When Afrofuturism Enters the Classroom

This story is part of “Black to the Future,” a series that examines how Afrofuturism pushes us to imagine and create a world where people of African descent thrive.

It’s been the inspiration of groundbreaking artists like sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler, as well as legendary musicians Sun Ra and George Clinton. It was the template for Wakanda, the utopian Black society in the Black Panther superhero movies. 

Now, Afrofuturism — the powerful idea that Black people will not only live but thrive and create new worlds for themselves in the near and distant futures — could be coming soon to a classroom near you.

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Educators at Assemble, a nonprofit STEAM education center in Pittsburgh, developed an in-house Afrofuturism curriculum that is now taught at several area schools. In Flint, Michigan, a teacher at Carman-Ainsworth High School developed an Afrofuturist curriculum that includes a Missy Elliot video, “Sock It To Me.” A book, “Conjuring Worlds,” by B. Sherise Moore, is widely regarded as the cornerstone of Afrofuturist K-12 education modules. 

And Afrofuturism lesson plans — including one sponsored by telecom giant Verizon and another developed by Ohio State University — are easily found online.  

At a time when some states are restricting the teaching of Black history in public schools, a small but growing network of teachers across the country is using Afrofuturistic books, art, and films to teach everything from understanding literature to writing computer code. At the same time, experts say, lessons or assignments centered on Afrofuturism can also help Black students imagine or create tools to dismantle racism and build a fair, equitable society. 

“The power of Afrofuturism lies in its ability to amplify the imagination, aspiration, and agency of our children,” says Nina Woods-Walker, executive director of the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California, which prominently centers the topic in its lessons and workshops. “It is critical for Black children and youth to imagine a future where they are thriving.” 

A 2021 Washington Post-Ipsos poll of 1,349 teens 14-18 years old found that despite the challenges of racism, poverty, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Black students are more optimistic about the future than their white peers. 49% of Black teens said the nation’s best days are still ahead, while only 38% of white teens said so.

When Black children optimistically envision their futures, “they are equipped with the tools to design a world they want to experience as adults,” Woods-Walker says. “Black children and youth become the authors of their journey, the curators of their future. In this future, we can see the possibilities of more Black doctors, politicians, educators, presidents, and prosperity.”

“We all benefit from the impact of young Black futurists,” she says. 

Rooted in an arts movement dating to the early 1990s, Afrofuturism broadly sweeps in themes and concerns of the African diaspora — slavery, institutional racism, and colonialism, as well as art and music trends — and blends them with broader themes of technology and science. 

Writing in the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s online magazine, educator Rochelle Spencer argues that Afrofuturism “reveals the links between the past, present, and future.” 

In “Conjuring Worlds,” author Moore “includes both trail-blazing Afrofuturists (Martin Delaney, Pauline S. Hopkinson, Robert Hayden) with bright new talents (Audrey T. Williams, Zetta Elliot),” Spencer writes. Writer-activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs “threads the voices of contemporary activists and scientists of color with old-school scientific guidebooks,” while artist and theologian Tricia Hersey, creator of the Nap Ministry, “references the Black Panthers and reminds us that innovative, problem-solving education has always been part of Black culture. 

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Woods-Walker, MOCHA’s executive director, has been at the vanguard of the movement’s educational component since 2019, when she began incorporating Afrofuturism into the museum’s programming. In 2020, MOCHA launched Reimagine Oakland 2045: A Community Futures School, a donor-funded program focused on Afrofuturism. 

Open to students, young adults, and community activists/facilitators, the goal is “to develop futures literacy, to better understand the role that the future plays in what they see and do,” Woods-Walker says. The school, she says, “develops skills in game design to re-imagine a more inclusive and anti-racist world and facilitates youth leadership development.” 

In the program, “CFS youth play an Afrofuturist storytelling game, AfroRithms from the Future, as a methodology that is useful for orienting them to world-building,” Woods-Walker says. “Fortunately, it works, as young thinkers have been able to use the game as a kickstarter for dreaming of a future where today’s problems are being tackled.”

Each cohort of between 20 and 30 youths comes from local high schools and comes together for weekly sessions at MOCHA’s arts district gallery and other classroom spaces, she says. Along with learning about Afrofuturism, and one another, Woods-Walker says the Community Futures School is part of the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation framework — a network of programs designed to help undo harmful stereotypes, rewrite damaging narratives, and train people to dismantle toxic racial hierarchies at the grassroots level.

“Community Futures School exists as part of an ecosystem of restorative healing for inherited collective trauma to create new alternative memories of the future that builds on ancestral and cultural knowledge,” she says. 

The program is particularly helpful by helping young people — some of whom are from marginalized, under-resourced communities where despair is common — to imagine that they actually have a future, and it can be hopeful, she says.

“Their artistic renderings become less dreadful, reshaped into an artifact that has possibilities,” Woods-Walker says. “When participants in CFS see the artifacts they produce exhibited to the public, they experience indications that their preferred vision of the future is possible.”