Groundings With My Students: Teaching and Learning Black Studies in Education in the Prairies


Giselle Thompson, University of Alberta; Sterling Tong, University of Alberta

This paper uses a collective autoethnography (CoAE) (Noel et al., 2023) framework, to delineate the distinctive ethos of the inaugural Black Studies in Education (BSE) graduate seminar in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta (U of A) in Fall 2023. Because Walter Rodney’s (1969; 2019) “groundings was the pedagogical praxis deployed in this course (Vaught, 2015), it will be invoked theoretically (Bogues, 2009) to explain how BSE “offers glimpses into the transformative power of the field to… serve as a means of empowering people to build the world we need” (Roane, 2017, para. 3). We, the authors, will draw from students’ written reflections on the course, in which they were invited to describe their respective experiences navigating the course materials, the instructor who was a Black woman, the “groundings” pedagogical approach, their fellow students, the course location (the U of A), and broader social and political Prairie, Canadian, and international contexts. The reflective journey addresses students’ knowledge of Black Studies prior to enrolling in BSE, resonant course topics, readings, and theories. Each student was invited to consider their race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender in undertaking this task. The reflections explore the implications of engaging in critical Black study, emphasizing its significance for future praxes as educators, academics, and human beings. The paper will also reckon with the timing of the inaugural BSE course – the post-George Floyd moment/a Black cohort hiring initiative/neoliberal budget cutbacks – and the institutional support that the instructor received/did not receive to develop it. To do this, we will draw from critical race (Delgado, 1995; Delgado and Stefancic, 2012) and intersectionality (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) theories. The transformative potential of the discipline of Black Studies, and its seminal role in empowering individuals to shape a more equitable world (Kelley, 2002, 2018; Wynter, 1994), will be delineated as a means of countering the embeddedness of anti-Black racism in the white academic landscape. For this reason, we present our case for BSE to be made a permanent course in the Faculty of Education.

This paper will be presented at the following session: