figure 4. A collection of some of Shane’s drawings ……........................................................................ 59 Figure 5. Photo, four corners activity; Classmate responses to Gary's comment ………………….95 Figure 6. Shane's drawing B as saturation of intensities; restraint; bleeding; and rupture ………….97 Figure 7. Shane's drawing B, four corners activity through drawn emotions analysis ………….... 101 Figure 8. James' exit ticket response ……………………………………………………………. 104 Figure 9. Shane's drawing C ……………………………………………………………………. 105 Figure 10. Shane's drawing C, historical and local tracings of emotion …………………….......... 107 Figure 11. Scrunching of texture around a rupture ……………………………………………... 113 Figure 12. Shane’s drawing …………………………………………………………………….. 117 Figure 13. Historical tracings ……………………………………………………………………118 Figure 14. Local tracings ……………………………………………………………………….. 119 Figure 15. Objects “sticking” …………………………………………………………………... 120 Figure 16. Analysis: Responses after incident ……………………………………………………121 Figure 17. Analysis: Rupture …………………………………………………………………….122 Figure 18. Analysis: Historical and local tracings …………………………………………............123 Figure 19. Analysis: Historical + local tracings + object’s stickiness …………….............................124 Figure 20. Analysis: Historical + local tracings + object’s stickiness + responses from students…125 Figure 21. Analysis: Historical + local tracings + object’s stickiness + responses from students + rupture ….…………………………………………………………………………………… 126 xvi PROLOGUE Over the next 173 pages, you will read a dissertation discussing how literature instruction and an attention to emotion does or does not help us to make our English classrooms more anti-oppressive and anti-racist. First, though, some needed things: 1: We sat in Katie and Vivek's apartment, celebrating Chim's passing of her dissertation defense, our legs crossed under us as we toasted a new Dr. Okoroji. We passed around facts and questions along with the champagne: AERA is supposed to be virtual now; what would Michael Scott do in this situation?; Do you think the K-12 schools will close, too? Kali the dog passed unimpeded at our feet. My fingers grazed the backs of her ears. It still wasn't quite as bad as it soon would be. 2: My mother had, years ago, taped together the peeling binding on her mother's bright orange Betty Crocker cookbook with duct tape that was a nearly exact match of the cover. She gifted the book to me when I left Michigan to become a teacher in Florida, taping to the inside cover a photograph of a younger me with my younger grandfather and my younger and then-alive grandmother on an impossibly blue lake in Northern Michigan. Now, I stood in my kitchen. I sifted through the pages until I found the laminated chocolate chip cookie/brownie recipe, my grandmother's painstaking cursive annotating the margins with instructions to add sugar here and (very rarely) less butter there. I always use this chocolate chip recipe. I know that it barely differs from the directives on the back of the Nestle bag, but my grandma's worn hands never held the Nestle bag. They had held this largely unhealthy and falling-apart-at-the seams recipe book. Now, I remember her. COVID-19 had reached our shores; 1 confirmed case in Ingham County; 1,000 in Washington state; 10,000 in New York City. March Madness had been cancelled along with: kindergarten; Catholic xvii Masses; track meets where my nephew Josh would break his mile record of 4:36; grandparents meeting their infant grandchildren for the first time; finding a fully stocked aisle of toilet paper at Meijer; drinking two-hearted ales with my husband in a bar elbow-to-elbow with strangers; my advisor dropping a hood over my shoulders; me kissing Shane's forehead. Figure 1. Grandma, Grandpa, and Mary at Torch Lake, 1998. So now, I remember her. I pour a cup of sugar into the mixing bowl. I change Spotify to "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac. I retrieve the melted butter from the microwave. I crack the egg against the metal mixing bowl. I remember her. I think about how my grandpa changed their name from Dobrzelewski to Dobie when he couldn't find a job. I pet Jack with the bottom of my foot, gently guiding the dog away from the stove. I worry for my brothers, three immunocompromised. I worry for my parents, both nearly 70 years old. I worry for the grandfather in that picture, now 94 and living in a nursing home, unable to receive family or visitors of any kind except the moments when xviii his son comes and waves to him through the window of his bedroom. I worry. I crack open the bag of Nestle chocolate chips. I sing, badly. I slide the button on the mixer to level two. I change Spotify to "Blessings" by Chance. I remember her. I glance at the picture of myself between her and my grandpa. I imagine her. I consider her, what she would do now, this force of a woman, the legends that roll unwieldy before me, spinning and toppling, the way she wasted nothing, having grown up poor on a farm in Northern Michigan in the 1930s, the way she once saved her younger sister's life in a once-in-a- lifetime blizzard, the way she invited strangers to Thanksgiving. I slide the cookie batter onto the brownie pan. I spread the dough out like a cake. I hear my Spotify change to "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. I place the pan in the oven, 325 degrees. I remember her. I plead for her strength and courage and grace. I summon her. I set the timer: 24 minutes. I lean above my kitchen sink, my forearms glancing against the edges of the book, my heart just above the picture of us at Torch Lake, 1998. I weep. 3: There was a story of an Italian priest who gave up his ventilator to a younger person. The priest died two days later. There was a story of a 22-year-old at a grocery store who overheard an elderly woman say she hadn't found the toilet paper she needed. The 22-year-old gave her his. There was a story of the school board president in the East Lansing school district raising $12,000 and hundreds of donations in a matter of days to send to preK-12 kids and the elderly. There were many stories of a jazz musician, a pianist, a drummer, a vocalist standing on balconies and leading renditions of Italian or Chinese or Spanish folk songs with hundreds of their apartment-mates. There were stories of humans leaning out their windows, clapping in disjointed unison, forming a cacophony of xix raucous applause to envelop these humans as they walked home in their scrubs from hospitals, their feet dragging, their heads bowed, their hearts and bodies weary. There were many stories. 4: Coronavirus-19 caused the global pandemic that is threatening our lives and daily routines. It did not cause the innumerable inequities laid bare across our society. The most vulnerable are now made even more susceptible to disease: the homeless, the elderly, the poor, those without health care, humans who are not provided a bailout while the non-human are. The children in our U.S. K-12 public school system are experiencing a lag in their education, a lag that has been confronted with a push to take some schools online in the midst of a pandemic. Some schools do not have the means to provide digital technologies to students even if they wanted to impose some sort of curriculum onto their daily lives during COVID. These schools do not have the resources that they need because of a long and tired history of racism, classism, colonization, and oppression. The disease has made visible the many inequitable fissures that constitute our society; it has not created the gaps in income, health care, education, and well-being, but it has elucidated the need to protect the most vulnerable. It has also made abundantly clear how connected each of us are to one another, how obvious that it is each other that we need. 5: Chim's dissertation defense, my grandmother's cookbook, and the image of people singing from balconies are examples of what Sara Ahmed calls objects of feeling. Objects hold layers of meaning for each of us, and these layers are connected across our collective and individual past, present, and futures. In considering the construction of anti-oppressive pedagogies, I argue that it is important to make clear the objects of feeling, and the emotions wrought within and by them, in order to interrogate the whiteness, anti-Blackness, and oppression present across our texts and schooling contexts. It is also imperative in times like this, as I sit attempting to write a dissertation in the midst xx of a global pandemic, to view knowledge in an eternal and intimate relationship with the outer contexts in which we live. As our immunities are connected to the humans living next door to us, as well as across the globe, so are our stories, our emotions, and the means by which we might one day create a system of schooling that is founded in the stories and feelings present in our students' lives. May we one day create a curriculum, a classroom, a school, and an education system worthy of the students fighting to survive within them. xxi “'We cannot know which story is correct because we were not there.' Yaw nodded. He sat in his chair at the front of the room and looked at all the young men. 'This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe then?' The boys were silent. They stared at him, waiting. 'We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.'” Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION "The truth about stories is that that's all we are." - Thomas King, 2003 In Gyasi's Homegoing, Yaw, a Ghanaian history teacher, teaches his secondary students a lesson entitled "History is Storytelling." Yaw has a scar on his face from his infancy, a mark on his body that students often wonder and laugh about amongst themselves. In the lesson, Yaw asks the students to tell him the story of his scar, and the students hesitantly offer theories and myths to explain their teacher's injury. Yaw explains that he only knows what he knows of his scar because of what has been told to him from before by his family. He asks his students, how do we know whose story to believe? He leaves his students with: We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture. (p. 239) I begin this dissertation with Yaw's lesson because it emphasizes a few of the main tensions and beliefs I hold about anti-oppressive English language arts (ELA) teaching and learning. In ELA classrooms and curriculum, teachers and researchers expect a great deal from a story. Stories are meant to open new worlds for students, to serve as "windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors" that might reflect their current worldview or open new ones (Bishop, 1990). Stories can help to develop empathy in students, particularly students from historically privileged backgrounds, and can help readers understand their own humanity and the humanity of others (Clark & Blackburn, 2009; Dressel, 2005; Ebarvia, 2018). Stories can offer counternarratives to the dominant stereotypes seen in media and in society about people from historically marginalized communities (Glenn, 2012; Hughes-Hassell, 2013). And stories matter, scholars argue, because they can help readers envision possibilities for constructing a different and more just society for future generations (Larrick, 1965; Thomas, 2016). 2 I have always been a reader. I rarely walk by a bookstore without going inside, and during my first visit to New York City, the place I immediately wanted to see was the New York Public Library. My first memory consists of me lying belly-down on my parents' carpeted living room floor learning to read. At my first job, which was as a waitress in a delicious Chinese restaurant while in high school, I used to get in trouble for sneaking to the silverware folding table and reading when the place was empty and (I thought) there was no more work to be done. When I told my boss that I was leaving to start college and would work at Michigan State's Spartan Bookstore, she looked me dead in the eye and said: I think a bookstore for you is for the best. I agree that books are, in the words of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, "meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower" and that, in many ways, "stories are all that we are" (Brooks, 1969; King, 2003). Books have indeed changed my life - I remember the shift within me when I read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and, as an adult, I still rely on lessons I've learned from books like Harry Potter, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Beloved the way that some people rely on Scripture. I became an English teacher because of my love for reading and my belief in books to inspire change in people for the better. I still believe that stories hold power to shift a person's worldview and to, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1956) stated, bend us and "the long arc of the moral universe toward justice." At the same time, I find myself wondering about this magical quality we as English educators believe exists within books. I question whether stories hold as much power as we hope that they do, and I wonder about the necessary work of unlearning that lies at the other end of the reading relationship: the reader. Rosenblatt (1938, 1994) explains that meaning does not reside solely within a text nor solely in a reader, but in a "transaction" between the author, reader, context, and the text. In the same vein, a change toward justice, empathy, anti-oppression, or anti-racism cannot solely exist within the text itself. We must understand the layers of emotion that are at play within and between the text and the reader of the text, as well as the layers of emotion that are at play within 3 the outside world and across past, present, and future temporalities, all of which are happening all at once. I find the need to interrogate, understand, and attend to the emotions of readers to be vital for anti-oppressive and anti-racist ELA pedagogies. In order to emphasize "healing pedagogies" (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017), educators must focus on how literature necessarily surfaces feeling. These feelings are connected to objects and bodies (Ahmed, 2010) that are present across our individual and collective spatial and temporal experiences. These feelings are also layered among places and times that we have physically inhabited as individuals, as well as those places and times that we have not physically inhabited, so that our emotions when reading for anti-oppressive and anti-racist aims are connected to that which happened two centuries before, as well as what will happen two centuries to come. Our emotions are also embodied, so that some of what we feel will be inscribed onto the surfaces of our bodies, in physical ways, such as through Yaw's scar in Homegoing, and in sometimes less visible ways, such as in the racial symbolic violence that occurs in ELA classrooms (Love, 2014, 2016, 2019). For this reason, anti-racist ELA educators also must prepare for the fact that reading and discussing literature, especially in a racially diverse classroom, almost certainly will bring up painful emotions that are often thrust upon students of Color, opening racial wounds from centuries or moments before (Grinage, 2019; Hanna, 2019). Reading for empathy, for social justice, for understanding, then, are not as simple as putting good literature in the hands of readers of all races. We as educators must contend with the layers of emotions that accompany reading for justice in anti-oppressive ELA classrooms. In Yaw's lesson in Homegoing, I see much of what is necessary to attend to in anti-oppressive ELA curriculum: a focus on the embodied emotions at play when we read; a connection to the historical layers of meaning through what came before us; a questioning of whose story is being told; 4 an attention to not only what a text means but also what it does to the reader, and what a reader does to the text; and, finally, the imperfection of reading and the ways books offer a "clearer, yet still imperfect picture." In this dissertation, I seek to understand how a focus on the embodied, emotional reading experiences of pre- and in-service teachers, as well as secondary ELA students, can help to construct and enact anti-oppressive and anti-racist ELA pedagogies. In this project, I analyze the ways emotions move amongst objects of feeling and across readings of whiteness and anti-Blackness1 in one 12th grade critical media literacy course and in a pre-service undergraduate young adult literature course. In particular, I ask the following questions across this three-article dissertation. Each of these research questions aligns with the corresponding article of the dissertation: ● Research question article 1: How are emotions "drawn" across past, present, and future "objects of feeling" as we construct and enact anti-oppressive ELA pedagogies? How might renderings of art help to facilitate our understanding of objects of feeling in our responses to anti-oppressive texts? ● Research questions article 2: How does a group of critical media literacy students' emotional responses to Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give afford or constrain the anti-racist possibilities of using literature to discuss race and racism in English classrooms? ● Research question article 3: How, if at all, does the inclusion of 13th alongside All American Boys offer space for a group of majority white pre-service teachers to refuse secondly within an anti-racist English education framework aimed at deconstructing whiteness and anti- Blackness? 1 I follow Johnson (2018) in purposely capitalizing Black, Brown, and people of Color and lowercasing white and whiteness in order to “disassemble white supremacy in my language” (p. 121). 5 I now turn to scholarly literature to discuss anti-oppressive ELA pedagogies, emotion, and whiteness and anti-Blackness in literature instruction. I conclude with a discussion of the organization of this three-article dissertation. Emotion and Literature Instruction for Anti-Oppressive Aims Anti-oppressive and Anti-racist ELA Pedagogies "Critical love is leading schools toward anti-oppression. It goes beyond acts of care, but it is authentically about embodying a great deal of concern, compassion, and empathy. And it is an action, not just a feeling, that pushes toward making sure no one experiences marginalization of any kind" (Muhammad, 2019, p. 168). Students in the U.S. and abroad are faced with a contemporary and historical context of oppressive violence enacted against historically marginalized communities across race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship status, language, religion, and other socially constructed markers of identity. ELA scholars, then, call for "urgent pedagogies that are not just responsive to the social times but pedagogies that are anti-racist and, overall, anti-oppressive" (Muhammad, 2019, p. 54). Anti-oppressive pedagogies must connect the ways that the current violence enacted against marginalized groups is intimately connected with the historical legacies of racism, sexism, and colonization that created all structures in society (Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). Anti-oppressive pedagogies require that teachers engage in critical acts of justice with and for their students, and that they explicitly teach students the critical skills necessary to move beyond rote, worksheet-driven, skills-based teaching that many schools serving historically marginalized students are forced to administer (Dunn, 2018; Muhammad, 2019). Instead, anti-oppressive pedagogies ask teachers and students, "What does it mean to be human?" (Muhammad, 2019, p. 118). How might youths' curiosities, questions, and literacies be centered to promote anti-oppressive stances in and beyond school settings? 6 While anti-oppressive pedagogies include multiple and intersecting identities, an imperative form of anti-oppressive curriculum for education broadly--and this dissertation in particular--is anti- racist ELA pedagogies. Given the current context of racialized violence in the U.S. and globally, scholarship in English education has focused on how ELA classrooms and English teacher education courses might become more actively anti-racist. Using an anti-racist English framework requires that teachers and students analyze the self in relation to the widespread racism and white supremacy evident across texts, schools, and society (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017). The focus of anti-racist English education asserts that English teachers “have a responsibility to use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice” (Baker-Bell, Jones Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017, p. 130). Moreover, anti-racist pedagogies are, as Love (2019) attests, a way toward "humanity," and anti-racist educators understand that "we all thrive when everyday people resist ... and when everyday people understand that loving darkness2 is our path to humanity" (p. 68). Anti-racist English education spaces must recognize and ameliorate the symbolic and curricular violence that is inflicted upon Black and Brown students and teachers in many schools (Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, & Baszile, 2017; Love, 2014). Anti-racist English education requires teachers and students to collectively analyze and deconstruct racialized violence and resistance across historical and contemporary texts and media, including the whitewashed children’s and YA literature canon (Baker-Bell, Jones Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017; Johnson, 2018; Johnson et al., 2017). It also "encourages teachers to challenge curriculum that overrepresents dominant racial perspectives with alternative points of view designed to more accurately and fully represent history and society" 2 I note here that Love (2019) uses the term "anti-darkness" rather than anti-Blackness, and I have quoted this term as the author writes it. Love borrows from Du Bois' (1926) assertion: "We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot" (Love, 2019, p. 1). 7 (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019, p. 9). While much scholarship on critical literacies and anti- racist pedagogies focuses on classrooms with students and teachers of Color, I argue that it is also necessary for white teachers and students to grapple with racism in texts, schools, and society (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019). Still, and as I argue in the introduction to this chapter, the simple inclusion of literature by authors of Color does not guarantee in teachers and students an anti-racist pedagogical framework, and there are challenges to using literature for anti-racist aims with white teachers and students. Pre- service teachers, for example, do not always change their attitudes or biases toward historically marginalized groups, and they may respond more often with what they expect their instructor may want to hear in an anti-racist teacher preparation courses than with their actual ideas about race and racism (Thein & Sloan, 2012). As Domínguez (2017) writes, cultural diversity in curricula is “equally and easily likely to be misused, creating a false veneer over a pedagogy that still curricularizes racism and replicates colonial expectations and constructions of success, knowledge and behaviour” (p. 229). In other words, the inclusion of texts written by authors from diverse backgrounds will do little when implemented within a system that still prioritizes racist policies and practices in our schools. Teachers and students who use literature to discuss issues of race, power, and oppression, then, must interrogate the whiteness and and anti-Blackness present in and across texts in order to enact anti-racist pedagogies. Whiteness and Anti-Blackness in Literature Instruction Whiteness can be defined as an ideology that upholds white supremacy, or the belief that white people are intellectually, morally, physically, and spiritually superior to people of Color (Anderson, 2016; Painter, 2010). Whiteness "pervades nearly everything from nursery rhymes, cartoons, children's literature in the CCSS, and the ways in which we interact with and teach our students" (Muhammad, 2019, p. 54). In Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction 8 for White Students, Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) drawn on Morrison (1993) to argue that "literature does not simply reflect race and racism in American society; literature has played a role in constructing race and racism in American society" (p. 7). They further note the many ways that white students show resistance (Sleeter, 2011; Gordon, 2005) by using "white talk" to avoid discussing race (p. 5) and express emotions that make conversations about race unpredictable (Grinage, 2019; Matias, 2017; Sassi & Thomas, 2008). The authors argue for the accountability and responsibility that white teachers must enact in order to disrupt the relentless anti-Blackness and whiteness of the secondary ELA literary classroom: As white teachers, we must shoulder responsibility for interrupting racism in our classrooms, without always relying on our colleagues of color to take the lead in this work. In our teaching in White-dominant contexts, when White students share that they have not considered their Whiteness before, we must recognize that this omission, this silencing in their lives and in our own, must be rectified. We must understand that it is our role as White educators to do this work and that this work is not optional. (p. 3) Still, white teachers attempting to enact anti-racist pedagogies often offer literature that centers pain in stories of people of Color. Muhammad (2019) writes: [Teachers] repeatedly start Black people's stories with narratives of struggle or suffering. This teaching of African American history isn't problematic on its own, but when this becomes the only part of history taught, it is limiting ... When we frame the stories of people of color as narratives teeped in pain or even smallness, this becomes the dominant or sole representation. (p. 21) This centering of only or mainly pain in the stories of Black people and people of Color is problematic because it teaches all students, and white students in particular, that racism is the only story to be read about people of Color. This focus on pain is an act of anti-Blackness, and English teachers "enact racial violence on Black and Brown youth" when we fail to include literature that shows the joy and heroism of people of Color (Baker-Bell et al., 2017, pp. 123 - 124). Take, for example, Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides' (2019) discussion of how majority white students in one young adult literature course responded to Kwame Alexander's The Crossover. In this novel, Alexander makes the authorial decision not to specifically name the race of his characters. PSTs in 9 the course then felt that the book "did not seem Black" and that they "did not realize that the characters were African American" until their instructor specifically told them they were by pointing to many indicators of race in the text, particularly through evidence of African American literary tradition. By the end of the conversation, some were still arguing whether the book included Black characters at all, with one student ultimately saying, "It is a book about a Black kid, but it isn't a book about racism" (p. 34). In this example, it is clear that white students have been taught, through the increased representation of characters of Color in their English language arts classrooms, that books that include characters of Color are books about racism. A continued deleterious effect of whiteness in English language arts classrooms, then, is that people of Color are read only through their pain. Like Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides, in my young adult literature course discussed in article 3, I, too, offered a range of texts, most of which emphasize some aspect of the pain of racism. In and of itself, this inclusion is not "bad," however when white students in white-dominant contexts only read about this pain, they are being miseducated about the humanity of people of Color. As Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides write: Reading this set of texts in combination helped students comprehend the ways racism has worked systematically in the U.S. through laws, language policy, schools, and citizenship. On the other hand, it seemed these literature selections contributed an emphasis on stories about people of color as stories about racism. (p. 38). As I consider how anti-racist ELA frameworks can help students understand the legacies of continued systemic racial oppression on the education of youth in ELA classrooms, I also wonder how ELA teacher educators might better enact anti-racist curriculum that is "more various and more beautiful" (Baldwin, 1963) than only enactments of pain. Again Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) write, All children in schools deserve to have their identities reflected in ways that are not always sad, depressing, or painful. Students of color deserve a wide range of stories that are uplifting - without having to focus exclusively on civil rights or other historical heroes. They deserve 10 stories that explore a wide range of genres and topics, including family stories about parents, siblings, and falling in love. (p. 41) Refusing the full humanity of characters of Color in our literature selections is an enactment of whiteness and this whiteness is implicated within the anti-Blackness that constitutes our schooling systems, curricula, and pedagogies. Interrogating anti-Blackness and whiteness requires a criticality on the part of teachers, and white teachers in particular. Muhammad (2019) writes, "Criticality calls for a direct interruption of the things that disturb peace in the world and in communities" (p. 120). Criticality, she writes, is equally important for students who have been historically marginalized as it is for those who have not, as criticality in our teaching and learning standards helps students "investigate positions from different standpoints" and "learn the historical, institutional, and structural elements that shape the world and that explains why forms of oppression exist" (p. 121). Moreover, this criticality necessitates that anti-racist teachers, including anti-racist white teachers, do something to change and interrupt the system of racial oppression that constitutes our society and schools (Baker-Bell, 2020; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019; Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019). I further argue that it is imperative for all students and teachers to investigate the origins of their emotions in order to trace the feelings attached to objects and bodies over time as we read and discuss literature for anti-racist pedagogical aims. Emotion, Affect, and Objects of Feeling In this dissertation, I focus on how emotion resonates within and across objects and bodies of feeling in literature instruction. While I discuss this in more detail in articles 1 & 2, I briefly define these terms here. Emotion. Building upon feminist, poststructural, and critical framings, I see emotion as socially and historically constructed. Emotion is “how we respond to objects and others” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 10), and emotions also “give us information about what we care about and why” (p. xviii). 11 Emotions are constantly shaping and shaped by language and culture (Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2005), and emotions are highly connected to, influence, and are influenced by reason and thought (Boler, 1999; Winans, 2012; Jaggar, 1989). Emotions are not “biologically determined” and they are learned in a variety of locations throughout our childhood and adulthood, especially through schooling (Boler, 1999). Mainstream society often deems certain expressions of emotion as “more” or “less” emotional, such as a sudden angry outburst in public being more emotional than a quieter response of joy to a literature text. I diverge from this conceptualization of emotion, as I follow Thein, Guise, and Sloan (2015) in viewing both examples as equally emotional. Particular bodies are allowed to express particular emotions in particular settings; these structures are negotiated through emotional rules, or boundaries that demarcate how only certain people are given license to feel and express certain emotions (Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 2007; Zembylas, 2002, 2005). These boundaries of emotion are gendered, raced, and classed. Thus, emotions are always and already imbued with and are about power (Ahmed, 2010, 2014; Boler, 1999; Grinage, 2019; Lorde, 2007). I say, then, that emotions are socially and historically constructed because the rules that govern the boundaries between who is allowed the expression of particular emotions and who is not are learned through social interactions, all of which are (hi)storied. Emotion and affect. There has been much fruitful theorization of the distinctions and inextricability of emotions and affect (Ahmed, 2010, 2014; Gorton, 2007; Ngai, 2005; Probyn, 2005), and in this dissertation I follow Ahmed's (2014) understanding of emotion and affect as being intricately connected and possibly inseparable from one another. I agree that affect may refer to the subconscious resonances of external stimuli on the body, or the "forces of encounter ... born in in- betweenness" of our interactions with the world (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 2). I also see emotion as a cultural and social inventory of some of these resonances (Ahmed, 2010). Thus, I refer to emotion in this dissertation, rather than affect, as I seek to move with the socially and historically 12 constructed understandings of emotion for discussions of power and oppression in classroom settings. Objects of feeling. While I define emotion above, I also follow Ahmed (2010, 2014) in being less interested in what emotion is and more interested in how emotion moves, sticks, and attaches itself to various objects and bodies of feeling across space and time. In the example from the prologue to this dissertation, my grandmother's bright orange Betty Crocker cookbook is an object of feeling that holds more individual layers of emotion for me, traces that move amongst my spatial and temporal selves and broadcasts emotional meaning for me in the present moment. Objects of feeling can also include emotion that resonates in more collective ways; as I'm writing this in spring 2020, for example, a COVID-19 test kit is an object of feeling that likely holds great resonance for each of us. Importantly, objects of feeling can also be bodies that have been dehumanized and turned into "objects" over time. Ahmed (2010) writes that the aim of anti-racism is to trace the historical saturation of emotion onto objects of feeling in order to understand how our emotions, rather than being irrational or antithetical to reason, help to inform our worldview and indicate to us that something is amiss in the way that our worlds are unjustly constructed (Boler, 1999; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 1983). Focusing on objects of feeling for anti-oppressive pedagogies, then, is beneficial in helping teachers and students interrogate and use texts and the emotions they foment in ELA classrooms committed to anti-racism. This dissertation is composed of three articles and covers two research sites. The first is a 12th grade Methods & Modes of Inquiry critical media literacy course and the second is an undergraduate pre-service teaching course on young adult literature. I briefly describe the contexts of each research site below. 