Towards a Bad Bitches’ Pedagogy

Abstract

In this paper, I present a personal narrative approach, grounded in Connelly and Clandinin’s ontological and epistemological stance that “humans are story-telling organisms”1 to discuss my construction of a uniquely working class Black feminist educator identity. This narrative inquiry is an adapted counter-methodological researcher approach that was born out of an interlinkage of my explorations into the histories of Black women educators, hip hop feminisms, and Higginbotham’s respectability politics,2 as it is understood in popular cultural terrain, and as the concept contrasts with and complements notions of (dis)respectability. I situate the paper within a critical hip hop feminist framework and access raunch aesthetics’ use of the sartorial and performative bad-assedness to understand how I have come to craft a transgressive teacher identity. By embracing a vernacular transgressive archetype of the bad bitch pedagogue, I analyze and complicate my own intersectional identity as a working-class Black woman who navigated an adversarial bourgeoisie traditionalist educational system as a teacher, unwed custodial parent, cultural worker and advocate for Black youth.