About This Case Study

Jarvis Givens argues that American schooling has carried an implicit "grammar" — a structure of racial assumptions about who is fit to learn, to teach, and to lead — and that Black educators, working under conditions in which Black learning was first criminalized and later segregated and surveilled, built a counter-tradition he names fugitive pedagogy. Fugitive pedagogy is not merely teaching while Black; it is a set of practices that evade, subvert, and reimagine the racial order encoded in the official institutions of schooling: the clandestine literacy of the enslaved, the double curriculum of segregated Black schools, the teachers who taught a history and a sense of self that the dominant system was designed to withhold. The Black teaching tradition, in Givens's account, is one of the central archives of African American life, and the school is a contested terrain on which the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and national belonging have been fought out.

This case study brings Givens's framework to a body of primary material: the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard Library and its Black Educational Timeline, a digital collection documenting the history of Black educators and Black education in the United States. The analytical move is to read the timeline not as a record of steady progress toward inclusion but as evidence of a counter-tradition — to locate specific moments at which the racial grammar of American schooling is visible, and specific moments at which Black educators worked against, around, or beyond it. Rather than treating "Black education" as a single undifferentiated story, the exercise asks learners to use a precise concept to read a precise record, and to test whether Givens's framework illuminates or strains against the material the archive contains.

Before You Begin

Pre-reading is required:

• The Black Teacher Archive. "Black Educational Timeline." Harvard Library. (curiosity.lib.harvard.edu)
• Jarvis R. Givens, American Grammar (Key Scholarship) — at least the introduction, or your notes on the work and on the concept of fugitive pedagogy as encountered in the unit. The recorded book talk in the unit's Open Educational Resources is sufficient if you have not obtained the book.

While working through the timeline, keep these prompts in mind:

• What does the timeline treat as a turning point — and who, in each case, is the actor? The state? A court? A community? A teacher?
• Where does the timeline show Black learning being restricted, criminalized, or surveilled — and where does it show Black educators building something in spite of, or against, those restrictions?
• What does Givens mean by fugitive? What distinguishes a fugitive practice from a simple demand for inclusion in the existing system?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Mapping the Timeline (10–12 minutes)

Take a single careful pass through the Black Educational Timeline. As you go, build a working list of entries, sorting each into one of two columns:

1. The racial grammar. Moments at which the official order of schooling restricts, criminalizes, segregates, or surveils Black learning — anti-literacy laws, the establishment of segregated systems, the exclusion of Black teachers, the imposition of curricula. These are moments at which Givens's "grammar" is doing visible work.
2. The fugitive counter-tradition. Moments at which Black educators, students, families, or institutions build, sustain, or transmit learning against or beyond that order — clandestine schools, the founding of Black institutions, teachers who taught what the system withheld, organizing for access.

Some entries will resist the sort, or belong in both columns. Note those especially — they are often where the analysis becomes interesting.

For groups: divide the timeline into chronological stretches across members. Each member maps their stretch, then the group assembles a combined two-column map.

Phase 2: Reading One Moment Closely (12–15 minutes)

Choose one entry from your "fugitive counter-tradition" column — a moment that you find genuinely illustrative of what Givens means by fugitive pedagogy. Develop a close reading of it in your notes, working through the following:

• The condition. What was the racial order of schooling at this moment? What did it permit, forbid, or assume about Black learning?
• The practice. What did the Black educators, students, or institutions in this entry actually do? Describe the practice concretely — not "they resisted," but what the resistance consisted of.
• The fugitivity. In what sense is this practice fugitive rather than simply reformist? Does it evade the system, subvert it, build an alternative to it, or reimagine its purpose? Givens's concept implies more than inclusion; specify what more is at work here.
• The grammar it answers. What specific assumption about who is fit to learn or lead does this practice contradict or refuse?

For groups: each member presents their close reading in two to three minutes. The group notes whether the chosen moments cluster in particular periods, and whether the same kind of fugitive practice recurs across different eras.

Phase 3: Does the Framework Hold? (8–10 minutes)

Step back from the individual entries and test the framework against the archive as a whole. A good concept illuminates its material; a concept applied too loosely flattens it. Address, in writing or discussion:

1. Where the framework illuminates. Name one feature of the timeline that you understand better through the lens of fugitive pedagogy than you would through a simple narrative of "the long road to integration." What does the concept let you see?
2. Where the framework strains. Name one entry or pattern in the timeline that does not fit cleanly under fugitive pedagogy — a moment of straightforward legal inclusion, of state provision, of demand for access rather than evasion. Does this strain reveal a limit of the concept, or a part of the history the concept is not meant to cover?

The aim is not to defend the framework at all costs but to use the friction between concept and evidence to understand both more precisely.

For groups: assign the "illuminates" and "strains" questions to different members or pairs, then reconvene to compare.

Closing Reflection

Complete this thought in two or three sentences:

The moment in the Black Educational Timeline that most clearly shows fugitive pedagogy at work is __________, because __________. Reading the archive through Givens's concept changes my sense of the Black educational tradition because __________. The thing the concept does not quite capture is __________.

The value of the sentence is in the precision of what you name — in the specific moment you choose and in what you find the concept unable to hold.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the three phases in order, writing brief notes at each step. The Phase 2 close reading is the central artifact; keep it for reference when answering Question 1 (on Givens and the racial grammar of schooling) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 works well divided chronologically across members; Phase 2 is individual close reading followed by sharing; Phase 3 benefits from full-group discussion. If group time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Return to Question 1 in the unit's Questions for Reflection, which asks you to identify a feature of schooling you would analyze as part of its racial "grammar" and to consider what it would mean to evade or subvert it rather than reform it. The Phase 2 close reading and the Phase 3 test of the framework supply the material for this answer.
• To extend the exercise: the Black Teacher Archive's larger digital collection includes periodicals, organizational records, and the writings of Black educators themselves. Working directly with these primary sources lets you test the timeline's framing against the documentary record and locate fugitive pedagogy in the words of the teachers who practiced it.
• For the contemporary dimension, read this case study against the unit's material on resegregation — the Stanford Segregation Explorer and the 2022 NPR report. The fugitive tradition Givens traces developed under de jure exclusion; asking what its analogues might be under present-day de facto segregation extends the framework from the historical record into the contemporary landscape.