“Things We’ve Known Even Before Having the Words to Explain”: A Critical Multimodal Witnessing Approach to Examining the Affective Pedagogies of Teachers of Color

Josephine Pham

Overlapping local, national, and global crises have galvanized explicit calls to prepare K-12 teachers with the knowledge and pedagogical skillsets for fostering students’ civic reasoning and discourse towards a more pluralistic democracy. Despite the promises of deeper integration of critical civic education and Ethnic Studies across grade levels and disciplinary content areas, teachers writ large remain unprepared with the approaches, sensibilities, and practices needed to support students’ reasoning and communication of racialized issues in complex ways. The affective nature of how students know and respond to social injustices are central to possible forms of civic engagement, even before having formal language to articulate their civic commitments. Partnering with teachers of Color with embodied understandings of race, racism, and power, this video ethnographic study examines how they leverage emotions, feelings, and bodily energies as pedagogical resources for students' race-based civic sensemaking. Multimodal representations of data (e.g. language, image, sound, gestures) will be used to empirically communicate the cognitive, socioemotional, political, and ethical dimensions of civic sensemaking activity. Developing a critical multimodal witnessing framework, this project positions teachers and researchers as co-theorizers and co-learners who re-construct, re-present, and re-imagine the simultaneity of multiple and conflicting perspectives that emerge during collective civic sensemaking. In turn, this study will highlight the potential of critical affective pedagogies for expanding learning opportunities that (re)center the experiences, perspectives, and dignity of communities of Color and other marginalized groups. Scholarly findings will also be used to co-design pedagogical tools for nurturing students’ critical civic and racial literacies.

About Josephine Pham

Josephine H. Pham, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in Education at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her lived experiences as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, former K-12 classroom teacher in her own communities, and teacher educator influence her critical race feminist approach to research with and among teachers of Color. Drawing upon critical social theories of race and methodological tools from literacy, learning sciences, and educational anthropology, Pham’s interdisciplinary research blends counternarratives, video ethnography, and the arts to examine the micro-interactional processes of social reproduction and social transformation in in/formal educational contexts. Her program of research explores three interrelated stands of inquiry, which include: (1) the pedagogical and leadership practices of justice-centered teachers of color, (2) antiracist teacher education and professional development, and (3) co-design approaches to research that are attuned with the daily livelihood, wellness, and aspirations of communities of color and other marginalized groups. Collaborating with research partners and artists, she also co-creates multimodal pedagogical tools for cultivating racially just educational spaces Her research has been recognized and supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation (2023), National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (2020-2022), American Educational Research Association’s Division K (2020), and American Anthropological Association’s Council of Anthropology and Education (2020). Her recent publications have appeared in journals such as Race Ethnicity and Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of Teacher Education, Cognition & Instruction, Journal of Language Identity and Education, and Journal of Learning Sciences.