









































Educational Renaissance Vol 12 (2023)

Research Article
“I Feel Sad”: The Cultural Politics of White 
Emotions in Pre-Service Teachers’ Response to 
Literature

Abstract
This paper details a critical ethnography I conducted in my own classroom—an undergraduate chil-
dren’s literature course for pre-service elementary educators—in which I analyze white students’ 
emotional responses to multicultural children’s literature through the lens of a cultural politics of 
emotion (Ahmed, 2015; Zembylas, 2008). In my paper I use critical whiteness studies and critical 
emotion studies to analyze the effects of these emotional responses, complicating the assumption that 
emotions are a bridge to empath and exploring how white emotional performativity often serves to 
deflect from authentic critical discourse, reinforcing white supremacy in educational spaces. I look 
reflexively at my own pedagogy as a white educator, noticing the ways in which my failure to critical-
ly interrogate white emotions contributed to a classroom culture that valued majority voices over the 
voices of students of color. I conclude with the impacts of this study on my own commitments as a 
teacher-researcher.
Keywords: children’s literature, empathy, critical whiteness studies, critical emotion studies

 In the dim basement of an old high school, now home to the Curriculum and Instruction de-
partment of the University of Minnesota, college students share their responses to children’s literature 
about immigration and refugees. “I feel sad,” one white woman shares, referring to the high number of 
refugees who are children, details she read about in that day’s assigned scholarly literature (observation, 
November 20, 2019). Other white students echo her thoughts, and most responses move between feel-
ings of sadness for refugees and questions about how to teach children’s literature about immigration 
and refugees without getting too “political,” a common concern in the course. The discourse clearly 
positions the identity of immigrant and refugee as Other, despite the fact that there are five women of 
color, four of whom are also immigrants, in the room.
 The students are sharing in a circle, and when it’s her turn to share her thoughts, Hope , a Black 
female with a soft voice who had mentioned a few weeks ago that she is an immigrant, says that there 
are often traumatizing reasons people have for coming to the United States from other countries, and 
when we teach this literature we need to support those students (observation, November 20, 2019). 
The room is quiet after Hope speaks, as hers is the first voice to disrupt the white discourse at work, the 
feelings of sadness for that had been circulating the room. I—the instructor for this course—find myself 
nodding, appreciating the perspective Hope provides to our discussions, until I experience a reflexive 
shift. I understand, in a moment, that Hope is not providing a suggestion for how to take up immigrant 
and refugee literature with young students, but is implicating our class in a failure to take trauma into 
account when discussing this literature ourselves, here and now. I realize that, despite my ideologi-

Kristin Bauck, M.Ed, ABD PhD. Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota
 bergs257@umn.edu

mailto:bergs257%40umn.edu?subject=


Bauck | 12 I Feel Sad

cal and pedagogical commitments to critical theory and social justice, I have enacted a pedagogy that 
assumed students were reading these texts as windows into cultures and experiences not their own, as 
opposed to mirrors of their own identities (Bishop, 1990). Though the development of empathy through 
engagement with literature is a goal I have for my students, the emotions circulating the room prior to 
Hope’s comment were instead examples of empty empathy (Zembylas, 2008). The class moves on, but I 
stay in this moment.
 This reflexive shift happened towards the end of data collection for a critical ethnographic study 
I conducted in my own classroom, a children’s literature course for pre-service elementary teachers that 
focuses explicitly on multicultural literature, critical literacy, and social justice. Until this moment I 
had been feeling very stuck in the “messy zones” (Fine, 1994a) of my first engagement with qualitative 
research, unsure of what I was looking for, questioning my positionality, and worrying about the ethics 
of trying to answer my research question by observing and making judgments about others. I knew, in-
tellectually, that critical ethnographers are implicated completely in our research, but I had not yet lived 
out this knowledge, or experienced how it feels to suddenly understand the intrinsic connection to both 
the problems and possibilities within research.
 This paper details the process of my critical ethnographic study and the analysis that came from 
this reflexive shift. I use critical whiteness studies (CWS) and critical emotion studies (CES) to analyze 
the effects of white students’ emotional response to literature, complicating the assumption that emo-
tions are a bridge to empathy and exploring how white emotional performativity often serves to deflect 
from authentic critical discourse, reinforcing white supremacy in educational spaces. I look reflexively 
at my own pedagogy as a white educator, noticing the ways in which my failure to critically interrogate 
white emotions contributed to a classroom culture that valued majority voices over the voices of stu-
dents of color. I conclude with the implications of this study for educators and researchers as well as its 
impacts on my own commitments as a teacher-researcher.

