(Re)claiming the Garden, (Re)learning to Fly: A Trinity Framework for Liberation in Virtual Graduate Spaces

Abstract

This reflective article, grounded in Endarkened Storywork and critical autoethnography, is a theoretically rich practitioner piece that contributes to current conversations in online graduate education. It introduces a trinity framework for online graduate (Re)liberation—Black Feminist–Womanist Epistemologies, Decolonial and Liberation Psychology, and Critical Race Theory. This framework holds the transformative potential to reshape the landscape of online graduate education, offering a new lens through which to view and engage with knowledge and learning.

Grounded in lived experience as a Black mother-scholar, doula, E-RYT 500 yoga instructor, and educator, the article offers a culturally rooted critique of online graduate education and its epistemic exclusions. The author presents an original liberatory framework, theoretical methodology, and cultural paradigm—Black Liberatory Ancestral Consciousness & Epistemologies (BLACX)—developed through critical autoethnography, communal praxis, and spiritual reflection as a practice of resistance, ritual, and relational andragogy.

Drawing from ancestral wisdom, spiritual epistemology, and storywork—including traditions like The People Could Fly—this work reimagines online spaces as sacred sites of transformation and provides a culturally responsive model for course design, pedagogy, and graduate learning. Implications include new possibilities for culturally sovereign pedagogies, institutional redesign, and healing-centered praxis in digital higher education environments.

Author’s Note

Cherina Okikilo Shaw (she/her) is a Black womanist scholar, doula, E-RYT 500 yoga instructor, and doctoral student of psychology whose work centers sacred resistance, ancestral knowledge, and the liberation of Black children and their caregivers. She is the developer of Black Liberatory Ancestral Consciousness & Epistemologies (BLACX), a culturally grounded framework for liberation and relational learning in online graduate spaces. Her work is rooted in the spiritual lineage of priestesshood and ancestral witness, bridging scholarly inquiry with healing traditions. This article is written in the first person to honor traditions of Black feminist scholarship, spiritual epistemology, and storywork as liberatory methodology.

Editor’s Note

Readers – Please note that the term pedagogy is applied holistically and not literally, as is most often found in research literature in PK-12 education. Pedagogy for this article, as with some others in the broader literature, refers to instructional practice for all ages of learners, not only for children.