Boyhood masculinities at play: Basketball, learning, and the pedagogies of the court.

• The sport and site of basketball is undertheorized within educational scholarship. • Courts are sites of critical pedagogy and transformative masculinity construction. • Pedagogies of the court support critical consciousness in black and latinx boyhood. • Formal, institutional spaces of play reify the rigidity of hegemonic masculinities. • Courts offer sense of belonging, relational intimacy, and emotional expression. While there is an abundance of interdisciplinary research on boyhood, education, and sport respectively, especially as relating to males of color in the United States, the extant education scholarship has a dearth of auto-ethnographic work that examines these areas. Hence, this article examines how sport, and specifically, basketball, links to the development of masculinities, identity, and critical pedagogies within our own "education." Further, considering the various tensions around the schooling of U.S. youth from minoritized backgrounds, we leverage our backgrounds as Chicanx and African American scholars to recollect and analyze our journeys and links to our boyhoods and sense-making in formal and informal spaces of play. Our findings entail a push for a re-examination of how sports and critical identities of race and class may work in dialectical and transformative ways, even amidst various contradictions of boyhood. Rather than perpetuating a view of basketball cultures as solely reproducers of harmful masculinities, this paper imagines the pedagogical and liberatory aspects of the game. We conclude with implications for research around gender identities within formal and informal play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]