Movement VI
Implications & Futures
Will belonging matter to Black Canadians in the future?
Absolutely.
How can the wisdom of the ancestors permeate and anchor black bodies as settlers on this land? How can that wisdom help to shape world-building through simulated play, while allowing learners to reimagine new worlds in their physical realities?
hooks (1990) describes homeplace as a space where Black people create safety, dignity, and collective restoration in the face of racist structures. XR worldbuilding extends this concept into the digital realm and creates a homelplace, which operates as a site of resistance.
Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogical Praxis
Playing towards Belonging seeks to answer these questions through a culture-first lens. Rather than centring technology for its own sake, learners use XR games as the creative vehicle through which cultural heritage is understood and negative stereotypes challenged. Flanagan (2009) argues that game-making is a form of procedural and critical literacy and a way to explore identity, power, and creativity through design. Educators can use these methods to design units in literacy arts and social sciences that foreground multimodal literacies, culture and identity.
Implications for Community Partnerships
“ We reach out to and build relationships with groups we respect, to lay the groundwork for being called to frontline work” (brown, 2017)
Black Community Organizations are essential root systems that become repositories of cultural memory. Drawing on The Sankofa Framework for Dismantling Antiblack Racism in Ontario's Education System (2025), the project demonstrates how XR games can support intergenerational knowledge transfer. Elders, cultural leaders, and youth co-create storyworlds that reflect both ancestral memory and contemporary realities. XR world building, therefore, becomes an emergent strategy for small-scale, culturally affirming practices to initiate wider systemic transformation. As brown (2017) articulates, change emerges from patterns of interaction and how people gather, create, and imagine together.
Futures: Project possibilities
When the fam lose the faith hold them up (Adegbesan, 2020)
Community-based XR labs become Sankofa points that support youth leadership, creativity and digital fluency.
Scalable pilots in schools
The development of destreamed world-building literacy units, where arts and technology become interdisciplinary modules.
Post Secondary Research Opportunities
The support of ongoing research in Black Digital Futures that informs teacher education and community-university partnerships.