Black Feminist Pedagogy Research Articles

For Us, By Us

This article describes how one group of African American women educators set out to change the narrative surrounding the achievement of African American girls at their high school through the creation of an elective course entitled Ourstory, which was designed using the tenets of culturally relevant, African-centered, and Black feminist pedagogy. The main goal of the Ourstory course was to use the study of African American women’s history and heritage to increase self-esteem, self-efficacy and provide a safe space for the African American girls involved. This descriptive study explores the design and implementation of the Ourstory class using a qualitative analysis of the course syllabus, lesson plans, course materials, student work, observations, and interviews with staff and students. The findings from this study demonstrate that there is value in creating a space for African American girls to express themselves and build community.

Framing Black feminist pedagogy through the contours of Black feminist thought: Black feminist praxis in and beyond the traditional classroom

ABSTRACT Marked by the tireless labour and contributions of Black women, the Black feminist tradition has significantly influenced the field and practice of education, broadly conceived, in which pedagogy plays a vital part. Little scholarship, however, has explored the relationship between Black feminist thought’s knowledge validation process and Black feminist pedagogy. This conceptual paper addresses that gap, using the contours of Black feminist thought to structure Black feminist pedagogy. Two primary questions are explored: 1) In which ways are Black feminist thought and Black feminist pedagogy compatible? and 2) How can Black feminist thought’s contours serve as a framework for analysing practices of Black feminist pedagogy? Illustrating how the contours of Black feminist thought help operationalise Black feminist pedagogy, the paper draws on diverse cultural examples from politics, religion, higher education, and public media to demonstrate that Black feminist thought and Black feminist pedagogy are deeply compatible and that their merger represents one form of Black feminist praxis. This paper contributes to scholarship seeking to uplift the work of Black women through critical appraisals of their labour and that which seeks to further Black feminist theories and practices in the interest of intersectional racial justice.

Decolonial identities in the leadership coaching space: against neoliberal leader identity regulation.

The study uses the decolonial lens to disrupt the contentious dominance of whiteness in leadership development, not to mention in coaching, in management and organization studies (MOS). It contributes insights into how a decolonizing coaching space enables and guides a coachee to reflect and rethink the navigation of the realities of her decolonial identity. The decolonial identity encapsulates the authentic self and the neoliberal identity is the plastic self in a neoliberal university context. Universities' pervasive and normalized neoliberal discourse has become a "paradigm"-the overarching worldview through which universities' visions, missions, strategic objectives, and values are constructed. For academics to thrive in their performance and "walk on water" in achieving performance targets, they ought to embrace being academic capitalists, which shapes idealized neoliberal identities-conforming identities, complicit in undermining social, economic, and epistemic justice. Qualitative research methods were utilized to conduct a reflexive study, and data collected from the reflections and reflexive dialogues in leadership development coaching sessions and journals were thematically analyzed. The study reveals that the coach and coachee's shared decolonial identity offered counter-narratives that unmask the dominant great "white" man leadership in organizations. It also illuminates insights into the significance of black feminist pedagogy in the coaching process to honor the coachee's decolonial identity and rich cultural experiences. It enabled her to explore them critically and derive meanings from developing decolonizing, critically conscious leadership strategies for emerging transformation challenges. Meaningful dialogue dimensions emerged, which served as lenses that steered a decolonial approach in supporting the coachee to reflect and rethink the leadership performance vision, strategic objectives, action plans, implementation, and monitoring.

Black Women Educators’ Activism: The Evolution of a Black Feminist Pedagogy

Exploring the historical narrative of activism among black American women offers valuable insights into their significant role in advocating for equal and high-quality educational opportunities within their community. It unveils their cultural and political acumen, attitudes, and dedication, which they extend into the realm of teaching. Their moral philosophies and sense of purpose have been instrumental in the creation of a black feminist pedagogy that has evolved within the frame of black women’s resistance to oppression and the ensuing battle for collective survival and institutional change (Collins, 1990).

