Black Liberation in Teacher Education: (Re)Envisioning Educator Preparation to Defend Black Life and Possibility

Abstract

Current configurations of teacher education programs are insufficient in attracting and producing teachers equipped to teach through the permanence of antiblackness, instead still relying on race-neutral or color-evasive pedagogies that perpetuate the misrecognition of antiblackness. As evident by the sustained inequities experienced by Black children and the routine marginalization of Black (teacher) educators in the field, we recognize that teacher education programs, and subsequently P-12 classrooms, are not designed nor equipped to reduce the harm caused by persistent anti-Black racism. Despite the ways Blackness is derided and invisibilized in educator preparation, Black students, families, and communities have long countered anti-Black schooling processes through methods grounded in Black liberation. Specifically, throughout the history of Black education, Black people have engaged in resistance and subversion, spiritual innovation, intersectionality, Black fugitive thought, and Afrofuturism to culturally sustain Blackness amid ongoing racial oppression. Through a multidisciplinary analysis, in this reflective and conceptual essay, we offer the framing of Black Liberation in Teacher Education (BLiTE) to help re/envision the cultivation of classrooms that refuse Black suffering and defend Blackness.