Toni Cade Bambara's Community-Controlled and Multimodal Pedagogy

This chapter explores how, in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program, Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, and Addison Gayle developed student-centered teaching methods to empower educationally disenfranchised students. Among their many creative approaches, it focuses on two dimensions of Bambara’s teaching. First, it illustrates how she developed a community-controlled pedagogy that involved students in collective decision-making about their learning. Second, it shows how she developed what is now called a “multimodal” or “multimedia” pedagogy that taught students to compose in different media, genres, and forms. This chapter also recovers the classroom context of Bambara’s landmark anthology The Black Woman (1970), which she edited while teaching at City College. The final section follows Bambara beyond the era of open admissions to show how she continued developing these methods both in universities (Duke University, Carleton College, and the University of Delaware) and in local community organizations like Philadelphia’s Scribe Video Center, where her teaching could more effectively serve Black communities.