Constellating Emotional Dialogues in Secondary Education: Autoethnographic Insights Into Queerness, Race, and Compassion

This innovative, autoethnographic study examines 12 stories of ＂wobble＂ moments--looking at ＂wobble＂ as an emotional experience--to illuminate new perspectives on LGBTQIA+ identity, school violence, racism, mental illness in students and teachers, and the emotional costs of empathy.

Utilizing the author’s experiences as they navigate education’s most difficult years of practice from 2020 to 2022 and extending the existing scholarship on dialogical pedagogy and teacher identity by offering a framework that goes ＂beyond wobble,＂ it provides a new theory for how teachers can deconstruct the emotions that surround the heaviest moments of their practice, shift perspectives on situations and selves, and ＂see the light＂ of compassionate possibility in both person and practice.

A sobering inquiry which provides valuable insight into the emotional landscape of a contemporary classroom embroiled in America’s culture wars and serves as a poignant exemplar of dialogical pedagogy in practice, it will appeal to scholars and post-graduate students of teacher education, educational psychology, and education policy.

Emily Wilkinson is an educator specializing in autoethnography and emotion. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s PhD program in English Ed, where she studied the intersections of emotions, dialogical pedagogy, conservatism, and queerness in a rural middle school classroom. She currently teaches English and advises a Genders & Sexualities Alliance at a high school in Northern California, USA.