Black Teachers Using Emancipatory Pedagogies with Black Students

TEACHERS AS RESISTERS: BLACK TEACHERS USING EMANCIPATORY

PEDAGOGIES WITH BLACK STUDENTS

KRISTEN EARNISE DUNCAN

(Under the Direction of Cynthia Dillard)

ABSTRACT

In this study, the author seeks to understand how Black teachers use emancipatory pedagogies with Black students as a way of preparing Black students for a society where they will encounter racism at many levels. Using critical race theory and narrative inquiry data collection methods, the author engaged in thematic analysis to find common themes. Findings indicate that Black teachers sought to keep their students grounded by alerting them of the inevitability of racism, sought to interrupt the racism that their White colleagues’ exhibited, learned to engage in emancipatory practices from their past experiences, encouraged students to use their voices and other platforms to speak about their oppression, and engaged emancipatory pedagogies in overt and covert ways depending on the social context and the teaching context. Based on the findings of this study, the author has determined that the participants of the study engaged in a pedagogy of racial realism. Implications are also discussed.

INDEX WORDS: Emancipatory pedagogy, Black teachers, Critical Race Theory,

Narrative Inquiry, Racism, Racial Realism

TEACHERS AS RESISTERS: BLACK TEACHERS USING EMANCIPATORY

PEDAGOGIES WITH BLACK STUDENTS

KRISTEN EARNISE DUNCAN

AB, BS, University of Georgia, 2006

M.Ed., University of Georgia, 2008

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2016

Kristen Earnise Duncan

TEACHERS AS RESISTERS: BLACK TEACHERS USING EMANCIPATORY

PEDAGOGIES WITH BLACK STUDENTS

KRISTEN EARNISE DUNCAN

Major Professor: Cynthia Dillard Committee: Jennifer James Bettina Love

Electronic Version Approved:

Suzanne Barbour Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2016

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Earnest and Doris Duncan, who taught me that while the world may attempt to limit me, the possibilities for my life are limitless. I could say thank you every day for the rest of my life and it would not be enough to truly express my gratitude. Thank you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my Lord and Savior, thank you. My prayer is always that I will be a vessel through which Your light will shine. Thank you for guiding me on this journey, and I pray that you will continue to order my steps.

An African proverb explains that it takes a village to raise a child. Throughout this doctoral journey, I have also learned that it also takes a village to raise a scholar. I want to use this space to say thank you to my village:

With a heart full of gratitude, I want to extend a resounding thank you to my dissertation committee. Dr. Cynthia Dillard, my adviser, thank you so much for everything. Your time, the experiences you provided me with, the opportunity to travel to Ghana (twice!), and the ways that you have challenged me allowed me to become the scholar and teacher and I am and continue to become each day. Dr. Bettina Love, I have never had a big sister. Thank you for stepping into that role for me, providing a listening ear when I needed it, and showing me what is possible by being and doing you. Dr.

Jennifer James, my journey into teacher education would not have been the same without you. Thank you for asking questions that stretched my thinking and having such an encouraging spirit.

Dr. Mardi Schmeichel, we’ve come such a long way! Thanks for being there for every step of this journey and giving me advice that helped me navigate the sometimes murky waters of academia. For your time, energy, and thoughtfulness I will forever be grateful. I would not be at this place in this moment without you. Dr. Sonia Janis, thank

you so much for providing me with new opportunities and serving as a listening ear. Our conversations allowed me to keep my love of young people at the forefront as I went about this doctoral journey. Dr. Jerome Morris and Dr. Ron Butchart, you both gave me advice that kept me on this path and ultimately led me to select this topic for my dissertation research. Thank you. Dr. Sheneka Williams, I am grateful to know that you are always in my corner.

To my sista circle: Marsha Francis, Stephanie Jones, and Dr. Latoya Johnson, I am so incredibly thankful for each of you. Having each of you with me to share in my joys, sorrows, and frustrations through this process made it much easier to bear. Jess

Kobe, Erin Adams, and Stacy Kerr, thank you for the constant reminder that I was not going through this process alone. To the friends I knew long before I embarked on this journey, thank you for your patience and understanding through all the missed birthdays and other celebrations. I am truly grateful to know such supportive and considerate people in my life.

