An escape from schooling: fugitive learning and educational flight

Abstract

This dissertation takes up divisions between schooling and education in the United States. Specifically, this project conceptualizes restrictions in institutional schooling and possibilities in fugitive education through a philosophical and historical framework of liberation and freedom. Through a critical, theoretical, multidisciplinary exploration, this dissertation argues that centering Black fugitivity can help school leaders, teachers, students, and activists erode limitations that confine spaces of learning to support, value, and explore spaces of education that already exist in the everyday. This project presents a theoretical framework of educational flight away from spaces of state normativity toward generative, creative spaces of being and knowing.