This week for the “Youth From Africa and the African Diasporas: Knowers, Innovators, Visionaries, and Everyday People,” guest speaker Dr. Esther Ohito came to speak to us about Black children exploring freedom in pedagogical spaces. Dr. Ohito is an Associate Professor of English and Literacy Education at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. An interdisciplinary Black feminist scholar and teacher, her research examines the embodied, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge production in curriculum and pedagogy, particularly as they intersect with theories of Blackness, race, gender, and space.
Her talk mostly focused on Black girls, using an assignment she did with her college students involving some of the literature they had read in class such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and some works from Christina Sharpe. She had them use those works to imagine what freedom looks like across genres. They were able to choose the time, future, past and present, and their choice of characters from a variety of media. I thought this assignment was really cool because it proved that one of the ways to think about freedom is through creativity and imagining an alternative freedom. It was really interesting to hear her perspective on the teacher’s role in creating space for students to dream about freedom, especially in schools where the institutional structure limits students’ freedom. One of the things that stuck with me from her interview is that she said most of the students did not imagine the life of freedom in the present life. This led me to reflect about how society makes it hard for us to think about freedom.
–Da’Mirah Vinson