Sam has a long history of facilitating improv theater. His facilitations often invite people to stand together in circles and participate in theatrical activities that involve sharing energy. Sam has done this work in K-12 settings, with college students, and with adults. With lots and lots of people. If there’s one thing Sam has become good at it is this—making people uncomfortable.
More seriously, Sam has spent much of career inviting students to make peace with discomfort. To enter strange or anxious spaces with the hope of being changed through their encounters with difference. Learning, growing, become something else.
“Please close your eyes,” Sam usually says at the start of the session, before leading participants in breathing exercises.
“You can close your eyes. I promise it is safe,” he often jokes. “Well, mostly safe.”
Participants often laugh at this joke. But there’s something insidious about the punchline. We remained convinced that schools, like other public institutions, aren’t safe spaces. There’s so much harm that people can do to each other. That institutions can do. That schools can do. There’s no pretending that harm away.
Sam is often invited to lead improv workshops about learning to facilitate “difficult” or “uncomfortable” moments in classrooms. While Sam is willing to do this work, he’s always skeptical about these words. Difficult of uncomfortable for whom?
We invite you to get comfortable with the discomfort that might come from reading the four pieces in this issue. But we also want to avoid disguising things with the word “comfort” or “discomfort.” Not talking about death and racism is comfortable for some people.
Uncomfortable to others. Power, experience, and discourse frame the ways we come to the word “comfort.”
The articles in this issue take up serious discomfort through topics such as racism and death. They also examine the less serious discomfort that comes from reading escape rooms.
To our view, these are powerful articles. Articles that asked us to remain in relation to subjects that maybe we’d rather not talk openly about. And this seems to be so much of Erin and Sam are after in our own work in schools. Spaces to talk and think about things that need to be talked and thought about.
So get uncomfortable as you encounter the pieces here. We think they are worth your time.
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In Manifesting Living Knowledges: A Pedagogists’ Working Manifesto by Cristina D. Vintimilla, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabow, and Nicole Land the authors present a working manifesto that emerged from their projects with pedagogists and draws on feminist scholars’ work. They offer this manifesto as a feminist call to actively think against the anti-intellectualism sustained by existing structures in early childhood education, and as a response to the urgent need to think about early childhood education in more complex, pedagogical, political and ethical ways.
In (Re)Reading the Room: The Literacies of Escape Rooms by Jon Wargo and Antero Garcia, the authors build a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies. They explore the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. The authors we propose alternative apparatuses for analyzing the gaming literacy practices and indeed the hidden and intended curriculum of escape rooms. This polyphonic rendering and reading are done not to argue that these are discrete phenomena within the flurry of the activity space of an escape room. Instead, they authors suggest this illustrates how these practices are interwoven with one another as well as with the tacit and collaborative knowledge of team-based cooperation, personal histories, and felt resources of play. The authors do not simply note how literacies mediate interaction in these gaming spaces, instead, their findings emphasize how learning, affect, interaction, and analog play are purposefully designed, entangled, felt, and understood.
Teaching Death Rituals During States of Emergency: Centering Death Positivity, Anti-Racism, Grief, & Ritual by Kari A. Lerum examines the challenges and opportunities of teaching an online university seminar on Death Rituals in the midst of several domestic and global crises, including: the COVID-19 pandemic; the massive uprising for Black Lives and against police homicides of unarmed Black individuals; and the climate crisis. The author uses this article to makes the case for radical inter and trans disciplinarity when teaching about death and dying. Specifically, the author calls for incorporating death positive and anti-racist pedagogies, while also making space for grief and ritual on both experiential and theoretical levels. This article provides an overview of dominant frameworks for teaching about death, a summary of the author’s work in a course, and a reflexive assessment for the future of teaching about death and dying.
“To Be Our Best Selves”: Critical Dialogue with Girls of Color About Their Experiences in a Social Justice Leadership Program is a critical qualitative study by Tashal Brown that explores the affordances of social justice-oriented education that centers youth of color and their desire to engage in complex and nuanced dialogue concerning social and political issues relevant to their lives. The paper focuses on the experiences of six high school girls of color participating in a New York City based nonprofit program committed to social justice, activism, and leadership. Guided by Critical Race Feminism (CRF) and figured worlds, this study highlights the necessity of discussions about topic often seen as “taboo” in school space. The girls saw the dismissal and/or reluctance to engage with “uncomfortable topics” in school as an attempt to cover up or shield students from histories and realities that may be harsh but necessary knowledge. The girls also stressed the value of opportunities to share and explore multiple aspects of their identity through the course content and activities. Lastly, the pedagogical practice of taking space and making space allowed girls of color to make sense of their individual and collective experiences.
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We think about the very real racism that flourishes as we finish this editorial. We also think about death.
Here’s we will be a little honest. And this is Sam writing this paragraph now, so I won’t put my hang-ups on Erin. Death frightens me. Causes me anxiety. Seeing updates on Facebook or Twitter about people I know or people I love dying or suffering from fatal illnesses troubles me. I can think of colleagues in Curriculum Studies I know from a distance and let you know that my energy is often with them when I read about a health concern on social media. That’s heavy for me. I guess I can also say this. I’ve never been in an escape room, but I’m the kind of person who probably would go into full panic attack mode trying to get out of there. Talk about uncomfortable.
Death is ugly. Racism is ugly. And yet pretending they aren’t there might be as ugly. We admire the ways the authors in this issue have brought us into relationship with these things. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Make some peace with ugliness and think about how to move forward differently. We’d be better off, we think, inviting our students into pedagogy that allows the opportunity to come into relation with the things that make us uncomfortable.
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