Storytellin’ by the light of the lantern: A polyvocal dialogue turnin’ towards critical Black curriculum studies

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Acknowledgements

We are enormously grateful to Grace D. Player for the stunning artwork, as well as to Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Ligia (Licho) López López for generously providing feedback on working drafts of this editorial.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This subheading riffs on the oft-cited declaration Anna Julia Cooper made in her 1892 book, A Voice from the South. Cooper (2016, p. 12) stated, “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

2 Here, “Black” is code for people of African descent. Recognizing the politics of race embedded in contestable language rules specific to capitalization, grammar, et cetera, we deliberately use upper case “B” in “Black” when referring to people of African descent and lower case “w” in “white.” We defer to the cited authors’ capitalization choices in works cited.

3 Ignorance is conceptualized here as a resistance to or rejection of knowledge (e.g., Peels & Blaauw, 2017; Sullivan & Tuana, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esther O. Ohito

Esther O. Ohito is an assistant professor of curriculum studies in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the inaugural Toni Morrison Faculty Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Broadly, her oeuvre centers Black women and girls and amplifies Black voices and knowledges. A transnational interdisciplinary scholar, she researches Blackness, race, and gender at the nexus of curriculum, pedagogy, embodiment, and emotion.

Justin A. Coles

Justin A. Coles is an Assistant Professor in the division of Curriculum and Teaching at Fordham University, Graduate School of Education. His multidisciplinary research agenda draws from critical race studies, urban education, and language and literacy to inform justice-centered educator preparation, particularly helping to inform the ways we develop counter structures to oppressive socio-political regimes in schools and society.