This teaching note reviews a four-part discussion post assignment that asks Black-identified students enrolled in a class connected to a Black living-learning community to make sociological and personal connections to concepts related to race, anti-Blackness, and institutional racism in Yaa Gyasi's novel "Homegoing." Reflecting on their…

I use Toni Morrison's "Paradise" as a backdrop for framing a "Black Liberatory Fantasy" (Martin et al., 2019) that is rooted in what Dumas and ross ("Urban Education," 51(4):415-442, 2016) have conceptualized as BlackCrit. The goal of the current undertaking is to evaluate anecdotes of this working idea of paradise,…

In this article, the authors work to illustrate how "Miles Morales Suspended" by Jason Reynolds, an author whose work has been targeted by book ban efforts (Knight, 2022), can be positioned in English classrooms to teach about contemporary attacks on Black literature through book bans. The teaching outlined in this article is part of a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to further theorize BlackCrit to include a deeper focus on the framing idea of Black liberatory fantasy via Afrofuturism. Design/methodology/approach: To develop the theoretical connections, the author revisits their previous scholarship on Black girls' Afrofuturist storytelling practices to elucidate how the…

What has it meant to produce knowledge and to teach at the intersection of English literature and Black Studies? This dissertation asks after the history and function of Black literary studies as it emerged as an academic discipline in the late 20th century U.S. academy. I propose that Black literary studies' institutional knowledge project is…

This essay profiles Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. It begins with biographical information about Bishop and her career trajectory in education followed by descriptions of three of her landmark works and the ways a sampling of scholars have utilized and expanded upon them. The three…

This article is a collaboration among three Philadelphia public school teachers who wrote curriculum units based on their new learning and research of W.E.B. Du Bois' groundbreaking book, "The Philadelphia Negro" (1899) of the Seventh Ward. Du Bois' book was the first major race study of an African-American urban community ever published…

In the US curriculum, "The History of Mary Prince" (Prince, 1831) is an under-recognized account of Black enslavement and the salt industry in the 19th century. Mary Prince, a Black enslaved woman and salt laborer, is the author of the earliest known anti-slavery, anti-colonial autobiography written by a self-manumitted Black woman.…

"Lift Every Voice and Sing," sometimes referred to as the Black National Anthem, has been sung everywhere from protests to concert halls in the United States for well over a century. The song's origins, however, come directly from the mind of educator James Weldon Johnson and the needs of his school community. This article recounts the…

When teaching a Drama and Theater class the author's students chose August Wilson's "Fences" to focus on the teaching of "dramatic" texts. As the author reread Wilson's play, she noticed that within the first pages is the n-word, used in conversation between two African American men, two friends, and it became an immediate…

In this article, the authors challenge the ongoing dehumanization of people of color by arguing for the use of Black texts as core readings in courses on adult learning rather than as add-ons or "special topics."

Afrofuturism often acts as an experiential portal that guides readers to reflect on the current state of the world, to hypothesize about the trajectory of society, and to challenge any possible future that continues the subjugation of Black people. As a genre that is concerned with the elevation and liberation of Black people, Afrofuturism aligns…

In this practitioner article, we detail how American English language arts and social studies teachers can select and teach young adult literature using LaGarrett King's Black historical consciousness framework. We provide supplemental, related research along with teaching suggestions and titles for each of the Black historical consciousness…

This research paper attempts at studying the operation of literary texts teaching through Black English Vernacular (BEV) in EFL context, selecting the American novel: "Uncle Tom's Cabin," henceforth (UTC), (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) as a parameter of research. Its main aim is to reveal and project the new venues for…

African American children's literature is a subcategory of diverse books that has benefited from critical theoretical research as well as historical and contemporary social movements. More recently, activist bloggers and online movements have extended the work of activist librarians and critically conscious educators and parents. These individual…