Comparative
Anti-Racist
Pedagogies

Points: 50 | Length: 2–3 pages, single-spaced

Purpose

This assignment invites you to choose a site of anti-racist struggle, resistance, or worldmaking—a place where the questions of this course come alive. Your proposal will frame a semester-long investigation into how racism operates, how communities resist, and how anti-racist pedagogies might be imagined, practiced, and sustained. This is not a neutral exercise. It is an act of love, care, and solidarity. Your topic will reflect a commitment to the understanding that anti-racism is simultaneously anti-heteronormativity, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism—that we do not live single-issue lives. This proposal prepares you for deeper analysis and creation in Assignments 2 and 3.

What to Include

Site of Anti-Racist Struggle or Possibility

Select a specific site—a movement, a text, a practice, a community, an archive, a pedagogical experiment—where questions of racism and anti-racism are being taken up with urgency. Your site can be local or transnational, historical or contemporary, institutional or grassroots.

Examples (but not limited to):

• A grassroots anti-racist movement organizing across borders (Black Lives Matter, Dalit resistance, Palestinian liberation, climate justice led by Global South communities)
• A community-led archive or digital storytelling project preserving silenced racial histories
• An artist, musician, or cultural worker whose work enacts anti-racist worldmaking
• A political speech, biographical narrative, or manifesto that articulates anti-racist vision
• A pedagogical experiment inside or outside institutional walls: a course, a workshop, a mutual aid project, a freedom school
• A social media campaign or digital community building anti-racist solidarity transnationally
• A policy or institutional practice you wish to interrogate through an anti-racist lens
• A moment of refusal, rebellion, or reimagination in your own educational experience

Context & Stakes

Briefly explain:

• Where and when does this site emerge? Who is involved? Who does it center?
• What forms of racism, colonialism, or interlocking oppression does it confront?
• What historical systems does it reckon with or refuse? (slavery, caste, settler colonialism, empire, apartheid)

Why It Matters

Articulate the political, ethical, and pedagogical stakes. Connect your topic to course questions:

• Why should this site matter to the world, this planet, and the people we co-exist with?
• What kinds of transformation does it dare to envision—in society, in ourselves?
• How might it help us design courses, assessments, teaching materials, and conversations that value the humanity and dignity in each of us while making room for others?

Guiding Questions

Pose 2–3 critical questions to guide your inquiry. These should be analytical, political, and pedagogical.

Examples:

• How does this site enact anti-racism as a collective liberatory project rather than individual sentiment?
• What does it teach us about crossing colonial-imperial borders until those borders become irrelevant to solidarity?
• How might its practices transform slogans like "Black lives matter" into lived experiences on local, global, and transnational levels?
• What would it mean to bring this site’s wisdom into a classroom, a syllabus, an assignment?

Initial Approach

Describe what materials or methods you might use to investigate this site. These could include:

• Movement publications, manifestos, zines, social media archives
• Oral histories, interviews, biographical narratives
• Scholarly texts, theoretical frameworks from the course and beyond
• Art, music, performance, digital storytelling projects
• Participant observation, if you are connected to or can engage with the site ethically

Formatting

2–3 pages, single-spaced

Times New Roman, 12 pt

Citations (if used): MLA or APA

Submit via Canvas

Before Submitting: What to Look For

A Note

Your proposal sets the tone for your work this semester. Choose a site you care about deeply—one that fuels your critique, your imagination, and your commitment to collective liberation. Let your inquiry be rigorous, your analysis be intersectional, and your vision be unbound.

Anti-racism is not a single-issue struggle. Neither is this course. We are here to question, to learn, and to build.

Points: 100 | Length: 10–12 pages, double-spaced (excluding citations)

Why This Assignment?

This assignment is an act of critical excavation and deep listening. You will analyze how racism operates through educational structures, discourses, and practices—and how anti-racist pedagogies emerge to confront, refuse, and transform them. Building on your project proposal, you will now examine 2–3 pedagogical artifacts or practices alongside the racist trends they respond to, illuminating the dynamic relationship between oppression and resistance. Your task is to understand what makes a pedagogy anti-racist—not as a fixed formula but as a living, context-specific, intersectional practice forged in struggle against specific forms of harm. This analysis directly prepares you for your final project, where you will move from analysis to creation.

