The National BLM@School Curriculum: Curricular Strikes, Radical Study, and Otherwise Possibility

• In Event: Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice

Abstract

Purpose
What we attempt to organize during the Week of Action follows in principle a call-to-action led by Lissovoy et al. (2015) whom suggested the tactic of a curricular strike, whereby educators and community members refuse the high-stakes, neoliberal, corporate curriculum for a set period to create space for educational activities answerable to the freedom dreams of communities of color. I cherish my role as Curriculum Chair because I believe that this shared, collective, reiterative process of curricular organizing pushes us to "reimagine everything" (Boggs, 2012) as we (re)center the purpose of education and the co-constitutive work of educators and families toward the honoring of community knowledge, (her)stories, and cultural imaginaries that build collective power and seek to (re)imagine the world otherwise.

Perspective
As Ashon Crawley (2015) offers, the only way to practice the alternative worldmaking that is otherwise possibility is to indeed, practice otherwise. We do that by accessibly curating, archiving, attributing, and spreading educational resources that show students and teachers alike that another world is possible, and we have nothing to lose but our chains (Shakur, 2016). While the technology is new, we need to remind ourselves that this work is not without historical precedent. Educational historians like Vanessa Siddle Walker (2018), Heather Andrea Williams (2009), Jarvis Givens (2016), etc. have documented how African-American educators have creatively and subversively deployed radical Black historical narratives to stretch students' imaginations about the possibilities for social transformation, refusing the unjust educational policies of their time. Students have also been front and center of these movements to reimagine schooling in service of liberation, such as the envisioning of Third World Studies during the S.F. State Strike of 1968 (Ryan, 2015).

Methods
The Curriculum Committee organizes educational resources that speak to the 13 intersectional justice principles espoused by the official Black Lives Matter network. Through curating, archiving, attributing, and spreading educational resources, we bridge primary and secondary compilations of grassroots struggle across many fronts, elaborating to students and teachers alike that another world is possible. We ask, paraphrasing the Abolition University collective (2019): How can curricular organizing help us expand how education-sited movements should imagine their political constituencies and the kinds of solidarities that they can strive to create?

Significance of Work
As Robin Kelley (2018) writes, it is important to remember that one cannot expect schools to ever be "engines of social transformation," yet wholly recognizing that they remain a site of political struggle (p. 157). The oft-erased work of the TWLF in jumpstarting Ethnic Studies and the words of Robin Kelley challenges us to navigate the tension that we might save the colonial project of schooling through multiculturalist curricular reform to consider furthermore how our subversive process of thinking, planning, and gathering together has the potential to incite collectives of change agents, insurgents, and revolutionaries who see public schools as but one site where one can enter into radical study for social transformation (see Meyerhoff, 2019).

Author

• Christopher Rogers, University of Pennsylvania