Love in the K-12 Classroom: A Critical Comparison of [White] Teacher Saviorism and ‘Love as the Practice of Freedom’
“Teaching is love in its purest form.” –Unknown
Walk into any discount department store during the month of August, and you will find an abundance of magnets, mugs, t-shirts, and pillows that feature a quote about teaching and its connection to love or care.
For many K-12 educators in the United States, the vast majority of whom are White women, teaching is considered much more than a job or even a profession: for these individuals, teaching is a “calling,” a noble act of service–even, at times, a sacrifice. One of the most popular quotes about teaching comes from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk–the first President of Turkey and a Problematic Fave™ if there ever was one–who reformed his country’s public education system in the mid-1930s and who famously declared that “[a] good teacher is like a candle–it consumes itself to light the way for others.”
A good teacher consumes itself to light the way for others.
Consumes itself.
Not only is this ubiquitous quote well-loved–particularly by those who are not, nor have ever been, classroom teachers–it is often distributed and/or displayed on cardstock in sweeping, swirling typefaces during Teacher Appreciation Week brunches held in teachers’ lounges across the country.
Brewing beneath sentiments like this–and others like it–is an unassailable belief that to be a “good” teacher is to love: to love one’s students, to love one’s chosen content or specialty, to love one’s profession, and so on–even to the point of “consuming” oneself in the process. In an interview for his 2018 book Love and Compassion: Exploring Their Role in Education, Dr. John Miller, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says,
One can teach basic skills without love, but to truly make a difference in a student’s life, there needs to be love. Love sees teaching as an art where we explore different ways of connecting to subject matter and to students. Love brings patience and understanding, which are so important in teaching.
Along these same lines, #LoveTeaching advocate and 2014 Michigan Teacher of the Year Gary Abud, Jr. warns in his essay “A Vision for 2020: Leading with Love” that
[E]ven among the best of the best education leaders…when you are disconnected from your “why” or when you don’t keep a love for others as the fulcrum of your work, the seeds of bitterness can take root, grow, and cause weeds to grow in the garden of the heart you have for the people you serve in education. (My emphasis.)
Is love, then, the answer to teachers’ effectiveness–and, ultimately, their personal and professional fulfillment? Should love be our central “why”? And most critically: do different scholars’ notions of “love,” as it’s contextualized within the education profession, match up with and/or complement one another–or are there crucial differences that we ought to interrogate through an intersectional, feminist lens?
“Watch a teacher with a classroom full of students, and you’ll see what real love looks like.” –Teresa Kwant
Popular media has long depicted–and reflected–a fairly consistent image of the “loving” teacher via films like Dangerous Minds (1995), Dead Poets Society (1989), Up the Down Staircase (1967), Freedom Writers (2007), Matilda (1996), and Stand and Deliver (1988), as well as in television shows like Boy Meets World, Head of the Class, Glee, Saved By the Bell (Season 1), and Welcome Back, Kotter. The “loving” teacher is also a staple of many popular pieces of children’s literature, including Mrs. Frizzle (The Magic School Bus), Mr. Daniels (Fish in a Tree), Mr. Terupt (Because of Mr. Terupt), Mr. Falker (Thank You, Mr. Falker), and Miss Nelson (Miss Nelson Is Missing). Just recently, a video of British pop star Adele went viral after her former teacher, Miss MacDonald, surprised her onstage during a televised special; and in 1994, beloved actor Tom Hanks famously thanked his high school teacher Mr. Farnsworth (and inadvertently outed him as gay) while accepting his Best Actor Oscar for his work in the film Philadelphia.
What are the characteristics of these beloved teachers? Despite the historically consistent thrashing of U.S. teachers in the news media and in “concerned” parent groups across the country, popular media has traditionally bestowed upon teachers an image of benign benevolence, most often depicting them as being somewhat bemused–if occasionally frustrated–by their unruly or disinterested students. Crucially, though, these model teachers ultimately come around to “love” their students and even inspire them to be better than they were before they met them (due, of course, to their giant, underpaid hearts). “Bad” teachers, on the other hand, are often portrayed comedically–as in most Disney Channel sitcoms or in shows like, well, Teachers–and even then are given occasional opportunities for redemption through some kind of loving (if generally uncharacteristic) act.
