“To Serve the Present Age My Calling to Fulfill”: CORIBE’s Vision and Transformative Research Praxis

• In Event: Looking Back, Looking Forward, Imagining Futures: CORIBE’s Black Education Research Agenda -- Impacts 20 Years Later

Abstract

2026 is the 100th anniversary of the establishment Negro History week by Carter G. Woodson, which became Black History Month and ultimately was a foundation for the discipline of Black Studies. AERA’s insurgent Commission on Research in Black Education, a forerunner of the field of Black Studies in Education, has been a culturally informed, national and global collective undertaking and the transformative research and action agenda that this collaborative initiative generated mobilized scholarship, emerging and senior scholars and organizing from the grassroots to the academy. CORIBE’s various activities across eight AERA presidencies —establishing an Elders Council, commissioned papers, online and conventional convenings including AERA annual meeting sessions, a Working Conference, a documentary film, an interactive website and public presentations in policy arenas—facilitated and illuminated transformative possibilities to respond to the proverbial “crisis” in Black education in the US and elsewhere in the world. CORIBE supported democratic engagement and research-practice partnerships that gave meaning to the Adinkra symbol that was used as the Commission’s logo: Hwehwemudua-- “Excellence, Superior Quality, Perfection, Knowledge, Critical Examination”. As such, in detailing the CORIBE vision to address the fundamental roots of the crisis in Black education, including the “entrenched system of thought that justified our predicament,” and the Commission’s transformative process-oriented praxis, this paper re-writes the historiography of Black Education research, theorizing, teaching and learning for human freedom.

Author

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University