The academy is good for teachers encouraging activism. Black teachers in the academia can have a positive influence, best way to rebel. Current academia can rebel and will

There is a long-standing body of literature on Black teacher pedagogies.Footnote1 Many scholars have described Black teacher pedagogies by emphasizing how Black teachers support positive racial identity formation for Black and other racially minoritized youth and teach students to be critical consumers of the racialized world in which they live. Black teacher pedagogies undergird a legacy of activism, high expectations, and innovative teaching for their students, and their beliefs around addressing anti-blackness show up in their curriculum, classroom practices, and leadership (Givens, Citation2021). Accordingly, Black teachers have used innovative pedagogies to support students to learn academic and social content that does not compromise their racial and cultural identities.Footnote2

Due to their understanding of anti-blackness and the underlying systemic issues in their students’ lives, Black teachers are less likely to blame Black students for academic or behavioral imperfections (Foster, Citation1990; Mitchell, Citation1998). Black teachers also tend to have high expectations for academic achievement, use their experiential knowledge of navigating anti-Black bias to expose the hidden curriculum of school, and offer a positive example of the outcome of schooling (Milner, Citation2006). A McKinney de Royston et al. (Citation2021) study found that Black teachers felt a need to protect Black students from racialized harm, and they used their knowledge of institutionalized racism to reframe Black students’ behavior through more asset-based lenses. Black teachers are generally more likely to interpret Black student behavior more positively and less subjectively, significantly decreasing the likelihood of Black students interacting with the school discipline system (Gregory & Weinstein, Citation2008).

Medgar, the teacher at the heart of this study, builds on these pedagogical practices through the prism of his students’ particular needs in 2022, a time when students and teachers alike were still processing the events of 2020: the mass deaths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial reckoning of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the growing criminalization of the teaching of history, Blackness, and Critical Race Theory. These current social and physical attacks on Black life have impacted how Black teachers must take up their work. As classrooms have become increasingly surveilled, Black teachers must employ pedagogical strategies of an imagined fugitivity. Fugitivity invokes the connotation of enslaved Black people running toward a real or imagined freedom, which Campt (Citation2014) argues “is the quotidian practice of refusal.” This refusal is a rebellion against an anti-Black system, even if this refusal to participate puts one’s livelihood at risk. Medgar engaged in fugitivity by participating in the Black Teacher ProjectFootnote3 (BTP), a Black community organization that serves as a Black teacher fugitive space (Stovall & Mosely, Citation2023) for teachers to build their capacity to navigate and disrupt anti-blackness, improve their pedagogies, and build their leadership aptitude. This article explores how Medgar transferred his learnings in this fugitive space to his classroom. I first asked: How does Medgar feel his professional learning in a Black teacher fugitive space shapes his thinking? And then: How is this reflected in observations of his teaching and in his students’ perspectives?