Teaching in the Service of Fugitive Learning

Abstract

In educational scholarship, abolition and fugitivity have been used to theorize youth literacy practices (The Fugitive Literacies Collective, 2020), teaching in solidarity with Black and brown communities (Love, 2019), and learning as an act of rebellion within the oppressive structures of schooling (Patel, 2016; 2019). Additionally, recent works in sociology (Shedd, 2015) and anthropology (Shange, 2020; Sojoyners, 2016) have thoughtfully and comprehensively documented the ways in which the disciplinary mechanisms of schools serve to contain, surveil, and expunge Black students. This paper draws on these recent scholarly interventions as a lens through which educators might engage with the students who and schools in which they teach. Patel (2016) suggests that authentic learning in schools structured by racial capitalism is a “fugitive act”—elusive, subaltern, and, as a result, under-theorized” (Patel, 2016, p. 397). What “fugitive acts of learning” take place in our schools? What relationship to these practices can teachers adopt so that we might “serve and shield” these spaces of “unruly learning” (Patel, 2016, p. 400)?