It has been just over fifty years since the Combahee River Collective formed in Boston and began work that would become foundational to the development of Black Feminism in the United States. This session offers a discussion that honors and critically engages the legacy of the Collective in terms of its influence on pedagogy. Speakers connect this legacy to pedagogical practices that have been useful for navigating classroom crises around race, to methods for building transformational and coalitional learning across identities, and to the development of pedagogies that empower students to take informed democratic action in service of sexual health and sexual justice. Together, these three presentations present a set of new pedagogical developments in the tradition of the Collective that are designed meet today’s political and educational climate.
Existing for only six years, the Combahee River Collective has had a long-term impact on Black feminist organizing, teaching, and writing through the 1977 publication of its Combahee River Collective Statement. This paper explores how the Combahee River Collective Statement’s themes—genesis, values, burdens, and focus—offers a vital framework for transformative pedagogy by womanist theologians and religious scholars. Key principles include embracing an outsider identity, decolonizing assessment, addressing emotional labor, and centering Black feminist perspectives. By reflecting on a crisis in a racial reconciliation course, this presentation illustrates how womanist pedagogy fosters liberatory learning spaces, breaking free from double consciousness to cultivate classrooms committed to survival, wholeness, and courageous exploration.
The Combahee River Collective Statement was the first articulation of “identity politics,” offering a Black feminist framework in which knowledge, revolutionary theory, and practice was created out of the lived experience and study of "interlocking" systems. I suggest the Statement’s theory of identity politics was not only a theory that centered Black women’s experiences in critiquing heterosexism, capitalism, and white supremacy, but also a method of knowledge-production in service of coalitionary politics. While it is critically important to center the Black feminist history and labor in its genesis, I also suggest that its methods of the “revolutionary leap” (Hong, 2015) might provide a pedagogical pathway toward learning in ways that catalyze contemporary coalitions. Drawing on my teaching of white clergy men, I explore how studying the Statement invites white men, who often don’t have methods for feminist praxis, into learning and joining the legacy of the coalitionary politics of Black feminism through developing their own feminist statements in 2025.
Creative projects can further student engagement with sexual ethics education that understands sexual justice as a social project, not merely a series of prohibitions on individuals. This paper describes projects such as mapping sexual geographies, roleplaying policy strategists, scripting meetcutes, and designing menstruation rituals. These assignments further learning objectives through creative action: they perform intersectional analysis of the risk of sexual violence, they create examples of how opportunities promoting sexual justice can be socially produced and/or hindered, and they orient students to democratic action for a sexual health and sexual justice-informed approach to public education. Lesson plans and assignments available as handouts for adaptation or re-use.