If we use an intersectional lens to examine the identities of these celluloid pedagogues, we will discover that the majority of the so-called “good” teachers are male, White, and/or fresh-faced–curious, considering that the average American teacher is, according to Education Week contributor Madeline Will, “a 43-year-old white woman with nearly a decade and a half of teaching experience.” Regardless, the typical narrative of the “loving” educator in television and film goes something like this:
Teacher meets students.
Teacher balks at students (especially those who are Black, Brown, poor, or multiracial).
Teacher love bombs students (even if said bombing is of a “tough love” variety).
Teacher “saves” students from their sad, uninspired, oppressive lives.
Fin.
This “savior” narrative, as played out by the loving teacher, is a staple trope that many scholars have written extensively about. In her article “The White Savior Industrial Complex: A Cultural Studies Analysis of a Teacher Educator, Savior Film, and Future Teachers,” Brittany A. Aronson writes that
popular Hollywood films such as Freedom Writers often promote the development of aWSIC [White Savior Industrial Complex] by illustrating how ‘big-hearted’ [W]hite teachers (including me) embody a ‘save the day’ mentality that will lead Black and Brown children and youth to obtain a ‘successful’ academic career and upward social mobility (37–38).
She goes on to note that this trope, as part of what she calls “the hegemonic project of [W]hiteness,” embedded itself into her psyche as a novice educator, “and as a teacher, I believed my ‘good heart’ and ‘good intentions’ were enough to get through any obstacle I might have faced in the classroom” (39–40).
Amy Blizard (née Brown), an educational anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Good Investment?: Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (2015), argues that the trope of the “savior” teacher is perpetuated “not only through mass media, but also in teacher training and professional development programs as well as through national [educational] policy debates’’ (129). This is abundantly demonstrated in popular professional educator books like Teach Like a Pirate (“Transform your class into a life-changing experience for your students!”) and others like it: HEART!: Fully Forming Your Professional Life as a Teacher and Leader (Chapter 4: “Got Compassion? Check!”), Fired Up Teachership (“Educators, you are the heroes that create heroes.”), and on and on.
These and other, similar examples demonstrate that the [White] savior teacher narrative is built upon love and love-adjacent concepts like care, compassion, and “heart.” But is this kind of love “praxis” the same as the kind that scholars like bell hooks and Paulo Freire write about in relation to teaching? Is this kind of love, ultimately, “love as the practice of freedom?”
“If you can’t teach them, love them. Love will teach them.” –Unknown
There are several differences between how the largely White, Western world conceptualizes what it means to teach “from a place of love” and how non-White and/or non-Western scholars envision what teaching “as an act of love” entails. (In order to differentiate between the two types of what we might call love “praxis,” I will use (l)ove to indicate how it’s conceptualized in White, Western–e.g., dominant–spaces versus (L)ove to indicate non-White and/or non-Western conceptualizations, with the caveat that neither group is monolithic.)
As is demonstrated in most American media representations of teaching and of the “loving” (generally White) teacher, love is an interpersonal gesture; something that is given or bestowed upon students, the majority of whom–especially if they are Black or Brown–are viewed through a deficit lens. This deficit view can be explicit, as in the case of teachers who use the term “Title 1 Teacher” in their bios to signify their role on social media, but it can also, and most often is, more implicit–benevolent, even. As Aronson writes, there is “an underlying assumption that teachers…are the stable influences in their students’ lives” (48), much like the “savior’’ teacher-characters that are depicted in films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds (which, it turns out, are based upon real-life individuals Erin Gruwell and LouAnne Johnson, respectively, who continue to this day to profit off of their saviorism).
Nicholas Ferroni, high school teacher-activist and People Magazine’s 2014 “Sexiest Teacher Alive,” has said that “as a kid, I wanted to be a superhero, lawyer, actor, philosopher, comedian, philanthropist, judge, and doctor…so I became a teacher.” This sentiment has been posted hundreds of times on social media and, at first glance, may seem to reflect the epitome of one who engages in a praxis centered around love. But consider how this might be received by the majority-Black-and-Brown students (and their families) that Mr. Ferroni, who is White, serves in his New Jersey community. Do they, in fact, need a White “superhero” to save them from their lives, or a “philanthropist” to lift them out of poverty? Have they asked for this? What set of assumptions is Mr. Ferroni making here?
