Reimagining Curriculum through Southern Black Ecopedagogies

• In Event: Pedagogies of Place and Power: Reclaiming Black Southern Educational Traditions

Abstract

This paper engages ecowomanism, Black geographies, and ecopedagogy to reimagine curriculum as an embodied, place-based, and liberatory practice rooted in the ecological and epistemological traditions of Southern Black women. Drawing from archival narratives, oral histories, and memory work, I explore how rural Black women teachers cultivated pedagogies grounded in relationship to land and represent a curriculum of ecological resistance that challenges colonial notions of schooling and centers the interdependence of people, land, and spirt.

This paper extends ecowomanism and ecopedagogy through an educational lens that is attuned to Black Southern geographies and epistemologies. I propose the term Southern Black Ecopedagogy as an approach to teaching and curriculum rooted in ancestral ecological knowledge, womanist care ethics, and land-based resistance. Through this lens, we interrogate how curriculum scholars and teacher educators might engage the land as text, reclaim ecospirituality as pedagogical, and co-create liberatory learning experiences with historically marginalized communities.

Author

• Asia Symone Thomas, Augusta University