Education

The purpose of this session is to present new research on the burgeoning discussion of reframing educational spaces to challenge white supremacist structures and empower African American students. Typically, educational research on African American students focuses on the " achievement gap " and other deficit modeling to describe and explain how students are failing in schools. This new research seeks to turn the discussion from descriptions of how students can do better in school structures steeped in white supremacy to how schools, communities, and other educational spaces can reconstruct in order to " do better " by our students. Objectives of the session: having attended the session on Challenging White Supremicist structures, attendees will: 1. Comprehend and synthesize new research on challenging White supremacy in educational structures to create successful educational environments that empower African American students. 2. Apply this new research to challenge White supremacy in educational structures to create successful educational environments to school design, museum design, and curriculum development. 3. Advance and refine the frameworks of student empowerment through redesign of education spaces leading to higher achievement for all students. Overall, attendees will understand new thinking on successful educational environments and trouble reified notions of the achievement gap and deficit models of educational environments.

While schools have long played a strong role in the social reproduction of inequity and injustice, since the 2001 passing of " No Child Left Behind " and the re-authorization with the 2015 " Every Student Succeeds Act, " schools have even further continued to be tools of corrupt anti-public education politicians, profit-seeking publishing regimes, special interest groups, corporate profiteers, and the inequitable power structure. With little attention to the importance of deep learning, the education system has become a beholden to measuring tools that sort students, reinforce the power of the dominant class, favor some groups over others, and reduce learning to a series of discreet, testable fragments. The purpose of this book is twofold and therefore in two parts. Part one will focus on critically and creatively describing the litany of current problems in education. By delving into historical trends and citing contemporary issues, this section will address the myriad of issues that are destroying education. Part two will focus on different visions that propose radical possibilities that could lead to an education system that celebrates deep and meaningful critical thinking and creative problems solving toward schools supportive of a diverse, equitable, and focused education for the 21 st century. Using research, essays, poetry, creative non-fiction, photojournalism, art, and spoken word pieces, the first section of the book will focus on the major social, political, cultural, curricular, instructional and other educational issues that are plaguing schools in the United States. By calling for authors to submit proposals for work that represents different styles of writing and researching utilizing diverse modes of communication, the idea of this book is to celebrate a variety of approaches of expression in exposing the issues before us and aimed at reaching a broader audience of readers. Part theory, part commentary, part research, and part creative writing, Emancipating Education will use multiple modalities to not only mirror the complexities of our educational system, but also allow for diverse voices from various fields to address the issues and potentialities of our education system. Including narratives from academics, activists, practitioners, and people interested in our education system, Emancipating Education speaks across contexts to discuss the challenges and opportunities of

Through an imagining of gender-queer space as a site that opens up a mesh of possibilities in schooling, this paper argues that a gender-queer hidden curriculum as enacted through a gender-queer space can be one possible corrective framework to the pervasive cis-norms and values that enact violence against queer, trans, and gender-fluid youth in schools. Using the respective authors’ counternarratives and an analysis found in dissensus, the authors argue that the sig- nificance of these spaces in as much about school safety as it is about unlearning normalized gender understandings in local and less local contexts.