Teaching for Black Girls: What Every Graduate Student Instructor Can Learn from Balck Girlhood Studies

The neoliberal university undervalues teaching and upholds standardization practices that reproduce harm towards marginalized students. Black Studies approaches to education challenge these education standards. Teaching for Black girls is a pedagogical approach derived from Black Girlhood Studies in which the instructor commits to engage students as their co-creator, co-witness, and co-conspirator. All graduate student instructors can implement curricular tools and instill pedagogical values, such as instructor responsibility, student agency, collaboration, and reflexivity, to engage a practice of teaching for Black girls. In so doing, instructors model behaviors that promote Black girl thriving within and beyond the classroom. Instructors in STEM can recognize their power within scientific production and engage teaching for Black girls to empower marginalized students and address the harms that have been inflicted on communities and the environment in the name of science

Exploring How We Teach: Lived Experiences, Lessons, and Research about Graduate Instructors by Graduate Instructors

This book combines the knowledge of 30 graduate student instructors sharing about how they teach and how they’ve learned how to teach

Carlota’s Children: Fugitivity, Healing and a Future for Youth in Baltimore and Beyond

Yemaya’s Children (YC) is a Black community-based education organization that facilitates international travel for low-income youth in Baltimore. The two Black women co-founders of YC were inspired to found the organization in 2014 after encountering Black students from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean attending Escuela Latinoamericana de la Medicina (ELAM) outside of Havana, Cuba. In their words, the organization is grounded in “heal[ing] Black people.” For the co-founders, if Black youth are to survive and thrive in Baltimore, they need to heal. Drawing on qualitative data collected over four years in collaboration with YC, including participant observations during program events and international excursions, content analysis of program material, and interviews conducted with youth and adult leaders, I conceptualize YC’s curricular framework as emphasizing healing, unlearning, and extending. This curriculum re-orients focus on the future through imaginative exercises, demonstrating one of the ways that contemporary Black travel moves away from the past-oriented engagements that roots tourism allowed for and emphasizes collaborative future-building. Youth participants extend what they have learned beyond the organization such as by collaborating with city government to pass legislation that addresses the unique experiences of Baltimore youth. Yet working with organizations and institutions that are not focused on Black liberation can present unique challenges for youth. I find that they navigate these challenges by implementing lessons learned from the YC curriculum, especially those pertaining to healing. I conceptualize the ways in which one of YC’s central productions – a poster that Mayah and Ari commissioned to illustrate Carlota Lukumi – acts as a visual representation of the organization’s curricular framework. As a maternal archetype of fugitivity, Carlota emphasizes the role of fugitivity within the process of achieving Black liberation; circulates revolutionary ideals throught the diaspora; and attends to the maternal as a mode of feminist boundary-crossing to recognize the ways in which people and spaces contain the capacity for multiplicity. Carlota’s image signifies the YC curricular framework as constituted within Black feminist and decolonial praxes that generates fugitive imaginations for the future. Ultimately, this curricular framework, aided by the incorporation of international travel, presents ways for youth to understand themselves as capable of creating the future they need to thrive