Is There a Black Pedagogy? Or, Portrait of the Dangerous Black Pedagogue

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Portraits of the Dangerous and the Permanence of Antiblack Racism

Abstract

This paper investigates Black pedagogy and explores its utility for Black students in a predominantly white university. The lived curriculum and knowledges of a Black, male university professor encountering anti-Blackness in the U.S. are centered. I juxtapose his theorizing against an analysis spun from my observations of one classroom pedagogical encounter involving the professor and two Black male students. This demonstrates the professor's operationalizing of a Black pedagogy he theorized as particular, place-based, discursive, and embodied. I show the potential of this iteration of Black pedagogy for humanizing the schooling/curricular experiences of Black male students and problematize its gendered politics even as I celebrate it as a radiant example of pedagogy as refusal of anti-Blackness in teacher education.

Author

• Esther O. Ohito, Rutgers University