Fugitive Pedagogy Quotes

“Racial socialization took place in schools and society, whether done explicitly or not. The prevalence of antiblackness in US popular culture and school content made it necessary to offer purposeful and humanizing perspectives on blackness to support the healthy development of black student identities. The learning aesthetic offered through Woodson’s program presented resources that supported the development of student identities that were historically grounded, aware of their oppression, and committed to imagining and building new possibilities for their collective futures. It was enacted discursively through curriculum development, materially through decorative educational resources produced for classrooms and schools, and affectively through performances and dramatizations during Negro History Week celebrations and classroom activities. This aesthetic presented new symbols of being and belonging that were distinct to black students, all of which offered explicit critiques of the master narrative about black life shaping their Jim Crow surroundings.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

“Stories of black learners developed into a critical black memory—a visual narrative comprising individual yet interrelated historical events. These accumulated accounts of black student witness formed a vantage point from the view of the black pupil: first, outside the American schoolhouse; then, inside on contingent and probationary terms. These memories prefigured the oppositional gaze of black students as a historically situated group of learners. The oppositional gaze of black students was made and remade through shared testimonies and personal experiences, and these memories were called on in black students’ educational journeys.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

“Black students’ “oppositional gaze” was not an opposition to learning itself but a way of looking that critiqued the practices of antiblack exclusion and confinement in education and that challenged the racist ideas that animated these experiences of domination. It was a way of looking that documented and destabilized relations of power by cultivating an awareness from black students’ marginalized perspectives. This looking back challenged the position of black learners as “substudents”—whereby black people were written into the social contract of the American School or included through distorted ideas that defined blackness as the antithesis of the human subject: the ideal (white) citizen / student.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

“Fugitivity—and fugitive pedagogy in particular—is the metanarrative of black educational history. It is a social and rhetorical frame by which we might interpret black Americans’ pursuit to enact humanizing and affirming practices of teaching and learning. To this latter point, I am referring to the reality that the literate slave was akin to a fugitive slave, particularly when we take into account antiliteracy laws, which criminalized reading and writing by black Americans, making it a punishable offense.”
― Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching