Dissertation Abstract

Society is lastingly structured through policy, ideology, and entrenched systems. Amid attacks on public education in the form of legislation restricting classroom content and federal efforts to dismantle the Department of Education among many others, communities most affected hold the methods needed to resist. Black women’s fugitive pedagogical traditions creatively enact what institutions refuse to provide or deem unlawful. Despite the critical role Black women caregivers and teachers play in encouraging educational equity and access, their collective contributions remain under-researched and under-theorized, particularly in the context of community-based, arts-integrated approaches. Manifesting the Village theorizes the arts-based Village Learning System as a fugitive practice that has the possibility to center Black women caregivers and teachers as co-constructors of sustainable support for each other and their young Black learners’ educational success across home, community, and school. Through focus groups, surveys, interviews and arts workshops, the study takes shape in the current conversation of educators. Further By tapping into womanist pedagogical literature and an othermothering framing, and by enacting a Participatory Action Research Counterspace (PARC) methodology, the study finds its scholarly community among Black women theorizing and practicing this kind of creative care for a millennia– a sturdy foundation for implications and correctives to the field of art education.