Theoretical Framework
  This study is grounded in critical theory, a broad theoretical framework that has influenced 
many more specific critical qualitative research methodologies and analytic lenses, including critical 
whiteness studies (CWS) and critical emotional studies (CES). What CWS and CES have in common—
what connects them to critical theory—is their dedication to challenging systems of power, oppression, 
and hegemony, to attempting to “confront the injustice of a particular society or public sphere within 
the society” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005, p. 305). In this paper I use critical whiteness studies and 
critical emotion studies to examine the ways in which white students’ emotional response to literature 
impacted and interacted with white hegemony in the classroom. In addition to these critical theories, I 
bring to my research and analysis a poststructural understanding of self/other, knowledge, and power, 
which significantly influences how I come to understand my own entanglement in my research findings.

Critical Whiteness Studies
 Critical whiteness studies (CWS) is a field of scholarship that aims to “reveal the invisible struc-
tures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege” (Applebaum, 2016). CWS approaches 
issues of systemic oppression from the perspective of whiteness in particular, seeking to “deconstruct, 
challenge, and transform whiteness” (Yeung et al., 2013, p. 18) as a project of antiracism. According 
to Matias and Mackey (2016), CWS uses a “transdisciplinary approach to investigate the phenomenon 
of whiteness, how it is manifested, exerted, defined, recycled, transmitted, and maintained, and how it 
ultimately impacts the state of race relations” (p. 34). Jupp et al. (2016) explain that, in the field of edu-
cation research, white teacher identity studies seek to “prepare and conscientize a predominantly white 
preservice and professional teaching force for teaching and learning across cultural differences in public 



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schools” (p. 63). The first wave of white teacher identity studies, which took place in the 1990s and 
early 2000s, emphasized “white privilege analyses and identified all the ways that white teachers denied, 
evaded or diminished the salience of race in teaching and learning” (Jupp, 2017, p. 17). Second-wave 
studies, in contrast, are “race-visible” (Jupp et al., 2016; Jupp, 2017), and provide a more critical ex-
amination of the complexities of whiteness and race. Second-wave scholars work to understand “how 
oppression and white supremacy function within individuals, institutions, and systems, in complex, 
socially contextualized and historicized ways” (Boehm-Turner, 2020, p. 64). While not every scholar 
writing within CWS identifies as researching within second-wave teacher identity studies, the field has 
impacted whiteness studies within education significantly.
 I believe that my own positionality as a white woman educator, which I will explore in more de-
tail below, necessitates that I approach issues of race, racism, and systemic inequality from a place that 
both acknowledges and continues to challenge my own implications in these systems as a white person 
in education. In my analysis I use CWS to examine the ways in which my white students’ emotional 
response to multicultural literature, as well as my own failure to interrogate those emotions, contributed 
to multiple missed opportunities to disrupt white hegemony in the classroom.

Critical Emotion Studies
 Critical emotions studies (CES) is an emerging field of analysis that connects to the “affective 
turn” (Clough, 2007) present in recent cultural studies and social science scholarship, which brings to-
gether psychoanalysis, theories of embodiment, political theories, and critical analysis of affect and emo-
tion (Zembylas, 2016). According to Trainor (2006), CES specifically “represents various disciplinary 
forays into the relationship between emotion and whatever it is that a particular discipline studies, from 
brain chemistry to teacher education to election results” (p. 645). In this paper I take up Ahmed (2015) 
and Zembylas’ (2008, 2016) understanding of emotions as things that do rather than things that are, 
and define emotions as performances that produce action within specific social and political contexts.
Specific concepts I explore related to CES in this paper include the dangers of sentimentality (Zembylas, 
2008) and the complications of empathy, which reveal the ways in which the performance of emotions 
such as love, care, and concern can lead to passive empathy (Boler, 1997), false empathy (Delgado, 
1996; Matias & Zembylas, 2014) or empty empathy (Zembylas, 2008), as opposed to active, or trans-
formative empathy. 
 Matias and Zembylas (2014) explain that in false empathy, for example, declarations of caring 
or empathy are often inauthentic because they fail to be accompanied by action: “the object of com-
passion exists primarily within an imaginary realm that sentimentalizes the other and avoids any action 
that shows caring in practice” (p. 321). This sentimental framing of the other’s suffering
remains at a superficial level and fails to acknowledge that this suffering is in part effect of socioeco-
nomic relations of violence, oppression, and poverty. But most importantly, such expressions of caring 
fail to recognize how they are embedded in modalities of racism and social inequality that are perpet-
uated by assuming that declarations of caring are enough to alleviate the other’s suffering. (Matias & 
Zembylas, 2014, p. 322)

