Freedom Seminars

The University of Pittsburgh School of Education offers Freedom Seminars to support students in understanding and engaging education within global social, cultural, and political frameworks of freedom.

The Freedom Seminars attend to a range of global freedom projects, theories, pedagogies, and praxes. Each course is a focused engagement with a specific set of questions, ideas, and topics relevant for understanding education within social, cultural, and political movements, systems, and structures. Students study both the what and how of freedom through global, insurgent knowledge traditions.

Course Structure

  • 1-credit courses offered in the fall, spring, and summer terms
  • Open to all undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh
  • Course title is EDUC 1067 for undergraduate students and EDUC 3067 for graduate students

Act 48 Credits

For in-service educators who have already obtained their teacher certification, the Freedom Seminar courses can qualify for Act 48 credits. Please note: the Pennsylvania Department of Education makes educators responsible for ensuring that the course content aligns with their certification area. Visit our Act 48/Act 45 website for more information.

Contact

For more information about Freedom Seminars, please contact Dr. Sabina Vaught, Director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership, at svaught@pitt.edu.

Spring 2025 Courses

Freedom Seminar flyer imageTeaching the Black Latinas Know Collective
Taught by Lisa Ortiz

This seminar will draw from the Black Latinas Know Collective’s scholarship. The seminar will consider their engagements with Black Feminisms and Latinidades through their practices of critical disruption, agitation, and public pedagogy.

Course Number: EDUC 1067/3067 (1 credit)
Days/Times: Tuesdays, 6-8:30 p.m. ET
Location: 3200 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
Dates: January 14 – February 18, 2025

Questions? Contact Dr. Lisa Ortiz at lortiz@pitt.edu

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flyer of bell hooks. see course description in the text on the webpage. the educational philosophy of bell hooks
Taught by Elon Dancy

This seminar will examine the Black feminist thought of hell hooks. The seminar will study key ideas and themes from her repertoire and consider how her body of work informs the study and practice of education. Autobiography, essay, dialogue, poetry, and film are among the mediums to be addressed in the course.

Course Number: EDUC 3087
Days/Times: Wednesdays, 4:30 – 7:10 PM ET
Location: TBD

Questions? Contact Dr. Elon Dancy at tedancy@pitt.edu

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Flyer image. see text on page for descriptionAntiblackness, Civil Society, and Education
Taught by Elon Dancy

Course Number: EDUC 3087
Days/Times: Mondays, 4:30 – 7:10 PM ET
Location: TBD

This advanced seminar will examine the claims of Afropessimism as a metatheory concerned with antiblackness. The course, which will consider a range of humanist and critical theories, will build out analytic capabilities for educational scholarship.

Questions? Contact Dr. Elon Dancy at tedancy@pitt.edu

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Past Freedom Seminars

Collage of 10 flyers

Freedom Seminars offer a rich diversity of topics, including:

  • Africana Thought in Education
  • Decolonizing Knowledge and Power
  • Disabilities, Genders, and Free Futures
  • A Freedom Dialectic: do Nascimento & Freire
  • For an Afro-Latin American Feminism
  • Latinx Migration and Education
  • Place, Race, and Self-Determination
  • Political Education and Freedom Struggles
  • Prisons, Schools, and Abolition

Freedom Seminar flyerBlack Literacies and Language: Freedom and Fugitivity
Facilitated by Chelsea Jimenez

Students learned about African and African diasporic languages and literacies through the study of Black migration, enslavement, and Black liberatory education movements.

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Boriken Against Empire Freedom Seminar flyerBorikén Against Empire (taught by Lisa Ortiz)

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Afro-Latin American Feminism course flyer

For an Afro-Latin American Feminism (taught by Watufani Poe)
In her groundbreaking text “For An Afro-Latin American Feminism” Brazilian scholar-activist Leila Gonzalez called for a type of feminism that reckoned with the weight of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous histories in Latin America. Following Gonzalez’s call, this course investigates the varied theorizations of Afro-Latin American feminism from throughout the region and how Black women theorize and work towards their own freedoms. The seminar will pay particular attention to how Afro-Latin American feminisms work to deconstruct myths about the existence of “racial democracy” and racially harmonious interactions in Latin America by highlighting the physical and sexual violence inflicted upon Black women’s bodies.
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