Finally, to my participants, you all welcomed me into your incredibly busy lives and talked to me as if you had known me for decades. I appreciate your candor, and I am grateful for the time that we spent together. Thank you for your insight and the work you do for Black and Brown children each day.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

LIST OF TABLES ...... x

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Statement of the Problem ...... 5

Educating Black Students by Proving “What They Need” ...... 7

Purpose of the Study ...... 8

Research Questions ...... 10

Significance of the Study ...... 11

Definition of Terms ...... 12

Organization of the Study ...... 14

2 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 15

Conceptualizing of Emancipatory Pedagogies ...... 16

Engaging Emancipatory Pedagogies ...... 29

Conclusion ...... 46

3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ...... 48

Theoretical Framework ...... 49

vii

The Importance of (Counter)Storytelling ...... 51

Narrative Inquiry as Methodology ...... 55

Researcher Positionality ...... 58

Site of Research ...... 59

Recruitment and Selection of Participants ...... 60

Relationship to Participants ...... 61

Data Collection ...... 62

Data Analysis ...... 65

Conclusion ...... 66

4 RESEARCH FINDINGS, THEMES, ANALYSIS, & DISCUSSION ...... 67

Destiny ...... 68

Sharhonda ...... 79

Xavier ...... 89

Emily ...... 96

Analysis ...... 104

Discussion of the Findings ...... 120

Conclusion ...... 126

5 DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, & RECOMMENDATIONS ...... 127

Implications ...... 128

Final Thoughts ...... 133

REFERENCES ...... 135

APPENDICES

A Recruitment Email ...... 144

viii B Consent Form ...... 145

C Individual Interview Protocol #1 ...... 148

D Individual Interview Protocol #2 ...... 149

E Individual Interview Protocol #3 ...... 150

F Individual Interview Protocol #4 ...... 151

G Group Interview Protocol #1 ...... 152

H Group Interview Protocol #2 ...... 153

ix LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1: Participants’ Information ...... 68

x LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Table 1: Selected contemporary and late twentieth century emancipatory pedagogies. ... 26

xi CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

“Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to

meet…”

-Rosa Parks, 1998 (Milloy, 2005)

My parents were born and raised in a small, rural Georgia town. Although they both attended school after the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered legally mandated segregation unconstitutional in 1954, both of my parents attended schools where both students and teachers were segregated by race. My father attended segregated schools throughout his entire educational career, all the way to his high school graduation. My mother attended segregated schools until her senior year of high school, as the school district closed the Black high school right before she began her senior year.

While I was growing up, my parents would speak fondly of their schooling experiences. As we sat at our kitchen table for dinner, I would hear loving stories about their teachers and the relationships these teachers formed with their students. I vividly remember my parents speaking about two of their teachers, a married couple named Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Mr. Adams was their school’s band director, and Mrs. Adams was an elementary school teacher. She later became an elementary school principal. Both Mr.

1 and Mrs. Adams held incredibly high expectations of their students, because they knew what they were capable of accomplishing. Mrs. Adams, being firm yet gentle, had a way of talking to her students that allowed them to see what was possible for them if they would just give their best effort at school. The couple also had a way of making sure their students, who lived in a legally segregated society, knew that being Black did not make them inferior. Mr. Adams had applied to attend the University of Georgia before it desegregated in 1961, and he knew that the denial of his admission was not due to his accomplishments or abilities. He was well aware that the university’s refusal to admit him was due solely to his race. He shared stories of experiences like this with his students, because he wanted them to know that it was not they who were the problem; systematic and structural racism were the problem. Mrs. Adams helped to foster a sense of racial pride in her students, helping them understand that they came from a long legacy of brilliance, of which they should be proud. Both of these teachers made sure that their students understood that they would have to work twice as hard as their White counterparts across town if they were to receive even half of the credit that White students received. Additionally, Mr. and Mrs. Adams held various roles within this community. Students would frequently see Mr. and Mrs. Adams at church, the grocery store, or other places around town. Teachers like the Adams were not just a bridge between the school and the community: They were an extension of students’ families.

