CMEI Colloquium
Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education
November 2, 2016
Black teachers performed a well-rehearsed dance between compliance with the system of Jim Crow and fierce critiques of the anti-Black discourse that shaped their realities. Given their vulnerability to a range of disciplinary technologies, these schoolteachers taught from a liminal space of fugitivity, even as they were forced to model normative ideals of morality. Jarvis Givens's talk explored this tension by analyzing Black educators' insurgent organizing through professional networks to incorporate Black history into curricula between 1890 - 1930s and how they taught about Nat Turner's slave insurrection of 1831. This paper explored ideas of respectability in the history of Black education, insofar as the idea of Black education itself was a project of fugivitity, both during slavery and well into the 20th century.
Speaker Biography:
Jarvis Givens is a Deans Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and earned his Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include: 19th and 20th Century History of African American Education, Education and the African Diaspora, and Race and Urban Schooling. He is currently working on a book that analyzes the relationship between Black education, freedom, and affect through Carter G. Woodsons philosophy and influence on schools during the Jim Crow period.
