A Legacy of Educational Resistance

• In Event: Educational Resistance: Fugitive Pedagogies and Community-Based Educators as Freedom Fighters

Abstract

Consider for a moment that a child’s worldview and culture is antithesis to schooling practices: even the ways teachers talk are foreign to the ways of being inside the family circle (Ballenger, 1992). In the United States, and especially in most low-income schools, there is a vast disconnect between teachers and administrators who are disproportionately white, and the students who are overwhelmingly children of color. These gaps are detrimental and even dangerous (Dumas, 2014), especially when education teaches a person to internalize their oppression.

Schooling also often perpetuates racism. For example, Indigenous children throughout the 1900s were forcibly placed into boarding schools “to kill the Indian in order to save the man” (Adams, 1995). Furthermore, these students were conditioned to seek and serve whiteness and adhere to the rules of colonization.

Settler colonialism catalyzed an ongoing demand for justice. This process of learning towards liberation can be understood as Educational Resistance, which responds to patterns of inequality perpetuated by white supremacy, decenters whiteness in the curriculum (Picower, 2021), recognizes the institutional trauma and structural violence of colonial-based schooling, and turns towards community-based education, which protects epistemologies, cultures and identities of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). Resistance prevails as individuals come together to reimagine, reclaim, and repurpose the schoolhouse (Kohli, 2021).

Fugitive pedagogies center the actualization of an education for liberation. Carter G. Woodson and his establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASLNH), Myles Horton’s The Highlander Center, and The Mississippi Freedom Schools are three exemplar operationalizations of 20th-century fugitive pedagogies which served to transform a world around anti-Blackness (Givens, 2021), gather grassroots activists, and promote freedom and literacy, respectively.

Community-Based Educators teach toward sovereignty, enact these fugitive pedagogies, and gain license to operate in communal spaces dedicated to the education and liberation of young minds. Akom (2006) revisits the positionality and purpose of role models in the inner city, contributing to the finding that direct life experience and wisdom are more valuable than a degree, especially when the measure of success is one’s connection to the community. United Playaz, Sacramento Area Youth Speaks, and the Grow Your Own initiative are some of the many CBE-led movements that create spaces for youth to disrupt inequity, challenge deficit narratives, and thrive (Baldridge, 2019).
Schooling and education are not synonymous; in Decolonizing Educational Research, Patel (2015) challenges us to consider “whether an entity borne of and beholden to coloniality could somehow wrestle itself free of this genealogy” (p. 4). Educational Resistance is a radical freedom dream connected to the long legacy of the freedom fighters - those who saw education as revolutionary work. These alternative spaces of abolition, or “schools of abolition”, exist where pedagogy is fugitive and learning is liberatory (Love, 2019).

Patel (2016) also finds that “learning is fundamentally a fugitive, transformative act. It runs from what was previously known, to become something not yet known” (p. 6). Learning is liberatory, and as such, the problem and solution are one and the same: education.

Authors

• Ijeoma E. Ononuju, Touro University California

• Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento