A portfolio for Dr. Carmen Kynard's fall 2025 seminar "Freedom School: Rhetorics and Histories of Black Education." 

This portfolio is titled “Threading Together; Histories of Black Language and Literacies as Directions Elsewhere” because my goal is to pay heed to and learn from the Black radical tradition in education, working collectively to create something elsewhere, beyond colonial logics, though sometimes, incidentally, moving in the same spheres. I took this seminar in my first semester of teaching freshman composition, which Dr. Kynard notes on our course website is structurally positioned as a white supremacist gatekeeping mechanism. 

My primary interest in teaching this course is to refuse this legacy of white supremacist bullshit, to honor the epistemological and rhetorical traditions of marginalized peoples, and to learn from pedagogues of the Black radical tradition. Black teachers have been creating elsewheres throughout the history of Black education, and as a white Queer graduate instructor, I find it exceedingly important to learn from these histories as a means of creating something habitable with and for marginalized students and writers. I have thought back frequently to Tessie McGee teaching Black students relevant material, the approved (white) curriculum in plain sight and the real curriculum hidden in her lap (Givens). As government surveillance and crackdowns on freedom of expression in academia only grow more intrusive, fugitive pedagogies may prove to be the only habitable way through. . .