This research looks at the features of successful mentorship programs and their influence on at-risk African American male students. The research examines how an Afrocentric mentoring program affects attendance, discipline, and achievement. This intervention draws on the principles of the African American rites of passage movement to focus on…

Through the conception of Black desire, a Black-specific rendering of Eve Tuck's researching for desire, I argue that educational research lacking critiques of antiblackness can cultivate damage-centered narratives that misguidedly identify brokenness in Black youth, rather than brokenness in society. Drawing from a yearlong critical race…

For too long, Black children's educational needs have not been prioritized with attention to their culture, language, historical and contemporary racialized experiences, and building their positive racial identity. It is critical that early childhood education settings for young children be transformed to be a place of learning and healing by…

Purpose and Method of Study: The purpose of this qualitative transcendental (descriptive) phenomenological study was to investigate and document the lived experiences of African American (AA) female graduate students utilizing Afrocentric mentoring paradigms at PWIs. I examined the challenges caused by institutional racism in PWIs and whether…

African American learners deserve liberating learning experiences, yet rarely receive them. We argue that the framework of Afrofuturism is a productive strategy for reconceptualizing the work of mathematics teaching as liberating and empowering for African American learners and the Rights of the Learner Framework offers useful tools to enable…

Antiblackness, and the dominant stories it produces about Black humanity, creates distorted images of Black humanness that are used to justify violence against Black youth in schools and society. However, Black youth have different stories to tell about their being in the world that stems directly from their lived experiences and are inherently…

African American males' mathematics identity has often been researched in relation to their White peers, from a Eurocentrically prescribed researcher presentation of achievement and in retrospect to the time frame being studied. Thus, their experience has often been framed negatively and from a resiliency stance. This qualitative study adds to the…

Historically, black male students in the United States have the lowest college degree completion rate. This chapter describes the work of the Black Male Initiative (BMI) at Empire State College in NYC. Grounded in an Afrocentric paradigm, BMI provides a safe space for students to share experiences. In this chapter, the author describes the…

This qualitative interview study explores the beliefs, feelings, and opinions held by the staff, faculty, and administrators who operationalize the Umoja student support programs on campuses within a southern California Community College district. Schiele's Afrocentric organization theory is the framework for this study. The six tenets derived…

The purpose of this article is to show how scholars and practitioners can come together to address opportunity gaps for Black students at Michigan State University. The authors detail identity-conscious student success strategies within Reason and Kimball's model of theory to practice used by a group of Black faculty and staff. Among the specific…

Predominantly Black schools may struggle with ways to keep their students engaged. When Black students are not engaged in class, it could lead to low academic performance, which may reflect the lack of culturally relevant content in the curriculum. Student engagement is increasingly viewed as one of the keys to addressing problems such as low…

This program profile describes the development and implementation of The Black Ink Project at Morehouse College. The Black Ink Project is a curricular initiative intended to support the development of writing abilities among the Men of Morehouse and immerse them in the writing process in the tradition of articulating servant leadership for which…

In continuing the legacy of community-mindedness, good Black educators today consistently enact emancipatory pedagogies designed to protect Black children's personhood. Cultivating community in the classroom setting is one ritual they use toward affirming young Black children's literate character, presence, and pursuits, and they do so in the…

Through an ethnographic case study within one struggling Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009 to 2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms and an incomplete attempt at Afrocentric education combined to redefine Blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical…

In this article, we deal with our need to "speak truth to power" as we examine the liminal space in which we find ourselves. We look back at a mas' camp pedagogy, that comes out of lessons learned from the work in Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival mas' camps. It is a kind of collaborative learning that values the heritage knowledge and…