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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Reimagining, reclaiming, and cultivating equitable educational systems requires reckoning with the deleterious, colonial nature of schooling, often forcing us to look beyond the schoolhouse for answers (Baldridge, 2019). We gather Community-Based Educators and scholar-activists from Northern California who embody and study Educational Resistance, which decenters whiteness and carves out pockets of hope and survivance. Community-based education protects and promote the knowledge, identities, and cultures of BIPOC communities, through operationalizing grassroots and fugitive pedagogies (Patel, 2019). Their work corresponds to increased agency, self-determination, and collective belonging for these communities’ youth. Panelists will speak to how their own academic or organizational work operationalizes Educational Resistance as a soulful and strategic response to a broader, historical struggle toward healing justice (Ginwright, 2016).

Sub Unit

• SIG-Grassroots Community and Youth Organizing for Educational Reform

Chair

• Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts - Boston

Papers

• A Legacy of Educational Resistance - Ijeoma E. Ononuju, Touro University California; Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento

• Kingmakers of Oakland - Christopher Chatmon, Kingmakers of Oakland

• United Playaz - Rudy Corpuz, United Playaz

• Sacramento Area Youth Speaks - Patrice Hill, University of California - Davis; Denisha Coco Blossom, University of California-Davis

• Square Root Academy - Shaun Patrick de Vera, Square Root Academy

Discussant

• Bianca Jontae Baldridge, Harvard University