“I can’t just keep talking about the men”: Black girl resistance in a history classroom

ABSTRACT Drawing from Black Feminist Thought and Black Girl Cartography the author uses the domain-of-power framework to analyze the Black Girl Charting practices of Cierra, a Black girl student navigating racial history in a secondary classroom in the United States. She encounters the physical space as a site of interpersonal oppression and the U.S. history curriculum as a space of cultural, hegemonic domination. Most importantly, she resists those constraints with her reframing of Blackness, women, and youth through her coursework. After examining Cierra’s essay, presentation, exchange with the principal, and responses to interview questions, the author reimagines the focal conversation as a pathway to empowering learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study for Black feminist pedagogy and abolitionist teaching in K-12 education, teacher education, and education research.

Developing Black feminist researcher identities

This project report describes a community-engaged, extra-institutional, out-of-school Wikipedia editing project focused on the digital literacies of Black girls. The project was located in a systemically under-resourced neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Given the under representation of Black women editing Wikipedia, and continued concerns about gaps in Wikipedia’s content, this project made a critical intervention towards information justice. We report on the project’s process in brainstorming, community engagement, set up, digital and analogue interactions, and reflection. Our approach was heavily informed by Black feminist pedagogy and critical information literacy.

Inclusive Listening

Our essay presents a critique of the limitations of Western Classical Music (WCM) in Aural Studies curricula, and the problems this poses for students from diverse musicking backgrounds. We propose a new teaching and learning framework, inspired by Black Feminist Pedagogy and aimed towards inclusivity, that devotes prolonged attention to multiple kinds of listening and analysis practices outside the WCM tradition. Our framework will be a live, open-access resource for teachers and self-directed students to understand various methods of listening and analysis. We prioritize the ability of this framework to communicate to students from a variety of disciplines and musicking backgrounds, including those who wish to develop listening skills relevant to electronic music practices, sound art, scored music, improvised music, and traditional musics. We believe that Aural Studies should be a teaching and learning space where a radical, prolonged breaking-down of institutional hierarchies can be enacted and propose that Aural Studies practices hold the potential to escape the notation-centeredness of WCM and the power dynamics implicit in that orientation.

Naming, blaming, and “Framing”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and the rhetoric of Black feminist pedagogy

ABSTRACT This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TEDTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.” Crenshaw enacts three distinctive features of Black feminist pedagogy in her activism for the #SayHerName Campaign. She challenges traditional “frames” of antiBlack police brutality, uses blaming vocabulary from a Black woman’s standpoint to create new frames, and names an audiences’ “revolutionary potential” in dismantling misogynoir in the justice system. An activist rhetoric of blame expands frames in dominant discourses so that the collective blame toward an institution can encompass intersectional oppression.

(Re)Imagining Jazz Education through the Lens of Black Feminist Pedagogy: (Presented at the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice)

(Re)Imagining Jazz Education through the Lens of Black Feminist Pedagogy: (Presented at the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice)

Black feminist pedagogy as a tool for inclusive teaching and learning: critical reflections of Black women scholars

