Reimagining the English Curriculum With the Black Fantastic

• In Event: Refusal, Radical Imaginations, and World Remaking Curriculum

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, we use curriculum theorizing to identify anti-blackness in one school’s secondary English language arts (ELA) curriculum. Then, we use the curriculum models of culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), critical race English education (CREE) (Johnson, 2018), and the theoretical lens of the dark fantastic (Thomas, 2019) to offer curricular commitments to the survivance of blackness. This includes examples of the enacted curriculum around Shakespeare’s Othello that use these elements of curricular theorizing and models to reimagining curricular spaces as spaces where students’ ways of knowing and ways of being are centered.

Authors

• Leah Panther, Mercer University

• Selena Hughes, Cristo Rey High School