Breathable Classrooms: Black Love as Pedagogy

In this talk, Dr. Justin Coles draws on a decade of collaborative work with Black youth to illuminate how their artistic and cultural practices offer powerful pedagogical tools for resisting antiblackness and shaping more just educational spaces. Centering Black love as a pedagogical stance, and through the sharing of aesthetic artifacts, he highlights concrete moves of perception and sensing that educators can take to cultivate classrooms that are relationally grounded and breathable. Attendees will engage in aesthetic reflection and creation to explore how pedagogical practices grounded in Black youth aesthetics can transform how we read, teach, witness, and create alongside students. Through stories, visuals, and interactive engagement, participants will examine what it means to interpret Black life through a reparative love aesthetic. This talk invites you to both witness and actively participate in imagining and building educational futures guided by Black love.

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Justin A. Coles, PhD is an Associate Professor of Social Justice Education in the department of Student Development at University of Massachusetts Amherst -- College of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the W. E. B Du Bois department of Afro-American studies. Within the college, Dr. Coles serves as the inaugural Director of Arts, Culture, and Political Engagement at the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research (CRJ). At the CRJ, Dr. Coles directs the award-winning Black Healing Joy and Justice Collective. Dr. Coles’ socially and community engaged, literacy and arts-based research engages Black urban youth creativity and activism to inform counter structures to oppressive US schooling policies, processes, and histories. Dr. Coles is a former William T. Grant Theories of Blackness, Indigeneity, and Racialization in Research to Reduce Inequality in the Lives of Young People Writing Fellow. In 2023, Dr. Coles was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. Formerly a Co-Editor-in-Chief for Equity & Excellence in Education, Dr. Coles currently serves on the International Editorial Board for Curriculum Inquiry, an academic journal based at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is a Co-Editor for the American Education Research Association journal Review of Research in Education (volumbes 51 and 53). In addition to his editorial roles, Dr. Coles is an appointed Research Foundation Trustee for the National Council of Teachers of English. Dr. Coles is published in a myriad of academic journals and published his first book project, Resisting Antiblackness in Education: A Pedagogy of Black Youth Aesthetics, in December 2025 with Teachers College Press at Columbia University. Dr. Coles is a Fulbright Specialist.

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