Sowing Seeds, Exceeding Categories, and Un/Doing Praxis

• In Event: Fugitive Text in Educational Research

Abstract

Since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal department of education has provided funding to states for improving educational outcomes of the so-called racially, economically, linguistically, and educationally disadvantaged. While this act has a civil rights intention, the funding approach for supporting state departments of education has set the stage for problematic engagements within the educational funding-accountability-assessment apparatus. In this conceptual paper, the presenter theorizes with Octavia E. Butler’s (1993) Parable of the Sower to rethink educational equity by asking: How do we ethically sow seeds for fugitive flight beyond a federal, corporate, and non-profit approach to the education system?

While equity has been a primary driver of research, policy, and practice, this paper rethinks the conception and systemic practice of educational equity by highlighting the effects of how it has been pursued through the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The presenter draws on the work of Eve Tuck (2009) and Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) to consider how coloniality, raciality, and neoliberalism are key tools for operationalizing and implementing equity in local school districts. Exploring the limits of educational equity’s promises for less disparity in educational outcomes amongst the “disadvantaged,” the presenter dream-plans with Lauren, Butler’s main character in Parable of the Sower, and fugitivity, in Harney & Moten’s (2013) The Undercommons to undo educational equity’s problematic entanglements with capital, coloniality, and raciality. Of fugitivity The Undercommons offers, “there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned” (p. 11). My task, then, is to free educational equity to open up other-wise learning and create conditions for flight.

As a queer black feminist scholar, gardener, educator, educational leader, the presenter re- and un-thinks the education system as we know it. Methodologically, re-reading scholarly and creative texts through one another exposes how allegiances to categorical thinking allow deficit ideologies to run amuck in educational systems in the name of educational equity and justice.

Black creative texts sow seeds to imagine alternative ways of being with/out the limitations of the category -- a critical approach for unsettling educational equity’s heavy reliance on notions of disadvantaged, disenfranchised, and other deficit language used to justify interventions. By freeing the pursuit of education equity from colonial-racial-capital’s regulation, there is possibility for learning indigenous pedagogies from the land and black prescient pedagogies from the future. This paper unsettles this year’s conference theme “Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century” by advancing the idea that educational equity for youthful and playful expression can be pursued outside and beyond institutions.

Author

• Cee Carter, University of Vermont