Consider how that scenario compares with one that Dr. Bettina L. Love, Professor of Education at the University of Georgia and author of the bestselling book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (2019), writes about having grown up as a dark-skinned Black girl in upstate New York. Here she describes how two of her teachers, Mr. Clayton and Mrs. Johnson, embodied the kind of teacher-love necessary to ensure that “dark children” thrive:
To me, they were both more than teachers or role models; they were necessary parental figures. Of course, I needed my own parents, too, but I required a village to survive and understand how I mattered in this world. My parents could not do it all. (53)
In both scenarios, the teacher is taking on a larger role–a role beyond “developer of skills” or “transferer of knowledge” or even “co-creator of information.” However, there are two important differences to consider. In the first scenario, the teacher is White and the students are majority Black and Brown. In the second, the teachers are Black–the first Black male and female teachers, in fact, that Dr. Love had as a young Black girl. But there’s more.
In Mr. Ferroni’s case–as is the case with most White teachers who consider themselves to be “superheroes,” or at least aspiring ones, and who spend their days bestowing love upon all of their students–there is no indication of an awareness of his own racial identity. Subsequently, there is no acknowledgement of the power dynamic between the White teacher and his students of color. While this may have changed in recent years, at the height of his “Sexiest Teacher Alive” fame Mr. Ferroni described himself as a “straight, Christian male” whose advocacy work primarily revolved around issues of sexism and other kinds of gender oppression. Lest one think I am merely picking on this one teacher (who, I must add with full transparency, has blocked me on Twitter), rest assured that such “colorblindness” (or, in less ableist terms, color-evasiveness) is not uncommon among those who consider themselves to be such saviors. Here is what Erin Gruwell had to say about her identity in the book she wrote that the film Freedom Writers was based on:
I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a “label” than of being a human being, that’s the way most of us were taught. (93)
While she does acknowledge and take pride in her ethnic identity, she fails to acknowledge her White racial identity, which is in stark contrast to the racial makeup of her students. Elsewhere in the book, she writes:
It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. … World peace is only a dream because people won’t allow themselves and others around them to simply be peanuts. We won’t allow the color of a man’s heart to be the color of his skin, the premise of his beliefs, and his self-worth. We won’t allow him to be a peanut, therefore we won’t allow ourselves to come to live in harmony. (18)
This implicit denial of or indifference to what Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire calls “our cultural existence as individuals and our political and economic existence as social beings” (180), which includes the racialized identities of both ourselves and our students, is part and parcel of a (l)ove praxis. So, too, is the notion that we as teachers ought to practice (l)ove in the classroom by individually “giving” students a voice (which they already have) or “empowering them” to use their varied knowledges (which U.S. schooling as an institution denies and devalues)–a common theme in professional books and memoirs written for an audience of teachers. But as bell hooks reminds us in “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” “a love ethic emphasizes the importance of service to others….To serve another I cannot see them as an object, I must see their subjecthood” (249). To move from a (l)ove praxis to a (L)ove praxis, then, one would have to understand not only how interpersonal power and oppression works, but also how systemic and institutional power affects both our own lives as well as that of our students.
To further solidify this idea, I will turn to Ed Brockenbrough, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted an ethnographic study at an urban HIV/AIDS prevention center that primarily serves queer youth of color in order to understand how the White women on staff effectively “engaged [in] culturally responsive modes of care, support, and advocacy” (253) for these youth. In analyzing the caring behaviors of two White women staffers in particular–who were engaged in a practice that Brockenborough calls “further mothering”–he notes that this mode of care, among other things, “require[s] a critical awareness of the ideological and material realities of [W]hiteness as power, and an ongoing commitment to assessing and addressing the impact of [W]whiteness on one’s identity and pedagogy” (268). Considering the ubiquity of White teachers working in a system that serves more and more students of color with each passing year, this seems particularly important to those committed to engaging in a [L]ove praxis.