Methodology
 Throughout this study I practiced critical ethnography, a research methodology that “begins 
with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived 
domain” (Madison, 2020, p. 4). In this case, the lived domain was a children’s literature course for 
pre-service teachers that is explicitly committed to critical literacy and social justice. I began my re-
search study with a broad question: what are the complexities and contradictions that arise in a chil-
dren’s literature course explicitly committed to critical literacy and social justice? I found critical eth-



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nography, with its focus on examining systems, social interactions, and culture as a way of making 
meaning and effecting change, to be the most appropriate methodology with which to explore that 
question. Critical ethnography also emphasizes the importance of relationships within the lived domain 
(Madison, 2020), and conducting research in a class that I taught over a full semester allowed me to en-
gage in “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1998) with students in our shared context over a significant length 
of time.
 In terms of methods, I used data collection methods common to critical ethnography includ-
ing class observations, two semi-structured interviews with two different interlocutors, and document 
analysis of relevant student work. Class observations were gathered in a handwritten notebook while I 
simultaneously taught and facilitated learning. After each class I captured my immediate observations 
and reflections in a field note, and then I traced my reactions and developing analysis through analytic 
and reflexive memos written after each field note. Over the course of my data collection, my research 
question shifted and narrowed as I traced patterns of discourse, and I ultimately found myself most 
interested in the ways in which the performativity of emotions in response to multicultural literature 
served to neutralize, and even shut down, real critical engagement of oppression and injustice.
 My own entanglement in the research process—as both instructor and researcher, as a white 
woman engaged in social justice research—led to many “speed bumps” (Weis & Fine, 2000) that caused 
me to reflexively reconsider the ways in which I was also implicated in the whiteness-at-work, or the 
“discursive strategies that create paradoxes among teachers’ beliefs, intentions, and actions” (Yoon, 
2012, p. 587) I was observing among my students. Ultimately, my reflexive and embodied participation 
in the research process itself allowed me to “work the hyphen” (Fine, 1994b) between self/other, joining 
other qualitative researchers to “probe how we are in relation with the contexts we study and with our 
informants, understanding that we are all multiple in those relations” (p. 72). As a result, my own iden-
tity and positionality, described in more detail below, are intrinsically connected to my research findings 
and analysis.

The Research Setting
            Children’s Literature for Educators is an undergraduate multicultural children’s literature 
course within the education department of the University of Minnesota. It is required for all pre-ser-
vice elementary teachers, but because it also offers a writing credit, many students from outside of the 
college take the course as well. During my study the class met once a week for three hours at a time, 
and throughout the semester students read a variety of diverse children’s literature, from picture books 
through young adult novels, organized into units focused on sociocultural issues such as race, gender, 
class, and disability. Students also read and responded to popular and scholarly articles that analyze 
how each sociocultural topic or identity is represented in children’s literature.
 I taught one of the three offered sections of the course, and chose that as my research site in 
large part because of the authentic relationships with the students that I had developed prior to my data 
collection, as well as the intimacy with which I knew the course materials and goals. Relationships are 
an essential tenet in critical ethnography (Madison, 2020). I knew that I would be more successful at 
working the hyphen between self/other (Fine, 1994b) if I was already an authentic member of the com-
munity, with relationships extending in front of and beyond the research study itself. 
 Of the 17 students in Children’s Literature for Educators, 12 were white, and nine of those white 
students were women. There were three white men and five women of color. Most of the students were 
in their early 20s, but a few were non-traditional students either coming to education as a second ca-
reer or taking the course for extension credits. Because of the differential in power between myself as 
an evaluating instructor and my students as participants in a graded university course, consent forms 
for participation in my research study were collected but sealed in an envelope until after grades for the 



Bauck  | 15 I Feel Sad

course were submitted. Ultimately, all students consented to participation. 

