My experienceshave led me to this moment. I have continued to build the “life vocabulary” I first started at Allegheny. I have the skills and understanding of how the world works from my time as VISTA; and now, I’m filling myself with knowledge I need to truly become a decolonized scholar. I am by no means near my goal or know all the things but I’m getting there. As I get deeper and deeper into my graduate studies, I moving away from only being interested in researching community-engaged teaching and learning and its effect on marginalized youth into a wider frame of decolonized education for unheard and marginalized, black K-12 students.

I believe that a decolonized education requires community involvement and engagement. It necessary, along with youth agency (which also something I interested in studying) and the centering of Black women voices in these spaces as well. I have had a dream of becoming the professors who have changed my life. The ones who have challenged my thinking and incited a fire within me. The ones who didn’t see the academy as place separate from the actual community we study; the ones invested in black girls like me.

I am not sure how this will manifest itself as a research topic but I will be using this site to talk through these topics and questions in my various graduate classes, my personal writing (poems and journals), and my professional settings. This site will be my space to share my journey through this process. A professor who has changed my life said that if I should be able see myself or my share myself in the work that I am passionate about , as a black woman, if I wanted to. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea but it is.