Recentering and claiming joy and radical love in education

Too often joy and radical love are brushed off to the side while addressing intersectional forms of supremacies within teacher education does not get addressed. While it is important to name systematic and intergenerational trauma and violence, building interdependence joy and radical love must be done alongside. We cannot dismantle and build if we do not know how to value ourselves. Using insights from auto-ethnographic approaches, we 1) define what a disability justice radical love approach, which centers joy, radical love, and the humanization of personal, professional, and programmatic identities, 2) illustrate how we started and continue to build such networks, and 3) offer strategic suggestions for centering joy and radical love within everyday educational practice — both on a micro and macro level — in building resistance, push back, and disruption of dehumanizing practices within teacher development and educational policy and practices.