Classroom Communities, Pandemic Portals: Rethinking Solidarity Through Pedagogy and Practice

Abstract

The P-16 classroom, already a space of potential conflicts and contradictions, gained new levels of complexity with the overlapping crises of 2020 onward: the COVID-19 pandemic; police brutality and corresponding “summer of abolition;” book and mask bans; and anti-critical race theory and anti-social emotional learning legislation. In this paper, we respond to these crises with collaboration through the concept of interdependency. Using disability and transformative justice organizer Mia Mingus’s definition of interdependency, we argue that an interdependent classroom can be a way out of narratives of atomized disconnection. Interdependency sees an individual’s survival as inherently connected to a larger community, emphasizing solidarity over the illusion of independence. Inspired by duoethnographic methods, we share our own reflections as students and teachers in classrooms where connection may or may not have been present. We find that, though we cannot go back to “normal,” we can go forward into new classroom context where white supremacist ideologies do not shape students’ and teachers’ shared learning experiences. Instead, interdependence can serve as a form of creative resistance to the more implicit forms of harm embedded in educational experiences, opening up platforms to counter marginalization and speak against what has been traditionally silenced.