Although my parents frequently told me about what they learned from Mr. and

Mrs. Adams, their commitment to Black students was so strong that I also have a relationship with them. I have a relationship with them, because they are frequently present at our extended family gatherings and holiday festivities. At various points in my

education, they gave me advice about navigating the world as a young Black woman, instructing me as if I were one of their students. They were particularly purposeful about this as I left for college to enter a predominantly White context for the first time. At the time I was unaware that Mr. Adams was giving me advice on how to navigate the place that had denied him admission because of racist policies decades earlier. That Mr.

Adams would take his time and energy to make sure that I was prepared and cared for is illustrative of the long-lasting relationships he has fostered with his students (and their children).

When I decided to become a teacher, Mr. and Mrs. Adams both gave me advice, warning me that the profession I was taking up could be difficult but it would definitely be worth it. I vividly remember Mrs. Adams telling me that I needed to be both fair and firm. She also told me that if were going to teach Black children, it would be imperative for me to “give them what they need.” She spoke further about the need to expect only the best from my students, because that would sometimes be the only way that they would know what they were capable of achieving themselves.

As my teaching career began, I found myself following not only what Mr. and

Mrs. Adams had told me directly, but I also found myself channeling what my parents had told me about the Adams’ teaching practices. I always kept Mrs. Adams’s words in mind: that I needed to give my children “what they need.” I thoughtfully sought employment in schools where the majority of students were Black, as I wanted my teaching practice to be a service to my people, just as Mr. and Mrs. Adams’ teaching practice had been. I held expectations of my students that far exceeded the school’s minimal expectation that students merely pass the state-mandated end-of-course test, and

3 I made sure to incorporate Black history whenever possible. While the Georgia Studies curriculum includes important Black historical figures like Henry McNeal Turner,

Hamilton Holmes, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, there were many more important Black individuals and civilizations that I wanted my students to know about. I taught my students about the former enslaved Africans who returned to Africa to create the nation of

Liberia, and I made sure they understood that Rosa Parks was a trained freedom fighter and not a woman who was simply tired on a bus one afternoon. I believed that I was doing exactly what Mrs. Adams told me to do; I was giving my students what they needed.

In conversations with my Black colleagues and seeing the assignments students worked on in different classes, I came to see that my colleagues and I had similar ideas about what Black students needed. The science teacher next door had her students complete a project on famous Black scientists, and while the content of this assignment did not necessarily align with the Georgia Performance Standards for physical science, she knew that her students needed to know that all scientists were not old, white men.

She also knew that they needed to understand that Black scientists not only existed, but they also excelled. Although we taught different subjects and were born of different generations, my colleagues and I seemed to be channeling the same spirit. We wanted our students to have a sense of racial pride, and we wanted them to expect the best from themselves and the people around them. We knew that teaching in this particular way was the only thing that would help our students to work towards dismantling the structures that oppressed them, as the student population was predominantly Black and most of our students lived in poverty. In the following section, I discuss why Black

4 teachers should practice emancipatory pedagogies in their classrooms and why researchers need to study the ways Black teachers engage with them.

Statement of the Problem

“How does it feel to be a problem?” (DuBois, 1903, p. 3) is the question that

W.E.B. DuBois noted that he was frequently asked. This question was pervasively directed toward Black people in the United States over a century ago, a question that

Blacks understood to be asked without ever actually being verbalized. Earlier in the same text, DuBois insightfully declared to his readers that the problem of “the Twentieth century [was] the problem of the color-line” (DuBois, 1903, p. 1). Like DuBois, I believe that race and racism were indeed the biggest issues of the twentieth century in the United

States. As we are currently in the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, I believe that the problem of the color line is just as pressing as it was a century ago.