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led us to this current public health and political moment, bringing widespread attention to social and health inequalities and interconnecting racial discrimination faced by Black communities and other communities of colour. The pandemic has also precipitated a transition of the qualitative methodology classroom from physical to virtual spaces. At this juncture, an opportunity has emerged to amplify critical pedagogies challenging White, Eurocentric, hetero- and cis-normative epistemologies and introduce their practice into the ever-evolving classroom. Rooted within a genealogy of Black women’s political and intellectual activism, Black feminist pedagogy captures their unique intersectional experiences and presents a methodology for teachers and learners alike to promote equity in the classroom and our society. In this presentation, we discuss the ways in which Black feminist pedagogy can support reflection on the inherent relations of power shaping the pedagogical practices and knowledge production of/in the classroom. We hold that Black feminist pedagogy is not simply concerned with the instruction of, for, and about Black women. It additionally puts forth learning strategies informed by Black women’s historical experiences of race, gender, and class discrimination that can support the inclusion of diverse epistemological positionings and meaningfully represent the social and health inequities of marginalized communities. We affirm that a ‘standpoint epistemology' is foundational to Black feminist pedagogy and that those who experience marginalization are best positioned to make claims about its meanings and impacts. The presenters draw from their epistemological standpoint as Black women, graduate and postdoctoral scholars, and Black feminist thinkers. We center our own experiential knowledge as learners and teachers to reflect on the value of Black feminist pedagogy. A major learning from our experiences in this current moment has compelled us to advocate for integrating a critical reflexivity process. This process is undertaken by teachers and learners to assess how knowledge is being produced, legitimized and/or erased as a counter to the social and institutional power and authority constituting the classroom. We also discuss considerations for teaching theoretical and methodological approaches to intersecting oppressions as elemental to Black women’s experience and a cornerstone of Black feminist pedagogy. An intersectional approach supports us to take stock of the interlocking stigmas shaping health inequalities, ontologically and epistemologically (re)position the multiply marginalized communities they impact, and take up theories, methods, and practices that better align with our experiences. Intersectionality will be used to exemplify tensions as a ‘travelling theory’ and its strengths when rooted in a Black feminist pedagogy. At a time where Black feminist thought is at the forefront of public consciousness, we emphasize the dangers of taking up this tradition through white and patriarchal logics and pedagogies. As we rework the notion and formations of ‘the classroom’ in this current moment, it is important to not only recognize it as a place of intellectual advancement but also as a historical site of colonial, racial, and epistemic violence. Black feminist pedagogy holds that the experiential knowledge of racialized communities uniquely positions them for the teaching of ontologies and epistemologies characterizing their social realties and the methodological approaches employed to interpret them. To this end, redressing academic violence unequivocally requires the meaningful engagement and inclusion of Black (feminist) scholars in academic institutions and actively creating an environment that supports this pedagogical practice as an ethic and praxis towards decolonizing the classroom and qualitative health research more broadly. In this presentation, we aim to represent Black feminist thinking as a pedagogical tool to emphasize the intellectual, experiential, and cultural contributions of Black scholars to knowledge production and to help practitioners meaningfully approach teaching-learning and conducting qualitative health research in a (post-)COVID-19 reality.

Living at the Margins: Black Feminist Pedagogy as Transformative Praxis During the 1980s-1990s and Epistemic Exclusion in the 21st Century—Where Do We Go Now?

In this essay I argue that Black women who teach Black feminist pedagogy experience “epistemic exclusion” (Buchanan, 2020) while advocating for the intersections between three disparate contexts: their activism in their communities, the women’s movement, and their work as educators in postsecondary settings. The period examined is the 1980s–1990s. I consider the institutional challenges and limitations Black women have undergone as knowledge producers and teachers. While pushing the boundaries erected between university settings and the Black liberation movement taking place in their communities (Joseph, 2003), they were limited to a precarious status as Black women teaching within White-male dominated institutions. The trailblazing theoretical pedagogical insights Black feminists have advanced in their work as educators in postsecondary settings is discussed at length. Additionally, connections are made to the present-day struggle among Black feminists for inclusion within contemporary educational contexts (Evans-Winters & Piest, 2014; Mogadime, 2002, 2003; Wane, 2009, 2011).

Mobilizing betrayal: Black feminist pedagogy and Black women graduate student educators

AbstractThis article addresses Black women graduate students' educational labor in higher education teacher training programs. We ground this reflective account of our respective teaching praxis in the educational betrayal we endured as younger students, connecting it to our engagement of Black feminist pedagogy. We illustrate how this praxis empowered us as undergraduate educators to implement pedagogies of equity and justice. Employing a structured vignette analysis framework, we draw on a Black feminist paradigm and Black feminist autoethnography to examine field notes of our teaching praxis. These two field notes, one from Francena and one from ArCasia, demonstrate challenges that emerged in our instruction of mostly white undergraduates. Despite the precarious nature of our political and professional positions, we discuss why working toward an anti‐oppression praxis remains our ultimate pedagogical aim.

