Freedom Schools Research Articles

The Chinese Freedom Schools: Historicizing and intersecting Lau with Brown

AbstractThe Chinese of Chinatown, San Francisco largely opposed the city-wide racial integration plan that would bus their children across the city beginning in 1971. Claiming that it was a violation of their language rights, a need for cultural preservation and continued autonomy from the San Francisco that had long excluded them, Chinatown instituted its own school system called the Chinese Freedom Schools. With this boycott of the public schools, the Chinese were constituted as oppositional to the aims of racial integration, searing constructions of them as being pro-White, anti-Black, and separatist. Yet, such a simplistic and binary argument omits the long history of exclusion including employment, schooling, housing, and voting discrimination as evidenced by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1965), the only law to exclude a specifically named ethnolinguistic group. To historicize and understand the Chinese Freedom Schools, I analyze this phenomenon using a racial matrix where Asians have long occupied a liminal, in-between space as perpetually foreign, unassimilable, and as a suspect class. Drawing from the theories and concepts of LangCrit, raciolinguistic ideologies and Asian American studies, I examine how agents, institutions, the press, and policies imposed, assumed, or negotiated specific identities of the Chinese during the development, implementation, and dissolution of the Chinese Freedom Schools. I analyze how the Chinese were constructed as uncooperative, creating a competitive cleavage among Asians and Blacks, while dismissing the centrality of White families who largely moved out of the system, avoiding critique. Implications for language-in-education policy are proposed for Lau’s 50th anniversary.

A Holocaust Survivor Who Became a Freedom School Teacher: Marione Ingram’s Journey from Hamburg to Mississippi

Marione Ingram was born in 1935 in Hamburg, Nazi Germany. In late July 1943, two days before the date of Ingram’s family’s deportation, the Hamburg air raid, one of the biggest air raids during World War II, began. Ingram and her mother narrowly survived it and spent the rest of the war in hiding. In 1952, Ingram immigrated to the United States to follow after her mother. Upon learning about the discrimination against African Americans, Ingram became involved in the civil rights movement to protest racial bigotry and prejudice. She worked for the March on Washington in 1963 and as a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi in 1964. Through her involvement in the civil rights movement, Ingram transformed herself from a “victim” of the Holocaust into a “combatant in a campaign against racial injustice.” This study aims to demonstrate an example of how a Holocaust experience could turn into power to bring peace and equality to the world through the analysis of Ingram’s autobiographies, The Hands of War (2013) and The Hands of Peace (2015), which Miyuki Kita translated to Japanese.

Welcome to Freedom Schools : A Journal of Democracy and Community

Welcome to Freedom Schools : A Journal of Democracy and Community

Freedom School, a Need for Europe

Freedom School, a Need for Europe

Virtual Connections: Teacher Beliefs and Practices Enacting Culturally Relevant Practices in a Virtual Freedom School

Virtual Connections: Teacher Beliefs and Practices Enacting Culturally Relevant Practices in a Virtual Freedom School

A Pathway to Liberation: A History of the Freedom Schools and the Long Struggle for Justice Since 1865

The Freedom School Movement originated at the nexus of the struggles for liberation and full citizenship. Beginning with the articulation of education as a means to freedom during the era of enslavement, the ideology behind Freedom Schools was an integral aspect of the long Black freedom struggle in the United States. Freedom Schools have continually recognized the integral role and contribution of Black activists and educators who, throughout the course of the United States’ history, have historically provided a counternarrative to white supremacy and racist policy through education grounded in the needs, aspirations, and wisdom of local community organizing.