13 12th Grade Critical Media Literacy Course Swanson High School is a large, suburban high school [Swanson High School3] in the U.S. Midwest. The racial demographics of the student population of Swanson High School, with a total enrollment of 1,378 students, is as follows. These terms are those chosen by US News and World Report (2017): American Indian or Alaskan Native (0.3%); Asian (3%); Two or more races (7%); Black (12%); Latinx (13%); and white (63%). I engaged as a co-teacher and co-instructor, as well as a researcher-participant, in one critical media literacy course for mainly 12th grade students. This course was taught by Ms. Granger, who had created the course curriculum herself. The main focal point of the study is a unit entitled "The Social Construction of Race and Gender." During this unit, we read the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a text chosen by Ms. Granger given the interest many of her students had in this book. Ms. Granger was invested in this course and in enacting ELA pedagogies committed to anti- oppressive, and particularly anti-racist, aims. She and I met in early 2018 when I contacted the principal of Swanson High to determine interest on the part of the ELA teachers of the school in engaging in a research project centering anti-racist ELA curriculum through literature. Ms. Granger usually identifies as a white person; however, in interviews with me, she confessed that she often feels conflicted about whether to identify as "mixed race," given that her father is Egyptian and her mother is white and she sometimes is physically identified by others as a person of Color. Data generated in this research context included 22 focal participant interviews, 11 total video recorded class sessions, 12 sets of exit ticket reflections, my fieldnotes, e-mail communication between Ms. Granger and me, and student classwork and homework. I video-recorded select class 3 All names of people and places in this dissertation are pseudonyms. The only exception is my name. 14 sessions, choosing the class sessions when I knew, based on my co-planning with Ms. Granger, that discussions of race and racism would be central. All class sessions in which we discussed the novel The Hate U Give and which I was present were also video-recorded. I analyzed data using both in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2015), "thinking with" theories of emotion (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Zapata & Van Horn, 2017; Ahmed, 2014), and visual analysis using my brother Shane's watercolor marker drawings (Sousanis, 2015). This research context forms the basis of the second article of this dissertation. Undergraduate Pre-service Teaching YA Literature Course The second research site was an undergraduate pre-service teaching young adult literature in which I was both the researcher and the course instructor. In this course, pre-service teachers and I- - all students at a large public university in the U.S. Midwest--read and responded to 12 young adult novels. Of the pre-service teacher participants, three identify as Asian American, two as Latinx, and 14 as white. All 19 participants identify as cisgender women and ranged from sophomores to seniors. Data for this context included quick write journal reflections, audio- and video-recorded class discussions, and one collective class Google document. I focused my analysis on the penultimate unit of the course about two texts: All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and the Netflix documentary from Ava DuVernay entitled 13th. I used iterative, thematic, and ongoing coding throughout the semester as well as at the conclusion of the semester (Braun & Clarke, 2006; McArthur & Muhammad, 2017) and used in vivo coding, focusing directly on words used by the participants themselves. In this analysis, I paid primary attention to the ways that pre-service teachers did or did not interrogate whiteness and anti- Blackness in their readings of these two texts. This research context forms the basis of the third article of this dissertation. 15 Researcher Positionality We are, of course, more than a sum of our parts. While here I construct a positionality that centers three aspects of my identity, I see this self-work as ongoing in aiming to construct a more just curriculum with and for students and teachers. I also see these parts as not separate from one another, and instead continually informing and constituting each other throughout my work as a researcher, teacher, and human. Whiteness and race. I am a white, able-bodied, cishetero woman who was raised in a middle class, U.S. Midwestern home. I am also Catholic, married, and a graduate student at the same place where I earned my undergraduate degree. I attended Catholic schools from 1st through 12th grade and again for my master's degree. Most of the spaces where I grew up were white, including the schools I attended, the Masses in which I prayed, and the books I read. I am privileged in more ways than I am not. As I note in the third article of my dissertation, I, along with most white students in the U.S., have been miseducated regarding issues of race, power, and oppression in this country and the historical legacies of racism and white supremacy that constitute our current schooling system. I also know that I will never arrive at being fully anti-racist; it is an impossible goal yet one that is necessary to always push toward in an eternal process of becoming (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). My whiteness constitutes my worldview, and thus my whiteness influences the ways that I engaged in this research process, analyzed data, and wrote this dissertation. In some ways, my whiteness provided me insights about race and racism in ELA contexts, particularly when discussing racism with white students. In many other ways, my whiteness inhibited me from understanding the layers and saturations of emotion present between and among objects and bodies of feeling in these classroom contexts. 16 Shane. As will be addressed in more detail in article 1, I am Shane's youngest sister. Shane is 13 years older than me and is developmentally disabled due to his epilepsy, a condition that causes him to have seizures at least twice a month and that forced the left side of his body to curve underneath itself. Shane did not graduate from any traditional schooling, although he did graduate from his own school, one that, for him, was humanizing and taught him ways to communicate with my parents, myself, and my other four siblings. Shane currently lives at home with our parents. Last spring, he underwent surgery for a hip replacement that did not succeed, and now he is unable to walk or move without a wheelchair. He has always talked to us using a series of ten sounds that only his immediate family understands: My name is Ra-Ra for the r's he hears in my full name - Mary Martha; he says "ah huh!" to say thank you; he pushes his hair between two fingers pinched together with the sound "kuh kuh" to say haircut. One of my favorite phenomena in life is the fact that, while he relies on these sounds to communicate to us, Shane understands everything that we say, so that when we say "Shane, can you turn the light on?", he obliges. I use Shane's drawings in this dissertation to construct a conceptual framework for understanding the layering of emotions present across objects and bodies and feeling in ELA classrooms. I understand that, in doing this, it is necessary to explain the ways that Shane's body has been dehumanized across oppressive spaces. There are countless times I remember people laughing at and mocking Shane, times that cause my own anger to rise up from my belly and that even now, as I write this decades later, leave my face red from frustration and shame. I would like to also emphasize here, in the midst of this oppression, the joy of Shane, and hopefully not in a condescending or ableist way. What I mean to say is that, in order to understand my positionality in this project, it is important to note that Shane's laughter is, hands down, the most contagious and the most filling of any I have ever heard. It is important to note that, if there is any goodness to be 17 found in me, I learned it from being Shane's sister. It is important to note that, of all the humans I've met in this life, he is the best I know. Teaching. I have wanted to be a teacher since I first started school; each year as I graduated to the next grade I wanted to be the teacher of that most recent grade, so that when I ended third grade I was certain I would teach third grade and when I graduated 11th grade I was certain I would teach 11th and now that I will graduate a doctoral program I am certain I would like to teach 22nd grade. I say this while still emphasizing my love of teaching middle and high schoolers. I began my teaching career as a middle school ELA teacher in Jacksonville, FL. I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade for three years, so that the 6th graders I began with I became particularly close with when I completed my time as a teacher at that school, having cycled up with them for each of their middle school years. As the cliché goes, I learned more from them in my first years of teaching than they learned from me, a fact that sometimes keeps me awake at night wishing I could go back and have a do-over with how I facilitated a discussion of Countee Cullen's poem "The Incident" or that I had better responded to Thomas' beautiful poem he reluctantly created as we sat outside for free write time or, most saliently, that I had better interrogated with them the racism of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Still, I learned in those three years, and what I most learned was that my third grade self had been correct in my desire to be a teacher. I returned to Michigan with my husband through a Catholic volunteer corps that placed me in a local school in Southwest Detroit. For two years, I taught 9th and 10th grade English. The moments I wish I had for do-overs there are even more than in Jacksonville, as it was here that I most saliently noticed the miseducation of my whiteness (Baldwin, 1963; DiAngelo, 2016). It was here that I attempted and often failed to support my students, almost all of whom identified as students of Color, in interrogating the ways their lived 18 experiences were connected to historical and contemporary legacies of race and racism, as well as to the joys, literacies, and art present in their lives and worldviews. I include this aspect of my positionality, a teacher, as it necessarily informs the pedagogical and researcher moves I make in this dissertation. My experiences as a teacher further constitute my worldview as a human in and beyond classroom settings, and particularly in my understandings of justice across the self, schooling, and society. Chapter-by-Chapter Overview In Article 1, I offer a conceptual piece explaining what I call drawn emotions as a metaphor for understanding emotions through Shane's artwork in anti-oppressive ELA classrooms. I follow Loveless (2019) in viewing art as having "an important and often overlooked part to play" in discussions of justice and anti-oppressive pedagogies. Loveless, in describing what she calls the "compromised times" in which we live, amongst climate change, racialized violence, and oppression against indigenous peoples, writes that the arts: offer modes of sensuous, aesthetic attunement, and work as a conduit to focus attention, elicit public discourse, and shape cultural imaginaries. "How might the world be organized differently?" is a question that matters urgently, and it is a question that art ... asks in generative and complex ways. (p. 16) In this dissertation, I use art to imagine how "the world might be organized differently," and I use Shane's art in particular for a few reasons: First, I attempt intersectional approaches to mapping objects of feeling across anti-oppressive ELA curriculum in order to interrogate whiteness within and across literary response. Second, across my work as a whole, I aim to center literacies and art from those who have been historically marginalized across identity markers, including ability. Third, I see the use of Shane's drawings as the beginning of the use of art as an analytic tool for me, and I aim to build upon this work to center art outside the realm of traditional ELA forms such as reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In the future, I will also work with youth participants of 19 Color as they create their own art through which we might analyze power and oppression in ELA classrooms. In article 1, I construct a framework for understanding emotions as drawn across space and time in ELA classrooms, ultimately using this framework to understand a past moment from my own teaching as a high school English teacher in Detroit. Drawing on data generated with Ms. Granger and her students, in Article 2 I use this conceptual framing of drawn emotions to empirically examine what I call cyclical emotional literary events in a critical media literacy course. I explore how students' emotional responses to Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give afford and constrain the anti-racist possibilities of literature in ELA classrooms. The findings from this study highlight how teachers and students navigate "ruptures" as they discuss and respond to literature about race and racism. These findings also complicate my own role as a teacher-participant in this context, and the ways that whiteness moves between and amongst objects of feeling even as we attempt to construct anti-racist ELA classrooms. In Article 3, I shift gears to focus on another context for anti-oppressive ELA pedagogies: the pre-service teacher education classroom. In this chapter, I draw on data from my undergraduate young adult literature course as we read and discussed the novel All American Boys and the documentary 13th. Borrowing from Adichie's (2009) TED talk, I discuss the concept of "refusing secondly" in the midst of whiteness and anti-Blackness in readers' responses to texts in this white- dominant course. Findings from this article demonstrate the necessity of interrogating whiteness with majority white pre-service teachers reading young adult literature, while simultaneously refusing to center whiteness pedagogically. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by returning to where I began: how can literature offer space for teachers and students to enact anti-oppressive and anti-racist curriculum with and for their students? In this conclusion, I offer implications for this work for teacher educators, pre-service teachers, ELA researchers, and ELA teachers in constructing anti-oppressive and anti-racist 20 curriculum. I center an attention to emotion in constructing anti-oppressive curriculum and to do so in ways that understand our processes of becoming more actively anti-racist as "incomplete, incoherent, always shifting and changing"; in short as a process of eternally becoming and yet never arriving (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019, p. 144). 21 REFERENCES 22 REFERENCES Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Adichie, C. (2009, June). The danger of a single story. [Video File]. Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. Croydon, England: Edinburgh University Press. Baker-Bell, A., Butler, T., & Johnson, L. (2017). 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Discursive practices, genealogies, and emotional rules: A poststructuralist view on emotion and identity in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21, 935 - 948. productions among young Latino picture book makers. Research in the Teaching of English, 51 (3), pp. 290 - 316. rules. Educational Theory, 52 (2), 187 - 208. 26 CHAPTER 2: ARTICLE 1 Drawn Emotions: A Conceptualization of Anti-Oppressive ELA Classrooms through Shane's Drawings Illustrator: Shane Peter Lefere Introduction "I ain't scared of no dog. I ain't scared of no dog." - Mrs. Williams, Just Mercy, p. 180 In Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, attorney Bryan Stevenson looks at race, the U.S. criminal justice system, and capital punishment. Stevenson tells his story of exonerating Walter McMillian, a Black Alabama man wrongly convicted of the 1986 murder of a white woman; when convicted by an all-white jury, the judge ultimately places McMillian on death row. The text moves through alternating chapters, half focusing on McMillian's experiences in prison for a crime he did not commit and half tackling the racist and legal practices that result in the overwhelming numbers of Black and Brown prisoners who await execution. At one point, Stevenson has gathered enough evidence to return to court and argue on McMillian's behalf. On the first of the three-day trial Stevenson is overwhelmed by support from Walter's community, as family and friends of the unjustly condemned man fill the courtroom near to capacity. As a result, the prosecution blocks McMillian's supporters entry to the courtroom on the trial's second day. Stevenson writes, Inside the courtroom door they had placed a large metal detector, on the other side of which was an enormous German shepherd held back by a police officer. The courtroom was already half filled. The benches that had been filled by Walter's supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white people (p. 175). Because there was only so much room left for McMillian's supporters, the group decided that Mrs. Williams, "an older Black woman," should represent them. As Mrs. Williams walked into 27 court, she "commanded a presence," and though she moved "more slowly than everybody else, she held her head high with an undeniable grace and dignity." She was ready to defend McMillian and to stand up for justice and for the communities she had worked to "build and sustain" (p. 176) over the course of her life. And that, Stevenson writes, "was when she saw the dog": I watched all her composure fall away, replaced by a look of absolute fear. Her shoulders dropped, her body sagged, and she seemed paralyzed. For over a minute she stood there, frozen, and then her body began to tremble and then shake noticeably. I heard her groan. Tears were streaming down her face and she began to shake her head sadly. I kept watching until she turned around and quickly walked out of the courtroom. I felt my own mood shift. I didn't know exactly what had happened to Mrs. Williams, but I knew that here in Alabama, police dogs and black folks looking for justice had never mixed well. (pp. 176 - 177) The next and final day of the trial, Mrs. Williams returns to the courtroom determined to walk past the German shepherd, praying loudly "Lord, I can't be scared of no dog" (p. 180). Stevenson learns that, in Selma in 1965, Mrs. Williams marched for voting rights and was beaten and attacked by police dogs. When she overcomes her fear of the German shepherd, McMillian's supporters "already inside beamed with joy as she passed them" (p. 181). She reaches her seat behind McMillian at the front of the courtroom and proudly proclaims, "Attorney Stevenson, I'm here!" Mrs. Williams’ courtroom scene is rife with emotion, both the overt expressions of emotion with which most of us are familiar (tears, paralysis, beaming smiles) and the covert resonances of unexplained, but still experienced, feeling. In this paper, I conceptualize the ways that emotion similarly moves in English language arts (ELA) classrooms committed to anti-oppression. To do this, I theoretically rely on Ahmed's (2010, 2014) theories of emotion as moving across space and time. To conceptualize this movement of emotion, I borrow from my brother Shane's, who is developmentally disabled, drawings. I formulate a theory of emotion that is "drawn": drawn across the past, present, and future; drawn through socially constructed rules of emotion; and drawn through messy and uncertain representations of our felt emotions. 28 I begin with Mrs. Williams' bravery to illustrate how emotions move across space and time through what Ahmed (2010) calls "objects and bodies of feeling." Objects, like a German shepherd being held back by a police officer, hold layers of emotion for us; these layers extend from our collective and individual histories, presents, and futures. The German shepherd in this scene held layers of personal, individual emotion for Mrs. Williams: as a young woman, she was personally attacked by police dogs, and thus came to fear a situation in which a dog was being held back by police. The German shepherd also is an object that holds layers of historical, collective feeling, emotion that is not only particular to Mrs. Williams but is felt by, for instance, her daughter, by Walter McMillian, by Stevenson, by the judge awaiting the trial, and in varying degrees, by the readers of Just Mercy. The German shepherd, the metal detector, and Mrs. Williams are saturated with emotion for those witnessing or reading this scene. Stevenson "felt his own mood shift" when Mrs. Williams left the courtroom in fear; McMillian's supporters already seated in the courtroom "beamed with joy" at the sight of Mrs. Williams conquering her fear the next day. Emotions, then, saturated and moved amongst the key players in that room and "shaped the surfaces" (Ahmed, 2014) of the objects viewed: the dog, the metal detector, and even the courtroom itself. Stevenson attests that, as the trial began after Mrs. Williams first fled the courtroom, he "was trying to shake off the dark feeling that the morning's events had conjured" (p. 177). This "dark feeling" is what Ahmed (2014) refers to as the layering or saturation of emotion across objects and bodies of feeling. Emotions are attached to "objects of feeling," or the material and immaterial "things," bodies, and collectives that attach or become saturated with emotion or feeling over time. These attachments are “shaped by the contact we4 have with others,” (p. 4) across time and space, both personally as well as historically. The emotions that attach to particular objects and bodies, 4 In this article, I use the pronoun "we" to emphasize that the attachment of emotions is saturated throughout the objects of feeling present not only in the lives of characters from literature but also in all of our everyday lived realities 29 then, attach themselves within our own personal and individual histories as well as in the social histories of what came and what will come in the years, decades, and centuries before and after us. This attachment moves across history, so that humans can affect and be affected by, evaluate and be evaluated by, objects of feeling that we never came into contact with ourselves, but that other subjects have come into contact with over time. The emotions in the courtroom that day are, of course, saturated across the present moment of that exact time in the courtroom: the second day of a trial to exonerate Walter McMillian. But these emotions are not only saturated amongst contemporary layers; they are saturated amongst historical events that came decades before that moment (Mrs. Williams in 1965 in Selma) or even centuries before our birth (the historical legacies of slavery and white supremacy). Ahmed (2010) argues that the work of anti-oppression requires a tracing of the histories that are attached to the objects of feeling that circulate in our affective economies (p. 44), much (all?) of which is negotiated through emotional rules and various social constructions such as race, class, ability, gender, sexuality, nationality, language, and ethnicity. The attachment of emotion onto objects of feeling in the scene with Mrs. Williams and the German shepherd, then, points us toward historical moments that include, but are not limited to, the following: ● The dog as an object of feeling: The resistance of civil rights activists in the 1960s and the violent responses of police through the use of dogs, beatings, and water hoses. ● The courtroom as an object of feeling: The layers of emotion attached to courtrooms as a system of racialized mass incarceration and injustice, most saliently through the personhood of Walter McMillian. ● Mrs. Williams as attached with emotion: Stevenson's response of emotion, the courtroom's response of emotion, the reader's potential response of emotion as they read of her bravery 30 ● The object of policing in a public space: metal detectors upon entering and a German shepherd as security. ● The object of the city in which the prosecution falsely claimed Walter McMillian murdered a white woman: Monroeville, Alabama. Monroeville is the hometown of To Kill a Mockingbird author, Harper Lee. Despite this novel's flaws and the presence of many other beautiful and racially nuanced texts written by authors of Color, To Kill a Mockingbird remains enormously influential in American society, topping the list of most often used texts in U.S. English classrooms for decades (Applebee, 1993; Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Stallworth, Gibbons, & Fauber, 2006). As Stevenson argues, there is great irony in the celebration of Lee for writing a novel in which a white lawyer fails to save the life of a Black man unjustly accused of harming a white woman occurring in a town in which a Black man is sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit (pp. 23 - 24). In this paper, I explore how English educators and researchers might attune ourselves to the historical and contemporary layers and saturations of emotion in ELA classrooms committed to anti-oppression. I argue that this attention to the historical and contemporary layering of emotion is essential for ELA classrooms as discussions of power and oppression are enacted through texts. Using Ahmed's (2010, 2014) construction of objects of feeling and borrowing from my brother Shane's watercolor marker drawings, I put forth a theory of drawn emotions to conceptualize how emotions are constructed and layered between and amongst humans, space, and time. While my research and teaching focus primarily on anti-racist ELA classrooms, I see a theory of drawn emotions as useful for exploring how ELA classrooms might be broadly anti-oppressive. I begin with a review of the literature on anti-oppressive stances in ELA classrooms and emotion in ELA classrooms. I then discuss my researcher positionality before turning to Shane's drawings in connection to Ahmed's theoretical framing of objects of feeling. Then, I remember my 31 student Richard's question - "Miss, I know you don't live in Detroit, right?", overlaying Shane's drawings to consider how English teachers might construct classrooms committed to interrupting the historical and contemporary legacies of power and oppression through an attunement toward emotion. I end with a discussion of the implications of drawn emotions for ELA classrooms committed to anti-oppressive curricular stances. Literature Review Anti-oppressive ELA Spaces In this dissertation, I focus on anti-racism as a pedagogical stance in a critical media literacy course (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017). Broader than anti-racism is anti-oppressive pedagogy. To understand anti-oppressive pedagogy, in ELA and broadly, we must understand oppression. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) define oppression as: a force that presses down upon members of historically marginalized groups in order to benefit those in power. Oppression describes a set of policies, practices, traditions, norms, definitions, and explanations (discourses), which function to systematically exploit one social group to the benefit of another social group (p. 61). Oppression, and resistance to oppression, crosses multiple and intersecting socially constructed identities including (but not limited to) race, class, gender, language, and ability. Oppression also is foundational to the geographic, economic, residential, and educational contours of cities. Muhammad (2019) writes that "as long as oppression exists in the world, young people need pedagogy that nurtures criticality." This criticality must be able to interrogate oppression so that youth can use their lived experiences to push toward "social transformation" (p. 12). Oppression is intimately connected to the way we read, see, and, as I argue in this article, feel the spaces and places within which we learn. I see ELA classrooms as a space of profound potential to engage anti-oppressive stances through the deconstruction and creation of art across reading, writing, speaking, and listening. 32 The focus on space and place is central to an anti-oppressive ELA stance, as the literacies and cities of youth in and out of secondary English classrooms are already-present texts through which teachers and students may center joy and disrupt oppression (Watson, 2018; Watson & Beymer, 2019; Kinloch, 2010). The spaces within which we live and learn are layered with historical and contemporary enactments of emotion, and in other words are "objects of feeling" (Ahmed, 2010). Butler (2018) centers space and place in her articulation of Black girl cartographies. She argues for a framework centered in the sociocultural and geopolitical locations of Black girls. Similarly, in Kinloch's foundational (ext Harlem on Our Minds (2010), the author argues that the questions youth pose about their world may inform PSTs’ construction of ELA curriculum focused on racial justice and founded in analyses of space, youth voice, and the everyday as art. Kinloch also centers Freire’s notions of space: “People, as beings ‘in a situation,’ find themselves rooted in temporal-spatial conditions which mark them and which they also mark” (p. 90). Anti-oppressive literacy pedagogies urge PSTs to understand how they “mark and are marked by” the spaces in which they live, learn, and teach. These spaces are themselves imbued with emotional meaning. Teachers and researchers have also long argued for the use of literature to address issues of power and oppression in ELA curriculum. As Thomas (2016) argued, while the struggle for so- called "multicultural children's literature" is often said to begin with Larrick's (1965) article “The All- White World of Children’s Books," as early as the mid-nineteenth century Black parents and community members were advocating for representation of people of Color in literature for children and young adults (Adichie, 2009; Bishop, 2007; Connolly, 2013; Martin, 2004). In addition to analyzing race and racism through children's literature, scholars have argued for literature that addresses sexuality (Blackburn, 2005; Clark & Blackburn, 2009; Dinkens & Englert, 2015); citizenship (Chattarji, 2010; Tuon, 2014); ability (Curwood, 2013; Hughes, Hunt-Barron, Wagner, & Evering, 2014); gender (Gooden & Gooden, 2001; Kinman & Henderson, 1985; Thomas, 2019); 33 and other issues of power and oppression. ELA classrooms, then, are seen as places where students and teachers might more strongly read and write new ways of being in the world by deconstructing and reimagining texts for justice. Emotion and Anti-Oppressive ELA Spaces The sole inclusion of literature by authors across historically marginalized identities is not enough, however, to automatically construct and enact an anti-oppressive pedagogical stance (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Garcia & Haddix, 2014; Thomas, 2018, 2019). I argue that an attention to emotion may help students and teachers construct anti-oppressive curriculum in ELA classrooms. Emotion is most often welcomed into the ELA classroom through the form of “personal response,” and is frequently viewed as a tool to be used by ELA educators to help students reach more “analytical” interpretations of texts (Appleman, 2009; Beers, 2003). Emotion is rarely depicted as inherently intellectual in itself, and is instead viewed as a vehicle through which students can achieve more valuable literary interpretations. Moreover, with the current focus on high-stakes testing, emotion is rarely understood as an intricate aspect of what it means to be literate (Dunn & Certo, 2016). All classrooms (like all social constructions) are imbued with emotional rules, or norms of behavior, learned throughout childhood and into adulthood that dictate which emotions are appropriate and which are not (Zembylas, 2002). The ways in which students respond to literature, then, are governed by emotional rules. Readers from historically marginalized groups, such as women or students of Color, are socially dissuaded through emotional rules from expressing emotions such as anger (Boler, 1999; Dunn, Moore, & Neville, in press; Lorde, 2007) in literature response classrooms. While ELA curriculum often encourages emotion only as a form of personal literary response, Thein, Guise, and Sloan (2015) assert that emotion is not something to be “leveraged, ignored, or gotten beyond” (p. 202) in literature classrooms. Instead, emotion is “part 34 and parcel with our intellectual work,” (Stenberg, 2011, p. 360) and is thus not only necessary but already present in our responses to texts in anti-oppressive classrooms. These broader societal understandings of emotion also influence the ELA classroom, particularly through literary response. As Thein et al. (2015) attest, emotion is “in the fabric of every classroom context” (p. 200). This is certainly the case in anti-oppressive ELA classrooms as students respond to literature. In their study of a secondary critical literacy classroom, Thein et al. (2015) note that, while the teacher was committed to helping students deconstruct power and identity using literature, students bucked against this anti-oppressive framework within small group settings. Students also changed their emotional expression in larger classroom discussions to fit the critical literacy discourse of the classroom. The authors argue that emotions “guided, policed, and shaped learning” when responding to literature and to peers. They advocate for the type of “critical emotional literacy” (Winans, 2012) that might help students not only acknowledge the emotional rules of a particular setting or reading of a text ,but also disrupt the emotional rules to gain further insights into the relationships between power, discourse, and emotion. v The authors argue against this model of English curriculum, stating that frameworks of personal literary response “focus on the right and tasteful kind of affect (or feeling),” thus directing what forms of emotions are appropriate in a literature classroom. “Empathy” and “enthusiasm about literature,” then, are sanctioned while anger is not (p. 321). Like Stenberg (2011), Thein et al. (2015), and Winans (2012), Lewis and Tierney attest that examining which emotions are deemed “correct and desirable” in a literature classroom is beneficial for helping students deconstruct dominant power structures for an anti-oppressive ELA framework. Following Boler, Winans (2012) critiques the type of “passive empathy” sometimes articulated by students in critical, multicultural education courses. She writes that the pity that some students who are historically privileged express when reading culturally diverse texts, for example, 35 might actually “pity, objectify, or distance themselves from others in ways that simply reinforce rather than question inequitable social norms” (p. 160). Winans also argues that emotions are sites of control and resistance that “inform and guide our attention and the kinds of questions we choose to explore” (p. 155). Cultivating a critical emotional literacy, then, could help students analyze their own and others’ emotions in order to reflect upon the power structures that influence how we respond with emotion to one another and to texts. She defines critical emotional literacy as: The