What You’ll Do

Select 2–3 pedagogical artifacts, practices, or sites connected to your semester topic that reveal how anti-racist pedagogies operate in specific contexts. For each, you will also identify and analyze the racist structures, ideologies, or educational trends they resist.

Pedagogical artifacts can include (but are not limited to):

• Syllabi, course materials, or assignments designed with anti-racist commitments
• Grassroots educational initiatives: freedom schools, community workshops, mutual aid education projects
• Digital pedagogies: social media campaigns that teach, TikTok abolitionist classrooms, Instagram pedagogy, YouTube series
• Cultural texts as pedagogy: music, art, film, zines, podcasts that function as sites of learning and consciousness-raising
• Institutional interventions: diversity training, curriculum reform efforts, faculty organizing, student-led transformations
• Movement pedagogy: how movements teach their members and the public (Black Lives Matter, Land Back, climate justice, Dalit resistance, Palestinian liberation)
• Personal narratives or testimonies that enact pedagogical power
• Your own teaching or learning experiences, analyzed with theoretical rigor

For each artifact, you will also investigate:

• The racist trend or structure it confronts: What specific forms of racism—historical and contemporary—does this pedagogy respond to? Consider anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, xenophobia, casteism, Islamophobia, anti-Indigeneity, or other racialized oppressions.
• How racism operates in educational contexts: Curricular erasure, tracking and streaming, discipline disparities, language policing, racist imagery in texts, etc.

All artifacts should be treated as pedagogical: they teach something to someone, whether intentionally or not. Your job is to uncover what they teach, what they resist, and what they make possible.

Required Sections

1. Introduction (1–2 pages)

Re-state your topic and its stakes within anti-racist struggle. For each of your 2–3 pedagogical artifacts, provide:

• What it is, where it emerges, who created or facilitated it
• Its intended audience and purpose
• The racist trend, structure, or educational practice it responds to and resists
• Why you chose it: What does it teach us about the relationship between racist oppression and anti-racist pedagogy? What questions does it raise?

2. Comparative Pedagogical Analysis (5–7 pages)

This is the core of your paper. Examine how each artifact functions as pedagogy in relation to the racism it confronts. Compare them across the following dimensions:

• Racist Context: What specific racist ideologies, structures, or educational practices does this pedagogy respond to? How are these forms of racism articulated or made visible through the pedagogy itself?
• Vision of Anti-Racism: What understanding of anti-racism animates this work? Is it individual or collective? Does it address interlocking oppressions? Does it move beyond representation to structural transformation?
• Relationship to Learners: How are learners positioned? As consumers of knowledge? As co-creators? As agents of change? Whose humanity is centered, and how?
• Crossing Borders: How does this pedagogy engage with the "comparative" imperative of our course—crossing colonial, imperial, national, or disciplinary borders until they become irrelevant to solidarity?
• Methods & Materials: What teaching methods, texts, and resources are used? How do they reflect anti-racist commitments and directly counter the racist trends you’ve identified?
• Site & Context: How does the setting—institutional or grassroots, Global North or South, online or in-person—shape what is possible in confronting racism?
• Transformative Potential: What kinds of transformation does this pedagogy dare to envision? For individuals? For communities? For the racist systems it names?

Use direct evidence: quotes, screenshots, descriptions of practices, excerpts from materials. Cite course thinkers—Lorde, Mignolo, hooks, Freire, Patel, Love, Simpson, or others—to deepen your analysis.

3. Discussion: Tensions & Possibilities (2–3 pages)

Step back. Synthesize what your comparative analysis reveals about:

• How racist structures shape the conditions into which anti-racist pedagogies intervene
• The tensions within anti-racist pedagogies: between institutional constraints and liberatory visions, between accessibility and radicality, between reform and abolition
• What these pedagogies make possible—and what they cannot yet imagine or dismantle
• How they navigate the question: Despite our situatedness within racist institutions, how can anti-racist pedagogies help students and teachers alike to resist, heal, and build otherwise?

4. Conclusion: Lessons for Our Pedagogies (1–2 pages)

Reflect on what you have learned about the relationship between racist oppression and anti-racist worldmaking. Pose lingering questions. Explain how this analysis informs your final project vision: What kind of anti-racist pedagogy will you imagine, design, or enact—and what racist structures will it refuse and transform?

5. Works Cited

MLA or APA style. Not included in page count.

