Black Women Teachers Research Articles

Cynthia Dillard, The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member

Review of Dillard, Cynthia B., The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).

“God Meant I Should Be Free”: Historical Black Women Teachers and the Womanist Theo-Ethical Imperative of Abolition

Historical Black women teachers actively participated in the fight to abolish slavery while simultaneously, struggling for educational equity. This paper departs to address what inspired them to engage in these radical actions during the era of enslavement and its immediate afterlives. Drawing on close analysis of archival documents, this paper reclaims the radical faith of historical Black women teachers that allowed them to move from intimate, inward yearnings of freedom to outward expressions of sociopolitical action. What is revealed is an intersectional, transcendent, lived womanist theo-ethic of abolition that responded to their existential and material realities, and informed their notions of education, freedom, gender equality and justice, constituting a very particular form of resistance. I suggest that in order to enact radical transformation within the field of education, and beyond, contemporary teachers must first interrogate the interior and embody an abolitionist ethic. Gratefully, historical Black women teachers have provided a prophetic witness on how to do so.

We BEEN Knowin: Black Women teachers (re)member that our language is a living legacy

ABSTRACT This paper explores how Black Women K-12 Teachers (BWTs) engage with Black Language, challenging prevailing narratives. Despite limited recognition, BWTs advocate for the authenticity of Black Language. The research centres on the 16-week Black Language Learning Series (BLLS), delving into the roots, rules, and ramifications of Black Language. Drawing from Black Feminist Thought (Collins 2000) and (Re)remembering praxis (C. B. Dillard 2016), the study employs the Double Dutch Methodology (Green 2014) to capture BWTs’ diverse experiences. Two pivotal themes emerge: Linguistic Push-Pull (Smitherman 2000) while (re)searching, highlighting the struggle to balance native Black Language with standardised English; and (re)presenting while (re)claiming Black Language through African American Women’s Language (AAWL). Thus, through the process of (re)membering, BWTs navigate cognitive dissonance, challenging harmful norms, resulting in greater awareness and a shift in perceptions of Black language, identity, and culture. The findings illuminate how exploring Black Language transforms BWTs’ self-perception and pedagogies, leading to a complex interplay of liberation and linguistic transformation. Ultimately, BWTs begin and emerge as agents of linguistic justice, poised to reshape education by centring Black language.

“Things your history teacher won't teach you: Science edition”: Black women science teachers as anti‐racist teachers

AbstractMarginalized communities cannot and do not have decontextualized experiences with how socioscientific issues, such as exposure to COVID‐19 as frontline essential workers, high Black infant mortality rates, air pollution leading to respiratory problems, and other issues, affect their communities. As PreK‐12 science teachers and teacher educators strive to dismantle oppressive practices in their classrooms and curriculum, it would be helpful to learn from Black women science teachers who have been engaging in anti‐racist practices before the racial awakenings of Summer 2020. In this study, three different virtual focus groups, or Sista Circles, were conducted with 18 Black women secondary science teachers. Ranging from 1 to 22 years of experience, Black women teachers across the country and international participants in Canada and Qatar participated in the Sista Circles. From intersectional qualitative analysis and narrative inquiry, the findings of the study reveal that Black women science teachers enact anti‐racist science teaching by bringing something new to the community; using NGSS standards within the context of the community; teaching at the intersection of history, culture, and science learning and teaching; and building critical consciousness in the science classroom. Furthermore, the findings of the study have implications for the use of anti‐racist frameworks within the context of science education that were authentically the practices of the Black women in the study. This study offers insights into how the critical consciousness of Black women teachers can be represented in the science classroom even in times of nonsupport from peers and administration. The power and necessity of Black women teachers are paramount in science classrooms specifically because of the neutral, apolitical ways science teaching has been approached in the past. The narratives and stories shared here exemplify how Black women science teachers transform science teaching and learning by displaying various acts of Criticality.

“They’re Already Punished Enough:” Fugitivity and Abolitionist Lessons from Black Women Alternative School Teachers

ABSTRACT While much of the literature on Black women teachers documents their legacy of addressing anti-black racism in traditional public-school settings, there is room for more dialogue about the labor of Black women teachers who teach in non-traditional school settings. This study draws on endarkened storywork, a methodological approach derived from the convergence of Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies (EFE) and indigenous storywork (ISW) to grasp insight from the storytelling of Black women teachers at an alternative school in central Georgia. To honor the breadth and depth of storytelling as an analytical tool, this paper focuses on how one of the three Black woman alternative schoolteachers creates a “fugitive space” in which she subverts conventional ways of schooling and offers nuanced narratives about herself and her students. The question that guides this study is how do Black women teachers’ praxis in non-traditional school spaces invite us to imagine liberatory possibilities in education?