ability to understand how emotions function, particularly in terms of the ways that they inform identity, impact our relationship to social norms, and guide our attention. Critical emotional literacy entails recognizing experiences of emotions in ourselves, in others, and in groups, and it calls us to identify emotional rules of our environments and communities and to consider their impact. (p. 155) In Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education, Matias (2017) demonstrates how common portrayals of a white person’s emotions when confronted with the pain and trauma of racial injustices for people of Color are often read by dominant society as sadness or empathy. However, this so-called empathy is not a form of “authentic caring” (Valenzuela, 1999) that might help teacher candidates better serve and respond to the needs of their future students of Color. Instead, Matias argues that this expression of sadness toward the pain of people of Color is actually a form of disgust manifest in a more “politically correct” way (p. 25). She also writes that, in order for white teacher candidates to authentically commit to anti-racism in their teaching and lives, they must be given opportunities to “feel” and “recognize” their emotions as well as where these emotions originate so that they might then be able to persevere through the emotional “ups and downs of discussing race” (p. 25). In constructing and enacting anti-oppressive frameworks, emotions are always and already at play in the ways that teachers and students read and create modes of resistance to oppression. In this article, I conceptualize how such emotions move across space and time in ways that both complicate and may support our attempts to engage anti-oppressive pedagogical 36 stances in ELA classrooms through literature. I now turn to my own positionality in constructing a conceptual framework of drawn emotions for anti-oppressive ELA spaces. Positionality "How does a reader of any race situate herself or himself in order to approach the world of a Black writer? Won't there always be apprehension about what may be revealed, exposed about the reader?" - Morrison, 1987, Sula, p. Xii In this article, I put forth the concept of drawn emotions to consider how emotions move amongst, between, and through objects and bodies of feeling. This is not an abstract or only intellectual theorizing; my positionality is bound up with my whiteness and within the choice to use Shane's drawings to understand how emotions circulate amongst objects and bodies of feeling in an ELA classroom committed to anti-oppression. Like Morrison attests in her foreword to Sula, I feel apprehension in approaching race and oppression as a white person, and particularly in doing it through the drawings of my brother, Shane. In considering my own positionality, I begin with Lumen Christi. In Latin, my high school's name means "the light of Christ," and the halls of this building where my parents were members of the first graduating senior class, where my sister’s 1996 5k cross country record (18 minutes, 17 seconds) still stands prominently in the entrance to the gym, where I fell in love with my husband, are objects of feeling for me. It is also certainly the Light of Christ, in that its student population is staggeringly white, middle-to-upper class, and overwhelmingly Catholic. This school is emblematic of much of my positionality and upbringing, particularly surrounding race and religion. In addition to my positionality as a white teacher and Catholic, I also am a cis-gender woman, straight, and able-bodied, and I was raised in a middle-class, Midwestern American home. I attended private schools, including Lumen, until college, and although I attended a public university, this institution was predominantly white. While as a child and adolescent I read myriad texts that directly centered race, the vast majority of these texts were written by white authors. The high 37 school where I was an English teacher was the first space where I, at the age of 25, worked, lived, and existed in which the vast majority of individuals with whom I interacted were people of Color. Lumen, then, was and is a space imbued with whiteness, and is one space among many that taught me lessons I constantly must unlearn - lessons upholding whiteness as "Light," as the pinnacle or model of superiority. I will never achieve this unlearning; it is a process of taking off whiteness that I will constantly work toward but never fully achieve (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019). As a white person, I must constantly work against the hidden and overt lessons I learned in Lumen's hallways, passed down from generation to generation, forming layers of understanding for me as I eventually became a teacher of Black and Brown students. Shane's is a body that is white, and is also a body deemed inferior, a body that has been shaped by layers of feeling of what is bodily acceptable, a body that has shaped my understanding of power, of oppression, of what it means to center the works and literacies of those who have been historically marginalized. In using Shane's drawings, I am not attempting to equate or compare the experiences of those who have been historically marginalized because of ability and those who have been historically marginalized because of race. That is not the aim of this project. I borrow from Shane's drawings for three particular reasons: First, I attempt to use intersectional approaches to understanding anti-oppressive pedagogies, including anti-racist ELA frameworks (Crenshaw, 1990; Love, 2019). Second, I attempt to center the literacies and art of voices who have been historically marginalized across socially constructed identities, including ability. Oftentimes in schools, we see youth literacies as a problem to be solved, or as youth inherently having a literacy deficit that we must fix (Paris, 2012). By centering the artwork of a man who has not graduated from any traditional schooling, and speaks a language centered around ten sounds that reflect words known only to those closest to him, I hope to model possibilities of methodological and pedagogical inquiry in varied considerations of literacies (New London Group, 1996; Moje, Luke, Davies, & Street, 38 2009; Muhammad, 2019). Third, the use of Shane’s drawings is the beginning of the movement in my work toward art as an analytic tool. In the future, I seek to trace emotion with the artwork of youth participants of Color and teachers across intersecting identity markers (Love, 2019; Loveless, 2019). I further seek to use art in ways that might help white teachers and students better analyze, construct, and enact anti-racist pedagogies in ELA classrooms (Baker-Bell, 2020; Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019; Love, 2019). I borrow from Shane's drawings, then, to study the movement of emotions across discussions of power and oppression in order to see how we might work against the dehumanizing process of objectification that comes with a layering of emotion onto bodies of feeling that have been historically marginalized. In this way, I seek to move with emotion and with Shane's drawings in ways that may, as Baldwin (1963) writes, break our own "inhumanity and fear" as we construct ELA classrooms worthy of the students within them. Layers and Ruptures: Conceptually Framing Drawn Emotions through Shane's Artwork "And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?" - Richie, in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, p. 186 In my analysis, I theoretically frame the saturation of emotion through Ahmed's (2014) notion of "objects and bodies" of feeling. I conceptualize the saturation of emotion as impressing onto and being impressed upon by objects and bodies in these literary events through my brother Shane's watercolor marker drawings. I name this concept as drawn emotions. Like Ahmed, I am less interested in what emotion is, or how it is defined, and more interested in what emotions do, or how they move, attach, and stick to “objects of feeling." Tracing emotion to its Latin roots, Ahmed explains that the word originated in emovere, or “to move, to move out” (p. 11). But rather than emotions being what is circulating, what is moving, it is objects and 39 bodies that circulate, with particular emotions attached to particular objects and bodies. Over time, emotions become ordinary, taken for granted affects that are assumed to exist alongside, within, and even synonymously with the object or body (p. 6). This attachment of emotions matters for our presence with one another, as seen, for example, in the symbolic and physical violence against Black and Brown students in classrooms, the "othering" of students due to their positionalities across ability in schools through exclusive classrooms, and the dehumanizing transphobic and homophobic policies of schools. Further, emotions are always "about something" (p. 7), and they involve a stance-taking toward humans' negotiations and views of their lived realities in the world. In this "about-ness," emotions shape the objects they encounter and are shaped by the objects that they encounter. Ahmed notes that there is an inherent sociality of emotions, claiming that emotions are always about relationalities between objects and bodies through the "circulation of objects and bodies." Over time, these objects and bodies become saturated with emotion, thus becoming objects of feeling. Emotions, then, involve a form of "stickiness," a stickiness that enables objects of feeling to have layers of historical and emotional resonance over time. Similar to Richie's assertions in Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, quoted above, emotions cause a rupture of space and time, so that what has happened before does not only affect what happens after, but that, instead, was "past, present, and future all at once ... that everything was happening at once" (p. 186). On Objects and Bodies of Feeling "There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long- haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It's called the Indian Head test pattern." - Tommy Orange, There, There When Ahmed (and I) say "objects," she means material (or, my brother's watercolor drawings) immaterial (or, memory, or, the way Emmitt Till's mother must have remembered her 40 son's laughter), animate (or, the beaming faces of Mrs. Williams family and friends as she proudly enters the courtroom), or inanimate (or, the look on the face of Parker, the little girl whose photo was taken as she, captivated, gazed up at Michelle Obama's painting in the National Portrait Gallery) "things." An object of feeling can be a physical setting, like my childhood home, or a physical object, like the "Indian Head test pattern" from Tommy Orange's prologue to There, There. Importantly, and as I note in the above examples, objects of feeling can also be bodies that are turned into "objects" because of the dehumanizing attachment of emotions over time and across various structures of power like race, class, and gender. Why does this matter? Why is it helpful to consider particular objects of feeling as saturated with emotion in the space of an English classroom attempting an anti-oppressive framework? Again following Ahmed (2014), I see the circulation of objects of feeling across history as vital to the project of continuing and dehumanizing enactments of power and oppression. Ahmed notes that the work of understanding power necessitates that we pay attention to emotions and the ways that they shape and form the "surfaces of bodies and worlds" (p. 36). Take, for example, the prologue to Orange's There, There. Orange begins with a description of the "Indian Head Test Pattern," an image that dominated television broadcast patterns until the late 1970s when a person left her TV on after shows were finished. Using this "object" as the opening to his prologue, Orange directs our attention to the images of Indigenous peoples that were received by Indigenous and non-Indigenous TV viewers: Images of the head of an Indigenous person, both in the broadcast symbol and also as a symbol of the violence that began the nation now known as the United States. "Indian heads," Orange writes, were like flags flown, to be seen, cast broadly. Just like the Indian Head test pattern was broadcast to sleeping Americans as we set sail from our living rooms, over the ocean blue- green glowing air-waves, to the shores, to the screens of the New World. (p. 6) 41 There is value in tracing the objects of feeling that are "broadcast" to us across history and into contemporary and future understandings of power and oppression. In considering how objects of feeling are saturated with emotion, and how particular bodies are created into objects of feeling, the work of anti-oppressive English classrooms might begin by tracing how this saturation is historical, contemporary, and layered. This layering of emotion is also simultaneously individual and collective. Objects of feeling, as Ahmed (2014) notes with the N-word (p. 59) or a landmine (p 20), become highlighted in the collective imagination, but are often dehistoricized. The lack of historicizing, or the lack of analysis of how these objects became historically saturated with emotion, is a part of the project of a variety of systems of oppression, including racism, ableism, sexism, and heterosexism. How does this saturation work, though? To examine how objects become saturated with emotion, I borrow Shane's drawings as a conceptual framework. I see these drawings as a potentially useful metaphor for understanding the saturation and impression of emotions onto particular objects and bodies across space and time. I see these drawings as particularly useful in analyzing and coming to understand what happens in English classrooms as students and teachers discuss issues of power and oppression through literature. I now turn to Shane's drawings to conceptualize drawn emotions. Shane Peter: Emotions as Drawn A seizure is a sudden, uncontrolled electrical disturbance in the brain. It can cause changes in your behavior, movements or feelings, and in levels of consciousness. -Mayo Clinic, "Seizures" I stared out my window as Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" came on my Spotify shuffle. The lyrics vaguely registered in my mind - this song that always reminded me of Shane. Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion was sitting open-faced in front of me, green and yellow highlighted lines vibrant against my dull, scrawled handwriting in the pages' margins. My gaze moved toward Shane's drawing, framed to the right of my window (See Figure 2). My computer was open 42 next to Ahmed, the cursor blinking at me in the midst of ethnographic fieldnotes. Tabs open: 12. Post-it Notes surrounding the window frame: 7. Transcribed interviews with students and teachers: 22. Words written for dissertation: 0. Figure 2. Shane's Drawing A I had finished collecting data the semester before, and there was something drawing me in - students' continued return to emotional events that occurred in response to discussing literature or discussing race or discussing both. I didn't know where to begin, but Ahmed was shaping the way I understood the emotional landscape of Ms. Granger's classroom. Shane was also shaping it. For the second time in 24 months, he was lying in a bed at Sparrow Hospital, our father seated beside him, likely asleep in the rigid chair next to Shane's pillow, his hand resting gently on Shane's unwashed curls. My dad hadn't left the building in seven days. I bet he had just signed the cross on Shane's forehead before they both drifted to sleep. Shane had landed in the hospital many 43 times over the course of my childhood but these past two events, both happening during my time in graduate school, were more serious. This most recent time, it was because the seizures wouldn't stop. We - my parents, my four other siblings, and I - all knew the variations and levels of concern associated with Shane's seizures. Shane's eyes rolling to the back of his head; a gutteral noise emanating from the crux of his throat; his legs kicking wildly; his tongue gurgling. These were the most frightening images and sounds to a person who had never before seen Shane in the grip of a seizure, but were the least concerning for us. These seizures were highly regular, happened at least once every two weeks since the day Shane was born 44 years ago, and lasted about four minutes. These were the type he'd had hundreds if not thousands of times, since the first one my parents noticed when he was eight months old, our mother helplessly holding his seizing infant body. They were the type that had created a developmental delay and curved his left hand up underneath itself, the seizures that permanently damaged the left side of his body, forcing his left foot to drag behind him as he walked. These were also the kind we knew how to manage and attempt to (but never fully) prevent - no, keep his shoes on in case he hits his foot too hard against the wall; someone grab a pillow for his head; it's okay, shay-bane, ra ra's here [does he hear me?]. - we'll have to stop giving him caffeine; does Dr. Burgess think we need to increase the Depakote?; what did he eat yesterday - I think the bread is what is making him have more this week. Seizures, then, were objects of feeling for each of us, in ways that both collectively and individually influenced our understanding of the world. They happened everywhere. In the middle of the dance floor at my cousin's wedding; in the Cheetos aisle at Meijer; in the last pew at St. Mary's; in our 1989 burgundy Aerostar van as we drove through Kentucky for a family vacation to Florida; in the snow; in the middle of a perfect three- point shot; in the middle of his laughter; right before he attempted, in his own language, to ask me for a French fry; during my family "Thank you" at Thanksgiving; in line for the Millennium Falcon 44 at Cedar Point in 1995; two steps in front of our five-year-old niece; as we sang the word "day" in "Happy birthday, dear Joshua"; on my sister's futon in Detroit; on his way up to receive Communion; in his wheelchair as he greeted my students during my second year of teaching; in the moment that I reached the Sirius Black reveal in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; as he opened a Christmas present; as he swung his arm in a wide circle, signing the word "Run" during my cross country meets; when he had just reached the "na na na na!!" part of "Hey Jude." These moments always brought fear to those who for the first time witnessed Shane's seizures in public, but for us, they were only slightly concerning. In reality, the quieter the seizure, both in volume and in physicality, the scarier. About two months before I sat at my desk uncertain of my dissertation, Tom Petty songs replaying in my mind, my dad had watched as Shane's eyes tilted to the right, his pupils seeming to disappear into the rightmost crease of his eyesocket. The pupil then slid back and forth, back and forth, his blue irises that are exactly my blue irises disappearing and reappearing again. Shane tilted his head back and to the right as if someone was calling his name at his five o'clock. For this seizure, there was no sound, there was no kicking of the leg, and, at the four minute mark, there was no end. So he had been lying in a hospital bed at Sparrow for around 40 days as I sat at my desk, staring out the window, trying to dissertate. I tilted my head back down toward Ahmed: "So rather than asking 'what are emotions?', I will ask, 'What do emotions do?' I will track how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they 'stick' as well as move" (p. 4). I looked up and saw, or rather, re-saw Shane's drawing - the pressing of his marker on the page, the lighter and deeper blues, the softer and harder points, the ways parts could almost break through, the emotions pressing up and against and upon one another. 45 Drawn Emotions Graph paper. Cardstock. Jude's math homework, numbers 6 - 20, evens. My Christmas wish list from 1995. Looseleaf, the top of the three holes slightly ripped, grasping onto the table where Shane works. Markers capped and standing in the teal container Mom keeps for Shane, always on the right hand corner of the table next to that picture of Shane and our cousin, Dave, both at five years old, their arms hanging across each other's shoulders. Shane is bent over the table, over the pages of my old wish list or Jude's homework from five months ago. His eyes are 22 years old, mine are 9. His right hand scrunches, pushes, moves through the paper. His body slouches above his work, his right hand intent on the page, his left, as always, curved underneath itself. He will continue with this marker for a while. Sometimes I or Mom or Jude walk over to him, gently taking the blue from his tight grip. He looks up from the graph paper, I grab the green. I uncap and hand it to him. Shane returns to the drawing, a new intensity in his hand, rubbing away at the marks on the page (See Figure 2). In front of Shane, my nine-year-old self sees the binders, neatly organized and leaning against one another. Our mother collected all of Shane's drawings over the years, his watercolor markings fully covering pages of looseleaf and cardstock and graph paper. Four binders altogether, with somewhere around 200 drawings in each. As Shane works, I absentmindedly flip through the drawings. This one with bright reds and pinks, that one with multiple points when Shane had pressed too hard onto the paper, breaking through, rupturing. This one from the year our mother had made photocopies to send out as our Christmas card. That one from the year she used a Shane drawing for the invitation to his graduation party from Lyle Torrant, a school for "kids like Shane," a school that would pick him up daily on a bright yellow bus with a wheelchair ramp in the back, a school that ended education when students turned 26, a school that taught Shane how to use the bathroom and also sign language so that I always know that Shane is telling me he wants a "cracker" 46 when he hits his right hand to his left elbow or that he means run when moves his arm in a wide, jagged circle and makes a "ra ra ra" sound or that he means prayer when he makes that p-- sound with his lips pushed together. Shane's drawings, like his seizures, are of course objects of feeling for my family and for me. This is individual and social, collective and historical. Shane himself also becomes an object of feeling in ways that are reflected in these drawings. He is an object of feeling through his body, a body that is deemed crippled, often less than human, a body that includes a left hand that perpetually turns in on itself, a left foot that points inward, a body that creates art like this. I view the emotional landscape of English language arts classrooms committed to anti- oppression as visualized through some of Shane's drawings (see Figure 3 below), a phenomenon that I call drawn emotions. The term drawn emotions is helpful in connecting the saturation of emotions onto objects of feeling for a few reasons. First, emotions [and languages and literacies] are drawn, or constructed, by human beings within the social and historical contexts within which humans live and learn (Baker-Bell, 2020; Boler, 1999; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 2007). Emotions are also drawn as in drawn out across space and time, in that they extend beyond one moment and connect to individual as well as social histories (Butler, 2018; Grinage, 2019; Ward, 2017; Wiley, 2019). Emotions are drawn out over time and across days, months, decades, and centuries, so that the construction of emotions we experience originated in the passing of stories from generations before (Ahmed, 2010, 2014). Finally, emotions are drawn because they are messy and uncertain representations of resonance that have occurred over time and in and beyond our own lifetimes (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019; Hall, 1997). In "expressing" an emotion, we cannot truly know our own emotions or those of others, and the expression or drawing of any emotion felt, perhaps particularly in a classroom setting, is always an exercise of shadows, of almost nearly getting to the feeling one feels. (See Table 1). 47 Table 1. Characteristics of Drawn Emotions Characteristics of Drawn Emotions Emotions (and language and literacy) as drawn, or socially constructed (learned in school, at home, in society) (Baker-Bell, 2020; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 2007) Emotions as drawn out across space and time (Butler, 2018; Grinage, 2019; Ward, 2017; Wiley, 2019) Emotions as drawn, meaning that the expression of our emotions are always messy and uncertain representations of what we feel (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019; Hall, 1997). Figure 3. Shane's drawing A, with drawn emotions framework I see Shane's drawings as helpful for conceptualizing the ways that emotions "circulate between bodies, examining how they 'stick' as well as move" (Ahmed, 2014, p. 4). Shane's drawings are instructive, particularly in the notions of bleeding, restraint, rupture, and the layering and 48 saturating of intensities, that occur within and between the movement objects of feeling in any classroom (See Figure 3 above). There is a layering and saturation of emotional intensities that originate in both local and historical objects of feeling. Shane's drawings represent this layering and saturation through the colors that are piled atop one another, so that there exists a dark blue beneath the surface, a layering of color. This intensity exists next to a lighter blue, with perhaps less historical and local layering of emotion, and this lighter blue is also next to a particular shade of green. There is restraint, then, between the layering and saturation of emotional intensities among these objects of feeling. The restraint keeps the layers of intensity separate from one another and requires that the "drawer," Shane, carefully separates the layering of intensities from one another. Still, despite this obvious restraint, there is bleeding. Bleeding involves the movement of intensities across and between one another, so that the viewer sees a slight blue in the midst of a green spot, or perhaps it is a green spot in the midst of a blue. Bleeding requires that there is a chaotic representation of origin, in that it is impossible to tell which one color, or emotional layering of intensity, was first saturated with the other. Finally, a rupture sometimes occurs. Figure 2 does not include a rupture, but a rupture requires that the saturation of emotion is pushed down onto the page so strongly that the "drawer," Shane, breaks through. I picture Shane impressing his marker down upon the graph paper in front of him. I see his choices of blue or green or red marker. I envision the beauty of these works, and I see the archived space of our mother's careful placing of this art. Like Shane's drawings, the attachment of emotion onto objects of feeling is archived, placed into binders on shelves, moving from a past time period and continually attaching itself to objects and others. Shane often pushes too hard onto the page, and a rupture occurs, a rupture that creates negation, a negative space. I picture the emotional landscape of anti-oppressive ELA classrooms through Shane's drawings because I see the ways that emotions become layered with and through objects. In this paper, I borrow from Shane's drawings 49 in the hope that the tracing of objects of feeling as drawn emotions may help us understand how to better enact anti-oppressive pedagogies in the ELA classroom. In the section that follows, I borrow from Shane's drawings to explore the notions of layering, bleeding, restraint, and rupture within an anecdote from my time as an English teacher in Southwest Detroit. Drawn Emotions: Implications for Anti-Oppressive ELA Pedagogies Miss, now I know you don’t live in Detroit. Right? Except for the light of the projector and the creaking of the furnace, our classroom was peacefully dark and relatively quiet. My students were diligently copying the definitions of tone and mood into their literature notes, slight smiles lighting the corners of their lips. Cristian had just made a joke at my expense, likely related to my seemingly never-ending use of the Harry Potter series in nearly every example of a literary element. As the last dregs of laughter (at my example of Neville Longbottom as a dynamic character) slipped away, I smiled, turning my attention toward the screen. The image on the projector was a brightly colored painting of two figures walking down a street on a rainy day, their bodies huddled together under one umbrella. Beginning with this image, I had imagined we could discuss the painting’s tone and mood before applying these elements of literature to Kabul in The Kite Runner. I turned toward the class with a discussion prompt lurking on my lips, and Richard instead broke the silence: “Miss, now I know you don’t live in Detroit. Right?” A white woman standing at the front of a classroom of majority Black and Brown teenagers was a strikingly familiar scene for my students. I was one of their many white teachers at Atticus High School, which boasted a predominantly Black and Brown student population. Despite their familiarity with the racial dynamics of our (and many) Detroit schools, the subject of my racialized positionality had rarely been addressed in our English classroom, and because of this lack of foundation, Richard’s February afternoon questioning threw me for a loop. His assumption was valid - a vast majority of the young white teachers in Detroit with whom I was acquainted drove at 50 least 45 minutes from the supposedly safe and suburban outskirts of the city to their school each day. Richard’s noting of this obvious racialized pattern espoused much of what 10th grade English language arts standards call for students to exhibit: a habit of critical thinking, a reading of both texts and the world in order to analyze systems of injustice and work toward change. In Richard's questioning, there is also a movement of emotion across the people in the classroom, emotion that was then redirected with my insufficient response ("Yes, Richard, I live in the city with my husband. Now what is the tone of this scene in The Kite Runner?") and Richard's knowing smile as he returned to the text. He knew he had outsmarted me, and he knew that I hadn't been comfortable responding. He, as with all of my students, was teaching me again, a task for which he shouldn't have been responsible. The saturation of emotion among, across, and between layers of feeling matters for scholars and teachers committed to anti-oppressive curricula and pedagogy. My whiteness as Richard's teacher is an "object of feeling" that has been and continues to be historically and contemporarily saturated with emotion. My whiteness is an object of feeling that can be traced, pointing us toward historical moments that include but are not limited to the following: ● The overwhelming presence of white women teachers in schools with predominantly Black and Brown students in Detroit but not only in Detroit, in 2014 but not only in 2014 ● The fact that the U.S. teaching workforce was not always dominated by whiteness, and that teachers of Color particularly in the South served as much of the impetus for the Common School Movement, which resulted in our current public school system (Anderson, 1988; Muhammad, 2019; Siddle-Walker, 1996, 2018) ● The racist redlining practices that shaped the contours of the neighborhoods we now see in Detroit but only in Detroit (Kendi, 2016; Rothstein, 2017; Wilkerson, 2011) 51 ● As Jamon Jordan (2019), Detroit historian notes: The highway system in Detroit which effectively obliterated the homes of Black families in Detroit's thriving Black Bottom neighborhood, an historical event that paved the way and intentionally created the situation in which many of Detroit's white teachers to live outside of the city and commute to their Detroit teaching positions (Francisco, 2019; Kutil, 2019; Sugrue, 2005). Table 2. Typology of Drawn Emotions: Richard's Question Definition Example from "Miss, I know you don't live in Detroit, right?" Example from Shane's drawings Layering and saturation of emotional intensities Restraint The piling up of emotions that are attached to particular "objects and bodies of feeling" (Ahmed, 2014). These layers and saturations are more or less intense, depending on how often and how hard emotions are "pressed down," like Shane's marker, atop objects of feeling The separation of layers of intensity amongst one another, either by individual subjects or by larger societal forces that require boundaries around particular emotions. My lack of talking about my whiteness; the emotional rules of classroom contexts that dissuades students from changing the topic in classrooms; the historical and contemporary trend of white, woman teachers in classrooms with students of Color. My lack of talking about my whiteness; "SLANT," and other forms of emotional restrain and instruction in (often "urban" schools); the set up of our desks in this and all the classrooms of the school in straight rows; the silence in the room right before Richard's question. 