Black Girl Genius Educator Summit 2025

The Black Girl Genius Educator Summit is a liberatory teaching and learning experience in Detroit for educators, youth organizers, cultural workers, and co-conspirators committed to building classrooms and communities where Black girls can rise, dream, and fly freely.

This year's theme, Defying Gravity: Centering Black Girls' Genius, Joy, and Resistance, calls us to examine the forces that keep Black girls, and ourselves, grounded. We'll do the soul work to unlearn what we never should have carried and imagine what becomes possible when we center liberation, healing, and creative pedagogy.

Why We Gather:

Black girls are being disciplined for defiance, criminalized for expression, and silenced for simply existing in classrooms not built for them. They face adultification, appearance-based discrimination, and disproportionate punishment at every turn.

• Black girls are 3x more likely to be suspended than white girls
• 86% of Black teens who experience hair discrimination say it began by age 1
• Black girls are the fastest-growing population in the juvenile justice system

We defy gravity because these conditions are too grave not to.

What You Will Walk Away With:

Learning Targets for the Black Girl Genius Educator Summit 2025

• I can reflect on how systems attempt to shrink Black girls and how I must resist those forces in my own pedagogical and personal practices.
• I can identify truths and tensions in my own teaching, healing, and leadership journey and recognize them as sacred elements of my work with and for Black girls.
• I can engage critically and creatively with foundational texts that illuminate Black girlhood, resistance, and literacy as tools of transformation.
• I can examine how Black language is policed and reclaimed in classrooms, and commit to instructional practices that honor Black girls' full linguistic humanity.
• I can articulate and visually express my commitment to liberatory teaching by creating a zine that honors my story, vision, and work with Black girls.
• I can name and release what no longer serves my ability to uplift Black girls—and declare the truths that allow us all to defy gravity.

Who Should Attend:

• Black women educators, school leaders, and caregivers
• Youth organizers, cultural workers, and teaching artists
• Allies and co-conspirators are committed to equity for Black girls.

Everyone is welcome, but Black women and girls will be centered.

Dress Code: Black Girl JEAN-ius

Wear your flyest denim and your most gravity-defying hairstyle—fro'd up, bantu'd, braided high, or stacked like a crown.

Let's Defy Gravity Together