Sabbath Pedagogies as Extraordinary Literacies: Disrupting Black Women Grind Culture Through Sacred Pacing

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Rest as an Extraordinary Literacy: Black Women Educators Reclaiming Power Through Stillness, Silence, Silliness, and Refusal

Abstract

This critical autoethnographic inquiry explores how Black women educators in K–12 and higher education resist the internalized rhythms of grind culture through what I theorize as Sabbath pedagogies—a divinely rooted, spiritually aligned practice of sacred pacing. Drawing on Staples-Dixon’s (2023, 2024) theory of extraordinary literacies—social, soulful, spiritual, cultural, and somatic technologies that catalyze interior excavation and embodied transformation—this paper frames rest not as leisure or retreat but as insurgent praxis. Sabbath pedagogies challenge the dominant metrics of productivity, speed, and efficiency imposed by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (Hersey, 2022; Okun, 2021), and instead offer counter-logics rooted in ritual, reverence, and radical refusal.

Positioning rest as an empyreal dialectic—a sacred spiritual logic and literacy of liberation—this paper investigates how rest practices such as spiritual pacing, ritualized pausing, and embodied stillness become forms of healing, reclamation, and curricular disruption. Through layered narrative and embodied reflection, I interrogate my own educational life and labor, revealing how institutional violence manifests in the soma and soul. Guided by Staples-Dixon’s articulation of the matrix of oppression within—comprised of hypervigilance, toxic narratives, and somatic overfunctioning—this paper illustrates how Sabbath pedagogies dismantle interior strongholds and enable the emergence of what she calls emotional freedom techniques (Staples-Dixon, 2023, p. 1208).

Sabbath, as both spiritual commitment and pedagogical act, functions as an extraordinary literacy that reorients time, honors divine alignment, and reconstitutes agency. Informed by Hersey’s (2022) assertion that rest is a “liberation theology” and Travers et al.’s (2025) call for Black scholars to embody radical rest, this work contributes to a growing body of Black feminist and decolonial scholarship that honors rest as sacred resistance. Ultimately, I argue that Sabbath pedagogies offer not only sanctuary, but also revolutionary strategy—recalibrating how Black women educators navigate and narrate their purpose, practice, and power within institutions not built for our thriving.

References
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Hachette Book Group.
Okun, T. (2021). White supremacy culture—Still here. Dismantling racism.
https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/white_supremacy_culture_-_still_here.pdf
Staples-Dixon, J. M. (2023). Extraordinary literacies & empyreal logics: regarding the
everyday praxises of black girls and women in schools and society. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 36(7), 1207-1211. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2203100
Staples-Dixon, J.M. (2024). Extraordinary Pedagogies: An Endarkened Feminist Approach to Revolutionizing Teacher Consciousness. Teachers College Press.
Travers, C. S., Breeden, R., Snipes, J. T., Ford, J., Wallace, J. K., & McCloud, L. (2025).
Communal rest is resistance: A spiritual balm for Black faculty in academe. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000647

Author

• Azaria I. Cunningham, Boston University