“Girls Hold All the Power in the World”: Cultivating Sisterhood and a Counterspace to Support STEM Learning with Black Girls

For far too long, schools have been violent places where Black girls are often adultified, overdisciplined, and overlooked. In school science and mathematics specifically, Black girls have been isolated, tokenized, and made to feel invisible. This qualitative study leveraged the Multidimensionality of Black Girls’ STEM Learning conceptual framework to explore the roles of two Black women middle school science and mathematics teachers on the STEM learning experiences of 12 Black girls who live in the U.S. Midwest and how the girls engage with culturally relevant lessons in an afterschool program—SISTERHOOD I AM STEM. Data sources included a demographic questionnaire, program artifacts, and semi-structured transformative dialogic interviews with student and teacher participants. Findings revealed the significance and benefits of single-gender STEM learning environments for Black girls who struggle to connect with school and the role of Black women teachers in creating safe spaces for STEM engagement. In addition, the afterschool STEM program served as a mechanism to promote self-visualization and confidence for Black girls in science with the HyFlex model fostering a communal experience for the girls and their families. This STEM learning space organized and facilitated by Black women educators resisted Black girls’ pathologization and cultivated their sense of belonging. It holds promise for developing the social bonds that are critically important to their persistence in the field and a new narrative where “Girls hold all the power in the world”.

Bookshelf: Kappan authors on their favorite reads

Dennis Shirley recommends To Have or To Be? by Erich Fromm. Jessica Lee Stovall recommends The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)Member by Cynthia B. Dillard.

Protect Black Women Teachers: Influencing Sustainability Through Mental Health Literacy

Critical Black women teachers (BWTs) play a vital role in education. They employ pedagogies that are political in nature and effective in outcome, particularly for Black students in urban schools. However, despite their impact, BWTs leave the profession at rates higher than all other teachers. Therefore, this study engaged sista circle methodology to explore how post-service critical BWTs reflected on their teaching experiences, specifically regarding their mental health and the role it had on their decision to leave the profession. Based on the findings, recommendations are made to key stakeholders to support critical BWTs’ mental health and sustainability in urban schools.

Schooling The System: A History of Black Women Teachers by Funké Aladejebi

Schooling The System: A History of Black Women Teachers by Funké Aladejebi

Shifting Teacher Evaluation Systems to Community Answerability Systems: (Re)Imagining How We Assess Black Women Teachers

Using a chronicle, this paper examines teacher evaluation systems to highlight how neoliberal reforms produce unjust conditions for both teachers and students of color. I specifically center Black women and their ways of knowing to provide a (re)imagining around what is possible when educational leaders move beyond reforms to create a system that holds teachers answerable to students and is rooted in love.

Review: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones

Review: <i>Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All</i>, by Martha S. Jones

“Nobody’s Mule”: Black Womanist Caring-Agency, Urban Charters, and the Choice to (Not) Teach

ABSTRACT Urban charter schools targeting Black communities struggle to recruit Black teachers and even more to retain them. At the same time that scholarship has begun to recenter Black and Brown teachers’ lives, the narrated perspectives of Black women teachers are often drowned out in urban educational reform’s Hollywoodization. In this article, we story Nina Sinclair’s 7-year teaching trajectory across five urban charters in two states to examine her layered Black womanist caring-agency. As our analysis demonstrates, for Sinclair, it was not enough just to teach. She wanted the autonomy to create motivating and engaging instruction to inspire her students and herself to do and be more. She wanted to be in a place where she could grow professionally; where she would be mentored, supported, and challenged; and where she could enjoy being Nina Sinclair with like-minded people. All of these things mattered because she mattered. Organizing Sinclair’s pivots in and out of the charter school classroom through a quare framework, we theorize her shifting professional movements for being whole. Our findings frame Sinclair’s self-care—her freedom to choose what she wanted to do, to be, to stop, to slow down, to picture what if and what else—as the legacy her ancestors had bequeathed her and as an underexamined but no less important dimension of her agentive caring.

Perceptions of classroom quality and well-being among Black women teachers of young children

Concerns about preschool effectiveness have increasingly led to early childhood education policy changes focused on teacher quality. While these reforms intend to ensure children’s educational well-being, they rarely consider the impact policies have on teachers. Additionally, child care work is a feminized profession with distinct social experiences along lines of race and class. Black women who are early child care teachers live in poverty at rates disproportionate to their white counterparts. Through Black feminist focus group research, this paper documents perceptions of early childhood education quality mandates in Georgia and their impact on the well-being of 44 Black women teachers of infants, toddlers, and preschool age children. Findings suggest that the call for quality complicates Black teachers’ work, adds undue financial and emotional stress that takes a toll on their well-being, and interrupts personal dynamics with their loved ones. The paper calls for antiracist and antisexist structural support to interrupt both the stressors exacted by the field and the sociohistorical processes devaluing Black women’s work with children.

Why They Struggle to Stay: Black Women Educators Reflect on the State of Teachers

This paper conceptually explores the lived experiences of three Black women classroom instructors who endeavor to change and improve how teachers are prepared to work in diverse K-20 learning environments. Given Black women are often poised to play multiple roles in the classrooms, such as nurturers, mother-like figures (othermothers), as well as teachers, their reflections are vital to the systemic improvement of K-20 education. The question often arises regarding how the system of education might attract and retain Black women teachers, specifically. Thus, it is important that the experiences of Black educators are robustly researched. In this manuscript, the writers critically incorporate reflections of their own classroom experiences and positionality regarding preparation. Relatedly, the researchers believe such reflections are the missing component of the professional development of teachers and its perceived impact could reveal why there are few Black teachers staying in the classroom. They also provide recommendations which reflect the coordination of work by teachers and teacher educators that address researched-based practices for long-term systemic change. The researchers explore the concept of sensemaking as it relates to understanding how it shapes them into who they are today.

