This is our 5th year anniversary! 2025 marks our 5th time offering a FREE, virtual conference for folks around the globe to come together and celebrate the power and potential of Black children. This is our 5th opportunity to identify the ways Black folks show up brilliant, buoyant, and bountiful, ready to teach and learn in schools not prepared to see, serve, and secure us. This is our 5th mix, calling out all the ways schooling spaces are not like us. 

 

Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop! 

 

Since 2021, we’ve had this conference thing jumping. CBCE scholars shape the stories how we want them to be told knowing our audience is not dumb, recognizing that our community is not slow. Challenging dominant discourse around discipline, ability, desegregation, leadership, belonging, problematizing and redefining what success means for Black school communities—we up the score on ‘em. 

 

Research and discourse around Black children maintain narratives that pray on our downfall. This is the real conference challenge… 

 

• Who did you call when you didn’t get the pub? 

• Did other spaces help you get your language up? 

• Did graduate degrees give you false street cred? 

• Does memorizing make you feel like you know in your head? 

• Do you ask for copies of other scholars' slides? 

• Dated metrics said we’re good, but they lied.

 

Don’t run from the truth about Black children when you need a few dollars; come through and continue to converse with courage. Sifting friends, foes, and fans, determining who is a colleague and who is a colonizer is collective work. CBCE is a place to learn for our lives. Come together with us to identify, examine, and dismantle deleterious school policies and practices, and disrupt the polish.

 

I want us all to win. Are we locked in? Then step this way.