What Can We Not Leave Behind? Storying Family Photographs, Unlocking Emotional Memories, and Welcoming Complex Conversations on Being Human

Everyone was startled by the flood that burst forth from my previously dry tear ducts, even me. What was supposed to be an ordinary oral presentation of a culminating assignment for Wendy Luttrell’s popular graduate school course on visual methodologies, Doing Visual Research with Children and Youth, had morphed into a strange waterworks festival starring me as the headlining performer. In addition to Wendy, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, the audience included Tran Templeton and several other peers who were also my fellow doctoral students at Teachers College, Columbia University.1 The course drew on Wendy’s work with children and youth in a public elementary school located in a working-class city in the Northeastern United States (Luttrell & Clark, 2018). Wendy’s intent was to inspire a “need to know more stance” (Luttrell, 2010, p. 233) about children and youth, that is, to cultivate a curiosity about how young people (re)constructed their lives and represented themselves, particularly with regard to the complex intersections of social identities, such as class, race, gender, and immigrant status. The assignment directions were seemingly straightforward: Wendy asked each student to peruse her extensive archive of photographs and videos, choose a focal child, then provide a visual analysis based on a video recording of that child making meaning of their own photographs

“Blackness is not just a single definition”: multimodal composition as an exercise for surfacing and scaffolding student theorizing in a Black Studies classroom

Purpose This study aims to investigate multimodal composition as an exercise or tool for teaching students theory building. To illustrate, an analysis of artifacts comprising a student’s multimodal composition, which was created in response to a multipart literacy assignment on theorizing Blackness, is analyzed. Design/methodology/approach Afrocentricity served as both theoretical moor and research methodology. Qualitative case study, focusing on the case of an individual student, was the research method used. Findings Multimodal composition was an effective exercise for surfacing the multidimensionality of a student’s complex knowledge while simultaneously placing the student in the powerful position of theorist. The process of composing multimodally integrated reading, writing and speaking skills while revealing the focal student’s need for targeted writing intervention. Practical implications The study evidences multimodal composition as a useful exercise for capturing students’ nuanced interpretations or students’ critical theorizing as well as meaningfully incorporating and assessing students’ literacy skills. Originality/value Exposure to preexisting theory alone relegates students to the realm of passive knowledge consumers. This undermines the emancipatory and justice-oriented objectives of critical education, which ideally contributes to social change by challenging dominant power structures and distorted perspectives of marginalized persons. To be empowered agentic learners, students need to be both taught how to theorize and engaged as theorists. This study shows how multimodal composition can be used as a liberatory literacy tool for those intertwined pedagogical purposes

How to be an antiracist teacher educator in the United States: A sketch of a Black male pedagogic provocateur

In the United States, scholarship on antiracist teaching in teacher education abounds. Extant research irradiates how antiracist pedagogues practice antiracist teaching and how students respond. The link between antiracist pedagogues’ teaching and lived experiences, particularly with anti-Black racism, is under-scrutinized. This article theorizes antiracist teaching through the experiential knowledge of a Black male teacher educator. It sketches his theorizing of antiracist teaching, illustrating how that theorizing—which is anchored to his lived experiences with anti-Black racism—shapes his provocative pedagogic posture. Implications for antiracist teaching practice and research are discussed

“I’m Very Hurt”: (Un)justly Reading the Black Female Body as Text in a Racial Literacy Learning Assemblage

There has been a recent rise in research that has attuned to matters of the body in literacy learning. This article is a contribution to that emerging corpus of scholarship. Specifically, the article is a Black feminist narrative inquiry into the undertheorized role of embodiment―and relatedly, the embodied knowing that materializes as emotion or affect―in racial literacy learning. To illustrate, I employed a blend of embodiment, affect, and assemblage theories to examine an episode of a university‐based (self‐described) anti‐racist pedagogue’s racial literacy instruction in an English teacher education program in the United States. A sociomaterial approach to literacy frames my exploration of the relation between the emotions generated during classroom discourse about the contents of a curricular text used by the Black female pedagogue and the reproduction of anti‐racist ideology. Findings underscore that racial literacy instruction is (inter)embodied and affective and that each body is a particular racialized, sexed, gendered, and otherwise marked text. These findings underpin my clarion call for a turn to Black feminist racial literacy instruction, an approach entailing the enactment of reparative and healing pedagogical practices that care‐fully tend to the embodied and psychic wellness of Black women and girls in particular while simultaneously cultivating pedagogues’ and students’ commitments to justice and humanization in English teacher education classrooms

Some of us die: a Black feminist researcher’s survival method for creatively refusing death and decay in the neoliberal academy

I engage Black feminist thought in this genre-blending text to further theorize Black feminist memory work, a visual research tool for embodied reflexivity. Using my lived experience surviving bereavement, I demonstrate how Black feminist thought—as anchored to the concepts of creation, improvisation, and memory—shaped the aforementioned self-invented method for humanely undertaking the task of heeding the embodied intensities of grief-borne sorrow and suffering. Sorrow and suffering can be exacerbated by systemic marginalization in dehumanizing settings such as the output-obsessed neoliberal academy. Black feminist memory work extends a long lineage of Black women subversively creating alternatives that defy the body-numbing demands of the death and decay-inducing knowledge production normalized in academia. Alternatives to those repressive and oppressive demands offer qualitative researchers apparatus with which to creatively re-member—that is, to return to the body—in order to increase the heart’s capaciousness and capacity for compassion. As qualitative researchers, embodied (re)connection to the essentially compassionate core of our human/e selves is imperative for resisting, recovering from, and surviving the deadening trap/pings of neoliberal academia

Feeling safe from the storm of anti-Blackness: Black affective networks and the im/possibility of safe classroom spaces in Predominantly White Institutions

Black affective networks form in evanescent moments when two or more Black people in a white space cluster around a Black feeling and other things. This article is a feminist narrative inquiry into Black affective networks in classrooms on the campuses of Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) in the United States. Authors inhabit dual roles as researchers and study participants in an investigation of affects that percolated in two classrooms, catalyzing the constitution of Black affective networks in those contexts. In the lineage of contemporary Black feminism, authors use beautiful writing as a method with which to narrate stories illustrating the formation of these assemblages. The stories show that these constellations served as locations for the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge of Blackness—that is, perceptual spaces where knowledge of Blackness not as abject but rather as a wellspring of Black excitement, pride, love, and joy was transacted. Ergo, Black affective networks provided Black faculty and students with pathways for temporary escape from the anti-Black violence built into PWIs. Authors pivot from this inquiry on the im/possibility of classrooms in PWIs functioning as safe spaces for Black faculty and students to echo calls for a turn to Black affect theory and to trouble diversity and inclusion discourses in US higher education

Storytellin’ by the light of the lantern: A polyvocal dialogue turnin’ towards critical Black curriculum studies

Esther: Justin, this special issue sprung from one critical question: how could we creatively and intellectually interfere with curriculum studies’ faithful marriage to anti-Blackness? I will return to that essential question and begin addressing how the issue’s contributors engaged it momentarily. However, as a preface to my response, I will tell you a story about when and where I entered this very white field. I theorize through this narrative (Christian, 1988) to illustrate that I was drawn to the possibility of this special issue because—invoking the womanist gospel of our ancestor and Queen Mother, Toni Morrison (1990; see also Le Fustec, 2011)—I wanted to freely imagine what curriculum studies could be with the white gaze and the field’s narcissistic love of whiteness parenthesized. So, I embarked upon this collaborative project wondering how we could co-create something that would “go further than a celebration of” the optic inclusion and infusion of Blackness in curriculum studies (Hull et al., 1977, p. 25)

Mapping women’s knowledges of antiracist teaching in the United States: A feminist phenomenological study of three antiracist women teacher educators

This feminist phenomenological inquiry pivots from the White, Western, androcentric gaze to probe the antiracist teaching of a multiracial group of women in the United States comprised of three teacher educators. I find that these teacher educators’ beliefs about and enactments of antiracist teaching are shaped by their knowledges of the (inter)connections among: 1) race(ism) and family histories; 2) race(ism) and schooling experiences; and 3) race(ism) and embodiment. I conclude by considering the questions raised by this pilot study for future and further feminist-concerned research on how, what, and why antiracist teacher educators teach

This Moment is the Curriculum: Equity, Inclusion, and Collectivist Critical Curriculum Mapping for Study Abroad Programs in the COVID-19 Era

Background: This article explores critical curriculum mapping in experiential education through immersive travel or Study Abroad Programs (SAPs). Purpose: The tetrad of authors theorizes then models the practice of criticality in curriculum mapping for SAPs. Methodology/Approach: Using Black feminist thought as a theoretical moor and dialogue and reflexive narrative as methods, authors present a curriculum mapping framework that is berthed to collective knowledge of how Black women in the African diaspora make meaning of lived experience to survive a perpetually precarious world. Findings/Conclusions: The framework exemplifies an epistemological alternative to dominant individualistic Euro/American approaches to curriculum mapping. Such approaches privilege predictability and linearity, contributing to the low participation of collectivist-oriented Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students in SAPs. Implications: A collectivist critical orientation to curriculum mapping may, therefore, be useful for (a) epistemologically diversifying curricular responsiveness (with implications for teaching and learning in the unpredictable chaos of the current COVID-19 moment) and (b) addressing enduring issues of equity and inclusion in SAPs

Stirring vulnerability, (un)certainty, and (dis)trust in humanizing research: duoethnographically re-membering unsettling racialized encounters in social justice teacher education

This article details how the embodied underpinnings of engaging in a duoethnographic collaboration were generative for theorizing and operationalizing humanization in a qualitative inquiry on social justice teacher education. We begin this exploring of humanization by presenting a poetic duoethnographic rendering of memories illustrative of affectively unsettling, racialized encounters re-membered from our lived experiences as two Black teacher educators in the hegemonically White field of teacher education. Then, we consider how our dialogic approach to the methodological labor of collaboratively seeing, hearing, and feeling allowed us to first, actualize a (Black) feminist conceptualization of humanizing research that accounted for memory and embodiment; and second, grapple with the mixture of vulnerability, (un)certainty, and (dis)trust that was stirred. We conclude by illuminating the liberatory affordances of duoethnography as a methodological device capable of containing the inherent indeterminacy of research concerned with noticing and nurturing the human(e) in education