52 Table 2, (cont’d) Bleeding The movement of intensities between layers of emotion, despite the restraint. Rupture The saturation of emotion is pushed down onto previous layers so strongly that there is a breakage. This breakage is not necessarily "good" or "bad," it simply exists and itself may become a further object of feeling. Richard's decision to not raise his hand to ask his question; Richard's question; the pregnant pause and hesitation in the room; the looks across the room from students wondering how I would respond; eyebrows raised, bodies shifting in school desks; feet shuffling; my mouth dropping slightly open. Richard's question; the whiteness of my insufficient response; the rest of our discussion about tone and mood in The Kite Runner; my lack of really "being there" for the rest of my classes that day as I considered Richard's question in the back of my mind. Richard's question provides space for me to consider the implications of drawn emotions for anti-oppressive classrooms. First, I see emotions as drawn across space and time, and across the past, present, and future enactments of power, oppression, and resistance. In viewing this moment from my teaching through drawn emotions, I see how the "past present and future" were "happening all at once" in the moment of Richard's questioning in our classroom. By this, I mean that my presence as a white teacher in the classroom was an object of feeling (Ahmed, 2010) that could be traced to multiple historical moments: take for example redlining, the historical erasure of Black teachers in K-12 public schools, the disenfranchisement and disinvestment in the lives of 53 Black citizens in Detroit, "white flight," and gentrification, to name a few. In constructing an anti- oppressive ELA curriculum and enacting its pedagogy, teachers, students, and researchers must attend to the multiple layers of feeling that are present across our past, present, and futures, and that are always and already constituting our experiences in ELA classrooms. In considering Richard's question now, I do wish that I would have paused the lesson, created a space for dialogue, and somehow restructured our curriculum in a way that centered my students' inherent curiosities about the world around them. Still, I want to avoid offering any one "perfect" way that I might have better responded to his question, because I see that the ways emotions were drawn across this episode were, of course, messy and uncertain representations of our felt experiences. One of the affordances of this uncertainty, this messiness, is the move toward literacies that do not always rely on traditionally prioritized forms of ELA instruction: reading and writing. For an anti-oppressive curriculum, this means that teachers must pay attention to the ways that emotion circulates (again, across our past, present, and futures), and the ways that our own emotions regulate that of others through emotional rules. It also requires that anti-oppressive ELA teachers seek out multiple forms and genres through which they and their students might negotiate an anti-oppressive stance. For ELA researchers, I see implications of drawn emotions for nuancing our understanding of how emotion is not always readily "measurable"; like all research, it is not possible to catalogue exactly what "truly" occurs when we feel. I see this immeasurability as a benefit rather than a deterrent away from emotions, because I recognize how artistic forms (and, thus, language arts classrooms in particular) might help researchers to methodologically and conceptually frame anti- oppressive classrooms. Love (2019) writes: "Social change cannot happen without art for joy and resistance." She continues, citing the famous Congo Square in New Orleans as a space of art, "Abolitionist teaching is dependent on spaces like Congo Square to create art for resistance, art for 54 (re)membering, art for joy, art for love, art for healing, and art for humanity" (p. 99). In the following article of this dissertation, I map the drawn emotions of two classroom events onto Shane's drawings. In using his art to construct drawn emotions, I seek out methodological forms beyond traditional notions of reading and writing, and while I begin here with Shane's drawings, I see the work of drawn emotions as robust ground on which I and other researchers might trace emotions with art constructed by participants themselves. In doing so, I again follow Love (2019): Art education in schools is so important because, for many dark children, art is more than classes or a mode of expression; it is how dark children make sense of this unjust world and a way to sustain who they are, as they recall and (re)member in the mist of chaos what it means to thrive. (p. 100) While here Love specifically notes the importance of art education in particular, I argue for the infusion of art within the pedagogical and methodological approaches of English education and research, focusing strongly on the arts of language arts classrooms (Baker-Bell, 2020). I begin here with Shane's drawings, but see this focus on arts as moving with youth of Color in particular as they engage anti-oppressive frameworks through their own art in ELA classrooms. Finally, Richard's question allows me to understand how emotions are drawn, or constructed, by human beings within the societies within which we live and learn. In (insufficiently) responding to Richard's question, I relied upon various rules that I learned during my time as a teacher and a student: the need to press on with a lesson agenda, learned during my time as a pre- service teacher; the worry that my principal could pop in at any moment and notice my lack of so- called "control" of the classroom if I gave Richard's question the attention it deserved; the fear that I, as a white person, might navigate this racialized discussion with my students in harmful ways. Reflecting on his question now, I see how my very movements as a teacher committed to anti- oppressive pedagogies were restrained by the whiteness and the emotional rules of our classroom context. Richard, then, helps me to understand how drawn emotions may help to inform a more liberatory engagement of emotion in classroom settings. 55 Ahmed writes: The experience of having an emotion [is associated] with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves it mark or trace. So not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me. (p. 6) Like Shane pressing his marker down, hard, onto our brother's math homework, Shane has impressed me, has been impressed upon me, and has left me with an impression. In similar ways, Richard's question has impressed me, has been impressed upon me, and has left me with an impression, as have the anti-oppressive texts I have encountered as a teacher and student: Mrs. Williams' assertion, "I ain't scared of no dog"; Richard's question in our high school English class; my father's signing of the cross on Shane's forehead. These "texts" are not stale; they continually press down upon us, and their impressions leave us with traces of drawn emotions in ways that remain with us. As I move forward with the theory of drawn emotions, I reiterate the ways I see the literacies of humans who have been historically marginalized across race, class, gender, ability, and other socially constructed boundaries as instructive for my understanding of anti-oppressive curriculum. I choose to highlight Shane's drawings because I have been impressed upon, within, and among them; a portion of myself is left in the blurred, chaotic, deep blue of that spot on the left hand corner of the page, in that negated space caused by his rupture, in that turned up corner of the looseleaf. My understanding of anti-oppressive pedagogies, then, was changed because of Shane's drawings. As I conclude this conceptual piece on drawn emotions and move, in the next article, to empirically illustrate how emotions are drawn in anti-racist ELA classrooms specifically, I remain with this assertion: I cannot move beyond the knowledge that Shane remains with and within me, as do his drawings. As I work to construct humanizing, anti-oppressive pedagogical stances, I aim for such an impression - that the literacies of the youth with whom we encounter sit within us as 56 teachers and researchers, that they "leave us with an impression; they impress us, and they impress upon us" ways of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and drawing new worlds into being. 57 APPENDIX 58 APPENDIX Figure 4. A collection of some of Shane's drawings 59 Figure 4, (cont’d) 60 REFERENCES 61 REFERENCES ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. University of North Carolina Press. the United States. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 59(1), 8-21. Adichie, C. (2009, June). The danger of a single story. [Video File]. Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. 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She sat with three of her classmates, whose eyes rolled to the ceiling as Gary said: “I just noticed that people in the book only care about Starr and Chris dating in Garden Heights. At the white school, nobody cares that she’s Black and he’s white.” My eyes move across the room toward Rosie, who seems passive and unconcerned. Her posture is only slightly bent over her desk; her eyelashes flutter for only a moment. I write in my ethnographic field notes, “Is Rosie annoyed? Gary is obviously wrong about this – both Garden Heights and Williamson took issue with Starr and Chris dating.” Across the classroom, the weights of 26 people shift, spines bending farther down the chair to avoid the feeling of discomfort descending upon us. Rosie parts her lips as if to speak, and instead looks down onto page 26 of The Hate U Give. Gary says it again: “I mean, I am right. Aren’t I?” This scene details one episode from two sections of a semester-long critical media literacy course in which the classroom teacher (Ms. Granger), 41 12th grade students, and I read and discussed the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. It also exemplifies the saturation of emotion onto objects of feeling (Ahmed, 2010) in ELA classroom discourse (Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2015; Zembylas, 2002, 2005) when teachers and students read literature as a form of anti-racist English language arts (ELA) pedagogies (Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017; Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017; Brooks & McNair, 2009; Thomas, 2016). In a present where Black men, women, and children are 2.5 times more likely to be unarmed and murdered by police (Lowery, 2016), where 68 children are separated from their families and even dying in U.S. custody (Jordan, 2018; Owen, 2019), and where schools are still de facto racially segregated more than 60 years beyond Brown v. Board (Khalifa, Douglas, & Chambers, 2016), anti-racist scholars argue that ELA teachers "must use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice” (Baker- Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett, p. 130). In the midst of this broader sociopolitical context, schools are saturated with physical and symbolic violence, so that students are forced to: modify or cut their hair to fit white, Eurocentric dress norms (Abrahamson, 2019; Ortiz, 2019); read the same tired, whitewashed novels their similar-aged counterparts read in the 1950s (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Thomas, 2019); and uphold Dominant American English as a false norm for language superiority while denigrating other languages including Black English (Baker-Bell, 2020). Anti-racist ELA scholars demand that language arts curricula respond to these historic and contemporary legacies of race and racism that are threaded throughout systemic structures such as schooling (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017). Rosie's (and the rest of our) emotional experiences listening to Gary's responses to The Hate U Give are never separate from the broader sociopolitical contexts in which this critical media literacy course is situated. Thus, I argue that an attention to emotion may help to inform the construction and enactment of anti-racist ELA curricula. While emotion has often been understood as separate from reason and logic, I follow other scholars in viewing emotion as "part and parcel of our intellectual work" (Stenberg, 2011). Emotions also "enable us to perceive the world differently from its portrayal in conventional descriptions," sometimes allowing us the "first indications that something is wrong with the way alleged facts have been constructed" (Jaggar, 1989, p. 161). Such an attention to emotion, then, could help teachers and students engage in anti-racist ELA pedagogies as they read, write, speak, and listen new and more just worlds into existence. 69 In this paper, I consider the intersections of anti-racist ELA pedagogies and emotion in order to understand the saturation of feeling across cyclical emotional literary events as students read The Hate U Give. I do this to examine how emotion is always and already connected to past, present, and future temporal and spatial understandings of race, power, and oppression, perhaps particularly in an ELA classroom committed to anti-racism. In particular, I address the following research questions: (1) How do students emotionally respond to a novel and their classmates' discussion of Thomas' The Hate U Give across two critical media literacy class sections? (2) How do students' emotional responses afford or constrain the anti-racist possibilities of using literature to discuss race and racism in English classrooms? To address these research questions, I explored the responses of 41 secondary English students across two critical media literacy courses to the novel The Hate U Give. I examined video- recorded whole-class discussions of the novel, students' in-class work and out-of-school assignments, my ethnographic field notes, focal participant interviews, and e-mail communication between the teacher and myself. I focused specifically on the ways that students' responses to the novel and to each other's ideas reflected a "saturation of emotion onto objects of feeling" (Ahmed, 2010) across the past, present, and future legacies of race, power, and oppression in the U.S. I considered students' emotional responses through the framing of "drawn emotions," in which emotions were "drawn" across space and time, were drawn as in socially constructed, and were drawn through messy and uncertain representations of language. Based on this analysis, I argue that students' responses to the novel formed and were formed by cyclical emotional literary events from class. I begin by contextualizing current calls for anti-racist English language arts curriculum through the use of literature by and about people from historically marginalized communities. I then 70 discuss my theoretical framing of drawn emotions, stemming from Ahmed's (2010) construction of objects of feeling. Next, I discuss my positionality as a white woman, researcher-participant, and co- instructor. I then explore how the cyclical emotional literary events from these two critical media literacy courses reflected the drawn layering of emotion onto objects and bodies of feeling in discussions of race and racism through literature. It is my hope that such an examination may help English teachers and researchers as we collectively seek to understand the resonances of emotion between, across, and amongst drawn layers of time and space in anti-racist discussions of texts in the English language arts classroom. Literature Review In this section, I review the intersections of emotion and anti-racist English education scholarship, focusing on how scholars have highlighted English language arts as a discipline in which students and teachers might interrogate and interrupt race and racism through an attunement toward emotion in literary response. Anti-racist ELA Pedagogies Anti-racist ELA scholars argue that today's students and teachers are learning at a time both characterized and constituted by physical and symbolic racialized violence (Nodjimbadem, 2017; Love, 2019). Given this context of racialized violence, scholars have argued for the inclusion of texts that address race, power, and oppression (Thomas, 2019) and pedagogies that center the languages and literacies of youth who have been historically marginalized in and beyond ELA contexts (Baker- Bell, 2020; Kinloch, 2010). Researchers have also encouraged teachers to analyze damaging narratives of youth of Color inherent across deficit media representations (Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017; Dunn, Neville, & Vellanki, 2018; Harris-Perry, 2013; Kinloch, 2007; Watson & Knight Manuel, 2017). For example, Johnson (2018) urges educators to consider how “Black lives are mattering in ELA classrooms” (p. 102) and Baker-Bell (2020a) argues that ELA teachers must 71 help students interrogate racism and white supremacy through an analysis of anti-black linguistic racism. She turns her analysis toward terms like "academic language," noting how such constructs are tied to whiteness, and she argues for a critical language pedagogy that connects "dominant language ideologies, negative language attitudes, identity, and student learning" (p. 4). In connecting racism across language ideologies, textual analysis, and the literacies of youth, anti-racist ELA scholars have named the discipline of English language arts as particularly well-suited for connecting issues of power and (in)justice across multiple texts, modalities, and voices. Anti-racist ELA spaces must also recognize and ameliorate the “symbolic” and “curricular violence” that is inflicted upon Black and Brown students and teachers in many schools (Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, & Baszile, 2017; Love, 2014, 2016, 2019). Racism is present across all societal structures, including schooling, resulting in what Gordon (2011) calls "heavy hauntings" that can be traced through the historical ramifications of white supremacy and anti-Blackness onto Black and Brown bodies in schools. Love (2016), following Williams (1987), names this symbolic and curricular violence as "spirit murdering," which Love defines as "the denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance because of fixed, yet fluid and moldable, structures of racism" (p. 2), naming how Black and Brown children are "humiliated, reduced, and destroyed" in schools. Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett (2017) also argue that this symbolic violence includes a pattern of a "humanization of white criminals and a dehumanization of Black victims" (p. 133), as well as the adultification of Black children (Crenshaw, 2015; Epstein, Black, & Gonzalez, 2017; Morris, 2016; Winn, 2011). The humiliation of Black and Brown children has real material effects outside the walls of a classroom or school building, as the physical violence of our wider sociocultural contexts begin within and are constituted by the symbolic violence present in schools (Baker-Bell, 2020; Cridland- Hughes & King, 2015; Johnson et al, 2017; Love, 2019; Wong & Peña, 2017). The focus on the 72 "fluid and moldable structures of racism" (Love, 2016, p. 2) is important for the construction and enactment of anti-racist ELA pedagogies. As Alexander (2010), DuVernay (2016), and Stevenson (2014) have argued, slavery, racism, and white supremacy never ended, and instead were purposefully redesigned across decades in the forms of, for example, sharecropping, segregation, and racialized mass incarceration. This is particularly important for anti-racist ELA teachers and students as they consider the system of schooling, given the effects of the school-to-prison pipeline and the unequal rates of school punishment, suspension, and expulsion for children of Color as compared to their white peers (Arcia, 2006; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Morris, 2016). Using an anti-racist ELA framework requires that teachers and students analyze the self in relation to this widespread racism and white supremacy that is evident across texts, schools, and society (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017). It is not possible to remain neutral in our pedagogies; because literature does not only "reflect" race and racism in the U.S., but actually "constitutes" race and racism in the U.S. (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019, p. 7), all literature instruction is racialized. Thus, anti-racist curriculum and instruction is necessary to intentionally interrogate the systemic structures that hold racism and white supremacy intact (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Morrison, 1993). The focus of anti-racist English education remains on “pedagogies of healing" (Baker-Bell et al., 2017), with an understanding that it is impossible to ever fully "arrive" as an anti-racist person. The work of engaging with and interrupting racism is always "incomplete, incoherent, shifting, and changing" (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019, p. 144) as students and teachers respond to the lived experiences of shifting racist policies and actions in schools and society. One way to analyze the self in relation to racism present across societal structures is through an analysis of literature. 73 Anti-racism and Literature: The Hate U Give Larrick (1965), in her foundational study of the extreme lack of racial diversity found in children’s texts, argues that this absence is problematic for students of all races. She asserts that children of Color are not able to see themselves in literature and white children are given “gentle doses of racism” through books that uphold their racially inflated sense of self (p. 65). Literature that reflects the racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity of U.S. society might allow K-12 students the chance to challenge the single story (Adichie, 2009) by “casting doubt on the validity of accepted premises or myths, especially ones held by the majority” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 144; Hughes-Hassell, 2013) that are often found in media generally and children’s literature in particular. Bishop (1990) further argues that literature holds possibilities for dismantling stereotypes present in wider society because it offers "mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors" into new worldviews. In contradicting the supremacy of the traditional canon in K-12 ELA curricula, research has demonstrated the benefits of including racially diverse children’s and young adult literature (Baker- Bell, 2020; Thomas, 2018, 2019). Scholars have long argued for teachers to center texts written by authors of Color to discuss issues of power and oppression (Bishop, 1990, 2007; Brooks & McNair, 2009; Thomas, 2019). Discussions of literature can provide a unique space of learning for students and teachers, as these texts may foster discussions that dismantle hegemonic notions of people who have been disenfranchised (Clark & Blackburn, 2009; Johnson, 2016; Kirkland, 2013; Sassi & Thomas, 2008; Tatum & Muhammad, 2012; Thomas, 2015). Research has further shown that K-12 students who are exposed to literature that represents their own race and culture experience more positive engagement with reading than when students read literature stemming from Eurocentric epistemologies alone (Brooks & McNair, 2009; San Pedro, 2017). As Hughes-Hassell (2013) attests, these texts may offer students of Color a counternarrative to the deficit perspectives often espoused in books, media, and society. 74 One novel often used to interrogate race and racism in ELA classrooms since its publication in 2017 is Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. Many educators see an alignment between this focus on anti-racist English language arts pedagogies and the explicit racial justice themes in the novel, and the recent popularity of the book-turned-movie offers teachers a text in which many of their students are already interested. In The Hate U Give, Starr is a young Black woman who inhabits "two worlds:" that of Garden Heights, her majority-Black neighborhood where she was raised, and that of her nearly all-white preparatory school, Williamson. Almost immediately as the novel begins, Starr witnesses the murder of her best childhood friend, Khalil, by a white police officer. Thomas shows how Starr moves to activism in response to Khalil’s murder, working to make widely known the racial injustices that made this killing possible, while simultaneously demonstrating the assets-based resistance to oppression taught to her by her community of Garden Heights. Many English educators have used The Hate U Give as a way for their students to “respond to the wake of racialized violence” (Baker-Bell, et al., 2017), attesting that books such as The Hate U Give and All American Boys can help young people engage the implications of racism and white supremacy in ways that leave students "uncomfortable" (Ebarvia, Parker, & Schmidt, 2018, p. 93). Rodesiler (2018) further argues that such novels can “promote critical literacy,” and can offer a space to critique the current sociopolitical moment, connecting characters’ stories to real-life police brutality cases. As the 2015 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)'s "Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children's and Young Adult Books" argues, "the stories of lived experiences across human cultures" matter (NCTE, 2015), particularly when we attend to "who is silenced and heard" in such stories and "how particular cultural and social contexts" influence our readings of literature (Thomas, 2016, p. 116). Ms. Granger, the teacher-participant in the classroom at the heart of this paper, chose The Hate U Give as a way to discuss the social constructions of race in her critical 75 media literacy classes. She chose this text based on the interest of many of her students, as well as the discussions of the intersections between race, class, and gender that the text allowed. One way that educators, researchers, and students in ELA classrooms might better articulate and understand our responses to texts that explicitly focus on race and racism is through an analysis of the emotionality of our literary responses. I now turn, then, to how scholars have documented the emotions present in ELA classrooms, particularly through literary response. Emotion in ELA Classrooms "Emotions bear the marks of the society that constructed them." - Jaggar, 1989, p. 159 In traditional and mainstream conceptualizations, emotion has been understood as separate from reason and intellect. Emotion has historically been understood as private and personal (Boler, 1999; Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2015; Stenberg, 2011; Winans, 2012; Zembylas, 2005). In addition to being separate from reason, emotion has even been considered “an obstacle to” logic and thus “anti- intellectual’ (Jaggar, 1989). Emotion is alsogendered and racialized, and is often characterized as irrational and distinctly “female,” while reason is noted as rational and “male” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 145). Moreover, we often think of emotions as being individual-- held within one's own body--rather than as a collective experience among multiple people in societal contexts (Thein et al., 2015). These broader societal understandings of emotion have implications for the ELA classroom, particularly through literary response. As Thein et al. (2015) attest, emotion is “in the fabric of every classroom context” (p. 200). In their study, the authors highlight how students in a critical literacy course moved between varying registers in whole-class discussion, utilizing an interpretive, "academic" tone that reflected back much of the focus on power and identity forwarded by their ELA teacher. In small group settings, students offered divergent emotional responses that may have been deemed inappropriate in whole class discussion, such as anger expressed in "intense" ways like 76 cursing (p. 201). Emotions, then, were shaped by and shaped not only the ELA classroom as a whole, but also different classroom contexts such as whole-group and small-group discussions. The authors argue that emotions “guided, policed, and shaped learning” when responding to literature and to peers. The authors advocate for the type of “critical emotional literacy” (Winans, 2012) that might help students not only acknowledge the emotional rules of a particular setting or reading of a text but also disrupt these strictures to gain further insights into the relationships between power, discourse, and emotion. Lewis and Tierney (2011) critique the way that English classrooms have historically focused on emotion and feeling. Like Thein et al. (2015), the authors articulate that English classrooms usually welcome emotion as a way for students to construct a personal response to a text that might later lead them to a supposedly superior interpretative stance. Emotion, then, is seen as a vehicle through which readers can gain a more intellectual positioning toward a piece of literature. Lewis and Tierney argue against this model of English curriculum, stating that frameworks of personal literary response “focus on the right and tasteful kind of affect (or feeling),” thus directing what forms of emotions are appropriate in a literature classroom. “Empathy” and “enthusiasm about literature,” then, are sanctioned, while anger is not (p. 321). Like Stenberg (2011), Thein et al. (2015), and Winans (2012), Lewis and Tierney attest that examining which emotions are deemed “correct and desirable” in a literature classroom is beneficial for helping students deconstruct dominant power structures. Grinage (2019) moves our attention to how emotion circulates within the "angled, pedagogic encounters" (Ahmed, 2010) of race discussions in an English classroom. The author argues that racial melancholia, or "the reopening of racial wounds that have festered for centuries, having never fully healed," (p. 127) are present in any classroom. There are then "tensions that arise" when ELA teachers attempt to focus on this wound, in which "feelings slowly emerge" that produce what 77 Grinage calls "melancholic affects" of "intensified emotional responses" during race-based class conversations. Focusing on his study of a high school ELA classroom, Grinage centers one "encounter" (p. 133) in which the teacher and his students responded to Richard Wright's (1940) novel, Native Son. The teacher, who the author acknowledges consistently attempts to engage in anti- racist ELA frameworks in his classroom, asked students to stand on a continuum from 1 to 10, 1 being that there has been "no racial progress since 1930s" and 10 being that there has been full racial equity (p. 134). Richard, a Black student, and Nick, a white student, positioned themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, with Richard strongly asserting that there has been very little racial progress, citing the continued state-sanctioned police violence against Black bodies in society (p. 136). After Richard and Nick argued with one another about their various positions, Richard eventually ceased talking, sitting down with his head on his desk in what seemed to be despair. Grinage argues that this moment had "reopened racial wounds," and that what was important in this pedagogic encounter was "not so much what [Nick, Richard, and Mr. Turner] were saying, but where their bodies were positioned in the classroom" (p. 138). In this way, Grinage points us toward how affect and emotion circulate in a classroom setting, arguing that whiteness became a "technology of affect" based on where the teacher physically positioned himself as neutral in the conversation. Grinage's work extends previous scholarship, urging us to attend to emotion and affect in ELA classrooms that center discussions of race and power in order to engage in humanizing and anti-racist pedagogies (Ahmed, 2010; Dutro, 2019; Grinage, 2019; Paris & Winn, 2014). Still, there is much to be understood about how teachers and students respond within layers of emotion, saturated in and across localized and historical tracings of affect, particularly when reading literature that addresses issues of justice and equity in racially and ethnically diverse English courses. In this paper, I borrow from Ahmed's theorizing of objects of feeling, noting how emotions are saturated 78 or "drawn" across space and time as students and teachers attempt to engage anti-racist frameworks in ELA classrooms. Building on Ahmed (2010) and using a concept I have elsewhere named "drawn emotions," I position Ms. Granger's critical media literacy course within the affective economies present across a classroom setting. Theoretical Framework I follow Ahmed (2010) in stating that emotions are "shaped by contact with objects, rather than being caused by objects" (p. 6). In this way, emotion is not "simply 'in' the subject or object," although as participants within society we often assume that these emotions exist within or are "caused by" that object or body. Across contact zones, or the multiple moments in which a person and an object or body have come into contact with one another, affect and emotion are what "sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects" (Ahmed, 2010, p. 29). According to Ahmed (2014), the work of anti-racism requires a tracing of the histories that are attached to the objects of feeling that circulate in our affective economies (p. 44), much of which is negotiated through emotional rules and various social constructions, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, language, and ethnicity. Over time, emotions become ordinary, taken-for- granted affects that are assumed to exist alongside, within, and even synonymously with the object or body (p. 6). This attachment of emotions matters for our presence with one another, as seen for example, in the symbolic and physical violence against Black and Brown students in classrooms, or the state-sanctioned murders of Black and Brown bodies. By attending to the "stickiness" of particular emotions we might come to better understand the layers of emotional resonance that have been, are currently, and will continually be attached to objects and bodies of feeling in literary response. Building on Ahmed’s work, I rely on my brother Shane's drawings to construct a framework reflecting how emotion is saturated between, amongst, and across historical and contemporary layers 79 of feeling. As I articulate elsewhere, I name this framework "drawn emotions." Shane is my brother who is 13 years older than me. He loves basketball and our mother's mashed potatoes. He has a contagious smile and a joyful spirit. He is also developmentally disabled. As a child, I remember Shane making his drawings for hours, using Crayola markers on pages of looseleaf which our mother then collected and archived into binders. These drawings remind me of Ahmed's construction of objects of feeling (See Table 3) through the intensities of color (emotion) that are present on the page - this reflects a piling up of emotions that are attached to "objects and bodies of feeling" (Ahmed, 2014). These colors, or emotions, are more or less intense depending upon how the drawer, Shane, has pressed his marker onto the page. The drawings also include examples of restraint and bleeding, where colors or emotions are kept separate through what could be seen as emotional restraint that sometimes bleeds into varying layers of intensity. Shane also sometimes pushed too hard down onto a page, causing a rupture. In this rupture, I recognize moments in a classroom when emotions are saturated so strongly that a "breakage" erupts - a breakage that is not necessarily good or bad but one that may further become an object of feeling. In using Shane's drawings, I understand that I am borrowing from the artwork of a man who is both white and developmentally disabled. In doing this, I am not attempting to equate or compare the experiences of those who have been historically marginalized because of ability and those who have been historically marginalized because of race. I borrow from Shane's drawings for three particular reasons: First, I attempt to use intersectional approaches to understanding anti-oppressive pedagogies, including anti-racist ELA frameworks. Second, I attempt to center the literacies and art of voices who have been historically marginalized across socially constructed identities, including ability. Oftentimes in schools, we see youth literacies as a problem to be solved, or as youth inherently having a literacy deficit that we must fix. By centering the artwork of a man who has not graduated from any traditional schooling, and speaks a language centered around ten sounds that 80 reflect words known only to those closest to him, I hope to model possibilities of methodological and pedagogical inquiry in varied considerations of literacies. Third, the use of Shane’s drawings is the beginning of the movement in my work toward art as an analytic tool. In the future, I seek to trace emotion with the artwork of youth participants of Color and teachers across intersecting identity markers. The emotions present in any classroom have been attached and are continually attached to objects and bodies, and the saturation of feeling across space and time have material effects for our understanding of anti-racist ELA pedagogy. I use Shane's drawings as a metaphor to name the layering of emotions as "drawn" in three ways. First, emotions are drawn in that they are socially constructed because we learn the "right and appropriate" (Lewis & Tierney, 2011) emotions in societal contexts such as school. Second, emotions are "drawn out" across space and time, extending from past and future, decades or even centuries beyond our present experiences. Finally, emotions are drawn because they are always messy, uncertain, and unresolved representations of how we "really feel." In other words, our expression of emotion is reliant upon our use of the language(s) that we use to express our emotions. Thus, emotions guide our intellectual understandings at the same time that they are never fully understood or expressed within the layering of historical and contemporary legacies of power and oppression. The drawn emotions in Ms. Granger's classroom are shaped by contact with objects and bodies. These objects and bodies include, of course, other classmates, the varied local histories each had held with one another in one-on-one interactions from going to school together since Kindergarten, or since one month before, or that one time they presented on cell structure in science class in 8th grade, or that time she had a crush on him and then changed her mind once this class started and she saw how conservative he was. Moving beyond bodies and local histories, these emotions are "drawn" or shaped by the contact one has with objects within that classroom space 81 and historically situated beyond that space. Raced interactions and gendered interactions. The object of the police car in Starr's story, the hairbrush, the physical space of lockers lining the halls of high schools that look like the critical media literacy students' own lockers. There is the local object of a look, a stare, a glare beyond the initial "you two are so cute!" which Mae, a Black girl who is walking hand in hand with her white boyfriend, feels directed at her from those two white senior girls, and the historical object of a hatred for interracial romantic relationships. These raced and gendered interactions are both local and historical, and there is both restraint and bleeding between and among the objects of feeling within these layered, saturated emotions. We can look to the novel at the center of this unit, The Hate U Give, for additional understandings of objects of feeling. Take, for example, Officer One-Fifteen, the white police officer who kills Rashad in the novel. The reader is taken to see Rashad as: a young Black man driving a car on a Saturday night with a girl, a best childhood friend with whom, as children, he had sparred with over who was Harry and who was Hermione and who was Ron in their childhood friendship group and with whom, now, he was flirting, with whom, now, he was recalling intersecting memories together in the front seat of his Chevy Impala he had used to drive her safely away from a party -- we see the front seat he leans across as he kisses her before gently putting the car back into drive and continuing down the silent night at something like 1 in the morning. Conversely to the reader's perspective, Officer One-Fifteen chooses to take no humanizing factors into account, and instead reduces Rashad's humanity by turning his body, that of a young Black man, into an "object" when he shoots and kills him. I view the emotional landscape of Ms. Granger's critical media literacy classroom as visualized through objects of feeling. Shane's drawings help me to conceptualize emotions in a classroom because with them I see how emotions become layered with and through objects. Emotions, as they are drawn, saturate objects and form layers of color upon us, upon the objects, 82 upon the space of a school setting, upon a first period class that is talking about racism and police brutality at 7:54 on an October morning and one 12th grader is sleeping and another is angry and another is amused and a rupture, like the ruptures in Shane's drawings, occurs. In this paper, I borrow from Shane's drawings in the hope that the tracing of objects of feeling as drawn emotions may help us better understand how to enact anti-racist literature pedagogies in the ELA classroom. Table 3. Typology of Drawn Emotions Definition Example from Shane's drawings Layering and saturation of emotional intensities Restraint The piling up of emotions that are attached to particular "objects and bodies of feeling" (Ahmed, 2014). These layers and saturations are more or less intense, depending on how often and how hard emotions are "pressed down," like Shane's marker, atop objects of feeling The separation of layers of intensity amongst one another, either by individual subjects or by larger societal forces that require boundaries around particular emotions. Bleeding The movement of intensities between layers of emotion, despite the restraint. Rupture The saturation of emotion is pushed down onto previous layers so strongly that there is a breakage. This breakage is not necessarily "good" or "bad," it simply exists and itself may become a further object of feeling. 