As we write this paper in late 2023, Advanced Placement (AP) Black history, psychology courses and the use of diverse literature written for children and young adults is being banned by many school districts across the United States. Educators are being threatened, sanctioned, reprimanded, and fired. Despite this, some teachers stand steadfast in…

In this R. Freeman Butts Lecture, the authors engage this year's AESA theme, "Dreaming of Otherwise Worlds and Alternate Nows: Unsettling Colonialisms and Racism in the Social Foundations of Education," through a set of Black knowledge traditions and schools of thought and how these implicate our ideologies about education, specifically…

This essay outlines how Black placemaking, a sociological framework used to study Black residents in urban contexts, might be used to study Black students' experiences at historically White institutions (HWIs) of higher education. Black placemaking engages with the intersection of Blackness, place, structure, and agency. The author argues that…

It is my belief that a prevailing colonial mentality in higher education dance spaces, as it relates to jazz dance, is responsible for the lack of serious engagement and appropriate regard. This article makes the argument for the decolonization of higher education spaces, advocating for fuller engagement with the jazz genre and positioning it to…

It has been created within the larger realm culture, in that "Black methodology differs from most colonial differences by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of cultural biases."

In this essay, filmmaker and educator Caroline Stephenson tells how Hurricane Irene started her on a journey to make a documentary about Rosenwald Schools in her native Hertford County, North Carolina. After many years working as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films and television shows, Stephenson moved back to the family farm to raise…

Starting from the premise that Paulo Freire's capacity for hope in the face of personal struggle and exile issued from his spirituality, this paper examines Freire's spirituality through the lens of Michael Dantley's concept of critical spirituality. The concept of spirituality as discussed in the literature is explored, followed by an explication…

After more than half a century, the music of Motown not only thrives, it transcends generations. The iconic sound of Motown has led a handful of scholars to write, teach, lecture and share the music, history and business of Motown on their campuses. In its golden age, from 1959 to 1972, the sound Berry Gordy pioneered at Motown Records in Detroit…

An African American mother and teacher educator uses examples from her own childhood to describe how she hopes her child will be treated by teachers, and what she fears. In her letter to her son, the African American mom expresses how she want teachers to know her son's journey to school--metaphorically and physically. She wants them to know that…

There is no doubt that mediation has become a central issue outside formal music education. An outstanding example of this is digital music and its dependence on the new technologies of production, dissemination, and consuming. In this paper, the author argues that (1) mediation is one of the most important aspects of digital artistry and that (2)…

This article presents the author's critique of "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL), a resolution affirming the legitimacy of dialect from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). "Students' Right to Their Own Language" remains the official position statement of the guild of college compositionists on…

This essay highlights a range of questions that arise when white suburban students engage urban neighborhoods of poverty and color in the United States. How can involvement in an "other" context move beyond "educational tourism"? The essay presents a pedagogical style that raises questions of the kind of socialized body one…

The purpose of this article is to assert that there are classic African American children's books and to identify a sampling of them. The author presents multiple definitions of the term classic based on the responses of children's literature experts and relevant scholarship. Next, the manner in which data were collected and analyzed in regard to…

In this essay, Joyce King attempts to interrupt the calculus of human (un)worthiness and to repair the collective cultural amnesia that are legacies of slavery and that make it easy--hegemonically and dysconsciously--for the public to accept myths and media reports, such as those about the depravity of survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans…

During the late twentieth century, Kanaka Maoli have struggled to push back against these representations, offering a rewriting of Hawaiian history, quite literally. Infused by Hawaiian nationalism and a growing library of works that investigate the naturalization of American colonialism in Hawai'i, innovative Kanaka Maoli representations in the…