"I'm Not Alone Anymore": A Community Review Board's Efficacy in Iterating an Abolitionist History Curriculum

• In Event: Fostering Black Space in Education: Co-Constructing Futures Through Community Collaboration and the Reimagining of Schools

Abstract

 Positioned at the axes of Black Education Studies and Abolition Studies (ross and Givens, 2022; Dumas and ross, 2016; Gilmore, 2022; Purnell, 2021), our project dares to articulate the K-12 history classroom as a (re)emergent and discursive site of social, ideological, and political intervention. We offer an abolitionist-oriented social studies curriculum that centers and historicizes the onto-epistemic dynamism of Black life and its radical tradition. This paper, co-constructed and co-presented with Black youth, focuses on the role of a majority Black community review board in guiding this research process through their feedback on pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.

This paper engages Angela Davis’ (2005) theorization of abolition-thinking that calls us to not only be concerned with “tearing down” violent systems but also about “building up, about creating new institutions.” Increasingly education scholars employ an abolitionist framework in service of reimagining the project of American schooling with specific regard for liberating Black and other minoritized students (Meiners, 2007; Shange, 2019; Dumas, 2016). Few studies have tested abolitionist theory in practice in education research. We build upon these fertile grounds by investigating how a Black Studies orientation can develop abolitionist education research. With deep ponderance on the position and construction of the Black within the social strata of the world (Wilderson, 2020; Wynter, 2003), we are interested in the vibrancy of Black social life within Black educational spaces (Sexton, 2011; ross, 2021). Here, our abolitionist-oriented curricular intervention seeks to make an essential difference in how the epistemological order of colonial racial logics are cohered in U.S. classrooms.

We employ a social design-based experiment (SDBE) methodology to bridge theory and practice in the construction of abolitionist-oriented middle-school history curriculum. Gutiérrez et al. (2020) asserts that SDBEs “are concerned with how the world gets built to advance some view or practice and not others” (p. 332). Thus, this team partnered with a middle-school history teacher in a majority Black urban charter school in a major Northeastern city. We collaboratively designed, implemented, and evaluated a five-cycle abolitionist-oriented middle-school history curriculum that addressed everyday resistance during enslavement, the rise of U.S. sectionalism, reconstruction, Jim Crow/mass incarceration, and modern abolitionist movements. We have conducted critical content and discourse analysis of student artifacts, in-depth semi-structured student and teacher interviews, and video-recordings of classroom observations, research team meetings, and community review board sessions. Preliminary findings suggest that the engagement with a majority Black community review board disrupted the traditional neoliberal model of schooling and research by inverting teaching as a collective enterprise. Triangulated through student interviews and classroom observations, we found that the CRB’s feedback aided in the empowerment of students to question systems of power, built their socioemotional astuteness, and improved student engagement. Ultimately, this project seeks to equip Black youth with the analytical skills to name, resist, and dismantle systems of oppression in their local and global context, while simultaneously developing their capacity to freedom dream new cognitive maps that are more hospitable than the ones they know.

Authors

• Darion A. Wallace, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Kia Turner
  Presenting Author

• Madisyn Cunningham
  Presenting Author

• Maliatu Jalloh
  Presenting Author