While laws requiring Black and White students to attend racially segregated schools have been overturned and restaurants and transit systems are no longer legally allowed to discriminate against customers on the basis of race and gender, Black Americans continue to encounter racism in multiple ways, including individual, institutional, structural, societal, and civilizational racism (Harris & Lieberman, 2015; Ikenuenobe,

2011; Lanahan, 2014; Scheurich & Young, 1997; Wiecek, 2011). These forms of racism present themselves in different ways in the daily lives of Black Americans. Blacks are more likely to be discriminated against in housing (Gonzalez, 2013), employment

(Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004), and financial borrowing practices (Pope & Sydnor,

2011) amongst other things. Additionally, measures like affirmative action that attempt

5 to remedy past discrimination or encourage racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses and in employment practices are continually being challenged by Whites and rolled back by the courts (Fisher v. Texas, 2013; Gratz v. Bollinger, 2003; Grutter v.

Bollinger, 2003; Hopwood v. Texas, 1996; Kim, 2005; Sterba, 2009). Although Blacks comprise only twelve percent of drug users in the United States, thirty-eight percent of those arrested for drug offenses are Black (NAACP, 2014). And most devastatingly, young black men and women including Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Renisha

McBride have been murdered at the hands of White civilians who claimed they fired shots in self-defense when the victims were unarmed. Martin’s killer was not convicted for his murder, and Davis’s killer was tried twice before he was convicted. Additionally, the police officers who took the lives of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both of whom were unarmed when killed by police officers, were not even indicted for their victims’ deaths, let alone tried. Racism for Blacks in America, as in centuries past, can be a matter of life and death.

The problem is that Black people in America have been labeled as problems, and

Black children are no exception. While DuBois was asked this question over a century ago, Blacks continue to be labeled and positioned as problems in the United States

(Bouie, 2014; Stabile, 2006). Further complicating the matter, all of this takes place in a social context in which many Americans believe that racism no longer exists and race no longer matters (Love & Tosolt, 2010; McWhorter, 2008; Speri, 2014; Wall Street

Journal, 2008a; Wall Street Journal, 2008b), while racism is simultaneously hypervisible and ever present in the mainstream news cycle. The perception of a post-racial America,

where racism is both invisible and hypervisible, has led to colorblind policies that further harm Black students and maintain White supremacy (Chapman, 2013).

Educating Black Students by Providing “What They Need”

Although some Americans believe that racism no longer exists, Black scholars and teachers have long been aware that Black students face racism in multiple forms throughout their lives. In the early twentieth century, scholars such as Ellis (1917),

Cooper (1930), Woodson (1933), and DuBois (1935) theorized about a critical liberatory pedagogy (King, 1991) that would help Black students emancipate themselves from the oppressive structures that dominated the racist society in which they lived. They also believed that the use of this pedagogy would ultimately force the United States to make good on its promise of democracy. Although their conceptualizations differed slightly, each of these scholars believed that Black students needed an education that was tailored to their specific needs as a group, including the group’s history and subordinate social and political status. These scholars wanted Black students to learn about the root of their oppression so that students could then begin to take action to end their oppression. They also wanted students to learn about their history and contributions of Black people around the world, as they knew that Black students would not be able to fight their oppression unless they had pride in their race.

Just as sure as Black scholars were conceptualizing the kind of education that

Black students needed to address racism and elevate their place in society, Black teachers have been engaging in such practices for centuries. My parents’ teachers employed this kind of pedagogy in segregated all-Black schools, because they believed education to be

7 the best tool to help Black students elevate themselves as a group and emancipate themselves from the structures that bound them because of their race. Forty years later, after schools had legally been desegregated, my colleagues and I employed our pedagogies with the same spirit, in our all-Black school, because like my parents’ teachers, we knew innately that education was the best tool to help our students elevate themselves, both individually and as a group. We also knew that the keys to that education were not available within the prescribed curriculum. Ultimately, my parents teachers, as well as my colleagues and I, engaged in these practices because we embodied the African spiritual concept of Ubuntu (Battle, 2009). Ubuntu is “an African concept of personhood in which the identity of the self is understood to be formed interdependently through community” (Battle, 2009, pp. 1-2). Spiritual in nature, the concept of Ubuntu allows individuals to form their identities through community, leading to the creation of the communal self. My colleagues and I, just like Mr. and Mrs. Adams understood that it was important to give our Black students “what they need,” because we understood our fate and the fate of our students to be shared (Williams, 2003). In the next section, I describe the purpose of this study and why I decided to engage this topic of study.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study arises out of the pedagogies of Mr. and Mrs. Adams, as well as many more of my parents’ teachers. As I found that my teaching practices, the practices of my colleagues, and the practices of my parents’ teachers had common aims and a common purpose because of our shared fate as Black people, several questions entered my mind. I wondered what led these different groups of Black teachers who had

