Movement II
Discourses of Race in Education & Technology
Educational spaces are not neutral and are steeped in long-standing policies and praxis that have disenfranchised black learners in both subtle and overt ways. These systems prescribe possibilities for black students before they have the opportunity to offer their brilliance.
Bettina Love: Punished for Dreaming
Educational Survival Complex
North American School Systems have long been the site of harm, diminished expectations and misrecognition of the culture, competencies and dreams that black learners bring to classrooms. Instead, schools have become places where the systemic exploitation of compulsory education by the state prioritizes punishment and surveillance over genuine learning (Love,2023). Systems then create policies that lead to the school-to-prison pipeline and reinforce harmful and limiting stereotypes of black learners. Policies that label black learners as " unruly" or " violent" and the use of punitive practices, standardized testing and excessive use of disciplinary practices to suppress black learner aspirations (Love, 2023)
Dumas & Ross
Black Crit
Dumas and Ross ( 2016) expand on Love's framing by positioning antiblackness as the system's organizing logic. Black Crit provides the framework for the argument that Black suffering is reproduced through the hidden and null curriculum, as well as disciplinary measures that label black learners as the problem, rather than the system itself.
Safe Schools Act (Ontario)
We too often believe that the oppressive and racist policies critiqued in the lexicon of literature provided by American scholars cannot be observed in Canada. The Ontario Safe Schools Act mirror the punitive reforms Love critiques. Zero-tolerance policies, mandatory suspensions, and the presence of School Resource Officers created an environment where Black youth were punished at disproportionate rates, often for behaviours interpreted through racialized fear.
The Sankofa Framework for Dismantling Antiblack Racism in Ontario's Education System (2025) argues that the current system " emerged out of a colonial project that positions schools as a tool of assimilation and social control." Educational policymakers continue to perpetuate policies that informed the system's origins. Further, the language of safety masked the logic of criminalization. Canadian politeness softened the tone, but not the impact.
Gray, Chang & Bird
Playing Difference
The Digital world is not exempt.
Digital Games have been positioned as powerful tools for learning because they combine challenge, feedback, creativity, and social interaction in ways traditional schooling often cannot. Games “engage users in creative and participatory activities” and transform ideas into concrete objects. Marone (2016). Gray, Chang, and Bird (2021) argue that play is not neutral and subject to the very same harmful narratives that pervade educational systems. In fact, Digital Spaces and Games often perpetuate harmful stereotypes that drive racist policies and systems. A critical examination of play demonstrates that the conditions for play are not created equal for all players. How do we ensure that games do not perpetuate the violence and oppression that black learners experience in their real-world classrooms? How can digital games be a site of freedom dreaming?
Robin D.G. Kelley and Stephanie Toliver
Freedom Dreaming and Endarkened Storywork
If Digital Games and Educational Systems can be a site of wounding, they can also be a portal for new worlds and imagination. They become a place where the logics that informal traditional digital and educational spaces can be subverted and refused.
Even within systems of oppression, Black Communities have always carved out modes of imagination and creativity as tools for survival. Through endarkened storywork, for example, narrative becomes a technology for healing. Toliver (2021).
Kelley (2003) goes further by asserting that black imagination is a political act, a method of envisioning otherwise under systems designed to constrict possibility.
Discourses on punishment, surveillance, deficit, digital bias, and colonial epistemology form the landscape that Black learners must navigate.
This is why new worlds are needed.
This is why imagination becomes methodology.
This is why Extended reality and Digital games hold such promise.
If games can reproduce the violence of schooling, they can also rehearse liberation.