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Jarvis Givens is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty affiliate in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He studies the history of American education, African American history, and the relationship between race and power in schools. His first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. This work traces African Americans’ traditions of challenging racial domination in schools and society by highlighting the various intellectual and political strategies they employed from the slavery era through Jim Crow.
Givens takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying history, employing conceptual and methodological interventions from the field of Black Studies. Such methodological interests led him, in partnership with Imani Perry of Princeton University, to an exciting new digital humanities project called The Black Teacher Archive (BTA). This is an online portal that houses the digitized records of national and state "Colored Teachers Associations" organized by black educators from the antebellum era through Jim Crow. The BTA is supported by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Givens is completing a work of creative nonfiction on black student life in the American school. This book is based on first-person accounts found in archival documents, African American autobiographical literature, as well as insights from his own life. This book is forthcoming with Beacon Press. Givens is also preparing new editions of two African American Classics: Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) The Mis-education of the Negro, to be published with Penguin Classics, and Booker T. Washington’s (1901) Up From Slavery, for the Norton Library. In 2018, Givens co-edited a volume on black male student achievement, entitled We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys, published by Columbia’s Teachers College Press.
His emerging projects include a book analyzing relationships between Indigenous, white, and black education in the United States through the nineteenth century; a biography of education leader and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune; and a project on black social life in Compton, California in the 1980s and '90s based on family and community archives.
Givens' work explores themes of education, power, and resistance contextually, beyond rigid frames that limit where we look for meaningful experiences of teaching and learning. His work is committed to clarifying how persecution has impacted the lives of black people (and other oppressed communities) in school and society, while also attending to how these communities have used education and culture, subversively, to seek out lives that transcend their suffering.
The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is the largest digital collection of historical material related to African American teaching and education. Its primary holdings include over 1,800 journals and serial publications produced between 1907 and 1973 by Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs), which were professional groups formed by African American educators as early as 1861. The BTA functions as an experimental incubator for knowledge centralization, utilization, and distribution; and as a collection focused on materials and institutions central to African American history, this work has required a breaking of traditional archival form to account for the conditions of black life and preservation. This work is made possible through material contributions and labor distributed across dozens of institutions; and it has, therefore, necessitated the re-establishment of networks and thoughtful, collaborative curation. While Phase One of the BTA focused on the discovery and preservation of CTA journals most notably the construction of this developing digital portal (set to launch October 3, 2023), Phase Two will continue to expand this digital collection while also investing in intellectual communities around the study and practical uses of this rich archive and tradition. The next phase of the Black Teacher Archive will mobilize efforts in creating communities of connection, study, and application. Through a range of convenings we will improve familiarity with the content and educational strategies featured in the Black Teacher Archive. Conceptually, we will explore what we are calling a networked engagement model in promoting and encouraging researchers and educators to interact with the archive. The major activities of this grant are as proposed: ¿ Microgrants open to institutionally associated scholars, public historians, archivists, and librarians to support local efforts on Colored Teacher Associations ¿ Further portal infrastructure improvement through digital humanities explorations with geographical mapping and text analysis preparation. ¿ Digitize proceedings, programs, and minutes of Colored Teacher Associations ¿ Curriculum development for inclusion of the BTA in teacher training programs (pre-service) ¿ Professional development for current k-12 teachers (in-service) ¿ Curriculum development in Black studies courses encouraging collaboration between historians/digital humanists and archivist/librarians ¿ Summer research institutes for emerging history of Black education scholars ¿ Public Wikipedia edit-a-thons to update entries using the BTA ¿ Social media presence to share about the project and portal contents ¿ Black Education Studies and the Archive Convening in summer June 2026
The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) seeks assistance from the Spencer Foundation to support Phase 2 of this educational history, archival, and digital humanities project, which is concerned with preserving the intellectual and political legacy of African American educators before 1970. BTAs primary focus is the discovery and preservation of historical artifacts related to Black teachers professional associations and the development of an online portal that will make these materials more widely available for academic research and the professional development of contemporary educators. Phase 1 began in July 2020 with a $610,000 public knowledge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and it focused on locating, digitizing, and constructing a portal of Colored Teachers Association journals published before 1970. The BTA teamconsisting of professors Jarvis Givens and Imani Perry as co-PIs and archivist Micha Broadnax as project managercontacted nearly 150 institutions to inquire about the existence of journals or related association records. To date, we have estimated approximately 2,500 issues of CTA journals were published. Of this number, we (together with Harvard Library) have located, digitized, and cataloged 1,444 issues, with about 425 additional issues currently in our queue for digitization and inclusion in the portal. Our team compiled materials from across states, including processed and unprocessed archival collections, and, by the time we have finished, will have effectively recovered more than 50,000 pages of text written by Black teachers. The journal issues collected have publication dates as early as 1907 and as late as 1973. They represent fifteen states and Washington, DC and were collected from more than fifty archival repositories. But Phase 1 also revealed extraordinary gaps in the archive. These gaps are most significant as it pertains to Black educator organizations in Delaware, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington D.C., Missouri, and Oklahoma. Therefore, Phase 2 of the BTA project will primarily focus on addressing archival silences in these states, while collecting additive material to supplement the journals included thus far. To complement our archival dataset, we will conduct oral histories with former members of the organizations, mine newspapers for coverage of CTAs, and we will continue to engage in on the ground research to discover scattered materials, which has proven successful in our prior efforts. Therefore, if awarded funding from the Spencer Foundation, we will apply the monies in the following manner: 1) We will build a database of additive materials to address gaps in Phase 1 by collecting and analyzing historic newspapers, proceedings of CTA meetings, oral histories, as well as personal documents and ephemera from the aforementioned states. 2) We will develop data visualization assets that will serve as interpretations of key findings from the historical resources collected, as well as a digital humanities mapping tool for the portal which will allow visitors to experience the geographic and architectural context of schools in the Jim Crow era. And 3) We will write academic and public facing scholarship to disseminate our findings about the history of African American teachers, the relationship between structural violence and gaps in educational archives, and the importance of digital humanities in the field of education.
The groundbreaking new digital repository centralizes the experiences of Black educators during Jim Crow and creates new portals to understanding the history of African American education