Nurturing as Redemption: A Reflection on the Significance of Black Feminist Storytelling Pedagogies
Brita Beitler, Ed.D., Assistant Professor of Education and Secondary Education Coordinator
Hands shaking, eyes scanning the audience, each person stepped over the invisible line to tell someone else’s story. For most of us, we didn’t know which person we had been assigned, if the person was male or female, what ethnicity this person was, or why they had chosen to tell this particular story. We each labored over the story for the past couple of weeks, memorizing it well enough to perform it – and, for many of us, the weight of making sure we took care of each word was of enormous importance. For me, the task for memorizing also meant allowing my children to participate more than normally in my professional life. One evening, my youngest son, Arne, walked with me around the block while I recited the first paragraph. He told me when I’d get the lines right with enthusiastic encouragement. Another night, my oldest son, James, walked the pathways of the baseball park with me and helped me with the second paragraph while we waited for Arne’s game to start. The entire time we discussed how to say the lines to better represent the person behind the story. In doing so, I was hoping to care for my storyteller well. In a speech we were assigned read in the seminar, Audre Lorde stated, “For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is discovered” (Lorde, 1979, p. 98-99).
Lorde, as well as the other Black feminist pedagogues and theorists, emphasize the need for critical empathy, healing pedagogies, and spaces where women can practice healing-as-resistance (Richardson, 2019; Squires, 2019; Winn, 2019; Lobb, 2017; Souto-Manning, 2010). Much of this healing comes through storytelling in homespaces where one does not need to explain the suffering, hopes, exclusion, or desires behind their story, but can find wellbeing and belonging (hooks, 2009; Posey, 2021). Following the storytelling performances and the play our cohort attended at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, the women in the group intentionally sought one another out and practiced redemptive nurturing. Together, we found power in our shared reflections and care-taking.
I have spent time researching the need for academic spaces to see healing and restorative pedagogies as professionally and academically valuable (Beitler, 2024a; Beitler, 2024b). The seminar reminded me to revisit research on dialogic listening (Helin, 2013), reflecting anew on our shared responsibility in the storytelling process, as people of color and women continue to feel the burden and ongoing repercussions within academic spaces that are careless with their stories. As Rilke puts it, we must listen “with the third ear” to understand the story between the lines (Lobb, 2017). In the circle at the CACE Seminar, we discussed what happens when we change someone’s story or tell it through our own lenses. Baldwin describes a moment when his own film writing is edited, and ultimately whitewashed, by someone else, warning that “the script is as empty as a banana peel, and as treacherous” (Baldwin, 1998, p. 554). The reality of the other, the person watching and listening as someone else tells their story, is of utmost importance in the storytelling act. We must be ever-present to their reality – their hopes, their dreams, their priorities, and their well-being – lest we slip and lose someone’s story.
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