83 Study Context Methods This study was conducted in a large public high school located in a suburban city in the U.S. Midwest. The racial demographics of the student population of Swanson High School, with a total enrollment of 1,378 students, is as follows. These terms are those chosen by US News and World Report (2017): American Indian or Alaskan Native (0.3%); Asian (3%); Two or more races (7%); Black (12%); Latinx (13%); and white (63%). The course under study in this paper is entitled Critical Media Literacy, an elective mainly chosen by 12th grade Swanson High School students and made up of two class sections. Across one semester, students and their teacher, Ms. Granger, discussed and analyzed news literacy, 21st century media representation, bias and identity, and social constructions of race and gender across newspapers, news broadcasts, documentaries, novels, poetry, music, and other multimodal texts. Ms. Granger created this course, initially teaching it in a nearby school district that she noted was particularly resistant to the curriculum as many administrators, teachers, parents, and students felt that course topics were "too controversial." At Swanson, Ms. Granger felt supported by administration, other teachers, and the school community to engage in this curriculum, although she was the only instructor of the course in the school and wished to expand the curriculum into a year- long class that met across grade levels. The data for this paper was generated during the third unit of the course, a unit that Ms. Granger and I co-planned: "The Social Construction of Race and Gender." Through research funding, I was able to provide a class set of novels to accompany this unit, and Ms. Granger chose the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The two sections of the course met during the first two class periods of the school day. I co-taught a portion of the unit, and was the solo teacher for the activity described later in this paper, "the four corners activity." 84 Participants Because I largely focused on class discussions, the participants for this paper include the entire class for each section of critical media literacy, as well as Ms. Granger. A teacher for nine years, Ms. Granger was deeply committed to this course and named it as one of her favorite parts of teaching. Ms. Granger identifies as white and Arab American and as cisgender, straight, and middle class. Included within this larger group of participants are the ten focal participants across both class sections with whom I conducted semi-structured interviews twice across the course of the semester. I chose these focal participants based on their participation in class discussions and/or class assignments in the first three weeks of the course, particularly following what I found interesting moments when they discussed race and emotion. Across each of the two emotional literary events for this paper, I focus on six students (both focal participants and not): In Period A, James, Mae, and Lyla, and in Period B, Rosie, Zach, and Gary. Participant, period, self- described race, ethnicity, & gender James, Period A "Mixed," Sudanese and Guatemalan, male Mae, Period A, Black, female Table 4. Study Participants Participant "snapshot" James was a focal participant in this study. He was enrolled in multiple A.P. courses and was interested in creating music outside of school. He was in a band and interested in digital music production. He had a core group of four friends in period A. James had moved from a local school district to Swanson in elementary school. He identified as " politically moderate," and often discussed how in today's society people become "too sensitive" when discussing particular topics. When asked if he was an emotional person, James immediately responded with "no." Mae was a focal participant in this study. She was interested in majoring in business while in college. She was very close to her family and often discussed their influence on her understanding of the world. Mae did not enjoy English class and stated that her favorite subject was math. She was very excited to read The Hate U Give and finished the novel by the time the class had completed half the book. When asked if she was an emotional person, she said yes. 85 Table 4 (cont’d) Lyla, Period A, Lebanese- American, female Rosie, Period B, African American, female Zach, Period B, white, male Gary, Period B, white, male Lyla was a focal participant in this study. She was interested in becoming a journalist and loved English class and horror movies. She identified as politically conservative and as a person who loved debating in class. Lyla's parents moved to the United States from Lebanon before she was born. When asked if she was an emotional person, she responded, "I would say so. I think all of us are emotional." Rosie was a focal participant in this study. She was very interested in English classes and was enrolled in multiple A.P. courses. She had moved from a local school district to Swanson, she stated, because she and her family wanted her to have more academic opportunities. She once brought me an anthology she had created in her sophomore English course entitled "The Black Lives Matter Anthology," which included short stories, poems, and nonfiction written by Black women. When asked if she was an emotional person, Rosie laughed and said, "Yes." Zach was not a focal participant in this study. He was the youngest of six children and labeled himself as "outgoing." Zach was fairly talkative during class. On one of the days that we discussed representation in the media for women, Zach wrote on his exit ticket: "I feel that today society is so anti-male that the idea that females are still oppressed isn't as true as it used to be." Zach was born and raised in the local area and loved football, dogs, and playing videogames. Gary was a focal participant in this study. He was talkative in class and very interested in the course topics of critical media literacy. Gary had moved to many different places throughout his life and felt that these experiences helped him to have a "unique perspective" and that he "has a voice even though, you know, I'm white." Gary's Christian faith was very important to him. He loved music and the movie Newsies. In our interview, Gary volunteered that he was "an emotional and passionate person" without my prompting him. Data Generation and Analysis Data for this paper included: 22 focal participant interviews, 11 video recorded class sessions, 12 sets of exit ticket reflections, my fieldnotes, e-mail communication between Ms. Granger and me, and student classwork and homework. I video-recorded select class sessions, 86 choosing those when I knew, based on my co-planning with Ms. Granger, that discussions of race and racism would be central. All class sessions in which we discussed the novel The Hate U Give and which I was present were also video-recorded. In this work, I see the process of qualitative data analysis as iterative and ongoing (Charmaz, 2006). At the same time, and in ways that I see as not in contradiction with grounded theory methods, I view analysis as always an archiving of emotion or affect, as the "inventory of shimmers" that occurs in the "in-betweenness" of how we "act and are acted upon" (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1). Therefore, I began initial data analysis throughout my time as a researcher participant in Ms. Granger's two class sections by taking note (in my field notes) of moments that held me in tension, that brought to mind for me (un)explained strong feeling, or that left me with questions about the ways we talk about race, power, and oppression in English classes and through literature. After my initial data analysis as participant-observer, I engaged in a first cycle of coding (Saldaña, 2015) of the data from the project as a whole. In this way, I sought to read with emerging and ongoing themes across our time in class. In this first cycle, I generated a total of 58 codes using both Ahmed's theory of objects of feeling ,as well as phrases directly from participants' words; these included: "I don't really know how to state my opinion without sounding angry"; "I don't think white people ruin everything"; and "I just feel so much all the time in that class." From here, I engaged in a second cycle of coding, collapsing these 558 codes into 37 broader emergent themes. From these themes, two events or "encounters" (Ahmed, 2010; Grinage, 2019) began to push through/take form/take shape within the data: "The day we talked about oppression" and "the four corners activity." Throughout this process, I thought with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Zapata & Van Horn, 2017) Ahmed's (2014) theory of emotion to consider how objects of feeling and the emotions attached to them are continually made and remade across these two events. I borrowed Shane's 87 watercolor drawings to serve as analytic transparencies with which I could overlay Ahmed's theory atop each of the events. I rely on Sousanis' (2015) notions of "grids and gestures" to represent how the visual allows the reader to see "emotional activity" as " ... not just loud or chaotic but sometimes slow and faint, tracing lulls and silences too" (p. 3). In his text Unflattening, Sousanis (2015) centers the visual by creating a comic book to theorize the impossibilities of language in expressing our experiences. He writes that comics are not "reliant on a chain-like sequence linearly proceeding from point to point," and instead are "associations that stretch web-like across the page, braiding fragments into a cohesive whole" (p. 62). This centering of the visual aligns with the ways I view and understand Shane's watercolor drawings, as well as the "drawn emotion" across objects and bodies in Ms. Granger's critical media literacy course. Rather than linearly articulating the movement of emotion through a "discrete sequence of words, strung one after another, like beads on a rosary," Shane's drawings allow me to see the saturation of emotion as "all-at-once, simultaneous, all over, and relational" (p. 58). I also borrow from Hollett and Dudek (2019) in constructing an imagistic analytic framework, considering what they term "affective sketches" as a way of "living and moving with the data" (p. 174). While these authors actually construct sketches as analysis itself, I use a previously constructed piece of imagistic art in my analysis -- Shane's drawings. Still, I resonate with the notion of using affective sketches to "attune ourselves to rhythmic capacities of affect through an emphasis on accelerations and decelerations, when things feel like they are speeding up or slowing down" (p. 174). In addition to this notion of movement and speed, I see an imagistic analysis using Shane's drawings as helpful to consider: the saturation or layering of emotion onto objects of feeling, bleeding, restraint, and rupture across the two cyclical emotional literary events at the heart of this paper. (See Table 3 for a typology of drawn emotions). 88 In using this framework, I flipped through Shane's portfolio of watercolor marker drawings to consider each of the two events that had taken form through the first two rounds of coding. I began by re-reading my field notes detailing each of the events as well as the retrieved coded segments of data attached to that particular event. I then revisited each of Shane's 200+ drawings, ultimately choosing two to help me better understand the attachment and saturation of emotion during and after each of these events. In order to "overlay" the emotional literary event atop Shane's drawing, I created a schema centered in the theoretical alignments of Shane's drawings with the concept of drawn emotions, specifically through saturation and layering of intensities, bleeding, restraint, and rupture. This schema included the following analytic questions: ● What overt or covert historical tracings are evident in the ways that these emotions are layered or saturated onto objects? ● What overt or covert individual/local tracings are evident in how emotions are layered or saturated onto objects? ● What objects of feeling are layered and saturated in this event? ● In what ways are varying "intensities" "bumping up" against one another, or restrained and bleeding, in this event? ● Is there a rupture? What is the context of the rupture? What sorts of texture "builds up" around the rupture? For each of the two events, I used Shane's drawing as the transparency through which to ask each question (See Figure 7). I drew arrows to point toward moments that occurred in the data that were then reflected in Shane's drawing for each of the five questions. Eventually, I overlaid these moments atop one another. After using the schema with each of the five questions, I then overlaid each of the images together, using transparencies in a way that eventually blurred a cohesive image 89 altogether. This blurred chaos is reflective of how the saturation of intensities layers our understandings of discussions of race and racism in ELA classrooms. Researcher Positionality In approaching this study, I consider how my positionality necessarily influences how I affectively and methodologically engage with this study, and in particular how my whiteness influences the depictions of emotion resonant in this paper (Gordon, 2005). I am a white, cishetero woman and I was raised in a middle class, U.S. Midwestern home. The majority of spaces where I was raised were also white, and while as a child I was an avid reader, many of the texts I read were written by white authors. My whiteness constitutes my worldviews, how I understand the classes under study in this article, and how I feel and express my own emotions and sense the emotions of others, particularly those of the students in this class. By way of showing this, I point toward the opening vignette of this article and ask (rhetorically): how does my whiteness implicate the noticings of emotion present in Rosie's tapping of her foot on the side of the desk? How is my whiteness at play in the moments in which I choose to write down a classmate's eye roll in response to Gary's false claim about Starr and Chris' relationship? Rather than seeking to diminish the impact of my racialized positionality on the emotional responses in the class under study here (which is an impossibility), I attempt to make transparent how my whiteness necessarily influences this work. I also served as a researcher participant and co-instructor in the classes under study in this article, meaning that I attended class with students four days each week, sometimes participating alongside students, sometimes sharing the instruction of the course with Ms. Granger or leading instruction in her absence. As I study students' emotions to the novel and to each other then, I do not (and cannot) situate my own emotional responses outside the drawn layers of emotion circulating in this classroom context. Rather, I am implicated within these layers, as is my whiteness, as is my positionality as a researcher and sometimes-teacher-but-one-who-doesn't-grade-homework, 90 as are my presences and absences in the classroom setting. I see these aspects of my positionality as layered amongst the saturations of emotion and meaning present in the cyclical emotional literary events at the heart of this paper. Findings In this study, I examined how emotions were layered, or drawn, across objects and bodies of feeling in an anti-racist ELA classroom in response the novel The Hate U Give. In this section, I highlight how students' responses became cyclical emotional literary events that were saturated throughout layers of emotional resonance. These events themselves became objects of feeling that served to distance, afford, and constrain the possibilities of anti-racist curricula in Ms. Granger's ELA classroom. Cyclical Emotional Literary Events In this beginning of this article, I outlined a scene in which Rosie, a Black woman in the course, listened to her white classmate, Gary's, false assertion that only Starr's community of Garden Heights "cared about" her interracial relationship with her boyfriend, Chris. This scene is representative of what I call a cyclical emotional literary event, or an episode from class discussion about texts officially read in the course curriculum that: a) evoke emotion and b) are cyclical, in that students continually and without prompting return to those events. One path through which we might explore the textures of cyclical emotional literary events in anti-racist English classrooms is by tracing what Ahmed (2014) calls the attachment of emotion onto various objects of feeling. The cataloging of what does or does not evoke an emotion is, of course, subjective and slippery. In this study, I name an event as "evoking emotion" when a) students self-identified when something caused an emotion in them (i.e. "I feel so many emotions in that class"); b) I noticed a visible and physical change in body language in a student or students); and/or c) I noticed a visible and physical transmission of body language between two or more students (i.e. when one student 91 rolled her eyes at another). These tracings of emotions are insufficient because we must rely on insufficient and simultaneously necessary modes of language to express our felt emotions to one another. Still, I use this schema to note cyclical emotional literary events, offering a framework of drawn emotions that both attempts to identify our emotional states while leaving the realm of emotion and affect necessarily "sticky," messy, and uncertain (Ahmed, 2010; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). The anecdote about Rosie’s response is one such event. Here, I analyze two additional cyclical emotional literary events from class: "the four corners activity" and "the day we talked about oppression." These events are indicative of how emotion is drawn across layers of feeling, extending beyond any one moment in class, and implicated within the saturation of emotion across space and time. The Promise and Warning of Rupture: The Four Corners Activity I feel like some of the white guys in the class like to play victim and say that just because they’re white they are judged and that’s not fair, but what they don’t understand is for years people of color were not only judged, but they were beaten, arrested, enslaved, lynched, and so much more just for the color of their skin. - Rosie, journal reflection after the four corners activity "Why? Because Martin Luther King is a hero of mine." - Michael Scott, The Office One day in early November, I led an activity originating in Tupac's quote from which The Hate U Give took its name: "Pac said Thug Life stood for 'The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. T - H - U - G - L - I - F - E" (p. 17). The class, Ms. Granger, and I had been attempting to work through this quote by historicizing some of the "hate given," or the legacies of racism and white supremacy that led us to our current state of racialized violence in the U. S. In consultation with Ms. Granger, I used a four corners activity to begin our historicization of "the hate given." A four corners activity is a common dialogic teaching strategy in which the phrases "strongly agree," "agree," "disagree," and "strongly disagree" are posted in each of the four corners of a 92 classroom. The instructor then provides a statement to which students respond, moving to whichever of the four corners of the room that corresponds to their level of agreement to the prompt. The first prompt was: "Agree or Disagree: Our schools are no longer racially segregated." In response to this, one white student student had stated, "Schools are no longer racially segregated, because as I look in the hallways here at [Swanson] I see students of all races and we don’t treat each other differently. We’re just all here and we’re all friends." A few other white students agreed, stating that Swanson was "racially diverse," and Bella, who identifies as Black, asked what was meant by the term "racially diverse." "What school are you comparing [Swanson] to say that it is diverse?" she asked. The room, then, was already moving with varying intensities after students had discussed whether or not Swanson High School was racially segregated. To introduce the second prompt, I showed a video from the Equal Justice Initiative explaining the need for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a museum recently opened in Montogomery, Alabama which memorializes the 4,400 victims of lynching in the United States (EJI Video). Specifically, we focused on the following quote from Bryan Stevenson: In South Africa, you can’t go there without learning about the history of apartheid. In Rwanda, you cannot spend time there without being told about the legacies of the genocide. If you go to Germany today, in Berlin there are monuments and memorials and stones that mark the spaces where Jewish families were abducted. But in America, we don’t talk about slavery. We don’t talk about lynching. We don’t talk about segregation. And so now it is time to talk about it. After the class viewed the video, we disussed the following prompt: "Agree or Disagree: Starr's Dad in The Hate U Give and Bryan Stevenson in this quote are correct - We do not discuss slavery, race, and racism often enough in school and in general." Students then moved to one of the four corners based on their level of agreement with the prompt. Some students took firm stances, crossing their arms and tilting their chins toward the ceiling as they stood tall in their chosen position, whereas others leaned against or sat atop the classroom cupboard somewhere between "agree" and "strongly agree." Some students giggled to one another, and one rolled her eyes at her 93 friend. Some students moved to wherever their friends were already standing whether they agreed with the position or not. One student hid herself behind the body of a friend so as to avoid being cold called, a practice Ms. Granger and I did not employ but was always lurking in a high school classroom. The movement of bodies settled into an expectant waiting, a turning toward me to see my next directive. By the end of movement, all of the students were on the "agree" side (with varying levels of agree to strongly agree) except for two white men, Zach and Gary, who were standing in "disagree" and "strongly disagree," respectively. I asked students to "talk with someone near you about why you are standing where you are standing." I then began to facilitate a whole-class discussion, beginning with a volunteer from the "agree" side. Students raised their hands from their respective positions in the discussion, and I called on them by alternating between the "agree" and "disagree" sides. I positioned myself by sitting on the teacher's desk and outside of the four corners of discussion. As I sat on the desk, I listened to students' points and scanned the room to see if other students wanted to speak. I also took notes in my ethnographic field notebook. Mary: Audrey, a Black student: because Aaron, a white student: Rosie, a Black student: Okay, so why are you standing where you are standing? Because it's true. People don't mention it really. I feel like it is it is still happening, but the Holocaust is not happening. I feel like when we actually start talking about racism, like in high school, we’ve already been nurtured to lean towards the way we lean. We should talk about this earlier in school, fifth grade onward. I just think that this should be a requirement to learn these things in school. I just think we don’t learn about this that much. My experience at [Swanson], we don’t learn that much about it here, we don’t really even celebrate Black History Month. Last year, we did movies after school but that was it. I don’t think we talk about this enough because it makes people uncomfortable. 94 Gary, a white student: I disagree because I remember growing up and hearing about segregation, to the point that Martin Luther King [Jr.] is one of my heroes. I feel like we talk about race almost every day. And umm, I think that was really good, but I think now the conversation of race and segregation has shown to victimize people, and in that way has kept people down. No one is successful if you have a victim mentality. Figure 5. Photo, four corners activity; Classmate responses to Gary's comment. Mary: *A moment of silence* Bella, a Black student: Gary: Okay, would someone on the agree side like to respond? Who is that you are calling a victim? Are you calling Black people victims? Yeah, well I think there is a focus, whether it's in the media or in schools where we pretend that white people have all the power and everyone else is the victim. 95 Mary: Trudy, a Black student: Zach, a white student: Gary: Aaron: Could you provide some evidence for that? Yeah, because I don't think we're talking about victimizing ourselves, it's just like, we need to talk about what happened in this country. Because I have a friend, she was an exchange student from Germany, and like, they don't let them forget what happened there. Not like we forgot here, but we do need to talk about it. So on the topic of like the Holocaust and stuff. If I was a German person, I think if someone kept bringing up the Holocaust and kept bringing it up, being someone who would now be two or three generations away from Nazi Germany, wouldn’t you feel like people were trying to make you feel bad for something that ancestors did, even though you weren’t really the person that did -- *interrupts Zach* Just to add to that because it was really good. So what you are told is what you will become. So if we're told this in society, if we're told "white people, you suck, you're racist and you don't even know it." Well I think white people are going to be like, you know what, they hate us anyway. Well, I was just saying, what he said about the Germans and stuff. You could just apply that to slavery and racism, and you could say that it’s about making white people out as criminals, and it’s not. It’s just educating the youth and uh, so we don’t make the same mistakes. It's not like we're trying to criminalize white people. Using one of Shane's drawings, I focus here on the saturation and layering of emotion onto objects of feeling, as well as rupture within this cyclical emotional literary event (See Figures 6 and 7 below as well as Appendix for closer view). Sometimes, in the action of pressing his marker onto the page, hard and with great frequency, Shane would break through, revealing a white space through the hole that was left in his drawing. Shane would often continue to draw despite the rupture occurring, and the viewer could see the colors surrounding the hole in the page scrunching up together, creating a texture that was different than the rest of the piece. 