Race and the Educated Imagination: Outlining a Pedagogy of Belonging

Abstract

A teaching life can be a powerful intervention into the structures of racial antagonism that shape the West, but only if we can find a way to overturn our colonial legacies and draw the dominant trajectories of Western educational institutions toward more life giving ends. A life that teaches in this racially agonistic moment must be angled in a new direction beyond simply building intellectual capacities, toward presenting an embodied desire to learn from and join others. To be teachers who live by faith at this moment is to be those who speak a word of belonging not simply by their words but by their lives.

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Notes on contributors

Willie James Jennings

Willie James Jennings is an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut. E-mail: [email protected]