3L: Leading in the Learning Landscape

a weekly list of topics trending among Black Women

Why Black Women?

Black Women's collective ability to read the Learning Landscape is unmatched. We are pattern-readers, trendsetters and taste-makers whose interests and behaviors get co-opted and "washed" by the mainstream. So, let's start at the source.

3L acknowledges the innovating Black Women do everyday to work around systemic challenges. 3L acknowledges the ways Black Women are constantly trying to tell others what we see on the horizon. 3L treats the truths Black Women tell as community resources, even if those truths are inconvenient for the larger society. The truths Black Women tell may seem true for a small group of people, namely Black People, but they eventually become true for humanity.

Every take by a Black Woman is not necessarily THE take, but, in the public discourse, we generally have a type of peer-review system for calling each other in or at least making sure nuance is added to the conversation.

I hope this week's 3L list inspires you to write, research, teach and learn. After you read this list, I encourage you to go to Google Trends. How does this week's 3L list compare to this week's Google trends? Teach/tell someone about the differences you see between the two lists.

The topics in the list below were mined from various online sites based on their alignment with this week's theme for The Learning Landscape Substack: Navigating the Learning Landscape.

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3L: Leading in the Learning Landscape for the week of June 9, 2025 - based on this week's theme for The Learning Landscape Substack - Navigating the Learning Landscape.

• Lest We Forget

• Digital Space for Yoga

• Community Learning

• Certifications & Colleges and Universities

• Getting into EdTech

• AI as Part of Everyday Life

• Expectations from the Crowd

Lest We Forget

• What's happening: Aura 3.0, through her Etherith community and the Substack 404 Not Forgotten, protects memories.

• Here's more: Caring for our memories is intimate and spiritual work. This work is especially important right now in the face of deliberate efforts to remove structures that have housed the artifacts that remind us who we are. The 404 Not Forgetten Substack is a digital library, a ritual circle and a memory machine that remixes tech with ritual.

• Related to this week's theme: 404 Not Forgotten is empowering community members to learn and teach about preserving memory. While this work can include top-down institutional knowledge and engagement, this project constructs meaning and builds worlds through folk data, folk information, folk knowledge and folk wisdom.

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Digital Space for Yoga

• What's happening: This content creator/influencer has made yoga/yoga spaces more accessible (socially, financially, physically, etc.) to more people through liberatory yoga practices.

• Here's more: Black Prana Yoga has made yoga spaces more accessible, user-friendly and comfortable for a range of bodies by developing yoga skills among instructors and prospective instructors who have experienced barriers to training in yoga spaces.

• Related to this week's theme: Skills acquisition is meaningful to communities as well as to the person who acquires the skills. The impact of one person

  acquiring skills is unlimited and may develop over years or decades.

  People need access to clinical and non-clinical healing and restorative spaces. When previously excluded people gain access to these spaces, they can bring others along for relationship and learning.

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Community Learning

• What's happening: This content creator believes more people will have to be educated outside the traditional channels in the future.

• Here's more: People still want to learn, even as education becomes less accessible. The desire to gain credentials is something different from the desire to engage in learning processes.

• Related to this week's theme: According to this creator, the future will be filled or should be filled with more opportunities for community (i.e., free and more affordable) learning opportunities. These opportunities will work better for those who tend to be self-directed. To clarify, self-directed does not always mean learning alone. Self-directed learning is supported with financial and other resources and by a skilled facilitator/teacher, based on the learner’s needs.

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Certifications & Colleges and Universities

• What's happening: This content creator is taking viewers through SAP’s free student digital learning hub.

• Here's more: This creator is demonstrating that learning in the Learning Landscape is not distinctly top-down nor distinctly bottom-up. She is showing how resources that college students are guided towards are also available to the wider population. The difference is that the college students’ interaction with the SAP platform is contextualized by their pursuit of a particular degree.

• Related to this week's theme: To boost capacity in a shorter period of time, colleges and universities must outsource some skills development (among their students) to private companies. This is especially the case with tech-based certification programs.

  Tech-based certifications are their own pathways to skills, which do not need to involve colleges or universities. However, the attachment of colleges and universities to outside certification processes legitimizes those certifications in traditional spaces. On the other side, these relationships give traditional institutions modern credibility, as they create new ways for students to enter colleges and universities (from certification to a 4-year program).

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Getting into EdTech

• What's happening: This content creator is advising K12 teachers on how they can transfer their skills acquired inside school districts to EdTech.

• Here's more: Because colleges and universities tend to be siloed by disciplines, career guidance (to already working teachers) typically focuses on progression through single pathways. Therefore, the type of advice (from 2024) offered by this creator may not be available to alumni through college and university career centers.

• Related to this week's theme: This creator is speaking to how interdependent learning and working opportunities are. What learners can learn (what information is curated for them) determines their range of possibilities for work.

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AI as Part of Everyday Life

• What's happening: This content creator/influencer experiments with trying to opt out of AI for a day.

• Here's more: She finds that AI is deeply integrated into everyday life. Even if we consciously opt out of AI use at the user-interface level, in the background, the personal and work platforms we must use are running AI-supported processes and decision-making algorithms.

• Related to this week's theme: It is important to survey where AI is already present in the Learning Landscape. Having AI literacy requires us to view it from its top-down, bottom-up and in-between functions.

  In one arena: Academic institutions’ automatically taking a moral purity stance against student use of AI suggests they are ill-informed or uncaring about how the technology is integrated into our lives, sometimes without explicit consent. Responsible decisions about acceptable AI use requires deliberate and nuanced decision-making by people who understand how AI works. In general, AI is pushing decision-makers to update the education model. AI dynamics are revealing that institutions need new, clear visions and definitions of what learning is.

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Expectations from the Crowd

• What's happening: This hairstylist is demonstrating a hair styling technique, without sharing the products she's using, that is liked by viewers.

• Here's more: Go to the comments to read the accusations of gatekeeping, even as the creator is delivering “free” content.

• Related to this week's theme: Viewers (learners) of industry-related content expect information about product and process, with no steps missed, not just the output. If the creator is purposely rage-baiting and/or upping her engagement on future posts, it is because she knows professionals and practioners expect to learn from other professionals and practioners.