Addressing Black “Student Outsiders” at AANAPISI/HSIs: Toward (Radical) Transgressive Teaching for Black College Students in Higher Education

Black students attending AANAPISI/HSI universities have long been overlooked in communication and interdisciplinary research. In this essay, I draw on bell hooks’s (2014) radical transgressive teaching and Patricia Hill Collins’s “outsider within” framework to examine the experiences of Black students at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) such as AANAPISIs and HSIs. Using my autoethnographic and autobiographical experiences as a Black student who graduated from two AANAPISI/HSIs, alongside recent literature on Black student experiences in these contexts, I explore how communication instructors at MSIs can improve engagement with Black students by establishing racially affirming curricula, instructional practices, and instructor-student rapport. I argue that radical transgressive teaching is essential to bringing Black student outsiders into liberatory learning spaces. I propose three interrelated instruction approaches: (1) a communicative-andragogical approach, (2) a liberatory andragogical approach, and (3) transgressive liberatory communication andragogy. Together, these approaches offer a starting point for reimagining communication instruction for Black students at MSIs like AANAPISIs/HSIs—and at PWIs.