A matter of race and gender: An examination of an undergraduate music program through the lens of feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy

Feminist pedagogy, originating in social constructivism and critical theory, offers an instructional approach for a more democratic and diverse curriculum and pedagogy. Extending from feminist pedagogy is Black feminist pedagogy, which offers a more specialized instructional approach for underrepresented populations in education. Both feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy foster a unique intersection for institutions of higher education whose historic mission integrates race and gender as part of its targeted efforts. This study examines ways feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy are integrated into the undergraduate music program at Spelman College, a historically Black college for women. Using Barbara Coeyman’s four principles of traditional feminist pedagogy for women’s studies in music and the general music curriculum (i.e., diversity, opportunities for all voices, shared responsibility, and orientation to action) as a theoretical framework, the following three components were examined for this study: content (curriculum and course design), context (structural influences of gender and race), and pedagogy (classroom instruction and learning outcomes). The analysis of data ascertained through triangulated measures of interviews, observations, and document collection provided suggestions as to how music educators can design and teach within a music environment that is socially and culturally inclusive for all students.

Shifting Out of Neutral: Centering Difference, Bias, and Social Justice in a Business Writing Course

ABSTRACTThrough an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

Afro-Latin American Documentary Resistance from the Pacific Coast: How Voces de Resistencia (2017) Changes the Landscapes of Aesthetics, Academia/Community Collaboration, and Black Feminist Activism During the Colombian “Peace Process”

Voces de Resistencia, Capitulo 1, is a short documentary film with an original soundtrack composed and performed by Black Colombian female folk a cappella chorus, or alabadoras. The multimedia product makes use of Black feminist pedagogy and resistance: it portrays a silenced and oppressed group in Bojaya, Colombia. The focus on alabadoras singers and composers promotes self-definition and exposes the power of self-determination in songwriting, an a cappella chorus performance, and documentary filmmaking.

Reclaiming Our Queendom: Black Feminist Pedagogy and the Identity Formation of African American Girls

ABSTRACTApproaches to rectifying the inequities Black female students encounter in U.S. educational institutions are rarely discussed in the body of research in which these individuals are the foci. In this critical race feminist auto-ethnography, the author used qualitative data from a two-year study of a girls' empowerment program that she established at an urban public high school. Through an analysis of Black feminist curricula, in-class video footage, student artifacts, and interviews with former participants, the author argues that Black feminist pedagogy may promote the development of positive social and academic identities among African American female youth. Concrete, research-based guidelines for developing culturally responsive pedagogical interventions are discussed.

Complicated contradictions amid Black feminism and millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls

ABSTRACTMillennial Black women teachers wrestle with two simultaneous burdens: disrupting the racist and sexist status quo of schooling through curriculum, and employing tactics to survive school politics among their majority White women colleagues. This article describes how the Sisters of Promise (SOP) curriculum aligned with Black feminism and Black feminist pedagogy, and how it did not. This curriculum was created for Black girls within the margins of school by a millennial Black woman teacher and other Black women teachers. Analysis of the SOP curriculum revealed that even with the best of intentions, and even for relatively self-aware millennial Black women teachers, it is possible to present Black girl students with contradictory messages, due to a lack of exposure to Black feminism, Black feminist pedagogy, and the work of Black women educational scholars, in their curriculum studies. Included are implications and recommendations for millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls.

Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought

Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells Barnett, and Fannie Lou Hamer are but a few names from a growing list of distinguished African-American women activists. Although their sustained resistance to Black women's victimization within interlocking systems of race, gender, and class oppression is well known, these women did not act alone.' Their actions were nurtured by the support of countless, ordinary African-American women who, through strategies of everyday resistance, created a powerful foundation for