Exorcising Demons: Rethinking Curricula and School Spaces Through Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds

• In Event: 31.026 - Black Life and Its (Curriculum) Matters

Abstract

This paper follows the work of a self-created professional learning community (PLC) of four white, female teachers at an urban public high school with a population of predominantly Black girls, plus an education researcher. Over a period of six weeks, this PLC read Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic grounds (2006), a theoretical work analyzing four cartographic, spatial, and affective locations of the Black Female struggle in North America. The members of the PLC noted the ways in which spaces in their school were analogous to the locations in McKittrick’s book. The members of the PLC then worked together to create curricula that they believed would begin to exorcise the demons of slavery and white supremacy from school spaces.

Author

• Jenna Kamrass Morvay, Miami University - Oxford