Researcher Identity and Positionality
 Throughout my study my identity as a white woman educator was entangled with my research, 
influencing the questions I asked, the discourses I centered, and the pedagogical choices I made. My 
whiteness was ultimately present in my findings and analysis as well, as it became clear that, despite my 
commitment to social justice education, as a white educator I am frequently complicit in the failures of 
education to disrupt oppression and injustice. I have been raised to value neutrality over discomfort. 
While ideologically I align myself with Fine’s (1994a) activist research projects that “seek to unearth, 
interrupt, and open new frames for intellectual and political theory and practice” (p. 23), this research 
revealed to me the ways in which I instead enact a neutral pedagogy, working “against [my] antiracist 
efforts, since [I] literally and ideologically cannot be in two places at once” (Grinage, 2019, p. 141). 
This understanding erased any boundaries that might have been left between self/other in my research, 
spurring me towards deep reflexivity of what I myself must confront and change in order to more fully 
live out my values and beliefs about the emancipatory and anti-oppressive goals of education.

Findings and Analysis
 My research revealed that emotions of white pre-service teachers were performed for two objec-
tives: to indicate morality and to maintain neutrality. I will examine each of these, using data collected 
from my observations, interviews, and document analysis to explore the impacts of white emotions on 
the criticality of classroom discourse and culture, particularly the ways in which these performances are 
evidence of the dangers of sentimentality (Zembylas, 2008).

Emotions as Indications of Morality
 Throughout my research and my reflexive analyses I realized that much of the supposed empathy 
circulating in our classroom was superficial and empty (Boler, 1997; Delgado, 1996; Matias & Zemby-
las, 2014; Zembylas, 2008), lacking the active qualities necessary for it to have any impact on the proj-
ect of social justice. I explore two examples found in classroom discourse and written reflections below.
            Each week my students wrote short discussion posts in response to that week’s readings. In her 
written response to the topic of immigration and refugees in children’s literature, Samantha, a white 
female, wrote: 

The post about migration makes me very sad. I did not realize the amount of people the US has 
been deterring in terms of refugees, and it makes me feel like we are not doing a good job as a 
country loving on people who need care. As somebody who wants to care for humans as a living, 
I think that there needs to be more value placed on human life and making space for refugees. 
(online reflection, November 14, 2019)

Megan, another white female, wrote that the article about refugees “broke my heart,” and that “for 
them to be removed from everything they have known to a world of unknowns and fear, especially in 
this current political climate, must be completely terrifying and traumatic for them.” She goes on to 
express gratitude for the people “out there doing this work” to support refugees. (online reflection, No-
vember 19, 2019).
            While an initial read of these two responses indicates emotions of empathy and compassion, a 
closer analysis reveals that these expressions of sadness and broken hearted-ness––absent any critical ex-
amination of the wider systems and structures that create refugees as well as what it would really take, 
beyond support, for us to no longer have a world where refugees exist––serve to normalize and rein-
force existing paradigms and create objects of the refugees. In her exploration of the cultural politics of 
pain, Ahmed (2015) explains that in an emotional response to literature:



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The negative emotions of anger and sadness are evoked as the reader’s: the pain of others be-
comes “ours”, an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralises their pain into our 
sadness. It is not so much that we are “with them” by feeling sad; the apparently shared negative 
feelings do not position the reader and victim in a relation of equivalence. . . .  Rather we feel sad 
about their suffering, an “aboutness” that ensures that they remain the object of “our feeling.” 
(p. 21)

