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This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.

This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum.

The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers draw upon each other’s writing to compose sociopolitical kinship poems when writing about critical issues affecting Black lives? What topics and oppressions do youth choose to write about and how do they write about these topics?

The authors found that the youth wrote across multiple topics affecting Black lives in their kinship poems. These include the appropriation of black beauty, gun violence and police brutality, love and Black lives, the need for equality, negative depictions and misrepresentations of Black people, the neglect and omission of Black lives and suppression of freedom. The youth took up various critical issues in their poems, which addressed what they deemed as most urgent in the lives of Black people, and these selected topics were highly historicized. We also found that the youth used the content, styles and audience of the original poems to pen their own pieces.

Writing with another peer afforded collaborative writing and spaces for youth to read and interrogate the world while building criticality through their writing.

Kinship writing is a genre in which one piece of writing has a relationship with another piece of writing. Kinship writing carries significance in the Black literary community as the history of Black education has been interlaced with ideals of social learning, community, family and kinship. This literary approach contributes to ways Black people used each other’s writings to offer healing, comfort and care in a turmoil filled world.