different life experiences to teach in particular ways. I also wondered how this form of teaching varied in different political and teaching contexts. With these questions in mind,

I decided to engage this topic in research.

Thus, the purpose of this qualitative research study was to study how Black teachers used emancipatory pedagogies in their efforts to help Black students navigate life in a racist society and work to counteract oppressive, racist structures. Through this study, I also sought to understand what Black teachers viewed to be their responsibilities regarding teaching Black students about racism, as I have found that many people believed that Barack Obama’s election as the first Black president of the United States in

2008 signified that the United States had moved beyond its issues with race and racism.

In my search to understand how Black teachers employ emancipatory pedagogies in the current standards and accountability context of teaching, I also sought to understand what measures of this movement teachers felt supported or interfered with their emancipatory practices, if any. As researchers have studied how Black teachers have practiced emancipatory pedagogies throughout different historical periods in the United States

(Dixson, 2003; Fairclough, 2007; Foster, 1990; Foster, 1991; Foster, 1997; Irvine &

Irvine, 2007; Milner, 2014; Walker, 1996), this study situates contemporary Black teachers within a long, historical line of Black teachers who have engaged in emancipatory practices in an effort to advocate on behalf of their students. Just as contemporary social justice advocates pay homage to those who did the work before them, contemporary Black teachers who engage in emancipatory, social justice oriented teaching methods must be understood as following in the footsteps of those who came before them. As racism has been consistently present throughout the history of the

United States, Black teachers have used schooling as a platform to work against that racism, adapting strategies to the different ways racism presented itself through different periods in American history. In the following section, I discuss why Black teachers should practice emancipatory pedagogies in their classrooms and why researchers need to study the ways Black teachers engage with them.

Research Questions

Racism exists in multiple forms and is experienced at multiple levels, by both

Black teachers and Black students (Collins, 2000; Knaus, 2014; Scheurich & Young,

1997; Vaught & Castagno, 2008). Black students live in an American society where they face the oppressive structures of structural, institutional, and societal racism, in addition to individual racism. Historically, Black teachers have played a large role in helping their students navigate their lives in this racist society (Fairclough, 2007; Foster, 1990;

Walker, 1996), but the contexts in which these teachers engage in emancipatory practices have changed over time. The most recent changes include the standards and accountability context of teaching and the social context that has oft been deemed post- racial (D’Souza, 1996; McWhorter, 2008; Speri 2014). These facts, along with my own teaching experiences and learning of the pedagogies of my parents’ teachers have led me to ask the following research questions:

1. How do Black teachers use emancipatory pedagogies to teach their students about

racism in an effort to help them to navigate life in a racist society and oppose

racist structures?

10 2. In what some describe as a post-racial United States (despite the omnipresence of

racism), what do Black teachers view as their responsibility in teaching Black

students about racism?

3. In the current teaching context of standards and accountability, what do Black

teachers who utilize emancipatory pedagogies see as challenges or constraints to

teaching their students about racism and how to cope with it?

Significance of the Study

Studying the ways that Black teachers practice emancipatory pedagogies and their perceptions regarding addressing racism with Black students is important for several reasons. First, this study contributes to the literature that focuses on Black teachers who serve as advocates for their students in their continued struggle against racism. There is a growing body of research that centers on how Black teachers have historically viewed uplifting the race as a part of their teaching duties (Delpit, 2006; Dixson, 2003; Douglas,

2005; Foster, 1990; Foster, 1991; Foster, 1997; Roberts, 2010; Walker, 1996). This study situates contemporary Black teachers in that historical lineage, describing the ways in which their advocacy in addressing racism is enacted in contemporary time and contexts and showing that Black teachers have not ceased to engage these teaching practices.