96 The saturation of emotions that eventually formed a rupture in the four corners activity was in place before the actual event occurred in class. This rupture was also pushed through by many "impressions" of emotions onto historied objects of feelings in the course. Like Shane's drawing, there is similarly a layering and saturation of emotion in this four corners activity. These layers are attached to objects of feeling that are historical and social (the Holocaust; Martin Luther King, Jr.; segregation; slavery; police brutality; the responsibilities teachers have toward their students in discussing historical oppression). These objects are also personal and/or local (the setting of Swanson High School in discussing whether schools are still racially segregated; the lack of "doing anything" for Black History Month; Trudy's experience with a German exchange student). Figure 6. Shane's drawing B as saturation of intensities; restraint; bleeding; and rupture The objects of feeling in this discussion included: my presence as a white teacher who was not their official teacher; my decisions, not always wise, about when I should or should not step in to halt harmful discussions of race; and some of the white students' lack of engagement with many 97 of the Black girls' responses in the class. These layers and saturations of emotions are "scrunched up" alongside the rupture on the page. The construction of the four corners activity, my decision to stand outside of the discussion, and the words of the white men in the class inflicted pain on the Black girls who attempted to explain how racism still exists in today’s society. While, as a researcher and teacher, I seek to center the joy of girls of Color, rather than only their pain, I find it necessary to make clear that Black girls’ and women’s pain has historically and routinely been displayed as a tool used to learn about race and racism in classrooms in particular and in society generally. Audrey, Rosie, Bella, and Trudy each attempted to calmly and clearly portray their lived experiences and their understandings of race to Zach and Gary. As a white woman, I can never fully understand the reverberations of pain that girls and women of Color experience when they are forced, again and again, to uncover, examine, and lay bare the violent racism they have encountered in their own and their loved ones’ lives in order to justify and explain how racism and white supremacy exists today (Baker-Bell, 2020b; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). The girls in this class expressed visible feeling when attempting to control their emotions in response to Gary and Zach. This pain is itself historical; like all emotions, it is drawn across space and time and originates in the continual denial of Black and Brown women’s and girl’s experiences from centuries ago to the present day (Cooper, 2018; Lyiscott, 2019). Moreover, a significant object of feeling from this event was the word victim. Gary often used the word victim, stating much of what he noted in this discussion about "media, or schooling" forcing people of Color to become "victims" and thus "fail to reach beyond their present situation" (Personal Interview 1, Gary). In addition to the four corners discussion, Gary spoke about "victim mentalities" in both of the interviews I conducted with him, referring often to how his father would tell him to never "be a victim," for "playing the victim was weak." Like in the movement with Shane's drawing, the impression of supposed weakness or pity to the word victim created a rupture 98 that resulted in a negated space. This rupture is seen in Bella's question to Gary, "who is that you are calling a victim? Are you calling Black people victims?" as well as the body language of those pictured in Figure 5, above: Mara's head leaning against the wall, looking out of the bottom of her eyes toward Gary. Carter, a white student who rarely spoke but often wrote in his exit tickets about how much he disagreed with Gary, hiding behind that wall in the back because he was laughing at Gary. Rosie's slight shake of the head when Zach talked about how German children in 2018 might feel bad if they learn about the Holocaust. It may be helpful to view these examples of body language as represented by the scrunched parts of the paper that surround the rupture on Shane's page. The students' emotional responses are surrounding this rupture, if not directly stating their emotions, and it points the viewer toward the negated space that is formed through the rupture. The layers of emotion from this event are also attached to objects of feeling that are not immediately present in the conversation from the activity. Take, for example, the "object" of talking time in class. Gary often talked the most during class discussions, and an example of this occurred when he interrupted another classmate, Zach, to evaluate what Zach had said as "so good." This domination of class time was common -- so much so that Gary would often begin to speak and most of his classmates would immediately shift in their seats, cross their arms, and look anywhere but at him. The saturation of emotion onto the object of talking class time moved between both historical/social and personal/local layers. These emotions also were layered across time, so that what had happened before class was layered between and amongst the saturation of emotion present in the four corners activity. An example of this occurred in Rosie's interview the week before, when she discussed her frustration with Gary equating his white father's arrest to the arrest of Starr's Black father in The Hate U Give. In the novel, Starr's father is arrested, and she and Starr's younger brother, Sekani, are traumatized when they witness the arrest. Gary, in a previous class discussion, stated that he 99 empathized with this moment in the novel, as he had also witnessed his father being arrested as a young child. Gary stated that this moment in the novel proves that issues of social justice are "more about class than about race," since he and Starr's brother had, to Gary, experienced the same phenomenon of watching their respective fathers' arrests. Rosie brought forth this moment from class discussion in her interview: oh my God, here we go again with this guy about to tell a story about his dad's point of view. That's another thing that angers me. He's all talking about, oh well my dad, I had this emotion. When my dad got arrested, I felt the same thing as Starr. No, you didn't. I literally, I feel so many emotions after this class. Like when Starr watched her dad get arrested, [Gary] said he felt that when his dad got arrested and for me I was like, how can you feel that same emotion? Because no offense but you're white and your white father getting arrested is not the same thing as if I were to watch my father get arrested. Here, then, the local, personal tracings of the domination of talking class time intersected with and were layered amongst the historical tracings of race and racialized police brutality in this example from the novel and class discussion. These emotions are drawn in that they are pressed down, often with great force, onto the "pages" of a classroom. The saturation of layers from the personal/local to the historical/social are constantly moving amongst one another, in ways that could give warning or promise of a coming rupture. Thus, Rosie's previous attachment of emotion to Gary's use of discussion time in class was already layered and saturated with feeling before Gary spoke the word "victim" in the four corners activity. Using the rupture on the left side of Shane's drawing as a point of origin to analyze the four corners event, one can view the layering of intensities that occurs around this rupture as local, or particular to the stories of Swanson High or certain bodies in that classroom. The layering of intensities are also historical, or collected across time and space within and beyond the classroom setting. Some of the historical tracings that occur are: my whiteness as the instructor; the camaraderie that occurs between Gary and Zach's presence as white men; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Rosie's assertion in her journal reflection after this activity that some of the "white guys in class 100 ... don't understand that for years people of color were not only judged, but they were beaten, arrested, enslaved, lynched, and so much more just for the color of their skin." This historical saturation of emotion moves together with the local saturation, and as the impression of emotion onto objects of feeling creates a rupture, a “white” space, or a negated space, is formed. Figure 7. Shane's drawing B, four corners activity through drawn emotions analysis (See Appendix for closer analysis) 101 This lack of presence, this ruptured area is not without emotion itself, despite the fact that there is no longer a saturation of intensity in the area of the rupture. The negative space may further reflect a lack of concern from other classmates in the room when discussions of race and racism occur in class, for instance, when one student in first hour, Mae, notes that she often looks around the classroom to see whether her classmates care about the discussion of racism at hand in class. She often would feel frustrated with classmates who seemed bored, whose heads would lie on the top of their desks, "zoning out." The negated space of the rupture can also reflect my whiteness as the teacher in the four corners activity, as well as my presence to them as a sometimes instructor, always researcher, sometimes participant in class. I further name this negated, ruptured space as my pedagogical decision making during the discussion. With Ms. Granger, I made the choice to bring this prompt to light in the class discussion. I offered up this prompt as a point of discussion, and to this discussion I responded twice, with less than successful attempts at corralling Gary's comments about victimization. This ruptured space, then, is layered as well, saturated with emotions of what I did or did not do as the facilitator of this discussion. My whiteness impacted many aspects of this class activity. First, my whiteness is implicated in the ways that I attempted neutrality in the four corners activity, to the point that students of Color were required to then justify their experiences with racism. Second, my whiteness is implicated within the rupture because of the way that I move on from this question in the four corners activity. Immediately following Gary's comment, I moved to the next prompt and asked students to again move to one of the four corners of discussion without a discussion of what was said within the rupture of the previous question. In fact, much of what I know about how students responded to the four corners activity came from their exit tickets and individual interviews that followed the activity. In this way, my whiteness is implicated in how I attempted to gloss over the emotional resonances of that space as I moved on with the lesson at hand. 102 The scrunching of Shane's drawing also points us to the cyclical returns that participants made to this event. The impression of emotions onto objects of feeling creates a "scrunching" that circles around the ruptured, negated space. Across the data from the entire semester, students often referred to the day that we discussed whether we talk about race enough in the United States. This amping up served as a scrunching around the rupture created in class. I will note here that the rupture created, as well as the scrunching, is not necessarily either negative or positive. Although students can put forth ideas that are blatantly harmful and that cause a rupture, I instead focus on rupture here to emphasize the idea that emotions circulate and are pressed down upon layers of feeling in all classrooms, and these ruptures are not extraordinary. I include the word rupture to note the piling up of emotions onto the objects of feeling in a class discussion about race and racism. Below, I note another example of rupture through the shadows of a cyclical emotional literary event. Drawn Emotions as the Shadows of an Event "Um, I don't know if you were there the day that we talked about oppression?" - Kara, Interview 1 Ms. Granger's e-mail showed up at 10:07 a.m. one Friday, right after the second media literacy class ended for the day. Friday was the one day each week that I did not attend class as a researcher and co-instructor, and Ms. Granger's e-mail was meant to catch me up on the fact that the first hour class had not finished the planned class assignment. The class did not finish the assignment, Ms. Granger wrote, because they instead had a spontaneous discussion about the existence of oppression in the United States. The main contributors to this conversation were Lyla, who identifies as Lebanese-American, Mae, who identifies as Black, and James, who identifies as "mixed," Guatemalan and Sudanese. This conversation "lasted the entire hour," with Lyla and James engaging in: a lively conversation back and forth on the topic of oppression - Lyla doesn't see oppression as being a problem in America, and James disagreed. Mae and Kara chipped in. Lyla is struggling with people complaining about America because she sees the beauty of this country, its freedoms and values as the daughter of immigrants and feels that oppression is 103 what happens in worse places; Americans have it so good. While James and Lyla dominated, others wrote responses they didn't want to share verbally. Sort of awkward because it was a good discussion between only a few people. Some others had heads down. Over the course of the semester, students discussed "the time we talked about oppression" on multiple occasions, without prompting, in class discussions and pair shares, in individual interviews, and in exit tickets and journal reflections after class sessions. This cyclical emotional literary event itself became an object of feeling onto which particular emotions were layered, saturating on and through one another. This event was drawn, in that the emotions that all parties felt were socially constructed through the boundaries of emotional rules. The event was also drawn out, relating to events reverberating across decades and centuries beyond the moment of this class session and into the future as well. The emotions that resonated through this event were further drawn, in that they were and could only ever be a representation of felt emotion (Derrida, 1995; Hall, 1997). Figure 8. James' exit ticket response Take, for example, James' four word exit ticket response (Figure 8) to Ms. Granger's prompt at the conclusion of class that Friday: How do you respond to today's discussion? Most of the students in the class wrote between 3 - 5 sentences for their exit ticket. James' response states: "We are oppressed lol." This might be seen as sarcasm, or as a refusal to fully explain his feelings about the 104 topic, or as simple, in that "we are oppressed" needs no other explanation or qualification beyond the obvious historical and contemporary examples of oppression -- the act of asking for more evidence, as Lyla did, was laughable and worthy of an "lol." It also may be a mix or a layering of all of these. Emotions, then, were "drawn" in this discussion, in that they could only be represented through our limited access to the language that is both necessary and insufficient to point others toward our emotions. Figure 9. Shane's Drawing C. In the same way that I analyzed the four corners activity, I chose one of Shane's drawings that most resonated with me as I considered this event, "the day we talked about oppression." (Figure 9). As I moved through the schema, I ended up focusing specifically on the historical and local tracings of drawn emotion present in the data surrounding this event (Figure 10 below). Viewing this event through Shane's drawing was helpful in conceptualizing how students' emotions were layered atop, between, and throughout various objects of feeling that could be historically and locally traced in the class. 105 One object of feeling that can be traced through Shane's drawings is Ms. Granger's positioning within the class. Based on Ms. Granger's e-mails, as well as the lack of mentioning of Ms. Granger in any of the data sources from the students following this episode, I assume that her role was mainly that of a discussion facilitator. This role was similar to my own in the "four corners activity," in which I positioned myself outside of the corners schema and spoke only twice despite my disagreement with some of the opinions of the students in the class. What we know about Ms. Granger's presence in the class is as follows: she postponed the plan for the class that day in order to make space for this conversation, and she asked students to respond to the prompt via an exit ticket. Ms. Granger's (and my own, in the previous event) simultaneous presence and non-presence is layered amongst this cyclical emotional literary event, and the fact that students did not specifically reference her actions in response to the class session points us to the ways that a teacher's presence can be both a rupture or, in this case, more of a "white space" in Shane's drawings. While Ms. Granger was decidedly not a main contributor to this discussion, James and Mae did take an active role in this conversation. Shane's drawing allowed me to see how James and Mae attempted to restrain their feelings regarding "the day we talked about oppression." During her interview, Mae discussed Lyla's assertion that there is no longer oppression in the U.S.: I want to say something but I don't want to come off as rude. And it's really hard for me not to come off as rude because I don't, I don't notice it. Like I just, I just talk. Like some people find it like offensive the way I talk. So sometimes I have to like think in my head what I was going to like ... how I'm going to say it and like how I'm going to get her to understand like where I'm coming from. And then by that time we moved on and I got new feelings coming in. 106 Figure 10. Shane's Drawing C, historical and local tracings of emotion In this explanation, Mae points us toward what Lorde (2007) described as the ways that certain forms of emotion, particularly anger, are not socially allowed for girls or women of Color. When girls and women of Color generally and Black women and girls, in particular, express anger, they are viewed as a harmful stereotype of an "angry Black woman," rather than as a human being expressing a human emotion. Scholars have also named this cataloguing of particular forms of emotion as an emotional rule, and these boundaries around emotion limit Mae’s expression of feeling, especially in schooling settings. The enforcement of emotional rules fall across gendered and racialized boundaries that have been historically constructed (Dunn, Moore, & Neville, in press; Lorde, 2007; Zembylas, 2005). Another layer and saturation of emotion to this event is the fact that both James and Mae, in our initial interviews, answered the question of "what do you want people to know about you when they read this research?" with "I would say, I am not how I look" (James) and 107 "Looks are definitely deceiving because I am a nice person" (Mae). These layers of how James and Mae, who are both Black, feel perceived are saturated amongst the attachment of emotions in this event from class. Both James and Mae discuss how they want to remain "neutral," or "open- minded," how they desire to avoid "coming off as rude," and hope that others will get to know them first before judging them by their appearances. As Mae notes, she hopes to control and organize her thoughts in her head, in this case about why oppression still exists, "to get [Lyla] to understand where I'm coming from." Similarly, in his interview, James told me that he "just wanted to talk to [Lyla] about life and why she doesn't believe that oppression exists." This notion of being open- minded toward others is a staple of critical and dialogic pedagogies in English classrooms, and Mae and James' willingness to engage in conversations with their peers about topics that are important to them are often the aims of equity-oriented English curriculum. In viewing James and Mae's responses to this event through drawn emotions, however, I noticed what Cooper (2018), Jones (2018), and Love (2019) have already pointed us toward: the incomprehensible act of asking students to engage in so-called civil discourse in the midst of the painful layers of emotion that can be historically and locally traced in any classroom event. For example, moments after discussing how she attempts to gather her thoughts in order to help Lyla see where she is coming from, Mae stated: Like everybody has their opinions and like that kind of brings up emotions with me cause I'm just, I don't see it from her side of view, but like I'm not going to judge her for thinking how she wants to. But I'm just like, I don't understand how you see it this way when it's hap- like -- it's right in front of you. In noting "it," Mae is calling attention to what Rosie, a student in the other section of the course, referred to as the history of racialized violence in the U.S. : "but what they don’t understand is for years people of color were not only judged, but they were beaten, arrested, enslaved, lynched, and so much more just for the color of their skin." These considerations of the layering and saturation of emotions atop one another make me consider what it means to ask students to calmly 108 engage in debate about the historical and contemporary oppression of people of Color. What does it mean for English language arts teachers to teach open-mindedness and respect for another's opinions, when someone else's opinion blatantly ignores the perpetual oppression of a group of human beings across history? The saturation of drawn emotions also prompts me to wonder what it means to analyze this event given that Lyla identifies as a woman of Color whose parents had sought refuge in the United States. I see this issue as complicated, particularly as a white researcher-participant in the class, and particularly given that Lyla's comments regarding the lack of oppression in the U.S. move up against James' and Mae's emotions with such great force. Lyla's comments resonated strongly with students throughout the semester, and especially with James and Mae. James' second interview of the semester, which occurred nearly two months after "the day we talked about oppression." Lyla, James, and Mae's class was the first period of the school day, and James was often absent from class, for reasons that were unknown to me. In the interview, James told me about one of Lyla's Instagram posts, which he took as being blatantly about him. James stated: "Ben (a classmate) sent it to me. He sent me a screenshot of Lyla's post and it was like, 'How can you be oppressed when you don't show up to class?'" Lyla's post adds another layer to this saturation of emotion from the event. This post is further layered with James' assertion that "you can be absent from school and still be oppressed," and the event is further layered atop James' obvious emotional response to Lyla's post, in that it seemed that he was hurt by the implication that he seemed "lazy" to Lyla, and thus unworthy of arguing that "we are oppressed, lol." This event is further layered with Lyla's presence as a Lebanese- American teenager whose lived experiences and that of her parents are imbued with historical saturations of emotion themselves, stemming from their attempts to engage in the "extremely long process of citizenship" in the midst of "a civil war; it was crazy for them," as Lyla stated in her interview. Lyla compares her experiences as a Lebanese-American with that of her parents', in that 109 as she says "there are places where like, especially in the Middle East oppression is still happening, but that's the reason people come to America," where, she argues, "there is no oppression." In viewing the saturation of emotions layered upon one another in this event, I note how time and space move with students' emotions. I note the complicated task of an anti-racist English teacher, to center the experiences of people who have been historically marginalized, and to do so in humanizing ways even when the emotional event at the heart of this "day we talked about oppression" stems from a person of Color herself, from a person whose lived experiences of course are also saturated with layers of emotion. Viewing this event through one of Shane's drawings also allowed me to analyze what it means as a white teacher to move amongst the layers of emotion that occurred without my presence, either on a day I was not in class or in realms like social media where layers of emotion are further saturated amongst a class event, even two months later. These discussions are unresolvable, they are constantly negotiated amongst the layers of feeling that we draw, that are drawn upon us, and that are drawn out across space and time. These cyclical emotional literary events, then, leave me with some broad wonderings about how anti-racist ELA classrooms might approach the unresolvable stickiness of the layers and attachment of emotion in response to literature. Discussion and Conclusion I return now to the opening scene of this article: Gary's incorrect statement about the two communities in The Hate U Give; Rosie's foot tapping against the metal bar of her school desk, her face bent down toward page 26 of The Hate U Give, her spine curved over her desk, her eyelashes slightly fluttering. I invite us to look at this scene through the lens of drawn emotions: the restraint of Rosie's annoyance with Gary's comment, the attachment of emotions across historical and individual layers and saturations of objects of feeling, the promise and warning of a coming rupture. The implications of this moment, and the two cyclical emotional literary events I discuss in this 110 article, are important for English educators to consider as we frame anti-racist curricula and pedagogies in the midst of the urgent need to "respond to the wake of racialized violence" (Baker- Bell, et al., 2017). It may be helpful to view the four corners activity through multiple iterations of drawn emotions. In my data analysis, I layered each analytic question atop one another, using a transparency tool to then make each layer of analysis visible and yet chaotic amongst each other (see Figure 9). Below, I outline some of the ways that a lensing of drawn emotions, seen through Shane's drawings, might offer a similarly complicated, chaotic, and messy look at the attachment of emotions onto objects of feeling in English language arts classrooms committed to anti-racism. The two events in this article point us toward questions for teachers pertaining to the layering and saturation of emotions across objects of feeling. First, I consider "the day we talked about oppression" as a cyclical emotional literary event that may help to inform how emotion is "drawn" in a classroom setting. Some may argue that, given the fact that I was absent from this conversation, I am unable to fully represent the movement of emotions across objects of feeling that are and were present in this emotional landscape, and in many ways they would be right. I also argue, though, that my absence from this discussion is informative for understanding how cyclical emotional events transcend space and time and influence the day-to-day affective economies (Ahmed, 2014) of students in our classrooms. For teachers committed to anti-racist English pedagogies, it is important to consider the ways that such events, both within and outside of the classroom and both in the midst of and extending beyond our physical presence, are further layered with emotion. Thus, the curricular innovations we may introduce into our classrooms in the hopes of engaging in any anti-racist pedagogical framework will always be saturated with those events that we may or may not have seen, witnessed, or experienced alongside our students. As I have argued throughout this article, Shane's drawings may help us to conceptualize how these events are saturated with layers of emotion to which we are or are not privy, and for which we were or were 111 not present or not invited to be present. In considering the four corners activity through the lens of drawn emotions, I also note how my pedagogical choices are layered amongst the historical and local saturation of emotion in this event. During this activity, I positioned myself outside the four corners of discussion. I made this choice based on my pedagogical training and my experiences as an English teacher hoping to allow discussion to flourish in a classroom without inserting my own values or opinions into how students are formulating their thoughts through dialogic activities in class. As I consider this pedagogical move through Shane's drawings and through drawn emotions, I find the choice to be messier than I initially knew. I do believe that the positioning of a teacher's body "outside" of the class discussion is important, and that doing so makes space for students to work through complicated ideas authentically, without attempting to guess what the teacher wants them to say. This positioning of my body, though, has attachments of emotion layered throughout (Grinage, 2019), saturating amongst other layers of emotion like the use of the word "victim" or calling back to Martin Luther King, Jr. or the lack of "doing anything" during Black History Month at Swanson High. Even as I physically and linguistically position myself outside of this discussion, the teacher is never really outside of the discussion. Drawn emotions lets me see the work of anti-racism as messy, complicated, and layered with emotions within and beyond our immediate purview. In analyzing these events, I also focus on how I center whiteness through my pedagogical decision making and my presence in the classroom. In addition to my physical presence as a white person in the classroom, I performed whiteness in ways that may have prompted both students of Color and white students to read me and my approach to teaching as white. By this I mean that my approach to teaching is always and already bound up in the ways that I have grown up in the midst of whiteness, of ideologies that uphold notions of emotion, value, and behavior in a classroom setting as superior if it aligns with a white value system. For example, my whiteness in my approach to teaching might be seen in the way I frame this structured discussion using the four corners, or in 112 the way that I ask students to silently write a quick write reflection. Even as I attempt to engage anti- racist frameworks, my whiteness is never separate from my teaching practice. Kinloch (2010) points us toward the "whitification" (p. 11) of a classroom space, and my whitification of the classroom space in this moment is evident in multiple ways. Most saliently, it is evident in the ways that I positioned students of Color in the room to "teach" their white classmates about racism by my positioning myself as neutral in class discussion. This project has allowed me to see the ways that whiteness and the whitification of a classroom setting is not only present in the texts, pedagogical events, or theoretical frames we as white teachers choose; my whiteness is implicated even in the ways that I position my body and my voice as outside of this classroom discussion (Grinage, 2019). Figure 11. Scrunching of texture around a "rupture" I also find the scrunching of textures around the ruptures in Shane's drawings to be potentially informative for the construction of anti-racist ELA pedagogies. As seen in Figure 11, the material of the paper creates a scrunched texture around the ruptures on Shane's drawings. We can consider the scrunched textures of emotion saturated in the two events from this paper. I name the scrunched material, like the rupture itself, as neither positive or negative. Affect theory invites us to reject binaries in our framings, to move away from what is "good" or "bad" and to instead see the gradations or stretching of affect across the movement of bodies and objects in any discourse (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). This assertion is helpful to consider ruptures, but is also potentially harmful. For instance, I expressly name the domination of class time by Gary in the four corners 113 activity as harmful for students of Color. I name my inability as the teacher to respond in ways that avoided that harm as similarly "bad." Still, it is helpful to consider how ruptures in class are not always "bad," and how these ruptures might be seen as a "stretching" within anti-racist ELA frameworks. This stretching might also be seen in the scrunched textures surrounding the ruptures on Shane's drawings. These textures are present in how Mae and James held one another up in the oppression discussion, or in how Trudy, Bella, and Audrey supported Rosie in the four corners activity. The textures around the ruptures might be where the work of anti-racist ELA instruction could begin, to sort through the restraint and bleeding and impression of emotions onto objects of feeling. The emotions that circulate in an anti-racist ELA classroom are constructed by emotional rules and boundaries. These emotions are drawn, in that they are socially constructed, drawn out, in that they reverberate across time and space and originate in the stories told to use across centuries, and are drawn, in that the expression of emotion is always only a representation of what we feel through the language we possess to express that feeling. In an anti-racist ELA classroom, teachers and students must attend to the ways emotions are drawn, layered, and saturated throughout discussions of literature that evoke emotion. This attention is not enough to forward the necessary and urgent justice needed in responding to racialized violence through English frameworks; even more, this attention will always make visible the chaotic messiness of the saturation of emotions across layers of time, thus leaving teachers with possibly more questions than answers. Do I position myself outside of the four corners activity next time, or do I stand and make my anti-racist assertions clear? Do I return to the oppression discussion? Should I respond, and if so how do I respond, to the layers of drawn emotions across moments for which I am not privy and I am not present, such as the oppression discussion or Lyla's Instagram post? Despite the many questions that the framing of drawn emotions offers us, the turning toward these drawn emotions in our ELA 114 classrooms and discussions may help to better support those students both in and outside of our classrooms who have been marginalized in educational settings. The framing of drawn emotions reminds me of Mae's assertion that, in the midst of the chaos of a classroom discussion centered on race, power, and oppression, "by the time we move on," we've always "got new feelings coming in." The use of art like those seen in these drawings, and the drawn emotions represented through the artwork's layers and impressions of intensities, may help teachers attend to these new feelings coming in, throughout, and before us in an anti-racist ELA classroom. 115 APPENDIX 116 Full Analysis of Four Corners Activity with Shane's Drawing Figure 12. Shane’s drawing 117 Figure 13. Historical tracings 118 Figure 14. Local tracings 119 Figure 15. Objects “sticking” 120 Figure 16. Analysis: Responses after incident 121 Figure 17. Analysis: Rupture 122 Figure 18. Analysis: Historical and local tracings 123 Figure 19. Analysis: Historical tracings +local tracings + object’s stickiness 124 Figure 20. Analysis: Historical tracings +local tracings + object’s stickiness + responses from students 125 Figure 21. Analysis: Historical tracings +local tracings + object’s stickiness + responses from students + rupture 126 REFERENCES 127 REFERENCES Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Today. New Press. Routledge. multicultural school district. Education and Urban Society, 38, 359 - 369. Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 59(1), 8-21. Abrahamson, R. P. (2019, Aug.) Hair policy for black students sparks outrage at Georgia school. Adichie, C. (2009, June). The danger of a single story. [Video File]. Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. 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Educational Theory, 52 (2), 187 - 208. 133 CHAPTER 4: ARTICLE 3 “I Can’t Believe I Didn’t Learn this in School”: Whiteness, Anti-Blackness, and Refusing "Secondly" in a Young Adult Literature Course5 It is disturbing that this history is not taught in schools and that it has taken me 21 years of life to witness some of the most brutally honest facts about this nation. -Mallory, a white pre-service teacher Introduction The image is a famous one: a very young Black girl6 is walking between four white U.S. marshals, her dress shining, her small hands clutching a notebook and ruler, her face set and looking forward. Her hair is pulled back into two pigtails, tied with a scrunchied hair band. Her white socks, the kind that some viewers may remember wearing with dresses as small children, the kind that fold over and inevitably always fall at some point when running around a playground, are visible at her feet. The hand that is not carrying her school supplies instead holds a fist that matches her determined face. She is 6 years old. Just beyond the child, a tomato lies on the ground, its juices trailing down the wall and offering the illusion of blood. The wall itself looks ancient, as if it had been set into the foundation centuries ago: immutable, insurmountable. As the viewer looks more closely, it is possible to make out a racial slur above the little girl’s pigtails, her head situated just beneath the letter “g.” The men, whose heads are outside of the boundaries of the painting, encompass the girl and offer a sort of 5 A version of this manuscript is currently in press at the journal Changing English 6 I follow Johnson (2018) in purposely capitalizing people of Color, Black, and Brown. Furthermore, I acknowledge the problem of naming the young person in this painting as a girl, given the construct of gender that reinforces the idea of two stable genders. I purposefully note her as a girl to further emphasize her youth, in a current context in which the “adultification” of Black women and girls has damaging consequences that lead to school punishment and incarceration (Annie C. Casey Foundation, 2017; Baker-Bell, 2017; Winn, 2011). 