Before Submitting: What to Look For

A Final Reminder

You are analyzing pedagogies of liberation—each forged in response to specific forms of racist harm. Some emerge from movement spaces, others from within institutions, still others from the creative work of artists and storytellers. Your task is to listen carefully, to name the violence they resist, to compare rigorously, and to understand what makes teaching and learning truly anti-racist. This analysis is not an end in itself. It is preparation for the worldmaking work to come.

Let your inquiry be humble, your analysis be sharp, and your imagination be bold.

Points: 150 total — Two Parts: I. Final Project (100 pts) | II. In-Class Presentation/Sharing (50 pts)

Purpose

This is your culminating intervention—the moment where critical analysis of antiracist pedagogies transforms into educational worldmaking. Building on your semester-long investigation of how teaching can either reproduce or dismantle racism, you will now propose, create, or enact a pedagogical project that teaches otherwise. Your work must move beyond critique toward liberatory practice—grounded in the traditions of communities who have always been teaching resistance, weaving knowledge, and building futures through radical, creative, and survival-based pedagogies.

Your project must answer: What does it mean to teach as an act of solidarity? To build classrooms that heal rather than harm? To enact pedagogies that demand the impossible?

Final Project (100 points)

Choose a format that aligns with your strengths, your community connections, and your political vision. Each option engages the course’s central questions: Can teaching be antiracist? What do decolonial, feminist, queer, and abolitionist pedagogies look like in practice? How do we move from analyzing oppression to enacting liberation?

Option A: Academic Paper — Blueprint for Liberatory Pedagogy

Length: 10–12 pages, double-spaced

Focus: Analyze an existing antiracist pedagogical practice, educational project, or community teaching initiative. Propose frameworks for building educational futures rooted in justice and collective liberation.

Sections:

• Introduction: Restate your topic and its stakes within racist educational structures. What harms do existing pedagogies reproduce? What must be unlearned?
• Analysis of Resistance: Examine how a community, educator, or movement is already practicing antiracist, decolonial, or abolitionist teaching. What can we learn from their methods? How do they teach otherwise?
• Liberatory Proposals: Offer 3–5 principles or actionable practices for reimagining curriculum, classroom dynamics, assessment, or educational spaces. How might teaching become a site of healing rather than harm?
• Conclusion: Vision for pedagogical futures rooted in antiracist struggle, feminist worldmaking, and collective liberation.

Option B: Action Research — Groundwork with a Educational Initiative

Length: Fieldwork Journal + Final Report (8–12 pages)

Focus: Engage directly with a grassroots educational initiative, community teaching project, freedom school, or organization doing antiracist pedagogical work.

Deliverables:

• Fieldwork Journal: Ongoing reflections on your engagement, observations, and learning.
• Final Report detailing:
  • The organization’s pedagogical practices and political commitments
  • Your role and contribution
  • Analysis of their strategies: How do they enact antiracist, decolonial, feminist, or queer pedagogies?
  • Co-created recommendations or reflections on sustainability, access, and transformative education

Option C: Multimodal Project — Pedagogical Worldmaking

Create a public-facing educational work that teaches toward liberation.

Formats include (but are not limited to):

• A syllabus for a course that doesn’t yet exist but should
• A zine or curriculum guide for community teaching
• A podcast or video series amplifying antiracist pedagogical practices
• A workshop or toolkit for educators committed to antiracist teaching
• A digital teaching resource or open educational materials
• A speculative classroom design imagining what liberatory learning spaces could look like
• An artist’s book or creative work that teaches through form and content

Deliverables:

• The creative work itself
• Creator’s Statement (2–3 pages): Explain your pedagogical, political, and aesthetic choices. How does this work answer the course’s questions? What does it make possible? How does it contribute to antiracist struggle and liberatory futures?

In-Class Presentation/Sharing (50 points)

Share your final project in a format that invites dialogue and collective learning. This is not a defense but an offering—a pedagogical act in itself. Be prepared to:

• Briefly introduce your project and its pedagogical stakes
• Showcase your process, choices, and discoveries
• Reflect on what this work taught you about the possibilities and challenges of antiracist teaching
• Invite questions, responses, and collective imagining

Evaluation Criteria

A Final Invitation

This is not the end of our learning. It is the beginning of our practice. Classrooms have been sites of colonial violence—and they have been spaces of radical possibility. Your task is to build with intention, imagine without limits, and create what must live. Teach with courage. Practice solidarity. Demand the impossible.