Salt Water Voices: Listen between the Trauma

Salt Water Voices continue Black liberatory pedagogy, healing how we listen between the trauma. Salt Water Voices cleanse the pain of double consciousness and reconciles our internal waters to the power of the Ocean Mother.

The Cryptographic and Metaphysic Nature of Liberatory Pedagogy

The initial purpose of this research sought to explore the following: What does it mean and what does it look, function, and feel like for an educational activist of color to fight for the liberation of others, but to also fight for the liberation of themselves? I also questioned and explored how one shares the spirit, metaphysics, and operationalization of liberatory pedagogy without jeopardizing its proliferation in spaces of plausible and probable oppression. In this article, found poetry was developed from participants’ responses and surfaced as a cryptographic method that coded the kinetics of liberatory pedagogy across disciplines.

Location, Location, Location: Liberatory Pedagogy in a University Classroom

In this article, we explore the practice, promise, and contradictions of introducing liberatory practice into a higher education classroom. Freire introduced liberatory education in response to the hierarchical transfer of knowledge, “banking” concept of education that has dominated educational institutions. The banking approach to education demands that students memorize and repeat top-down “official” knowledge in order to achieve success. Liberatory pedagogy holds great hope, but developing a space for liberatory dialogue within the university classroom remains messy and rife with contradictions. Professors interested in liberatory pedagogy must make explicit the contradictions and challenge the multiple ways schools shape students, politically and culturally. We reflect on three different points in the semester as moments of explicit focus on the contradictions of creating liberatory spaces and dialogue within higher education. Location matters in every moment: our social locations shape our experiences, and the location of the classroom within higher education and the shifting locations in the liberatory process include managing the contradictions and possibilities of human liberation. We offer educators wishing to develop liberatory practices some ways of reflecting on and shaping a liberatory space within higher education classrooms through the lens of a professor and student engaged in the process of liberatory dialogue.

Toward a Liberatory Praxis for Emerging Black Faculty

Authors of this chapter offer Black junior faculty a praxis that thoughtfully supports their efforts to advance justice issues in their classrooms, whether a central or ancillary focus. Liberatory pedagogy supports the development of critical consciousness in students, which advances equity and justice in and beyond the classroom. Applying liberatory pedagogy with attention to the unique experiences of emerging Black faculty helps to mitigate the challenges these faculty may face as educators and change agents. This also empowers emerging Black faculty to mobilize their personal experiences and reflections for the interrogation, (re)construction, and delivery of content, strategies, structures.