134 frame for the eye; when looking at this image, the viewer is immediately drawn to the girl. She is brighter, and she is more central, than any other person, word, or object in this scene. Rockwell named his famous painting The Problem We All Live With, and the girl at the center is Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 (Rockwell, 1964). I used this painting in a university-level critical young adult literature course for pre-service teachers (PSTs) to begin our unit on Reynolds & Kiely’s (2015) novel All American Boys, a text that focuses on race and racialized police brutality in the U.S. The course was a majority white context and there were no Black students in the class. As we viewed the painting, I imagined that we might discuss the positionalities of the child, creator, and viewers of the image, asking PSTs to consider with me: What does it mean for this child to not only be Black, but to also be a girl? What does it mean for us to be viewing this, given our own positionalities across race? What does it mean that this painting was created by Norman Rockwell, a white man, and what does the title The Problem We All Live With mean when considering this painter’s racial positionality? How could “the problem” to which he alludes in the title ever be the same for him as it is for this child? I found myself surprised, however, by some of the pre-service teachers’ initial responses: “This girl is walking away from the N-word and the blood, which shows America’s racial progress.” “What were the White men’s true intentions in this painting?” and “Maybe the ring symbolizes the men’s marriages and potential fatherhood, so maybe they feel like a ‘father figure’ to the girl.” This move to primarily focus on the men in the image was particularly interesting to me, as Rockwell seemed to have framed the girl in this painting purposefully, to guide the eye directly to her. The men who frame the girl in the painting are even faceless and positioned around her so as to, again, direct the attention of the viewer to the centrality of this child. The pre-service teachers’ responses caused me to wonder whether I had offered enough of a wide-angle view of the historical antecedents that had led the child in this painting to this particular moment, walking into her 135 elementary school with four fully armed men protecting her. While our discussion was centered in the analysis of one painting, this experience led me to further wonder about the pedagogical ramifications of critically reading literature with pre-service teachers; in what ways might I have offered further unbounded space for students to more fully “see” the child in this painting? How might I have further helped PSTs investigate how, as white readers, our readings of any text is implicated within and by whiteness.? This opening vignette displays the ways that pre-service teachers in a majority white young adult literature course displayed and enacted whiteness in this class. While this vignette points specifically to Rockwell's painting, in this paper I focus on how students respond to literary texts, and how these responses may be framed through an anti-racist framework centered in refusing "secondly" (Adichie, 2009). In English education scholarship, literature has often been conceptualized as a tool for teachers and students to deconstruct issues of social justice by offering “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990) to familiar and new worldviews. Still, the simple inclusion of such texts is often insufficient, and possibly even damaging, to teachers’ and students’ understandings of race and racism when left without an orientation that refuses the damaging societal narratives historically and contemporarily placed upon Black and Brown bodies. Moreover, the erasure of the histories and current lives, joys, and humanity of people of Color in curriculum is a form of anti-Blackness (Baker-Bell, 2020; Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Dumas & Ross, 2016; Muhammad, 2019) or "anti-darkness"7 (Love, 2019). Anti-racist ELA scholars have argued that the English classroom is a parituclarly robust space within which students and teachers can deconstruct whiteness and racism within and across texts (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017; Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017; Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, & Baszile, 2017). It also 7 I note here that Love (2019) uses the term "anti-darkness" rather than anti-Blackness, and I have quoted this term as the author writes it. Love borrows from Du Bois' (1926) assertion: "We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot" (Love, 2019, p. 1). 136 "encourages teachers to challenge curriculum that overrepresents dominant racial perspectives with alternative points of view designed to more accurately and fully represent history and society" (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019, p. 9). Moreover, anti-racist pedagogies are, as Love (2019) attests, a way toward "humanity," and anti-racist educators understand that "we all thrive when everyday people resist ... and when everyday people understand that loving darkness is our path to humanity" (p. 68). In this paper, then, I engage with Adichie’s (2009) concept of refusing "secondly,” which asks readers to widen our angle of vision to consider the historical legacies of power and oppression that situate us in our current socio-political and racialized context. I also analyze how refusing "secondly" makes space for (or does not make space for) situating Black and Brown lives as full, complex, and joyful in ELA classrooms. Beginning with refusing secondly, I examine how Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th allowed space for pre-service teachers and me to deconstruct race, whiteness, and anti-Blackness across historical and contemporary texts and alongside the novel All American Boys. I offer Adichie’s refusing secondly as a way for teacher educators and pre-service teachers to continue within the “uncomfortable, indeterminate process of becoming” more anti- racist (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019) and interrogating and challenging whiteness and anti- Blackness in and outside of schools (Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). In particular, I answer the following research question: How, if at all, does the inclusion of 13th alongside All American Boys offer space for a group of majority white pre-service teachers to refuse secondly within an anti-racist English education framework aimed at deconstructing whiteness and anti-Blackness ? Before I delve into the theoretical frameworks supporting my study, I define some key terms. Some Defining Terms In this work, I define whiteness as the ideology that upholds white supremacy, or the belief that white people are intellectually, morally, physically, and spiritually superior to people of Color (Painter, 137 2010; Anderson, 2016). Whiteness is not equated with white people, however white people enact whiteness in both conscious and subconscious ways. Whiteness upholds all of the societal structures with which the United States was founded (Anderson, 1988; Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Morrison, 1993). Whiteness as an ideology can influence the worldviews of both white people and people of Color (Leonardo, 2013). I define race as a socially constructed and fluid system of categorization of human beings based on physical characteristics (Du Bois, 1997; Picower, 2009). The concept of race was purposefully constructed in order to forward the project of whiteness and anti-Blackness through enslavement and colonization (Grande, 2015; Kendi, 2016; Paris, 2019) Race is fluid because the ways in which humans fit into which categories has never been exact and has constantly shifted over time (Painter, 2010; Anderson, 2016). While race is not real, the enduring beliefs about race are very real, and the enactment of racism extends to all societal structures of society today, including schooling (Cross, Tosmur-Bayazit, & Dunn, 2019; Evans-Winter & Hoff, 2011; Sleeter, 2017). Racism is "the belief that some races are better than others" (Painter, 2010, p. xii). Anti-Blackness is racism that is specifically targeted at people who identify as and/or are labeled as Black. Anti- Blackness is particularly important to consider as Blackness is often "culturally disregarded" and viewed in"disgust," (Dumas, 2016) and Black people have endured some of the most violent and horrendous enactments of racism and White supremacy both historically and contemporarily across the nation and the globe (Baker-Bell, 2020; Dumas, 2016; Love, 2019; Muhammad 2019). Refusing "Secondly” through Literature Instruction Theoretical Perspectives In framing my pedagogical stance in this course, I saw the study of literature as a means to discuss and interrupt race, power, and oppression with pre-service teachers. However, I also found that only including the novel All American Boys was insufficient in helping my students and I connect broader historical legacies of race and racism to the present day. Here, then, I offer Adichie’s (2009) 138 discussion of how to widen the “chronology, or frame” of literature by asking students to refuse secondly in their readings. In her influential TED talk, Adichie discusses how one might avoid the single story of literature. She begins by connecting her experiences as a young child in eastern Nigeria to her affinity for reading and writing literature in which “all the characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked about the weather.” Adichie argues that her young authorial choices demonstrate “how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.” Because the texts she loved to read were crafted by and for people who did not look like her, it took time for Adichie to realize that “people like [her], girls with skin the color of chocolate … could also exist in literature” (Adichie, 2009). Adichie’s discussion of the danger of a single story is helpful to consider how English teachers might use literature to forward an anti-racist ELA pedagogy, as it centers the need to offer representation for students from diverse backgrounds across race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language, and citizenship status. Moving with her articulation of the danger of a single story, Adichie offers ELA educators a way forward in rejecting the one sidedness of the K-12 literary canon through refusing "secondly.” Refusing secondly requires that readers approach texts with a wide-angle view of the historical legacies of power and oppression that have led to our present racialized moment. Adichie cites the poet Mourid Bourghouti, stating: If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and start with ‘secondly.’ Start with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. As Adichie notes here, the chronology of the story of racism and White supremacy is important to consider in deconstructing power and oppression through literature. While dominant narratives about race and racism tend to “start with secondly,” by offering multiple access points for students 139 to consider historical and contemporary racism and oppression, teacher educators may allow students the opportunity to shift the frame of their analysis. Moreover, particular texts can provide teachers and students a form of refusing secondly. For example, Reynolds and Kiely (2015) “refused secondly” in All American Boys when they chose to tell Rashad’s story from his perspective from the beginning. Because dominant narratives often cast Black boys and men as criminals (DuVernay, 2016), some may have situated Rashad as suspicious as he walked the aisles of the shop in which he eventually is beaten by police officer Paul Galluzzo. Following Adichie, instead of starting with the image of Rashad seemingly harassing a white woman in the store, the authors began their story with Rashad talking with his friends (p. 12), getting excited for the weekend (p. 13), and choosing his favorite brand of potato chips at the local convenience store (p. 17). This allows the reader space to view the chronology of Rashad’s story from his perspective, rather than the perspective of damaging media narratives about Black youth. Following Adichie (2009), then, one might see 13th as a “refusal to start with secondly”: “If you want to dispossess a people,” start with the jail cells of Black men, and not with the media narratives that vilified them across centuries, “and you have an entirely different story.” Such media narratives include the vilification of Black bodies alongside the denial of liberty to Black people through slavery, lynching, sharecropping, segregation, and other violent means of depriving the Black body of basic freedoms (Kendi, 2016; Wilkerson, 2011). Refusing secondly offers a way forward for teachers and students using anti-racist ELA pedagogies. In considering how to avoid the danger of a single story with pre-service teachers, refusing secondly makes space to center a variety of modalities as a form of anti-racist pedagogy. I see the call to refuse secondly as inclusive of and extending beyond the traditional texts in an ELA classroom, and as necessarily pointing us toward diverse texts (both in content and in form) through 140 which we can widen our angle of vision of the historical legacies of racism and white supremacy. Refusing secondly requires a simultaneous refusal of ahistorical understandings of oppression: An ahistorical understanding of oppression leads folx to believe that quick fixes to the System, such as surveillance, more testing, and more punishment will solve the issues of injustice and inequality. (Love, 2019, p. 92) Refusing secondly then requires a deeper understanding and recognition of, as well as interrogation of, the historical structures that allow for racism and anti-Blackness to flourish in spaces of education (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). This framework further offers space for teacher educators to consider our own practices and how our pedagogies may or may not meet the standards of anti-racist frameworks. In our course curriculum, I felt that I was also "starting with secondly" by not offering a historical view of, for example, the centuries-long path that eventually led to the young girl in The Problem We All Live With walking into her school surrounded by men and guns, with tomatoes and racial slurs lining the walls of her school building. Similarly, I consider the presence of13th alongside All American Boys as potentially beneficial in helping pre-service teachers begin to refuse secondly when constructing Rashad’s narrative. Like with Rockwell’s painting, I had started with secondly by not offering a wide-angle view of Rashad’s experiences meeting Paul Galluzzo in that convenience store, reaching for a bag of potato chips. Without this historical underpinning, the ways that Reynolds and Kiely were refusing to start with secondly were left incomplete. This paper, then, focuses on how 13th afforded and constrained anti- racist possibilities when used as a form of refusing secondly alongside literature in our course. Whiteness and Anti-Blackness in the Midst of Refusing Secondly "Again, Black folx are highly visible and invisible at the same time. The sad truth is that White people can spend their entire lives ignoring, dismissing, and forgetting dark peoples' existence and still be successful in life. The latter is not the same for us." (Love, 2019, p. 127) The majority of the pre-service teachers in the course under study in this paper identify as white, and none identify as Black. Love (2019) writes, "White folx truly concerned about 141 understanding racism, about being in solidarity with dark folx, about building community, and who are interested in intersectional justice have to start with learning about Whiteness and how it functions" (p. 143). Thus, as I consider how literature instruction may be a form of refusing secondly, I interrogate how whiteness and anti-Blackness intersect in my construction of this course and in my students' responses to 13th and All American Boys. Teachers of Color currently represent 20% of the teaching population in the U.S. public school system, and students of Color represent about 52% of the student population (Carter Andrews et al, 2018; McFarland et al., 2018). Students, then, are overwhelmingly taught by white teachers, and in addition to the inordinate physical presence of white teachers in the workforce, ideologies of whiteness pervade curriculum, instruction, pedagogy, and administrative policy (Love, 2019). Ideologies of whiteness constitute the historical origins of schooling in, for instance, the first U.S. pupils as solely white and wealthy sons of prominent U.S. landholding citizens (Anderson, 1988; Tozer, Senese, & Violas, 2013). The current state of the overwhelmingly white teaching force is a direct result of ideologies of whiteness which, in post-Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Ruling (1954), forced teachers of Color generally and Black teachers particularly out of their schools to make space for white teachers (Anderson, 1988; Siddle-Walker, 2000). These educational injustices are implicated within ideologies of whiteness, or the historically and socially constructed idea that white people are superior and more worthy of humanity than people of Color (Anderson, 2016; Painter, 2010). Whiteness is violent; those who enact whiteness physically and spiritually harm and even kill Black and Brown people. Whiteness is also harmful to white people, as the idea that white people are superior to all other socially constructed races miseducates and dehumanizes all people (Baldwin, 1963; DiAngelo, 2016; Watson, 1988). In the midst of these historical injustices, Black and Brown people have resisted whiteness both in and 142 outside of schooling contexts, creating and enacting excellence with and for children (Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). An examination of whiteness is inherent and vital to the enactment of an anti-racist pedagogy "with teeth" (Love, 2019, p. 13). Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) write, Because Whiteness maintains power, in part, through maintaining invisibility, one of the main goals of antiracist education is making Whiteness visible. Naming it and calling out the ways it works helps to deconstruct Whiteness as a category, delegitimize its neutrality, and reveal the ways it operates as an ideology. (p. 11) As I reflect upon being a researcher and instructor in the course under study in this paper, I note the multiple ways that my students and I enacted whiteness. I sometimes put forth material that more often centered pain or damage of people of Color rather than their joy; I failed to respond in more concrete and immediate ways to the statements made by white students that erased the histories of people of Color, for instance in the discussion of Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With; and, finally, while I attempted to use critical race theoretical frameworks as a response through which pre-service teachers could analyze race in literature, I did not articulate or introduce my students to how whiteness is necessarily bound up in anti-Blackness. Dumas and Ross (2016) define anti-blackness as "a social construction ... an embodied lived experience of social suffering and resistance" in which a Black person and Blackness is "a despised thing-in-itself" (p. 416). Love (2019), defines what she calls "anti-darkness" as "the social disregard for dark bodies and the denial of dark people's existence and humanity" (p 14). Anti-Blackness in schools fails to educate students across races about the historical legacies of race and racism present in our language and literacies practices and pedagogies. Baker-Bell (2020) writes that this enactment of anti-Blackness for language pedagogies is particularly "dangerous and harmful to Black students as [it] teaches them to be ignorant of anti-Black linguistic racism and bow down to it rather than work to it" (p. 6). While here Baker-Bell is writing about linguistic racism, anti-Blackness is present throughout language arts pedagogies as a whole. 143 In the beginning of this article, I addressed how my pre-service teachers looked at Rockwell's (1964) The Problem We All Live With and did not truly "see" Ruby Bridges; they instead pointed out and looked toward the white men surrounding the young girl in the painting. This failure to see is an enactment of anti-Blackness, and it is possible both because of the unwillingness of the pre-service teachers in my class to center the young Black girl in the painting as well as the failure of the students' education to center Blackness throughout their K-12+ schooling. We as teachers and teacher educators, then, continue this form of anti-Blackness by failing to enact pedagogies that center youth of Color in all of their human complexity. Anti-Blackness is manifest in the stories that we tell or provide to our students, as Love (2019) writes: And, most importantly, how did my White students come to know what they know about dark students [?] Students knowing so little about dark people is not an accident; racism erases dark bodies from historical records of importance and distorts their everyday reality. (p. 127) The pre-service teachers in my class, then, have been routinely taught to ignore the experiences, pain, and courage of people of Color in stories and to instead focus on white people's experiences, pain, and courage. Given their miseducation, who else would my students see in this painting besides the white men? I do not attempt here to excuse the white students in my course; instead I argue that both my students' individual decisions to uphold whiteness, as well as the institutionalized whiteness of our k-12 education system, leaves white students vastly underprepared and undereducated regarding issues of racism and white supremacy. What, then, might ELA teachers do to interrupt anti-Blackness? Love (2019), in her formulation of abolitionist teaching, writes that such justice pedagogies "require the willingness of teachers and school administrators to address systemic racism and its effects on dark children while loving Blackness enough to see its assets so that dark children matter" (p. 113). It also requires that white teachers and teacher educators understand that "antidarkness can happen without dark children in the room" (p. 14), and this is evident in the ways that anti-Blackness was enacted in my 144 young adult literature class despite the fact that there were no Black students present. Two examples of this are from my own class are a) my students' responses to the Rockwell painting and my failure to point out the whiteness of noticing the white men more than Ruby Bridges and b) my students' assertion that they had not learned about the 13th Amendment loophole in their schooling. In ELA classes, anti-Blackness is enacted through the erasure of Black people's histories, joys, and fullness of their humanity across the past, present, and future. This enactment of whiteness through anti- Blackness can be seen in one common component of ELA classrooms: literature. In this study, I focus on two texts used in this young adult literature course as an attempt to refuse secondly: All American Boys by Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely and 13th by Ava Duvernay. See Appendix A for text synopses. Methods Data for this project were collected within a larger qualitative study of the responses of pre- service teachers to children’s and young adult literature in one teacher education course (Saldaña, 2015). I studied one section of an undergraduate, critical literature course for pre-service teachers at a large public university in the U.S. Midwest. I served as both researcher and course instructor. Of the 19 pre-service teacher participants who agreed to this study, three identify as Asian American, two as Latinx, and 14 as white. All 19 participants identify as cisgender women and ranged from sophomores to seniors. In our course, pre-service teachers and I read and responded to multiple novels focused on topics of social justice, including a total of 12 novels and/or documentaries over the course of one 15-week semester (See Appendix B). Data sources included: Quick write reflections via a Google document shared only with me; three audio- and video-recorded class discussions on All American Boys and 13th; student individual responses via one handout on 13th; and one collective class Google document. The majority of data for this paper focused on students’ individual Google document 145 responses to All American Boys in light of their viewing of 13th. After viewing the documentary, I asked students to respond to the following open-ended prompt: “What did you feel while you were watching this documentary, and what were some thing(s) you learned from this documentary that you did not know before watching it?” Most students responded to this prompt in class, using between 200 – 500 words. Data Analysis I focused data analysis on pre-service teachers’ interrogation (or not) of whiteness and anti- Blackness in refusing secondly when responding to 13th and All American Boys. I engaged in iterative, thematic, and ongoing coding throughout and after the conclusion of the semester (Braun & Clarke, 2006; McArthur & Muhammad, 2017), using in vivo coding by paying particular attention to participants’ words and phrases (Saldaña, 2015). Throughout this process, I wrote analytic memos, defining and describing the broader themes and codes in each round. In the first cycle of analysis, I generated 55 codes, which included phrases such as “I can’t believe I didn’t learn this,” and “shocked me.” I then engaged in a second cycle of analysis, collapsing the 55 codes into 12. I collected salient student responses for each of the codes, and I used these examples to help inform my recursive process of defining and describing the patterns emerging from the data (See Table 3). In defining the codes and broad themes, I focused primarily on participants’ words, scholarship on anti-racist ELA instruction, and Adichie’s refusing secondly. For example, I coded Andrea’s statement from a small group discussion that she “had no idea about 90% of this information. I wish I knew this information before” with the in-vivo code “I can’t believe I didn’t learn this in school.” I used the data to define the code as “PSTs stated their disbelief at never having learned an accurate history of mass incarceration and slavery in school.” In defining the code refusing secondly, I used Marta’s Google doc reflection that stated: “This makes me think of all the white people outside of this classroom who are so terribly ignorant about our government and their 146 beliefs.” Marta’s reflection helped me to define the code “discussion of other people” as PSTs discussing individual or groups of people, often implicating them in the continuation of racism. From here, I collapsed the twelve codes into three broad themes: first, PSTs’ shifting notions of history, second, PSTs’ analyses of the self in relation to 13th and All American Boys, and, third, anti- Blackness in the midst of refusing secondly. Researcher Positionality In considering my positionality, I note the ways that my experiences and identities necessarily afford and constrain the possibilities of this study (Gordon, 2005). I am a white, former secondary English teacher, and I am also a straight, cis-gender woman who was raised in a middle- class Midwestern U.S. home. Most of the spaces within which I lived and learned as a child were predominantly white, and many of the authors I read as an adolescent were also white. Because of my experiences and positionality as a white person, there is apprehension for me in conducting research with pre-service teachers regarding race and racism in literature (Morrison, 2004). I believe, however, that it is imperative for me as a white teacher educator, and particularly as the instructor for the course under study here, to interrogate the enduring legacies of racism with my pre-service teachers, the majority of whom are also white women and many of whom will in the future teach children of Color (Carter Andrews et al., 2018; McFarland et al, 2018). I also argue that majority- white spaces, much like the communities in which I was raised and the schools that I attended, can benefit from a critical deconstruction of race, power, and oppression through texts. I now turn to the perspectives and texts underpinning my analysis, beginning with All American Boys and 13th before turning to anti-racist English education and Adichie’s refusing secondly. Findings: 13th, All American Boys, Anti-Blackness, and Refusing Secondly Pre-service teachers’ responses to 13th demonstrated how readers might refuse to "start with secondly” (Adichie, 2009) when reading young adult literature. These responses both widened and 147 limited pre-service teachers’ interpretive possibilities when reflecting on the novel All American Boys. In particular, when viewing 13th in light of All American Boys, PSTs: (1) connected historical events of enslavement and white supremacy to the present day; (2) often implicated individual agents or societal institutions before considering their own past and possible future actions in relation to racism and; (3) through literary response, enacted anti-Blackness in the midst of refusing secondly Table 5. Coding Scheme: Young Adult Literature Course Code Shifting notions of history Definition or description PSTs demonstrated how their knowledge of history shifted Discussion of societal institutions PSTs directly implicated or discussed what this knowledge means in connection to societal institutions such as schooling, religion, or government. Example from data I just want to talk about how slavery is always brought up as something that is so far removed and as something that happened in the past and like “how could that even happen?” but things that are happening now you can trace it back, like she said, all the way back to the very first kidnapping of Black people. And that’s just crazy to me. I always thought slavery was so far before my time, it has nothing to do with me, it’s just something that is a part of our history. And now I’m like, what I thought was wrong (Whole class discussion). Watching this documentary really shocked me and made me feel disgust towards the leadership in this country who abused their power and continue to do so. They say it’s because of drugs, but in reality it’s because they are black. They treat black people completely different than white people when it comes to crime and that is their (government) crutch (Google doc reflection). 148 Frequency 37 35 PSTs demonstrated “seeing beyond” the traditional mainstream story of race through a historization of race and racism. PSTs stated their disbelief at never having learned an accurate history of mass incarceration and slavery in school. This disbelief is a form of harm to students of Color, as it negates the experiences of people of Color and in particular enacts anti- Blackness. PSTs directly implicated or discussed what this knowledge means for them. Table 5 (cont’d) Refusing secondly Anti-Blackness through shock at "not learning this in school" Discussion of the self Discussion of other people PSTs implicated others or groups of people T (A white pre-service teacher): This makes me think about all of the white people outside of this classroom who are so terribly ignorant about our government and their beliefs (Google doc reflection). 149 20 In the documentary, it showed how many African Americans were accused of different crimes, but many of them didn’t actually commit any of them. Similarly, in AAB, we see that Rashad gets accused of different crimes too and he didn’t commit a single one of them (Class Google doc). K: I can’t believe I’ve gone 21 years without knowing. A: I didn’t know, like, any of this. K: Same. That’s the first thing I said. I was just shocked, like, why am I hearing about this now? A: I had no idea about 90% of this information. I wish I knew this information before (Small group discussion). S: How could we go 21 years without knowing any of this?. It’s, like, sad that this has been happening for centuries. And we still can’t figure this out (Whole class discussion). While watching I thought about why I don’t watch the news and it’s because this is really sad and negative. I don't want to consume this information (Google doc reflection). 19 19 6 Table 5 (cont’d) Pedagogical questions Things that I am shocked that I did not learn about in school… why was this such an intense topic and major points in our history but not talked about in schools? (Google doc reflection). 