“[I]t is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love.” –Paulo Freire
Besides these, there are additional distinctions between what typically constitutes a pedagogy of “love” in the majority of U.S. classrooms [i.e., a (l)ove praxis] and that which can be categorized as a (L)ove praxis based on the work of hooks, Freire, and others:
However, note at the top of the infographic an important similarity between the two. In both a (l)ove and a (L)ove praxis, the educator is expected and/or encouraged to “give fully” of oneself or to “go the extra mile” to serve their students. We see this both in Dr. Love’s depiction of Mr. Clayton and Mrs. Johnson as well as in Charmaine J. Smith-Campbell’s and Steven Littles’ characterization of “Freirean pedagogical love,” which “extends beyond the altruistic act of caring” that they write about in their 2016 article, “Freire’s Pedagogy of Love and a Ph.D. Student’s Experience.” In this way, teaching, they write,
becomes an unconditional, selfless, egoless commitment of educators practicing pedagogical love and expecting nothing in return for themselves….[it] calls on educators to be practitioners of agape–love given without reciprocity or personal gain–given only for the love of justice for humanity. (35)
In the case of the two White women whose “further mothering” of the youth they encountered at the HIV/AIDS prevention center, part of their being characterized as “culturally responsive” staff members included the fact that their “investment” in the youth they served “led them to go the extra mile” to do so (262) time and time again.
As a feminist, I theoretically embrace–and desire to advocate for–the existence of a (L)ove [as opposed to a (l)ove] praxis in schools and classrooms. But as a feminist, I must also ask: how does the embodiment of what it means to engage in a (L)ove praxis coexist with the gendered nature of teaching as well as its existence within a capitalist economy?
In her chapter “Time to Love” from the book Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Emerita Professor of Politics at the University of Huddersfield Valerie Bryson considers the gendered nature of all caring responsibilities, teaching included, alongside “women’s ongoing economic, social, and political disadvantage in contemporary western societies” (113)–one that disproportionately impacts Black, Brown, and Indigenous women–within a context of time. In particular, she focuses on “the contradictions between the time needed for caring for others and the temporal logic of the capitalist market place” (114) and argues for a “fluid, open-ended and process-oriented sense of time that attends to natural rhythms, unpredictable needs and the intangible processes inherent in interpersonal relationships” (116).
While effectively engaging in a (L)ove praxis should include, but also should move beyond, interpersonal acts (e.g., should involve more broader political work), I am drawn to Bryson’s attempt here to make visible the ways that those engaged in care work often do not rigidly adhere to temporal restrictions such as, in the case of teachers, approved contract hours or the academic calendar. In addition, I appreciate how elsewhere, she emphasizes the “emotional labor attached to care…that often takes place alongside other, more recordable activities.” For teachers who embody a (L)ove praxis, these activities may–and often do–include:
- reflecting on their own identities as well as those of their students and considering the many ways in which these identities may play out both in and outside of the classroom;
- engaging in advocacy/equity work both within and outside of school spaces (e.g., serving on a district-wide curriculum committee or composing and presenting a public comment at a School Board meeting);
- if living elsewhere, attending events or patronizing local businesses in an attempt to familiarize themselves with the neighborhoods/communities in which their students and their families live;
- keeping apprised of local, national, and global politics (e.g., familiarizing oneself with New Hampshire House Bill 1255);
- etc.
For U.S. teachers, the majority of whom are women (and a good number of whom have their own families/children to care for, as well as on whom the majority of familial care work often falls, particularly for those in heterosexual relationships), this can take a heavy and unsustainable toll–physically, emotionally, and even financially. Furthermore, at the risk of stating the obvious, this often invisible and undocumented sort of labor occurs within a profession that is historically underpaid, with teachers earning almost 20% less, on average, than college-educated non-teachers (Frohlich, 2020).
“Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two together.” –Scott Hayden
“But wait!” some argue. “Most teachers don’t go into teaching for the money. Or, at least, they shouldn’t.” And here is where we come full circle. Recall the famous quote about a “good teacher” being like a candle: “it consumes itself to light the way for others.” Yes, teaching is a service-oriented profession. Yes, schools must work alongside families and the wider community to help raise strong, resilient, compassionate children who’ve developed a robust critical consciousness and who will work to make the world a better place for all. Yes, teachers ought to commit, whole-heartedly, to embodying a (L)ove praxis. But who will (L)ove the teachers? Who will support these practitioners, the majority of whom are women, in “straddl[ing] multiple temporalities” as they engage in this care work at the same time as they live their own lives? Who will provide the space, time, and opportunity for them to learn what the vast majority of teacher preparation programs have failed to teach them–about oppressive systems, about economies of power, about their own historical complicity in both? And who will ensure, for sustainability’s sake as well as for the sake of their own ability to live well-rounded, fulfilling lives, that these teachers don’t consume themselves in order to “light the way for others”? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we wish to move beyond the magnets and mugs–and truly commit to a (L)ove praxis in our schools.
