Dream Doulas: Cultivating DreamSpaces through Radical, Holistic Pedagogy

Abstract

Drawing on Hersey’s (2022) articulation of DreamSpace, we explore how classrooms can be cultivated as sites where dreaming is protected, honored, and mobilized in service of collective restoration and liberation. Anchored in our experiences as Black women scholar-practitioners, this study is guided by the overarching research question: What are our perceptions of Black dreaming, and how do our pedagogical praxes support the cultivation of DreamSpaces? Using Virtual Kitchen Table Politics as a dialogic methodology, we engaged in sustained reflection and communal meaning-making, allowing for personal narratives to become data. Through these conversations, we named dreaming as an embodied foreshadowing, familial practice, and an act of political warfare. We foregrounded three pedagogical approaches, namely sensory learning, student agency, and community involvement, that enabled us to transform our classrooms into DreamSpaces. Collectively, our offerings highlight DreamSpaces as disruptors of dehumanizing educational norms, while posturing dreaming as a serious and necessary educational practice.