6 PSTs discussed what this means for education broadly and their future classrooms in particular. Connecting the Historical with the Contemporary Students in this course did see 13th as a challenge to the dominant narrative surrounding race and racism in the U.S. Many students expressed shock that they had never learned a more accurate history of racialized criminalization, and asserted that 13th offered “new perspectives” to the history they had learned in their K-12 schooling. Students noted that, while there exists a dominant narrative that still attempts to portray people of Color, and Black people in particular, as criminals, DuVernay showed them an alternate understanding of this story. Students also noted how slavery is connected to today’s state of mass incarceration in the U.S. For example, Maria, a white pre-service teacher, wrote “I learned that no matter what time in history or what the issue is with racism it goes all the way back to the first moments of slavery” and Carolina, a white pre-service teacher, wrote, “I really liked how the documentary started from the very beginning of the issue and slowly led us into present day and how the problem has persisted.” While 13th did begin the discussion of mass incarceration with pre-enslavement, I would argue that it is impossible to truly pinpoint an exact "very beginning" of any aspect of history. Still, I see Carolina here noting how 13th attempted to refuse secondly by pushing past well-known facts about enslavement to begin with the decisions of the oppressors. Students also connected the documentary’s focus on the historical and contemporary ramifications of race and racism to All American Boys. For example, Andrea wrote: The documentary showed how many African Americans were accused of different crimes, but many of them didn’t actually commit any of them. Similarly, in [All American Boys], we 150 see that Rashad gets accused of different crimes too and he didn’t commit a single one of them. Another student, Norah, wrote, “Rashad’s incident is not isolated. Police are given deliberate power to use excessive force and eliminate certain people society views as criminal, historically black men.” The use of 13th, then, offered space for many students in this course to analyze dominant, damaging, and racist societal narratives about Black men and women in the U.S. In this way, students were able to see past the “secondly” of Black criminalization and incarceration rates and witness the historical path that led to Rashad’s experiences in All American Boys. Implicating Institutions when Responding to 13th Many of the pre-service teachers assigned blame for the damaging narrative of Black youth and incarceration on the shoulders of government policies, institutions, and politicians without noting how they themselves might act in the future, and also have worked (or not) in the past, against this social problem. For example, white PSTs placed blame upon “the media,” “Bill Clinton,” and “all of the ignorant white people.” Two other white PSTs wrote that the issue lies in “young people that are blindly following white male leaders,” and in “political actions taken that had such awful ramifications.” Here, I note in particular the ways that PSTs resort to the passive voice, lifting the onus of blame from any person, when discussing issues of racial injustice. PSTs placed blame on the actions of government officials and societal institutions, a fact that coincides with the themes of the documentary as a whole since 13th focuses primarily on politicians, policy-makers, and institutional-level decision-making. When considering this documentary in light of their course readings, pre-service teachers most often expressed disgust, frustration, and blame upon their past schooling experiences for failing to educate them. For example, Kendra wrote, “I think back to 3rd grade, when I first started learning about [slavery] and how I really trusted my teachers. It’s just sad – because it doesn’t have 151 to be that way.” During one class discussion, Layla called her own experiences with historical education as “being twisted.” She stated, Not only is history not being taught with what really is happening or what really happened – we are also being told fake versions of what happened. It’s not just that [teachers are] not saying stuff, but they’re saying things that are actually not true. While discussions of the self occurred 19 times across the data, only twice did PSTs consider how their past actions may have contributed to systemic racism or offer ways to change the current system. One student did consider her own actions and what it meant for her to be a white person viewing this documentary and envisioning her future classroom. She wrote, “As a white person, it’s easy to ignore this or not pay attention, but I think it’s important to push our comfort zones and watch these videos, to show them to our younger generation, to show them these problems.” Most students, however, mainly placed blame upon others without noting the changes they could make to influence the future, particularly once they are teachers in their own classrooms. This finding has direct implications for the need to historically contextualize contemporary experiences of race and racism in anti-racist English language arts courses. Pre-service teachers and their future students would benefit from an understanding of the unbroken line from slavery through Jim Crow to the current state of mass incarceration and racialized police brutality in the U.S. to the everyday instances of spiritual, physical, and emotional harm enacted against students of Color and Black students in particular. Without this historical contextualization and the focus on refusing secondly, the inclusion of texts such All American Boys will do little to forward the aims of an anti-racist teacher preparation course. Anti-Blackness in the Midst of Refusing Secondly In their responses to 13th and All American Boys, the PSTs did engage in refusing secondly by historicizing the path from enslavement to racialized mass incarceration in the U.S. This historicization allows a chronology of racism for PSTs to follow to counteract the dominant 152 portrayals of Black and Brown people as often seen in stereotypes. However, the PSTs in this course, both as evident in their lack of critical racialized self awareness as well as in their continued insistence that they never knew about these historical racial injustices, enacted anti-Blackness through their literary responses. Critically, the fact that they are likely correct that they never learned about the loophole of the 13th Amendment also points to the institutionalized anti-Blackness present in our K-12 schools. Finally, I as their instructor also engaged in anti-Blackness by focusing mainly on the pain of the historical and contemporary experiences of people of Color in our texts ,as well as failing to push my students to consider their own whiteness in their literary response (Borsheim- Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Morrison, 1993). PSTs in this course frequently stated that they were "shocked" or "disturbed" by the truths of DuVernay's documentary 13th, and, without moving beyond this shock, these feelings can be a form of individual anti-Blackness. I want to be clear that I, of course, think we all should feel disgust for the historical and contemporary examples of racialized injustice and white supremacy in this country. I name the PSTs' admission as an enactment of anti-Blackness because this shock is often the first and last consideration white students give to the embodied racism that people of Color experience daily. This is anti-Blackness because, as a white person, I am able to intellectually consider, for example, the loophole of the 13th Amendment, or the racial profiling of young Black boys like Rashad as they walk into a convenience store, and I can summon my shock and disgust, and then I can put it back down. Conversely, Black and Brown people must experience the embodied knowledge of centuries of whiteness and anti-Blackness that was and is inflicted upon them. This privilege is institutionalized anti-Blackness that we did not create, but that we as white people enact and forward when we feel only disgust or shame without working to interrupt the relentless path of whiteness. The students in this course likely did not learn about the histories, lives, 153 and experiences of people of Color in complex ways across their K-12 education; this failure of curriculum is an enactment of institutionalized anti-Blackness. Love (2019) writes, "Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the 'human hierarchy' was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological racial inferiority to 'those Americans who believe that they are White'" (pp. 7 - 8). It is helpful to consider curriculum then as questions of mattering; what injustice matters enough to be present? Whose lives, languages, and literacies matter enough to include in a 7th grade ELA unit? Whose joy, struggle, and courage matter enough to be centered in our pedagogies? In order to interrupt the anti-Blackness of our collective miseductions, white pre-service teachers must learn how to use curriculum and instruction to ensure that the lives, histories, and joys of Black and Brown people matter in their curriculum and instruction. This begins with an acknowledgement of their, and our, miseducation, but must move beyond the feelings of guilt and shame associated with this unlearning. One consequence of using 13th as a form of refusing secondly in this white-dominated class, taught by a white teacher educator, is that white PSTs may see the single story of pain in the lives of Black people without understanding their joy. In this way, Black people, whether characters in stories or in real life, may become instruments for white people's humanity. Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) write, Whites comes to important realizations about social issues like slavery through their humanity, their ability to empathize with Black people. Also important to point out is how Blackness, and Black people, are portrayed in order for this portrait of Whiteness to become visible (p. 62). This use of Black people in stories to make white people understand their own humanity is violent and is an act of anti-Blackness, one that "excludes" Black people from the "social recognition of the humanness of others" (Dumas, 2016, p. 13). Anti-Blackness has implications for our ability to 154 read our own racialized responses to literature, particularly as white people seek to refuse secondly and refuse whiteness through texts. Discussion and Conclusion I now consider how pre-service teachers began to refuse secondly through 13th and All American Boys, and what this may mean for English teacher educators attempting to use literature in our courses to interrupt race and racism. Pre-service teachers in this study often implicated institutions and individual people in power before thinking of their own past and future actions regarding race and racism. As a future educator, critiquing one’s own education can be an important way to reconsider the promises and possibilities of schooling. By calling attention to the ways that Kendra, a white PST, notes her own distrust toward what she learned in school, as well as Layla’s, a white PST, frustration with the “twisted nature” of learning about history, these teachers may begin to ask themselves how they could make their future classrooms different. Pre-service teachers in this course, then, were able to see the “twisted nature” of dominant narratives of race and racism by viewing 13th. However, in viewing 13th, most of the PSTs in this study did not discuss or write about how they might individually act against race and racism. PSTs further did not address their own individual enactments of whiteness and did not critique the institutionalized anti-Blackness present in schools that resulted in their own miseducation about race. Students also rarely offered up solutions for future action and pedagogy when considering the contemporary legacies of historical racialized violence. While students were able to discuss the benefit of refusing to start with secondly by considering how historical formulations of racism and white supremacy have far-reaching implications today, their expression of blame toward other institutions or individuals is insufficient in helping them formulate an anti-racist teaching framework. This lack of self-implication is rooted in whiteness (Love, 2019; Painter, 2010) and it is necessary for teacher educators to not only present 155 students with a way to refuse secondly, but also to trace our own positioning alongside the construction of the dominant narrative. In order to refuse secondly and interrupt whiteness and anti-Blackness in literature instruction, white PSTs and teacher educators must directly confront our own racialized literary responses to texts. Baker-Bell (2020) argues that it is equally significant "if not more important" for white students to interrogate how whiteness, both their individual whiteness and institutionalized whiteness, perpetuates anti-Blackness across language and literacy practices (p. 11). Refusing secondly as anti-racist pedagogy requires that we push against our own readings. This might be enacted by, first, acknowledging how readers can misread characters of Color and their stories, and how we fail to view the lives of characters of Color as full, complex, and human. Following Borsheim-Black and Sarginiadies' (2019), we must ask our white students to consider in our misreadings: What does this misreading help us understand about our own racial identities, the racial dynamics of the class, or the dominant racial ideology of our society? What are consequences of such a misreading?" (p. 48) This requires that teacher educators and PSTs work together to understand the complexity of racism and each of our individual positions within whiteness and white supremacy. In the course under study in this paper, I might have better held the PSTs and myself accountable (Love, 2019, p. 122) for understanding where each of us stand in our whiteness in relation to race and racism. Importantly, literature is a space that can reflect our own biases and assumptions, and this course may have more strongly refused secondly by turning the gaze back onto the reader to consider how particular readings had occurred (Morrison, 1998). Refusing secondly in readings of literature must also prioritize readings that display the full complexities of human beings. By this, I mean that teacher educators must help PSTs understand the painful histories that have led to the current state of whiteness and anti-Blackness while 156 simultaneously centering the joy and love in stories of people of Color. Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) found that white PSTs in their courses were conditioned to expect a story about Black people to "be a story about racism" (p. 34). When the story is not about racism, their students even assume that the characters are actually not characters of Color because it is not seen as a "typical Black book." While these PSTs certainly must reflect on their whiteness in these readings, I also argue that the K-12 ELA curriculum has, for white students, relentlessly associated the stories characters of Color with pain: we as white educators have created their response. I follow Muhammad (2019), then, in emphasizing historical, systemic injustice in the midst of the joy of youth, of their literary learning, and of their lives (p. 167). It is necessary, then, for PSTs to read a cavalcade of texts across a diverse range of form and content in order that readers might avoid the single story of pain and continually reflect upon their own racialized positionalities alongside the reading of stories. Refusing secondly charges teachers and students with the task of continually tracing their own learning and positionalities across a wealth of texts addressing issues of race, power, and oppression. I agree with Franklin-Phipps and Rath (2019), who argue that the work of engaging race and racism with pre-service teachers is always “incomplete, incoherent, shifting and changing” (p. 144) and with Love (2019) and Muhammad (2019), who argue that this work cannot be accomplished in one single course or through one text. Thus, in order to more fully refuse secondly, teacher educators and their students must see their work as a continuous process of becoming, and engage with many texts from multiple, shifting, and changing perspectives. It is my hope that this project offers insights for teacher educators and pre-service teachers in dismantling the racialized structures of power within which our students are learning to become anti-racist English educators. By refusing the dominant societal narratives around race and racism, teachers and teacher educators 157 may more fully attend to the potential for justice that is inherent within the discipline of English education. 158 APPENDICES 159 APPENDIX A Table 6. Synopses of All American Boys and 13th 160 APPENDIX B Table 7. Titles of Texts Read by the Whole Class (Sans “Choice” Text Weeks) Week in course Title Author 3 4 6 7 8 9 11 13 14 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- time Indian Inside Out and Back Again Sherman Alexie Thanhha Lai Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Benjamin Alire Sáenz Piecing Me Together Renée Watson History is All You Left Me Adam Silvera Saints and Misfits S. K. Ali Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King Hasan Minhaj American Born Chinese Gene Luen Yang All American Boys Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely 13th The Hate U Give Ava DuVernay Angie Thomas 161 REFERENCES 162 REFERENCES New Press. University of North Carolina Press. The guide for white women who teach black boys (pp. 97–107). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Adichie, C. (2009, June). The danger of a single story. [Video File]. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The Anderson, C. (2016). White rage: The unspoken truth of our racial divide. 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School and society: Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York: Watson, L. (1988). An Aboriginal perspective: Developing an Indigenous social work. Change and Wilkerson, I. (2011). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books. Winn, M. (2011). Girl Time: Literacy, justice, and the school-to-prison pipeline. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. continuity in Australian social work, 177-84. 167 CHAPTER 5: DRAWING CONCLUSIONS/REFUSING CONCLUSIONS "We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture." - Gyasi, Homegoing " ... Be attentive to which stories we are crafted out of as well as which we participate in crafting; which stories we teach, and which stories we are taught by." - Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World Introduction English teachers, like all humans, love a good story. We believe in the power of story for a multitude of purposes, for entertainment, for social change, for "meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower" (Brooks, 1969; Johnson, 2019). In the midst of the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, stories have not been supplemental; they have sustained us. Stories of Portland's Powell's bookstore being able to keep their employees on payroll because of an enormous uptick in online sales (Williams, 2020); outrageous and heartfelt stories like those seen in the [for this author] innumerable rewatches of the TV show The Office; stories told through virtual tours of art, history, and technological museums across the world made open to the public during this crisis; stories made available through podcasts or Youtube videos of principals, teachers, and children's book authors reading to youth; stories of pain and redemption and hope as most of us feel hopeless. In noting the power of story, though, one must attend to the instruction of Yaw, the history teacher in Gyasi's Homegoing. We must not only comprehend a story, but also understand our own emotions when reading a text. In other words, we must take account of a key player in the act of reading: the reader. And along with the reader come the sociocultural processes by which their emotions can be traced through objects of feeling across space and time. Loveless (2019) writes: 168 Stories are powerful. The stories that we believe, the stories that we live into shape our daily practices, from moment to moment. They have the power to promise some futures and conceal others. They encourage us to see some things and not others. (p. 21). My goal in this dissertation was to consider the role of emotion in the power that stories have to "shape our daily practices," to "promise some futures and conceal others," to "see some things and not others." I sought to explore the emotion in readers' responses to literature that addressed race, power, and oppression in a secondary ELA classroom and in a young adult PST undergraduate course. It was my hope that such an examination may help educators and researchers construct anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogies by exploring the "always and already present" emotions that are implicated within our readings of literature for justice (Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2015). I also wanted to interrogate the whiteness and anti-Blackness that are implicated within our readings of literature, and how this whiteness is particularly present for white teachers, students, and readers, even as we attempt anti-racist frameworks (Dumas, 2016; Muhammad, 2019; Love, 2019; Morrison, 1993). My own whiteness limited my readings of others' readings; as my whiteness has miseducated me across my lifetime, so it can misinform my analysis, my pedagogy, and my methodology as a researcher and teacher. Still, I attempted here to center voices, emotions, and literacies of the historically marginalized and to do so in ways that pushed back against the often sterile, standardized, and whitewashed curriculum prioritized in many K-12 ELA classrooms (Dunn, 2018). Teachers and students are often taught to devalue their own emotional readings of their lived experiences, and to ignore their emotional responses to texts unless those emotions can gain for them a supposedly more superior, "analytical," and interpretive stance (Lewis & Tierney, 2011; Thein et al., 2015). When I present on this work, I am often asked about the push for teachers to quell emotion in their classrooms, to avoid emotional outbursts, and to navigate students away from conversations that will often result in renderings of difficult emotions, particularly through 169 conversations about race, power, and oppression. Emotions are seen, then, as something to be avoided at all costs. In this dissertation, I argue that teachers should not and cannot avoid emotion in the anti-racist ELA classroom; emotion is already present and is already drawn across our individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures (Ahmed, 2010, 2014; Grinage, 2019; Hanna, 2019). Moreover, it was my aim in this dissertation to emphasize the responsibility that white teachers and teacher educators have in interrogating and interrupting whiteness and anti-Blackness with and for their students, and with their white students in particular (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019; Dumas, 2016; Cross, Tosmur-Bayazit, & Dunn, 2019). This is not easy work: as white teachers and teacher educators we must continually engage in the critical self-work of deconstructing our own whiteness and anti-Blackness in our readings of the word and the world (Freire, 1985); we must skillfully respond to the emotions of our white students as they unlearn their own whiteness (Matias, 2017; Tanner, 2019); we must traverse the delicate balance of speaking up when we can use our privilege to break down racism in schooling settings and silencing ourselves when we must instead listen to our colleagues of Color (Love, 2019). Amidst all of this, white teachers must see how their attempts to become more actively anti-racist in their pedagogy and instruction may place undue harm on the psyches of students of Color in our classrooms (Grinage, 2019; Hanna, 2019). While all of this is certainly difficult for the white teacher, it is still voluntary for us as white people. This work is not nearly as emotionally and physically exhausting as the involuntary work students and teachers of Color must contend with to simply survive and, most importantly, thrive (Love, 2019) in the schooling contexts that have been historically and purposefully designed to thwart the thriving of Black and Brown students and teachers. In both the critical media literacy course and in my own undergraduate course in this dissertation, I both succeeded and failed at interrupting racism and oppression in these classrooms. 170 These experiences hold implications for how secondary ELA educators, teacher educators, and literacy researchers may engage in anti-oppressive pedagogies through an attention to emotion and a refusal of "secondly" in our readings of literature with and for students. In the sections that follow, I conclude this dissertation by first summarizing the previous chapters and detailing some implications for ELA collaborators across classroom and research contexts. I then discuss my future research trajectory and what this work means for my methodological and pedagogical goals. In this way, I attempt to draw conclusions, as I connect the work of this dissertation to the day-to-day lives and instruction of teachers and students. At the same time, I attempt to refuse conclusions, as I see and understand the work of anti-oppressive and anti-racist ELA pedagogies as never concluded; this work continues on. Summary and Implications This dissertation was split into three separate articles: the first conceptual and the second and third empirical. The dissertation holds implications for secondary ELA educators, English teacher educators, and literacy researchers committed to anti-racist literacy pedagogies to deconstruct and interrogate whiteness and anti-Blackness with their students. Broadly, while the current context of high stakes testing and neoliberal ideologies would ask teachers and students to negate their emotions in order to achieve high scores on mandated tests (Dunn, 2015), I argue that ELA curriculum in particular offers space for readers to understand their emotions as "part and parcel of our intellectual work" (Stenberg, 2011). Article 1: Drawn emotions. In this article, I offer a conceptual framework entitled drawn emotions to analyze how emotions can be traced and layered across objects of feeling in anti- oppressive ELA classrooms. In constructing this framework, I borrowed from my brother Shane's drawings to serve as metaphors for the layering of emotion across objects of feeling (Ahmed, 2010, 2014) in discussions of literature in ELA contexts. I offer three characteristics of drawn emotions 171 for anti-oppressive ELA classrooms: first, emotions are drawn, or constructed, by human beings in the social contexts within which we live (Baker-Bell, 2020; Boler, 1999; Jaggar, 1989; Lorde, 2007). Emotions are also drawn out, in that they extend from our individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures (Butler, 2018; Grinage, 2019; Ward, 2017; Wiley, 2019). Finally, emotions are drawn because they rely on our own messy and uncertain representations of feeling through language. The expression of emotion is always about almost nearly getting to that feeling that one feels through our words (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2019; Hall, 1997). I then analyzed a moment from my time as a high school English teacher, when one of my students, Richard, asked me, "Miss, I know you don't live in Detroit. Right?" Using the framework of drawn emotions, I demonstrated how objects of feeling such as the whiteness of the U.S. teacher workforce, racist redlining practices, and the purposeful, historical, and state-sponsored destruction of thriving Black neighborhoods throughout the city were layered amongst this moment from class. The main implication for the framework of drawn emotions is that teachers and researchers cannot avoid the emotions that are already present in any ELA classroom, and in anti-oppressive and anti-racist ELA classrooms in particular. This article could help teachers and researchers work with students to trace the historical layering of their own emotions as they read literature for justice. I see this as especially important for white students to understand how their layered emotional response is itself a racialized response; for example, it would be fruitful to consider my own whiteness with my students in my emotional response to Richard's question: Miss, I know you don't live in Detroit, right? This moment could be seen as an object of feeling in itself, and my emotional desire to move past the tension of Richard's question could be helpful for all students to work through an understanding of how whiteness silences emotion as it inflicts its violence. I also see this work as having implications for pedagogical and methodological inquiry with and for students. In this article, I centered the art of my brother Shane very purposefully: I sought to 172 emphasize the literacy and art of a person whose voice is traditionally ignored in classroom settings. While this focus on anti-oppressive pedagogies is particular to ability, I see the work of drawn emotions as extending to teachers and researchers as they engage their students in exploring their own emotional tracings present across objects of feeling in discussions of anti-oppressive pedagogies broadly. I envision this research as potentially moving within a type of literary analysis in which students might center their own artwork by creating conceptual frames tied to theory, theory that they learn or read about as I did with Ahmed (2010, 2014), or theories originating in their interests across music, popular culture, and their own lived experiences. Article 2: Cyclical emotional literary events and rupture. In this article, I use the framework of drawn emotions to analyze the cyclical emotional literary events across two class sections of Ms. Granger's 12th grade critical media literacy course. I also explore how students' emotional responses afforded and constrained the anti-racist possibilities of literature. I found that students responded both to The Hate U Give and to their classmates' comments during whole class discussion through cyclical emotional literary events. I define these events as moments from class that evoked emotion in and among students and that students continually returned to, without prompting from either Ms. Granger or myself, throughout the course of the semester. Students' responses were layered among and between the objects of feeling that arose in class. The two main events I focused on in this article were the discussion of whether we talk about racism enough in school and in society and the "day we talked about oppression." Across both of these events, it was clear that the power dynamics at play layered emotion among the objects of feeling and students in the course in ways that could harm students of Color and sometimes placed students of Color in a position to defend or justify why they thought racism existed. The events themselves became objects of feeling that were complicated by the identities and life experiences of 173 students in the course, for instance through the insistence of Layla, who is a Lebanese-American teenager, that oppression does not exist in the U.S. This article offers questions for teachers and researchers to consider as they attempt to construct anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies in their classrooms. First and foremost, I consider the ways that students of Color like Rosie, Bella, Trudy, James, and Mae were required to justify their painful experiences of racism in order to "teach" their white classmates. I see the ways white teachers like myself must better construct anti-oppressive pedagogies that critique the historical legacies of racism and white supremacy through readings of texts while simultaneously finding ways to avoid harming students of Color when we essentially require them to lay bare their understandings of race and racism in the U.S. This research also makes me consider pedagogical uncertainty. I call our attention back to Layla, the student who identifies as Lebanese-American and who argued that oppression no longer exists in the U.S. In writing this article, I found myself uncertain of the best way to analyze this experience of emotion in the class, and to consider what it means for me to be a white researcher analyzing the lived experiences of a student of Color, even in the midst of her harmful beliefs regarding oppression. How could drawn emotions help us, and Layla, to consider these emotional responses? How could these emotions be traced among Layla's lived experiences, that of her family, and the message of the "American dream" pushed upon her in school and society? This article helps me to see how teachers and researchers may never unsettle this uncertainty in attempting anti- oppressive pedagogies; the work will always be messy and uncertain even in the midst of our attempts. This work further leads me to consider how teachers and researchers can better support students like Rosie in class. I urge us to recall Rosie's admission that, while she "had so many feelings" during and after class, during discussion she often avoided speaking because she did not 174 want to seem "like an angry Black girl." I also note that it was difficult for anyone to speak during this class because of the amount of talking time taken up by Gary, a white man. This finding has implications for considering how to construct anti-oppressive pedagogies not only in the texts we choose but in the ways that we equitably clear space for all students' ideas in a classroom. I also wonder what it might look like to help students understand emotion as "part and parcel of our intellectual work" (Stenberg, 2011). Rosie often felt wary of expressing emotion because she did not want to come across as "angry." As teachers, how might we help students see emotions, including and perhaps especially anger, as purveyors of meaning for our understandings of the world rather than as antithetical to reason and argument? In this, I do not mean to focus only on Rosie's emotions, but instead to help students as a whole class view emotion as instructive. I see emotion as one with our intellectual response; how can we help students view our emotion as a guide for understanding the world? Article 3: Refusing secondly. In this article, I shifted from the framework of drawn emotions and from the critical media literacy course to focus on how majority white pre-service teachers in an undergraduate young adult literature class did or did not refuse "secondly" (Adichie, 2009) and did or did not interrogate whiteness and anti-Blackness in their readings of the novel All American Boys alongside their viewing of the documentary 13th. Using Adichie's (2009) TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story," I examine the affordances and constraints of literature in helping pre-service teachers deconstruct and interrogate whiteness in their literary responses. I found that the PSTs were able to connect the historical legacies of enslavement and white supremacy to the present system of mass incarceration in the U.S. and to tie this to Rashad's experiences in All American Boys. In this way, PSTs were able to refuse "secondly" by taking a wide-angle view of the current system of racialized violence through incarceration. However, I also found that PSTs rarely implicated themselves when analyzing systems of racism in society, and instead focused on 175 implicating only institutions. This deconstruction of institutional racism is not "bad" in and of itself, and is indeed necessary to understand and link the historical to the contemporary. However, without the critical self-work of deconstructing ideologies of whiteness within their own readings of literature, I ultimately found that PSTs were unable to move toward a more full enactment of anti- racist pedagogies. This article has implications for teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers committed to deconstructing whiteness and anti-Blackness within PSTs' literary responses. First, I recall our attention to the image of the Norman Rockwell painting in the article’s introduction. The move on the part of the PSTs to emotionally resonate with the four white men in the painting before Ruby Bridges is instructive. Teacher educators might help their white PSTs enact anti-racism by asking them to shift their gaze toward their own readings: what does it mean that we would first resonate with these men? What does that tell us about whiteness generally and our whiteness in particular? What does that tell us about ourselves and the ways we read the world? What does that tell us about how we might otherwise read the world, about how we might shift our understanding? This work further has implications for teacher educators in constructing teacher education curriculum committed to anti-racism. How can teacher educators and researchers guide students toward the violent history of racism and white supremacy that is necessary to construct anti-racist pedagogies while simultaneously prioritizing the joys, loves, and literacies of humans in the stories we read? As I noted in this article, my syllabus and many critical young adult literature curricula in teacher education programs focus on the pain experienced by people of Color or people from historically marginalized communities across class, gender, ability, and sexuality. This article has implications for teacher educators and researchers as we prepare teachers to critique the violence of historical and contemporary oppression while sitting within the joy and resistance of humans as seen in literary texts. 176 Drawing Forward: Plans for Future Teaching and Research Across my work as a teacher and researcher, I have centered the question: What can English education classrooms mean for students and teachers in light of the historical and contemporary legacies of race and racism? How might literary texts help students and teachers deconstruct injustice and center the emotions, joys, and literacies of youth? Scholars have long called for literacy curricula to more fully reflect youths’ multiple cultural, linguistic, and modal ways of knowing and being (Bishop, 1990; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Myers, 2014; Smitherman, 1986). Still, there is much to explore regarding how readers respond with emotion to literary texts within anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogies. I seek to move forward from the work of this dissertation then with a plan to implement research and teaching methods that center emotion and interrupt the violence of whiteness and racism across texts, schooling, and society in ELA classrooms. The exploration of emotion-based, affective literary research is becoming more prevalent across scholarship and teaching in English education classrooms. More research is necessary, however, to understand how emotion and affect work as purveyors of meaning as readers encounter and create their own texts that address issues of power and oppression. Whether I am exploring students’ emotional responses to multimodal texts, the decisions of English educators committed to anti-racist pedagogies, or the contours of emotion when youth construct meaning within their own literacies, I aim to center the emotions of readers as they seek to enact justice in their local and global contexts. I further align myself with the literacies of those who have been historically marginalized or silenced, as seen in my student Richard's question or in Shane's artwork, to seek new ways of knowing and being within anti-oppressive pedagogical frameworks. My goal in this work is to help students and teachers situate themselves, their emotions, and their multimodal readings within broader justice efforts through the textured possibilities of emotion in ELA classrooms. 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