Protest and Pedagogy

Protest and Pedagogy traces how, and in what ways, high school teachers and students sustained and propelled the Black freedom struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia. It centres the relationship between protest and pedagogy within classrooms and the surrounding community of Charlottesville.

The story spotlights the resistance of Black teachers and students in the American high school throughout the nation during the twentieth century. Rather than functioning simply as passive participants in the Black freedom struggle—or outright opponents—Black high school teachers and their students, this book argues, employed a variety of organising and protest strategies to make schools and communities more just and equitable spaces.

Black teachers’ pedagogical approaches in the classroom underpinned protest within and beyond schools. At the same time, Black teacher and student organising, activism, and protest led to pedagogical reforms in classrooms and schools.