When the Affinity Group Goes Underground: The Impact of Black Teacher Fugitive Space on Black Teacher Pedagogies

• In Event: Refuge, Resistance, and Reimagination: Racial Affinity Spaces for Educators of Color Across the Pipeline

Abstract

1. Objectives
Black people have long established a tradition of teaching despite the systemic withholding of education from enslaved peoples and their descendants, and they establish their pedagogies through collective work. This study focuses on a subversive form of an affinity group, called a Black educational fugitive space (ross, 2021), that allowed Black teachers to build their capacity to navigate and disrupt antiblackness in the mission of Black liberation. This paper explores how two Black teachers, Medgar and Mariah, who participated in this fugitive space transferred their learnings in the classroom. I ask, how did they feel their learnings in this fugitive affinity space shaped their pedagogy?

2. Theoretical framework
Fugitivity connotes an enslaved person who escapes from anti-Black atrocities in pursuit of freedom. In Fugitive Pedagogy, Givens (2021) argues that this legacy of Black people stealing their education persists because there is a set of enduring structures in schools that are a carryover from slavery. Fugitivity allows us to see how teachers subversively work together to navigate and respond to antiblackness is the latest iteration of Black teachers enacting refusals against antiblackness in order to imagine other possible worlds.


3. Methods and Data sources
The Black Teacher Project (BTP) is an all-Black affinity group that supports teachers in liberatory teaching practices. I first followed 20 teachers in the group during the 2019-2020 school year, collecting interviews, open-ended survey questions, and audio transcriptions from the meetings. To better understand the ways that the BTP impacted their pedagogies, I followed two of these teachers into their classroom during the 2021-2022 school year, collecting over 100 hours of participation observation, interviews/focus groups with their students, and several interviews with the teachers throughout the school year.


4. Results
The central findings were that the participation in the Black teacher fugitive space impacted Medgar and Mariah’s pedagogies in the following four ways. They: (1) created a collective learning community by establishing a healthy community of care and trust to break norms of individualism and competition (2) directly interrupted antiblackness by openly teaching about anti-Black and systemic racism in their lessons, despite the expectation for teachers to be politically neutral (3) centered Blackness by prioritizing the well-being of their Black students (4) prized authenticity through creating an environment where students could “true speak” (hooks, 1989, p. 8) and share their multiple identities without ridicule.


5. Scholarly significance
As states across the United States attack CRT and the teaching of history, it is becoming increasingly necessary for Black teachers, and any teacher that wishes to push against the antiblackness embedded in schools, to teach fugitively. And the stakes are high--in some states, there are now consequences of job loss or lawsuits for teaching the truth about antiblackness and students’ role in addressing it, which is why teachers like Medgar and Mariah often do this work “under the cover of darkness.” And yet, scholars, school leaders, and education abolitionists can learn how to build equitable and liberated learning environments from these teachers’ fugitive work.

Author

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin - Madison