Abstract
This track is an elegy and a blueprint—a poetic inquiry into what remains after the schoolhouse is buried. It builds alongside my published work on poetic inquiry, joy, and healing as pedagogical praxis. Drawing upon the frameworks of Tiffani Marie and Kenjus Watson’s Apocalyptic Education and the notion of Ruha Benjamin’s ancestral intelligence, this track reimagines sustainability not as environmental rhetoric but as spiritual and communal practice. Through verse, narrative reflection, and pedagogical testimony, I explore how Black educators and communities sustain life amid institutional decay—transforming grief into growth, resistance into restoration. Anchored in ancestral memory and the radical traditions of Black pedagogy, this track argues that the end of schooling as we know it is not a loss but a return—to the gardens, to the songs, to each other. In the ruins, we remember how to build again, not from scratch, but from seed.
Recommended Citation
Phelps, D. (2026). After the Bell: Black Sustainability as a Practice of Remembering. Black Educology Mixtape "Journal", 4(1). Retrieved from https://repository.usfca.edu/be/vol4/iss1/5