Ahmed contends that “stories of pain involve complex relations of power” (p. 22), and both Samantha 
and Megan’s responses are evidence of this neutralization of pain into emotions about the other that 
reinforce rather than challenge the power differentials between the students and the objects of their feel-
ings. These emotions indicate a proper morality, yet fail to move students towards what Spelman (1997) 
calls co-suffering.
            In a different unit focused on Indigenous representation in children’s literature, three students 
read and discussed When We Were Alone, a picture book written by David A. Robertson and illustrated 
by Julie Flett. The book is about an Indigenous grandmother’s forced attendance at government man-
dated residential schools during her youth, arguably a heavy and emotionally weighted topic. Chloe, the 
only white female in the group, read the book aloud, often stopping to make comments about the book 
and talk through her interpretations and reactions. It was clear that she didn’t understand the context 
of the story, despite the unit’s explicit focus on Indigenous representation and our class discussions of 
Indigeneity and decolonization that preceded this small group discussion. As she read, Chloe paused 
and said, “It looks like she went to a private school,” then, “That looks like her grandma,” and at one 
point, “Oh that’s so sad” (observation, November 6, 2019). In the end Chloe summarized that the 
young children are lucky they can speak their [Indigenous] language and wear whatever they want, as 
the grandma couldn’t in school. In addition to a lack of understanding of the experiences faced by In-
digenous students forced to attend residential schools, this response was an example of empty empathy, 
where Chloe’s moral sadness only served to reinforce the power dynamics at work in the historically 
unequal relationship between white and Indigenous peoples rather than challenge it. It also positioned 
Chloe as a moral spectator in the “distant suffering of victims and perpetrators” (Zembylas, 2008, p. 9), 
one of the dangers of sentimentality outlined by Zembylas (2008) in his critique of trauma narratives in 
education.
 It is important to note here my own complicity in the discourse of empty empathy that often 
circulated in our classroom. As an educator, it is my job to help develop students’ dispositions of empa-
thy, and reflexive analysis of my own choices in terms of pedagogy and facilitation revealed the ways in 
which I allowed empty empathy to stand as adequate indication of morality instead of pushing students 
towards active empathy. In many moments my entangled identities as both teacher and researcher led 
me to simply observe when I should arguably have intervened, worrying about my own influence on the 
data I was collecting but forgetting that “intellectual questions are saturated in biography and politics 
and…they should be” (Fine, 1994a, pp. 30-31). Upon reflection I realized that my failure to interrogate 
superficial sentimentality was also evidence of another way in which whiteness was at work (Yoon, 
2012) in the classroom: the primacy of neutrality and feelings of comfort over the uncomfortable dis-
ruption of injustice.

Maintaining Neutrality
 Throughout my observations it became clear that my students were preoccupied with concerns 
about the difficulties they might face when incorporating diverse representations in children’s literature 
in their future classrooms. Moments of potential for active empathy were often stymied by the pre-ser-
vice teacher’s desire to remain neutral, to avoid situations that might be deemed “controversial,” a word 
that often circulated in our class discussion. One week I opened class with a discussion based on a ques-



