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This chapter takes a panoramic view to explore the lives of collegiate Black men. We begin with brief reflections from our own experiences to position ourselves to and alongside Black men's lives and college years. After setting the stage through our own reflections, we explore the literature on Black men's lives during their college years and pay particular attention to their social statuses, campus engagement, and health and well-being. Two critical components in many Black men's collegiate experiences are how they are projected in wider US society through deficit-based perspectives and repositioned away from educational success. We interrogate these realities and advance a discussion on ways to improve the conditions, environment, and understanding of their college journeys and possibilities. We conclude with recommendations for research, practice, and policy.

A Legacy Community is a living and learning community supported by broader institutional departments (e.g., student affairs, academic affairs, foundation, and alumni affairs) that dedicate resources, opportunities, and supports intended to: (a) undo legacies of educational disparities that Black/African American males have historically witnessed and (b) build capacity for students engaged in these communities (i.e., Black/African American males) to create and leave positive legacies on their terms. In this qualitative study of Black and African American undergraduate male living and learning community (LLC) participants at a primarily white institution (Legacy House), we investigate the LLC program elements that impact participants' educational and social experiences, and foster pathways for student legacy building. Legacy house participants describe brotherhood, sense of belonging, and leaving a legacy as elements that enable positive student academic and social outcomes, campus involvement, and career readiness.

Comics and graphic novels can disrupt traditional texts by challenging the “worship of the written word” (Torres, 2019), a feature of white supremacy that perpetuates textual hierarchies within educational spaces. Giving all of our students access to contemporary literature that centers Black youth perspectives is not only important in decolonizing literature education but also in presenting a holistic view of Black childhood. They can be used in the classroom as subjects to challenge stereotypical depictions by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts that are often marginalized in traditional curriculum. Within this chapter, we focus on comics and graphic novels as tools to enact students’ multiliteracies and to analyze visual stories depicting BlackBoy adolescence, using the frameworks of BlackBoy Crit Pedagogy (Bryan, 2022), an equity framework that interrogates the interdisciplinary ways that Black boy students' literacy learning can be formed through the teaching and learning of Blackness, maleness, and the schooling experiences of Black boys. We utilize this framework to analyze the use of diverse comics and graphic novels to facilitate critical conversations of bringing inclusive visual texts into the classroom. We invite practitioners to reimagine curricular ideas and content centered on empowerment and Black boy adolescence and how those ideas are presented to youth through a variety of visual narratives.

Engaging with digital heritage requires understanding not only to comprehend what is simulated but also the reasons leading to its creation and curation, and how to ensure both the digital media and the significance of the cultural heritage it portrays are passed on effectively, meaningfully, and appropriately. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization defines ‘digital heritage’ to comprise of computer-based materials of enduring value some of which require active preservation strategies to maintain them for years to come.

With the proliferation of digital technologies and digital media, computer games have increasingly been seen as not only depicters of cultural heritage and platforms for virtual heritage scholarship and dissemination but also as digital cultural artefacts worthy of preservation. In this chapter, we examine how games (both digital and non-digital) can communicate cultural heritage in a galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] setting. We also consider how they can and have been used to explore, communicate, and preserve heritage and, in particular, Indigenous heritage. Despite their apparently transient and ephemeral nature, especially compared to conventional media such as books, we argue computer games can be incorporated into active preservation approaches to digital heritage. Indeed, they may be of value to cultural heritage that needs to be not only viewed but also viscerally experienced or otherwise performed.

The authors focus on using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a lens through which to analyze the holistic welfare development of Black male student-athletes, namely their identity development and overall college and career readiness. The authors contend that if structured and delivered well with the appropriate supports, athletics can be more of a mobilizing mechanism for Black males versus an exploitive one. Specifically, athletic identity does not have to be exclusive, but rather one aspect of the student-athletes' multidimensional sense of self. To this end, the authors outline specific research, practice, and policy recommendations that address the unique challenges of Black male student-athletes in K-16.