About The Kinloch Commons
Committed to the urgent leadership and pedagogy questions of our time, The Kinloch Commons advances freedom study and praxis across organizational, institutional, community, and disciplinary contexts. We work collaboratively as a connector and a hub for people and organizations to develop and support their aims, providing a rich, stable curriculum of workshops, roundtables, lectures, and other offerings.
Our participants and partners come from within the University of Pittsburgh School of Education and across educational organizations, institutions, and communities. Together, we support critical pedagogical and leadership creativity, learning, and cultivation of practices toward a free world.
2024-2025 Annual Theme: “education & the Black Fantastic”
In collaboration with the Center for Urban Education and the Practices of Freedom Project
“What is the Black Fantastic? The Black Fantastic is our freedom. The Black Fantastic is liberation,” says Ekow Eshun. It is temporal reclamations, ambitiously creative imaginings, aesthetic invocations and evocations, repurposings and rearrangements beyond modernity, conjure, realms, the political and artistic. And more. The Black Fantastic is expressed in the provocations of curiosity and questioning.
We invite you to join the Practices of Freedom Project, the Center for Urban Education, and the Kinloch Commons for a year of asking: What is education in the Black Fantastic? What is our educational freedom? Our liberation?
What is a Commons?
A commons is a place, a cluster of resources, and a network of relations stewarded for the common good. Through our stewardship and cultivation of critical pedagogy and leadership, The Kinloch Commons links local and planetary educational commons through the dynamic relational work of pedagogy and leadership for freedom.
Our guiding framework:
- Purposes: Cultivate, enrich, and steward freedom knowledge ecologies through critical pedagogy and leadership praxis in a broad range of educational contexts.
- Principles: Critical pedagogy and leadership foment and support longstanding and nascent freedom work locally and globally. Collective critical pedagogical and leadership endeavors are solidarity projects for shared purpose across meaningful difference.
- Commitments:
- Germinate emerging critical pedagogical and leadership praxes in individuals, collectives, classrooms, and schools through shared study and praxis;
- Advance vital scholarly inquiry into critical pedagogy and leadership;
- Respond to organizational, communal, and individual questions through collaborative design;
- Provide support, space, and structure for student, faculty, and community member design and facilitation of workshops, study groups, and other proposed resources; and
- Foster inventive leadership and pedagogical freedom praxes
- Praxes: Constellate and coordinate resources for supported growth of critical pedagogical and leadership endeavors.
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.
Courses are 1-credit and are open to all undergraduate and graduate students across the University of Pittsburgh
Students study both the what and how of freedom through global, insurgent knowledge traditions.