Reclaiming Our Roots: A Collaborative Autoethnography Exploring Black Life and Rural Education

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 4:55 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Rural Community Futures: Migration and Civil Life (Table 15)

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnography explores the place based pedagogies of three Black males whose life, work, and future are connected to rural education. Educational research imagines the experiences of Black males from not only deficit lenses but also as if they only learn in urban spaces. For three Black males, reclaiming the knowledge and practices of their rural roots have helped them create educational spaces that acknowledge their humanity, agency, and dreams. Drawing from Fanon’s zones of nonbeing and Woods’s blues epistemology, the author argues that their praxis is grounded in the educational struggle and resistance of Black rural communities. This study can broaden the ways rural education understands schooling at the intersections of race, gender, class, geography, and ecology.

Authors

• Ezekiel Joubert, California State University - Los Angeles

• Batiste Joubert, Ohio University

• Janeau Joubert