Beyond the Sacred Timeline: A Curricular Pluriverse Framework for Understanding Black Educational Temporalities

• In Event: Speculative Methodologies and Anti-Racist Curricular Practice: Building Curricular Futures Beyond Anti-Blackness

Abstract

Objectives
This study examines how dominant educational systems maintain temporal colonialism through singular curricular timelines that systematically exclude Black and community-based knowledge systems. Guided by two research questions—In what ways do community literacy practices operate according to different temporal logics than dominant educational systems? And, How might these alternative temporal logics inform new approaches to curriculum development? —the primary objective is to develop a curricular pluriverse framework recognizing multiple educational timelines as simultaneously valid rather than competing for dominance.

Conceptual Framework
Contemporary education operates under a “sacred timeline” (Drzakowski, 2022) positioning Western epistemologies and standardized measures as natural while rendering Black knowledge systems as obsolete. This temporal colonialism achieves coherence through systematic destruction of alternative educational timelines. However, in this paper, I draw on temporal colonialism (Phillips, 2015, 2025; Said, 1993, Shippen, 2014) and pluriversal thinking (Brooks, 2015; Freeman & Katwyk, 2020; Krawec, 2022) to challenge dominant narratives about legitimate curriculum, recognizing curriculum as one temporal possibility among infinite educational timelines, each valid within its own ontological framework.

Methodology/Data
This study centers on the Paul Laurence Dunbar Reading Circle (PLD), a Black literary society in western Pennsylvania. The research employed critical ethnographic methodology with participant observation, interviews with PLD members, and examination of institutional history. To consider the sacred timeline, I also collected comparative data (i.e., archival documents, participant observation, and community interviews) to document the surrounding white educational institutions in an effort to compare temporal logics. For data analysis, I followed Madison’s (2020) critical ethnographic analysis. I immersed myself in data through repeated reading and listening to become a story listener (Archibald, 2008; Author, ----). Using Atlas.Ti, I grouped data into categories related to research questions and theoretical framework. After clustering, I examined pieces within categories, identified links, and took research memos. I compared information across clusters, noting themes that united codes using central organizing concepts. These themes were verified through member checking with key interlocutors in an iterative, reflexive process.

Results
The findings reveal that the Paul Laurence Dunbar Reading Circle generated entirely different curricular timelines that sustained intellectual life and community knowledge according to their own temporal logics. This institution refused the dominant timeline positioning Black peoples as “imprisoned in a ‘before’ stage in literacy’s educational history and, instead, created parallel curricular universes with fundamentally different ways of organizing knowledge, learner relationships, and temporal understandings of development. The research demonstrates how suppressed Black educational timelines contain unrealized possibilities available for activation.

Significance
This research contributes to decolonial education theory by introducing the curricular pluriverse as both analytical framework and ethical imperative. The framework refuses both singular timeline dominance and uncritical relativism by demanding multiple curricular temporalities coexist simultaneously. The key principle: any curricular timeline can exist provided it doesn’t destroy others’ possibilities. White supremacist educational logics are incompatible with the pluriverse because they achieve coherence through timeline destruction. Beyond academic theory, this offers practical frameworks for cultivating multiple educational futures that honor different ways of being human across time and space.

Author

• Stephanie R. Toliver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign