November 15th: Intellectual Tradition & Legacy IV

Facilitator Biographies

Dr. Jarvis Givens

Jarvis Givens is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate in the department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. He studies the history of American education, African American history, and the relationship between race and power in schools. His first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. This work traces African Americans’ traditions of challenging racial domination in schools and society by highlighting the various intellectual and political strategies they employed from the slavery era through Jim Crow.

Givens takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying history, employing conceptual and methodological interventions from the field of Black Studies. Such methodological interests led him, in partnership with Imani Perry of Princeton University, to an exciting new digital humanities project called The Black Teacher Archive. This is an online portal that houses the digitized records of national and state “Colored Teachers Associations” organized by black educators from the antebellum era through Jim Crow. The BTA is supported by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Givens is completing a work of creative nonfiction on black student life in the American school. This book is based on first-person accounts found in archival documents, African American autobiographical literature, as well as insights from his own life. This book is forthcoming with Beacon Press. Givens is also preparing new editions of two African American Classics: Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) The Mis-education of the Negro, to be published with Penguin Classics, and Booker T. Washington’s (1901) Up From Slavery, for the Norton Library. In 2018, Givens co-edited a volume on black male student achievement, entitled We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys, published by Columbia’s Teachers College Press.

His emerging projects include a book analyzing relationships between Indigenous, white, and black education in the United States through the nineteenth century; a biography of education leader and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune; and a project on black social life in Compton, California in the 1980s and ‘90s based on family and community archives.

Givens’ work explores themes of education, power, and resistance contextually, beyond rigid frames that limit where we look for meaningful experiences of teaching and learning. His work is committed to clarifying how persecution has impacted the lives of black people (and other oppressed communities) in school and society, while also attending to how these communities have used education and culture, subversively, to seek out lives that transcend their suffering.

Dr. Tatiana M.F. Cruz

Assistant Professor and Interdisciplinary Program Director of Africana Studies I am an historian that specializes in Critical Race, Ethnic, Diaspora, and Gender Studies. My research centers on 20th century African American and Latinx social movements. I joined the Simmons faculty in 2021 as an Assistant Professor and Interdisciplinary Program Director of Africana Studies in the newly formed Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies in the Gwen Ifill College.

I also currently hold a Fellowship for Faculty Diversity at the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), where I am working to develop a regional consortium for reparative justice in New England colleges and universities and initiatives to nourish and uplift BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) faculty.

Research/Creative Activities - My scholarship reflects the intersections of African American, Latinx, women’s, urban, and social movement histories, as well as Critical Race, Ethnic, and Diaspora studies. I position my research at the crossroads of racial formation, postwar urban community development, and social movements during and after the classical civil rights era. My work contributes to the scholarship on northern struggles for freedom as well as intervenes in the rapidly growing field of comparative African American-Latinx relations.

My research centralizes the city of Boston as a major site of resistance in the long freedom struggle. The book manuscript I am working on is the first historical monograph to examine the comparative and relational history of African American and Latinx racial and political identity formation, community development, and mobilizations for racial justice in the city in the postwar era (with a focus on the 1960s and 1970s). My work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Boston’s College’s African and African Diaspora Studies Program, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.

This session is designed to build from the learning we did during cohort retreat last May about Intellectual Tradition and Legacy grounded in Dr. Theresa Perry and Dr. Francesca López's scholarship.

Consider:

Ground in LLA Mindframes: Leadership for Equity in Schools (in particular the 4th and 6th bullets) to support your meaning making and weaving as you engage with the texts for the session. For all reading for this day, please consider the following questions:

• What is the core argument or idea advanced in each text? How does it relate to intellectual tradition and legacy?

• To what extent and in what ways do the ideas intersect with or add nuance to the LLA Mindframes? to Dr. Perry's scholarship? to Dr. López's? Where are these ideas resonant or dissonant with one another? with Dr. Muhammad and Dr. Valenzuela's work?

• What implications does it have (explicitly or implicitly) for planning, instruction, and/or adult learning in schools in general? in your school in particular?

Read:

[AM Session]

Givens, Jarvis, R (2021). Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Read the preface, intro, chapters 2 & 5. (e-book was sent to you)

Consider the following as you read. Identify passages that relate to the questions. Also identify passages of interest, which you'd like to discuss further, whether they correspend to the questions below or not.

1. • • What perspective did you have about the history of Black teachers and African American education before reading Fugitive Pedagogy? How has your perspective shifted or expanded?

     • What intellectual demands are reflected in the history of Black teachers presented in Fugitive Pedagogy? Do you typically think of educators as intellectuals? If so, why? What intellectual demands come with being a teacher?

     • Chapter 5 refers to the African American teachers in Fugitive Pedagogy as "scholars of the practice." How do you understand this classification to be distinct from the label of "practitioners" usually employed to describe teachers?

     • What educational traditions informed the professional identities of the Black teachers in Fugitive Pedagogy? What educational traditions inform your professional identity? Why, if at all, is it important to be grounded in an educational tradition? Furthermore, what does grounding oneself in an educational tradition entail, and how is this practice sustained?

     • What ethical and moral questions are teachers wrestling with in Fugitive Pedagogy? How, if at all, are these questions related to your work today?

[PM Session] Please read the two articles linked below.