The Young People’s Black Pedagogical Activism Lab is a multi-organizational, multi-institutional, multi-state research collaboration in partnership with the Southern Education Foundation supported by a Harvard Black Teacher Archive Micro-grant. Participants included Education, History, and Black Studies professors, graduate students, a librarian, digital instructional designers, university partners, a filmmaker, community educators, and young people in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. 

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The Project Purpose is to broaden the Black teacher narrative by documenting and preserving archival resources and legacy interviews that highlight professionals and community educators who engaged in education as liberation in and out of schools in the “Jeanes Teaching Tradition”. The project designed a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) course (The Lab) to engage high school and undergraduate students with this Jeanes Teacher legacy of pedagogical activism (1908–1968), the Harvard Black Teacher Archive, and other resources. The Project Team uses intergenerational, interdisciplinary collective study and Africana/ Emancipatory research methods to prepare young people to produce accessible interpretive tools that appeal to other youth, educators, and community members to fill gaps that can expand the HGSE BTA archival transcript. This approach is especially relevant at this time when insurgent Black education and pedagogy are being constrained and erased at all levels.

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Dr. Joyce King, Georgia State University, Co-Principal Investigator

Dr. Max Altman, Southern Education Foundation, Co-Principal Investigator

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