Doing The Work to Do the Work: Black Teacher Educators Learning to Heal and Healing to Teach

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, we, both co-authors and Black teacher educators, explored our experiences imagining and practicing Black liberatory pedagogical praxes through the contours of anti-Black violence. Framed through engaged and healing-centered pedagogical conceptualizations, we use Black storytelling to present narratives of our storied experiences doing the work to do the work. In doing the work to do the work, we encourage other Black liberatory educators to both create and sustain individual and collective space(s) to build their sociopolitical analyses of oppression in their worlds, to remember Black movements and moments of the past that have transformed oppression, and to imagine more justice-centered pedagogical praxes that liberate themselves and their students. Doing the work to do the work is both theory and practice; we hope that Black educators and those supporting the liberation of Black peoples can contextualize our storied lives shared here in their own dreams and practices.