Gathering to Write, Writing to Gather: Teachers’ Critical Love and Caring Through Writing Together

Asking the question, “How can teachers explore writing as a way to care for themselves and each other,” this paper explores the possibilities of writing in community and features the work of The EdWrite Collective, a group of teachers who joined together to “write to change the world” (Woodard, 2023). The EdWrite Collective was designed to support educators’ civically-engaged writing about education, which was defined as writing that employs a public voice, advocates civic engagement or action, argues a position based on reasoning and evidence, and employs a structure to support a position (National Writing Project, n.d.). We imagined this writing as a way to foster the reimagination of public life in ways that “honor…experiences, relationships, and dreams for the future” (Mirra & Garcia, 2020, p. 297). With faith in the transformative power of writing as a tool to reimagine our worlds, members of EdWrite published in EdWeek, Chalkbeat Chicago, and California Educator, and presented at the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference. We have co-written a chapter for a series of books about civic engagement. We cheered at the thrill of seeing our writing in public, feeling successful and as though we honored our commitments to using our writing for civic engagement – to ameliorate the lack of teacher voices in the media. But, in our subsequent conversations and meetings, and with time passing from the excitement of seeing our names in print, a different response has become remarkable, one that rests in care and love, gathering to honor our own experiences and expertise in recognition of complexity and contradictions (both beautiful and terrible) in ways that we don’t tend to see in contemporary discourse on education. This paper describes this particular aspect of the EdWrite Collective and is written through a methodology of arts-based narrative inquiry (Levy, 2020 ), which blurs fact with imagination to explore some of the more subjective meanings embedded within our activities as a research community. It also honors my own interests in writing and scholarship, which lie squarely outside the confining requirements and brutal nature of more traditional academic writing. Three main ideas thread through this project: gathering together; critical love and caring as defined and understood according to scholars bell hooks (1994, 2018), Carol Gillian (2014), and Nel Noddings (2012); and writing as a way of being (Yagelski, 2011). I suggest collectivity as a way to mitigate the challenges of today’s educational contexts, and as a means to elevate teacher voices, which are so often overlooked or ignored in larger conversations about education. A collection of narrative forms, scholarly and not, take up affective, human dimensions of our experiences and engage with the subjectivities and complexities of teaching and learning suggesting that educators can care for each other by writing to gather and gathering to write.