Of the Meaning of Pedagogy

W. E. B. Du Bois, Racial Progress, and Positive Propaganda

Bibliographic Data

ID11063129
AuthorsF Blume Oeur (0000-0002-9442-9144, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume52
Issue4
Pages385-399
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTeaching Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0092-055X • E-ISSN: 1939-862X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0092055x231226229
OpenAlexW4391388556
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited42

A silence in the resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois has been his work as an instructor. This article uses Du Bois’s early teaching experiences and reflections on the “ugly” progress of schooling to ask: What should guide the pedagogy of sociology instructors when racial progress is so ugly? I sketch here a pedagogy inspired by Du Bois—who was the teacher denied—which is motivated by a positive notion of propaganda. Du Bois was a radical pedagogue whose mixed-methods instructional agenda informed a critical Black Sociology and bridges recent calls by American Sociological Association leadership for a discipline that is more emancipatory and educative. Embracing the right to propaganda gives pedagogical teeth to honest appraisals on racial progress. Triangulating art, science, and agitation in our pedagogy offers a general compass, and my article concludes with one direction that compass might lead: a classroom assignment where my undergraduate students became “print propagandists.”

Epistemology · Higher education · Meaning (existential · Pedagogy · Political science · Race (biology · Racial bias · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

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