Bauck  | 17 I Feel Sad

tion I’d received after the previous week’s unit on LGBTQ representation: “How can we teach LGBTQ 
literature without feeling like we are pushing our beliefs?”
Jonathan, a white male, was the first to respond. He shared that in his education courses he’s been 
taught to try to be “objective,” avoiding interpretation and just stating things as they are, as fact. Chloe 
chimed in, suggesting that you could, for example, do a unit about family, and include books with two 
moms and/or two dads (observation, October 23, 2019). At this point both students’ tones were pretty 
hesitant—they weren’t sure how to answer this question, and they were clearly taking a careful ap-
proach.
 Abigail, a white female who also identifies as Jewish (interview, November 25, 2019), raised 
her hand and said she thinks it’s “totally fair to educate” children on “specific LGBTQ topics.” It 
“shouldn’t be controversial” to talk about real kids and real families (observation, October 23, 2019). 
Two more students, both white females, spoke up in agreement, saying that if you are grounded “in 
your own reason for teaching” and bringing LGBTQ books in the classroom then you’re positioned to 
answer any questions from parents about why you teach what you teach, and that these issues “should 
be talked about and normalized” because you “can’t avoid hard conversations, and young kids can 
make sense of anything” (observation, October 23, 2019). My observation notes detail that all three of 
these students were much more engaged in this topic vocally and with their bodies than the first two, 
and that they “positioned themselves in opposition to ideas of objectivity or neutrality, in opposition to 
Jonathan” (field notes, October 23, 2019).
            Erik, another white male, joined the conversation to argue that diversity can be objectively 
taught in a classroom but that it “gets tricky when you are talking about values” (observation, October 
23, 2019). This assumption that values are “tricky” appeared again for Erik a few weeks later during 
our focus on disability in children’s literature, when he qualified disability as a non-controversial topic 
because it’s not about “values” (observation, November 13, 2019). Erik’s understanding that some of 
the sociocultural topics the class covers are more controversial than others, that some are about values 
and others aren’t, reveals to me the whiteness-at-work (Yoon, 2012) in the assumption that whiteness 
and heterosexuality are normal and everything else is different, and therefore difficult.
            The ways in which some students, including Erik, focused on teaching with a neutral stance 
reveal the primacy of feelings of comfort over hypothetical moments of discomfort, such as when a 
teacher is challenged to defend their choice to include non-majority representations in classroom litera-
ture. Ahmed (2015) theorizes the dominant white heteronormative space as a sanitized “comfort zone,” 
arguing that “normativity is comfortable for those who can inhabit it. The word ‘comfort’ suggests 
well-being and satisfaction, but it also suggests an ease and easiness” (p. 147). The cultural politics of 
comfort at work in these discourses clearly values ease and easiness over moments of uncomfortable dis-
ruption.
            My students’ concerns about controversy also reveal Yoon’s (2012) whiteness-at-work, which 
“can be difficult to pinpoint because it is often a normative, unspoken assumption of how things are” 
(p. 607). Yoon details a study group that investigated white teachers’ problems of practice, where re-
flection was limited because teachers failed to talk about their own identities or question their own 
privilege, instead positioning themselves in “non-racial and culturally neutral terms” and “positioning 
students as generically ‘different’” (p. 607). In this group the facilitator’s intervention only served to 
excuse the participants from talking about race explicitly. It is clear to me that my students who were 
concerned about controversy positioned themselves in alignment with white normativity, and there-
fore positioned the diverse texts and the identities they represented as that which was different. As I 
mentioned earlier, despite my ideological commitments to social justice education, this research study 
revealed to me the ways in which I also enacted neutrality. I found that I often valued my own embod-
ied comfort and “easy” alignment with white normativity over the more discomforting, but much more 



Bauck  | 18 I Feel Sad

important, work of justice. As Zembylas (2008) argues, “schooling is not a neutral ground” (p. 7), and 
both pre-service and more experienced white educators must continually push ourselves to tear down 
the facade of neutrality and commit to antioppressive education.

Implications
 Classrooms all over the United States, from K-12 through higher education—including teacher 
education programs such as the setting for this research—use literature for the purpose of increasing 
students’ experience with textual mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors (Bishop, 1990). Students 
read to get to know themselves and others. However, beyond the initial inclusion of representative 
and inclusive texts in classrooms, this study demonstrates the vital importance of pedagogy. As much 
care, attention, and education needs to be given to how inclusive texts are taken up in classroom spac-
es, especially when those classroom spaces are majority white. Following are two pedagogical praxes, 
developed from critical emotion studies scholars, that provide educators with ways to enter and move 
through affective classroom spaces intentionally and directly. 

Critical Emotional Praxis
            According to Zembylas (2008), a politics of emotion does not only involve risks for educators 
but also offers possibilities for a renewed criticality that might serve to produce new understandings and 
ways of being in the world. Critical emotional praxis, or CEP, is Zembylas’ suggestion for a “critical 
mobilization of emotion” (p. 5). According to Zembylas, CEP is grounded in an understanding of the 
role of emotions in power relations; it consists of the ability to question emotionally charged and cher-
ished beliefs, “exposing how privileged positions and comfort zones” (p. 12) inform perspectives and 
actions. CEP translates these emotional understandings into relationships, teaching practices, and enact-
ments of social justice. My analysis demonstrates the need for CEP in teaching and learning, specifically 
in courses such as mine that explicitly ask students to engage emotionally with identities different from 
their own.
 One way that I have aimed to practice CEP in teaching settings after this study is to guide stu-
dents through critical reflections about their positionalities in relation to course material, as well as how 
they are affectively responding to both texts and classroom interactions over the course of the semester. 
When students name their positionalities and investigate how their multifaceted identities are impacting 
their cognitive analyses and emotional responses, it allows for a more complex and critical exploration 
of their responses to literature. In addition, these reflections have given me as the educator the oppor-
tunity to better know and respond to each student, asking questions and inviting them to consider their 
emotions in relation to explicit course goals around social justice.

