Radical Love as Pedagogical Praxis: Vignettes and Letters from a Multilingual Classroom

This paper examines what radical love can look like in the everyday life of schooling, focusing on the pedagogical work of Luis, a Latino educator serving multilingual learners. Drawing on bell hooks’s conception of love as an ethic and deliberate practice, it conceptualizes radical love as a justice-oriented pedagogical praxis enacted through solidarity, everyday care, and strategic advocacy. Emerging from a yearlong ethnographic study, the paper uses vignettes and letter writing as a reflective methodological approach to show how radical love is enacted in daily classroom interactions, challenging deficit narratives and affirming students’ linguistic and cultural identities. The study shows that radical love functions as a political and pedagogical stance that challenges structural inequities and humanizes schooling. Ultimately, the paper argues that education grounded in radical love can foster epistemic justice, relational accountability, and collective empowerment.