Presidential Invited Session: Learning from Black Lives Matter: Pro-Black Educational Practices and Comparative and International Education

Group Submission Type: Presidential Invited Sessions

Proposal

This group panel examines how the intentional creation of pro-Black educational spaces and practices are globally significant praxes for educational justice. Drawing on movement knowledge from Black Lives Matter, reflections on pedagogic interventions and practices among Black educators, and social theory that centres Black Joy, Black Freedom and unapologetic Blackness, the papers in this panel discuss how systems that constrain Black life can be dismantled whilst also creating structures that nurture Black aliveness.

The panel emerges from the work undertaken for a Special Issue in Comparative Education Review on Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice (published November 2022). BLM calls us to pay deeper attention to state violence, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and abolition in our frames of analysis within educational research and practice. Panellists outline and engage with the theory and praxis of the Movement for Black Lives, critically examining how education might be understood as a crucial force in realising the abolitionist horizons BLM envisages for racial justice. Together, we set out to elucidate the political, practical and intellectual significance of the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly for the field of CIE. In refusing anti-Blackness in education, the presentations in this panel offer insights into Black-centred praxes of solidarity and learning.

The panel acknowledges the global nature of anti-Blackness as well as its specificities in different temporal and geographical locations. Therefore, in advocating for pro-Black educational spaces and practices, it draws attention to the theoretical and methodological work required across the field - for researchers, policymakers and educators.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Krystal Strong, Rutgers University

Individual Presentations

• Learning From the Movement for Black Lives: Horizons of Racial Justice for Comparative and International Education - Sharon Walker, University of Bristol

• Black Lives Matter and the Making of Black Educational Spaces: Reimagining how pedagogy can transform classrooms into sites for Black healing - Jordan Bell, CUNY Graduate Center

• Ubuntu, Black dolls, and counter-stories: How a teacher deployed BLM praxis in the peripheries of São Paulo City - Marla Roschelle Goins, The University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Fugitive Pedagogies / Black Lives Matter At School: Curricular Organizing as a response to the criminalization of social justice education - Christopher R Rogers

• Black Joy and Collective Resistance: BLM in Contemporary Picture Books - Breanna McDaniel

Discussant

• Krystal Strong, Rutgers University