The Center for Urban Education (CUE) Student Fellows program is a longstanding initiative to build an active community of interdisciplinary scholars who engage urban education concerns.
When CUE Executive Director T. Elon Dancy II decided to revamp the CUE Student Fellows program for the 2023-24 academic year, he invited Stacey Akines, Robin-Renee Allbritton, and Christopher M. Wright to serve as tri-chairs to guide the vision and facilitation of the program.
“When Dr. Dancy reached out to us to be in a lead role of revamping the student fellowship, he gave us the flexibility to make it what we wanted and what we thought would be useful for other students,” says Wright, a PhD student in urban education. “We envisioned a space for reading, critical dialogue, study, writing, and collective scholarship.”
The tri-chairs first worked together to craft language for the fellowship application and recruitment materials, and to develop core pillars to establish a strong foundation for the critical study space they wanted to create.
“The core of our study is reading, which we use to inform the conversation, dialogue, and thinking together when we convene. The reading sets the foundation for us to learn from each other,” says Akines, a CUE visiting student fellow and PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.
The 2023-24 fellows consist of about 12 graduate students, with the majority of the fellows in the School of Education.
The tri-chairs started the year by studying Black knowledge traditions to establish a groundwork for further study.
“In laying the framework for the fellowship program, we wanted to set a foundation in Black and Indigenous knowledge traditions by studying anti-Blackness in the higher ed space and how that impacts Black and Indigenous bodies,” says Allbritton, a PhD student in urban education.
Wright adds: "While the three of us are deeply grounded within Black knowledge traditions and traditions of Black radicalism, we understood that the fellows might not approach the readings with the same lens. We spent the first semester doing readings within Black studies to cultivate an intellectual grounding."
Examples of the texts the fellows studied together include "Black Study, Black Struggle" by Robin D. G. Kelley; "Institutional Diversity and Its Discontents: Antiblackness, University Political Economy, and George Floyd Uprising Statements" by Dancy and Wright; and “The Captive Maternal: Anti-Fascist Renegades, Runaways and Rebels” by Joy James.
After establishing a knowledge base in Black studies, the fellows began reading August Wilson’s Century Cycle (also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle), a collection of 10 plays that document Black experiences in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood during each decade of the 20th century.
“We are paying attention to spaces, geographies, and places, and the rich history that Wilson provides us,” says Akines. “We're looking at the educational components in the ways Wilson describes how the characters are educated and the knowledge that they possess and transfer. We're also addressing the gender aspect in his plays, looking at how gender functions within the Black community, specifically in Pittsburgh.”
The tri-chairs plan to invite two guest scholars to speak with the fellows later this semester: Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon, associate professor of English and African American studies, theater, and Caribbean studies, and Khalid Y. Long, associate professor of theatre arts at Howard University. Both McMahon and Long are renowned scholars of Wilson’s work.
In addition to reading and studying together, the CUE Student Fellows will have opportunities to engage with August Wilson’s archives and participate in collaborative research, teaching, and service; to be presenters in CUE panel discussions, webinars, and workshops; and to participate in the CUE Summer Educator Forum (CUESEF) in June 2024.
Akines, Allbritton, and Wright say serving as tri-chairs has been a deeply fulfilling experience, and they are grateful for the support of CUE, and particularly faculty members Elon Dancy, Martez Files (assistant professor in the Pitt School of Education and CUE Faculty Leadership Fellow for Political Education), and former CUE postdoctoral fellow J.Z. Bennett (assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati).
“While the program is student-facilitated, the support from faculty has been important,” says Wright. “This has become something so robust, fulfilling, and fun. It's something that we each look forward to.