A Pedagogy of Discomfort
 A pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Zembylas & Boler, 2002) is 
an explicitly antiracist method of teaching that “requires that individuals step outside of their comfort 
zones and recognize what and how one has been taught to see (or not to see)” (Zembylas & Boler, 
2002, n.p.). A pedagogy of discomfort involves the investigation of emotions and “critical reflection 
that informs changes in hegemonic beliefs and habitual yet harmful actions and practices” (Ohito, 
2016, p. 458). In a pedagogy of discomfort, moments of tension revealed at the nexus of racialized 
interactions and their inscribed traumas should be welcomed, even designed. It is only when feeling and 
facing our discomfort that white pre-service and practicing teachers can begin to re-vision our affective 
reactions, habits, and behaviors within systems of white supremacy.
 In my own praxis, the ability to practice a pedagogy of discomfort has begun with developing 
my own critical awareness of my responses to emotions, many of which have been socialized in me 



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from family dynamics and social norms since childhood. It has been essential for me to develop my 
own comfort with discomfort, to sit in moments of tension instead of trying to resolve them, and to 
be okay myself with times that discomfort circulates in classroom spaces. Only after developing that 
personal praxis have I been able to welcome—and as Ohito (2016) names, even design—opportunities 
for discomfort in curriculum and pedagogy. After a recent course lesson that was full of tension, where 
students were challenged to investigate their own thinking in relation to power and community change, 
students’ reflections revealed that, while some did not enjoy the experience in the moment, they later 
realized that the conflict itself was a learning moment, a spark that challenged their held assumptions 
and ideas of is and what can be.       
 In sum, I believe that pre-service education programs as well as in-service professional develop-
ment should draw from CEP and pedagogies of discomfort in order to support teachers’ understanding 
of the powerful role of affect in the classroom, as well as the vital role teachers hold in noticing and 
disrupting emotions such as empty empathy when they circulate.

Conclusion
            Emotions are and will always be at work within education. This critical ethnography demon-
strates the dangers of these emotions when they fail to move past sentimentality and empty empathy, 
and when they value the comfort of white educators over the challenging but essential enactment of an-
tiracist pedagogies. Those interested in the role of emotion and affect in education should look towards 
critical emotional praxis and pedagogies of discomfort as methods by which to explicitly challenge 
white supremacy in education, as well as develop antiracist dispositions within white educators. Teach-
er-educators, myself included, must not let ourselves lapse into neutrality, but must instead interrogate 
our students and ourselves, reflexively uncovering what our emotions are enabling and what they are 
preventing.
 As described above in the implications, it is essential that educators—especially white educators, 
in this context—embark on a critical reflexive practice to consider how to design, invite, and respond 
to moments of affect in the classroom. When teaching inclusive children’s literature, it is important to 
plan not just for the course itself, but for the affective, emotional responses that will inevitably come up. 
Practices like having students keep a self-reflexion journal have significantly increased my own ability to 
guide students through naming and examining their own emotional responses, considering what those 
emotions do (Ahmed, 2015) to reinforce or disrupt the norms of white supremacy culture. Instead of 
simply teaching literature, I now teach literature and attempt to facilitate multiple opportunities for 
students to consider and discuss their personal and collective response to literature.
More than any tangible recommendations, however, this study reveals the personal work white educa-
tors must do to make possible real learning around social justice. When I look back at what I learned 
over the course of this research process, I realize that all my important growth was born not of comfort, 
but of discomfort. When I failed to interrogate my white students’ emotional responses to literature and 
the shallow emotions circulating in our classroom I failed as an educator to provide them opportunities 
for growth. Realizing my own role in the data from this research was certainly not comfortable—but 
it was essential. The reflexive process of conducting this research and practicing writing as inquiry has 
opened up new commitments and possibilities for myself as an educator. As Ahmed (2007) describes, 
“every experience I have had of pleasure and excitement about a world opening up has begun with such 
ordinary feelings of discomfort” (p. 163). 
 



Bauck  | 20 I Feel Sad

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