We Been Relevant: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Black Women Teachers in Segregated Schools

This paper considers how the practice of culturally relevant pedagogy may have predated the theory’s coinage. Using scholarly accounts of Black women teachers in de jure segregated Black schools in the Jim Crow South, the authors suggest that these educators engaged a critical, politically and culturally informed pedagogy; their praxis built on and affirmed their students’ cultural, racial, and political knowledge, worldviews, and assets. Despite the white supremacist regime of antiBlack terrorism that hampered many material aspects of Black segregated schools, this paper documents intangible dimensions that partly defined during the Jim Crow era the tradition of African American pedagogical excellence. Demonstrating pedagogical alignment across each of the theory’s three propositions, we use scholarly examples to indicate how in de jure segregated Black schools, Black women teachers’ praxis reflected culturally relevant pedagogy before the label was introduced to the education research community. Highlighting what Black women teachers’ historic labor offers the current educational landscape, this paper’s implications call for education researchers to excavate this rich site of knowledge to inform and enhance the current education of students of Color broadly and Black students specifically.

Blood, sweat, and tears: black women teacher’s organizational experiences in schools

This article examines the organizational experiences of Black women teachers in contemporary schools. This work centers Black women teachers’ voices to highlight how their organizational contexts have impacted their careers. Additionally, the researcher utilizes qualitative, case methodologies and phenomenological methods to center the voices of seven Black women teachers. Further, this research leans upon Black Feminism to elucidate the experiences of being Black and female within today’s public schools. The study reveals how Black women teacher’s blood commitments, sweat sacrifices, and tears impact their career journeys. This paper closes with recommendations for advancing organizational theory and leadership in hopes of improving the experiences of Black women teachers and Black students.

Black teacher: White school

ABSTRACT Although many Black women teachers are effective in their practices with students in predominantly White teaching spaces, they may experience troubling, unfair, unrealistic, and controlling organizational expectations that can have lasting impact on them. The author discusses 3 interrelated themes that capture challenges of Black women teachers in these mostly White spaces: (1) Black women teachers are expected to be the expert on everything Black; (2) Black women teachers are expected to engage in invisible work without recognition or compensation; and (3) Black women teachers are expected to agree with the White majority and be “team players,” even when they disagree. Drawing from a theory of disruptive movement, recommendations to disrupt Whiteness and oppression are discussed.

Teaching While Black and Female: Navigating Mental, Curricular, and Professional Aggression

ABSTRACT It is evident that many Black women teachers (BWTs) are leaving the teaching profession due to mental and emotional health, professional and collegial relationships, as well as curricular and school culture. In this article, we use the story of Alicia to explore the instructional, professional, and emotional stress that many Black women teachers endure. We also provide highlight theoretical constructs and practical applications that can impact BWTs. In addition, we examine approaches that engage the retention of Black women teachers through a process of personal and professional support systems.

Black womanist teachers’ political clarity in theory and practice

ABSTRACT Black women educators have a legacy of political clarity about teaching and learning as well as about anti-Black racism. Scholarship on Black women teachers has begun to map out this political clarity (e.g), yet is continually at risk of being devalued and deintellectualized in an educational era that privileges universalist and reductivist (e.g.“best-practices”) approaches to teaching and learning and over politically relevant forms that are relational and intergenerational, embodied and heterogeneous. Re-focusing our attention back onto the voices of Black women educators already present in educational research, this article distills their understandings of teaching and learning to honor them as womanist intellectual and pedagogical interventions designed to disrupt anti-Black racism. Their intellectual interventions offer a distinct view of teaching and learning and their pedagogical interventions cultivate the brilliance and belonging of Black youth. Understanding these interventions has implications for how we (re)conceptualize the relationships between teacher’s theories and practices of teaching and learning and engage in teacher education and development.

I am because we are: (Re)membering Ubuntu in the pedagogy of Black women teachers from Africa to America and back again

ABSTRACT Given the clarion call for culturally relevant and sustaining practices, it is often assumed that Black women have a deep well of knowledge about Black history and culture to draw from. However, given that today’s Black teachers were mostly educated post-integration, they were rarely afforded accurate representations and cultural knowledge of Black histories, heritages, and contributions in the US and the world. This education also did not include understanding their historical and spiritual connection to African people on the continent and throughout its diaspora. Given these historical and cultural omissions in their teacher education, we explore the question: What can be learned about Black women’s pedagogical practices when we begin instead in Africa? Using the concept of Ubuntu, we explore what this shift in standpoint provides that is integral in commitments to (re)membering Africa in teacher education and the professional development for Black women teachers.