Black Lives Matter at School Pedagogy as Cultural Citizenship for Black Liberation

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

Abstract

The Black Lives Matter at school curriculum creates a transformative pedagogy that goes beyond the call to promote "diversity" and encourage anti-bias by insisting that education materials, practices, and policies affirm Blackness in all forms. This commitment to resisting anti-Blackness in education anchors the practices of educators in the historical push to make education a space for liberatory praxis. This session explores how the BLM@School curriculum and pedagogy serves as cultural citizenship education for Black liberation.

Perspective
The push to develop culturally relevant pedagogy and a culturally responsive curriculum continues to grow in the field of teacher education as a requirement for preparing effective teachers. The earlier work of Ladson-Billings (1995) and Gay (2000) called for a shift from blaming Black students for not succeeding in a Eurocentric system to creating an environment that allowed them to successfully navigate the educational demands of schooling and maintain their cultural competence. Those who teach the curriculum during the week of action, enact a Black Lives Matter at School pedagogy connected to the historical push for culturally relevant teaching and representative of the current social movements and challenges to public education. The Black Lives Matter at School pedagogy affirms black lives and constructs cultural citizenship education for liberation.

Cultural citizenship explores how marginalized groups use their agency to claim membership in and remake the dominant society. Miller (2002) argues that the role of cultural citizenship is to develop and maintain one's cultural lineage through education and reinforce a positive recognition of differences in the larger society. Research on cultural citizenship has primarily been with non-dominant cultural groups such as Latinx (Fránquiz & Brochin-Ceballos, 2006) and Asian Americans (Rodriguez, 2018). What remains untheorized is the application of cultural citizenship for Black students.

Methods
In this presentation, I begin by describing the Black Lives Matter at School pedagogy. Then I apply BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) to theorize how traditional citizenship education has primarily functioned as a tool to blame Black people for the failure of citizenship education to assimilate them as a global citizen (Banks, 2008; DeJaeghere, 2009, Gordon, 1985) and identify the need for multicultural citizenship education (Banks, 2001; Kumi-Yeboah & Smith, 2016) to address anti-Blackness specifically. Using the 13-guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter at School movement (Garcia, 2018), I explore how this form of contemporary Black cultural knowledge supports Black liberation and BlackCrit's call to "create a space for Black liberatory fantasy" (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 431).


Significance of Work
The movement to center and affirm Black lives in classrooms, schools, and communities provides an opportunity to transform our educational practices. As we continue to fight for education for liberation, it is imperative we document the pedagogical practices, curriculum approaches, and ideological commitments that support our work and sustain our efforts.

Author

• Denisha Jones, Sarah Lawrence College