Black Lives Still Matter: Freedom Schools as an Embodiment of Critical Literacy Through Reflection and Action

The continuation of racial inequities in the United States has ignited the recent Black Lives Matter Movement, a protest of police brutality and gun violence. Black lives matter in public school classrooms, too—where students of color face barriers to equitable educational experiences. The Children's Defense Fund Freedom School program is a major component in developing critical literacy skills through critique, inquiry, and transformation through social justice and action. Critical literacy is enacted through identity—mainly as difference, self, consciousness, narrative, and positionality. Historical and contemporary relevance of Freedom Schools connects to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Cultivating Community Cultural Wealth and Armed Love: Freedom School as a Vanguard

We present a conceptual exploration of armed love as a component of liberatory pedagogy. We ground our work in community cultural wealth theory (CCW) that centers social capital often found in non-dominant communities under pressure. We argue that recognizing and working against exploitation using the community's social, cultural, and historical assets are central to liberatory pedagogy. Explicating the connections between armed love and CCW is a novel contribution to the field, as it has not been done before and it highlights how asset-based pedagogies that are grounded in love can act as a protective factor for students in a racist society.

Mind Stayed on Freedom: Education for Liberation Through the Freedom Schools Movement

Mind Stayed on Freedom: Education for Liberation Through the Freedom Schools Movement

Good Troublemakers: Freedom School Servant Leaders as Change Makers

Breaking stereotypes and changing generational outcomes of historically excluded students requires educators who are willing to be what civil rights leader John Lewis called “good troublemakers.” Transformational, culturally competent educators can make a significant impact in the lives of students, classrooms, and communities. This research studies the impact of teaching experience of the Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools Servant Leader Interns on young educators themselves. This study reveals how Servant Leader Interns were transformed by the process of teaching in ways that influenced their sense of self-authorship, their career aspirations, and expectations of how education should be.

The Freedom School Way: A Model for Intergenerational Research Training Partnerships Among Universities and Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools® Programs

Partners United for Research Pathways Oriented to Social Justice in Education is a partnership between a university research training program and a Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools® site in north Florida. It addresses the lack of demographic diversity among doctoral students in education. Emphasis is on researcher positionality and building relationships with stakeholders in a service-learning practicum. Research fellows design projects around literacy and social action, negotiate with stakeholders, and provide service. We use autoethnographic methods to articulate how Fellows, CDF Freedom School staff, and faculty collaborate. We offer suggestions for conducting research that can lead to meaningful, systemic change.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

Central Gulf Coast CDF Freedom Schools’ approach to poverty and learning loss

The Central Gulf Coast Children’s Defense Fund summer program has provided a solution to the issues related to learning loss and poverty over the last three years. Elementary students were strategically selected from low-income, at-risk, and minority communities to participate in the Freedom Schools program. This study describes the benefits to the students, their families, and the community, as well as the Servant Leader Interns who provided the culturally relevant curriculum. The history, structure, and essential components of Freedom Schools are described for the national model and Central Gulf Coast’s approach. The benefits of the program are also shared, as well as the practical implications for the participants in this study.

The Boston Freedom Schools as Places of Possibility for Reciprocal Integrated Education

AbstractIn 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs—one-day school boycotts—to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black youth. This article examines the 1964 Stay-Out and Freedom Schools as spaces where Black educators, organizers, parents, and students developed and enacted a vision of integrated education distinct from the dominant models of integration proposed in Boston and across the nation post-Brown v. Board (1954). The 1964 Freedom Schools modeled reciprocal integration, a vision for integrated education that promotes bidirectional physical and cultural movement, rather than the dominant model of integration that moved Black children into white schools to be taught white history and culture. Reciprocal integration was developed through Black parents’ and students’ educational testimony, the Stay-Out organizers’ own educational analysis, and the practical necessity of interracial organizing.

Who will remember?: Racial identity and civil rights literature for Black children at Freedom School

Within Freedom Schools, the intellectual identities of academic achievement and success for Black children are fostered with positive cultural identity and social action as the foundation. This is partially accomplished with access to positive cultural messages in children’s and young adult literature. The study in this article contributes to existing literature on the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools and focuses on the ways in which Black children’s positive racial identity development is supported through the use of culturally sustaining content and pedagogical practices at Freedom Schools. Specifically, this research explored racial identity development through examining the educational experiences of Black children’s interactions with Movement Oriented Civil Rights-Themed Multicultural Children’s Literature.

The 1964 freedom schools as neglected chapter in Geography education

ABSTRACT Our paper revisits a neglected chapter in the history of geographic education–the civil rights organization SNCC and the Freedom Schools it helped establish in 1964. An alternative to Mississippi’s racially segregated public schools, Freedom Schools addressed basic educational needs of Black children while also creating a curriculum to empower them to become active citizens against White supremacy. Emerging out of a history of Black fugitive learning, Freedom Schools produced a critical regional pedagogy to help students identify the geographic conditions and power structures behind their oppression in the South and use regional comparisons to raise their political consciousness and expand their relational sense of place. Freedom Schools have important implications for higher educators, especially as contemporary conservative leaders seek to rid critical discussions of race from classrooms. They offer an evocative case study of the spatial imagination of the Black Freedom Struggle while pushing us to interrogate the inherent contradictions, if not antagonisms, between public higher education and emancipatory teaching and learning. Freedom Schools prompt a rethinking and expansion of what counts as geographic learning, whose lives matter in our curriculum, where and for whom we teach, and what social work should pedagogy accomplish.

Contribution of children's reading motivation and prosocial efficacy to reading growth

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among summer reading camp participants' initial prosocial efficacy, reading motivation, and their reading skill changes. Despite the theoretical explanation of social and emotional learning (SEL), there is a lack of empirical studies demonstrating the complex relationships and processes among students' social-emotional competencies and beneficial academic learning outcomes. The Freedom Schools reading camp provides learning opportunities during the summer vacation for children primarily from low-income families and minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds. This study tested the linear relationship between students' initial reading motivation and reading growth with prosocial efficacy as a moderator (n = 67). We found that initial intrinsic regulation was related to students' reading comprehension skill growth, and prosocial efficacy moderated the relationship between reading skill changes and intrinsic regulation. Results provided clues about how students' efficacy for prosocial behavior could explain the relationship between students' reading motivation and reading growth.

The First Amendment, Religious Freedom, and Public Schools in the South

This study was designed to explore preservice elementary teacher understanding of The First Amendment and religious freedom in public schools in the Southeastern United States. Participants of the study were 160 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in the teacher preparation programs of 3 universities across 2 states located in a region commonly referred to as the “Bible Belt.” Data was collected via an electronic survey containing questions and scenarios requiring short responses, and field notes were recorded during class discussions of the topic. Results indicated that preservice elementary teachers possessed some basic understanding of The First Amendment and that public educators are acting government agents of the state. Yet, they demonstrated a dearth in understanding of their professional duties in accordance with this law, specifically with regards to the Establishment Clause.

We who believe in freedom: Freedom Schools as a critical context for the positive, sociopolitical development of Black youth

ABSTRACT Due to the shortcomings of traditional schools, innovative supplementary (e.g. out-of-school, summer) programs have been identified as important sites for the positive development and learning of Black youth. This study foregrounds Black youth perspectives to offer additional insight into the role of supplementary programming. Drawing from 15 semi-structured, pre-post interviews with Black youth participating in a six-week summer CDF Freedom Schools program, we analyzed core distinctions drawn between youths’ experiences in the program and in their traditional schools. Black youth attested to how the program expanded opportunities for them to express themselves, build community, engage in critical structural analyses, and imagine sociopolitical possibilities beyond the constraints of the present. We conclude with a discussion of implications, with an eye toward further specifying the types of educational contexts required to counteract detrimental aspects of traditional schooling and cultivate dispositions toward more just futures.

A Country’s Religious Freedom and Graduate School Attendance in the U.S

Due to large numbers of students arriving in the U.S. with different religious beliefs/backgrounds, it is necessary to analyze the religious environment of students’ home country and examine how it affects educational attainment. This research examines the relationship between religious freedom/restrictions and international enrollment rates in graduate school programs in the U.S. This study uses a quantitative cross-sectional research design that represent a total of 78 countries. The results demonstrate that students from countries with high levels of government restrictions enroll in graduate school at a relatively lower rate than students from countries with low levels of such government restrictions.