Jarvis Givens, Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Black education was a fugitive project from its inception. As a foundational premise, Givens argues that the racialized exclusion of Black people within the 19th century Common School Movement, and then their confined-inclusion within the American schooling project following “emancipation,” forged an ethical crisis that persisted in the educational life-world of Black people. African Americans recognized that a transcendent education required constant intellectual and embodied acts of subversion. This conundrum is what Givens calls “Black educational heritage,” a conceptual paradigm and methodological framework at the heart of his book, Schooling in Forbidden Fields: Carter G. Woodson and the Demands of Black Education, (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). His analysis of Carter G. Woodson’s (1875-1950) iconic educational philosophy and ongoing collaborations with schoolteachers across the country illuminates how this entanglement of anti-Black exclusion/confinement with Black fugitive learning practices contoured the relationship between schooling and Black socio-political life.

This talk unpacks “Black educational heritage” through three key scenarios from Schooling in Forbidden Fields: Woodson’s inheritance of key pedagogical ideals from his first teachers in the 1880s, who were his formerly enslaved uncles; a 1942 Black schoolteachers’ convening, where Woodson offered striking criticism of the American Schooling project; and a Louisiana teacher secretly reading to her class from Woodson’s textbook in the 1934. Givens combines historical methods with performance theory to read these mundane scenes from the archive as sites of educational criticism. He illuminates how embodied subterfuge shaped Black people’s learning practices both during slavery and its afterlives. Ultimately, Givens asserts that the history of Black fugitivity in education reveals how the American School is always already at odds with a desire to make Black students feel whole and aspire towards their highest human potential; what’s more, this history captures what becomes necessary of educators who are committed to straining against these constraints.