Locating a pedagogy of love: (re)framing pedagogies of loss in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities

Abstract

Recent contexts of migration for immigrant communities from African countries have comprised what sociologist April Gordon discussed as a “new diaspora of black Africans to the U.S.” (p. 84). Yet amid contemporary contexts of migration, popularized narratives of African immigrant youth consistently linger on deficit framings and “emphasize what a particular student, family, or community is lacking”. As the ongoing work of rendering visible narratives of possibility, we analyzed how the cultural and linguistic strengths of African immigrant communities are named (or not named) in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities. We utilized King and Swartz frameworks for “Afrocentric praxis,” as discussed by Johnson et al. in evoking a “pedagogy of love” (p. 47), together with the theoretical lens of BlackCrit to examine popular-media narratives. In particular, we examine complex meanings of locating a pedagogy of love in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities in the interplay of three themes: “eldering and communal responsibility,” “language as a colonial modality of loss,” and “envisioning a pedagogy of love as speculative seeing.” We conclude with productive implications for teaching, teacher education, and educational research.