During my internship, I taught qualitative research skills to high school students based in NYC with NewComm, a transformational education program centered on increasing advocacy efforts in the Bronx. Focusing on the Harlem Renaissance and James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1952), I found it incredibly useful to explore this pivotal era with these bright young minds. Regarding community engagement practices, I also had the opportunity to welcome a fellow Columbia colleague, Muriel Taks, to visit our class and share her incredible research on the impact of racial violence on cognitive health with our students.

I applied the skillset I have learned from my current PhD journey by organizing a course with a focus on scholarly research rooted in increasing qualitative research skills and engaging with innovative pedagogical practices. As BIPOC critical thinkers based in the United States, we are living, feeling, and engaging with and within the 21st century world. More specifically, we are learning “how to” effectively challenge widely-accepted Western philosophical beliefs formed by thinkers such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Karl Marx, Hegel, John Locke, etc. We are using the United States’ tumultuous 400-year history to increase our awareness of specific forms of oppression that are interrelated, such as racism, sexism, and classism.

Comparatively, histories of Africa can be traced back to the BCE era, whereas the founding of the United States began during the Colonial Era. As a result, we must unlearn language forms and political tactics that promote various systems of oppression and understand the true meaning of radicalization and liberation. As critical thinkers, we can transform our own political consciousness and develop political solidarity among BIPOC communities. Using the NewComm literary science, studies, and lab framework, we must define our own terms, compelling us to centralize the experiences and the social predicaments of BIPOC youth who understand the complexity of systems of domination, legalistic reforms, and the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression.

When conducting a research project and curriculum design tailored to 16 and 17 year olds, it was challenging to readjust my instructional scaffolding techniques. Each student in this program is from a different public or private school from across NYC. Finding innovative ways to encourage students to engage in work that is designed for university-level students has pushed me to find useful ways to make this work both relatable and iterative.

I used my position as a part of NewComm to outline necessary terminology that students should memorize. Oftentimes, students who take undergraduate-level and humanities-related courses for the first time seem to avoid acknowledging the significance of memorization. In STEM related-fields students can identify, accept, and choose to retain intricate formulas or concepts needed for exam preparation. I found it both difficult and stimulating to create materials for students interested in humanities to channel a similar form of problem-solving that offers space to memorize empirical facts, historical dates, formulas for essay-building, and vocabulary. These academic materials serve as a useful tool for students to study a “crucial terms list,” definitions of these terms, some usage examples, and what the importance of each term can be in the context of a university classroom.

Throughout this experience, I encouraged my students to pose simialr key questions guided by Performance Studies scholar, Diana Taylor. Referring to Taylor’s text, 'The Archive and the Repertoire,' we explored the idea that “If, however, we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity in the [African Diaspora] have traditionally been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents, and look through the lens of performed embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? What tensions might performance behaviors show that would not be recognized in texts and documents?”

Inspired by my work with NewComm, I will continue to propose that a critical engagement between the fields of theater and performance studies and Africana studies (with an emphasis on the regional, political, and linguistic realities of the peoples of the African diaspora), will allow me as a researcher and educator to explore embodied practices that challenge the epistemic systems developed in Western thought.

For the purposes of my work with NewComm, I will define theater and performance studies (T&P) as synonymous terms that serve as necessary “acts of transfer” (Taylor) that transmit memory, social knowledge and a sense of identity. I have noted how performance studies began as a tool to “bridge the divide between anthropology and theater by looking at social dramas, liminality, and enactment as a way out of structuralist notions of normativity” (Taylor, 6). Now, in my third year, I hope to expand on this practice by using performance studies to bridge the gap between Western theatrical forms and Africana Studies. I aim to use my position as a Summer Fellow to study Western theatrical productions as case studies used to explore the process, role, and impact of marginalization and colonization in the 20th-21st-century.