Essentially, this study highlights how contemporary Black teachers have followed the lineage of their predecessors, like my parents’ teachers and those who came before them, addressing racism in ways that are responsive to the specific contexts in which they live.

Another reason why this study is significant is because it provides insight into the relationships between Black students and Black teachers. This study helps us understand

how Black teachers convey vitally important information regarding racism to their students. It also helps us understand the ways that Black teachers perceive this information to be taken up by Black students, which is vital to those of us who believe it is important to provide Black children with the tools necessary to help them thrive in a racist society.

Finally, this study is important not only to educational researchers but also to those who are responsible for supporting teachers, including administrators and instructional coaches, and policy makers. This study is important to these groups, because it highlights how Black teachers pursue social justice while satisfying and attending to the multiple measures required by the contemporary standards and accountability teaching context.

Definition of Terms

The following definitions are provided to ensure understanding of these terms throughout the study. While citations accompany some definitions, I have developed the definitions that are not accompanied by citations.

Black: A person of African ancestry. 1

Emancipatory pedagogy: Referred to by King (1991) as critical liberatory pedagogy and first conceptualized by Ellis (1917), Cooper (1930), Woodson (1933), and DuBois

1 While there are certainly Black people residing all over the world, this study focuses specifically on Black people living in the United States.

12 (1935). For the purpose of this study, emancipatory pedagogies are ways of teaching by which teachers:

1. Hold high expectations of their students;

2. Employ a curriculum that allows Black students to become knowledgeable of the

positive contributions of their race;

3. Work to help their students gain a critical lens or consciousness to examine the

root causes of their oppression and develop ways to end it.

Pedagogy: The art or science of teaching; (Dictionary.com, 2015)

Post-racial: The belief that racism no longer exists and that the social and political contexts of the United States have moved beyond the ideas of race and racism, rendering race irrelevant (Ikenuobe, 2013).

Standards and accountability context: The contemporary teaching and schooling context, which began as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and continues with the Race to the Top initiative of 2012 (RTTT). In this teaching and schooling context, teachers prepare students for standardized exams that have high stakes for both students and teachers, as teacher evaluations and student promotion/graduation is frequently tied to such exams. Additionally, in the standards and accountability context, teachers work with a prescribed curriculum and must stick to strict pacing guides, which tell them what to teach and when to teach it.

13 Organization of the Study

The study of Black teachers engaging in emancipatory teaching practices in an effort to help their students navigate the racist society in which they live will be discussed in the following chapters:

Chapter 1 has introduced the background, problem, and purpose of the study.

Chapter 2 presents a review of the literature that focuses on the ways that Black scholars have conceptualized and theorized emancipatory pedagogies, as well as a review of the empirical research studies that scholars have conducted about Black teachers engaging in emancipatory pedagogies. Chapter 3 provides information about the means of qualitative inquiry that were used in the study, including the theoretical perspective, methodology, and data collection methods. Chapter 4 provides the narratives of each participant, along with the analysis and discussion of the findings. Chapter 5 includes the implications of the findings and recommendations for practice and further study.

14 CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

“The mere imparting of information is not education.”

–Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro,1933

Black scholars and educators have long believed that education was a weapon they could use to fight against the racist social, political, and economic structures that held Black people in a state of oppression (King, 1991). They were well aware that the education made available to Black children only sought to have them maintain their status of subordination, and these thinkers knew that a different kind of schooling—an emancipatory pedagogy—would be necessary for Blacks to work towards dismantling the individual and structural racism they faced each day. These scholars, including George

Ellis (1917), Anna Julia Cooper (1930), W.E.B. DuBois (1935), and Carter G. Woodson,

(1933), also believed that the use of emancipatory pedagogies in the education of Black students would allow them to participate openly and actively in democracy, pushing the

United States to make good on its promise and become the democracy it claimed to be.

This chapter begins with the ways in which Black scholars theorized emancipatory pedagogies in the early twentieth century. These early theorizations are followed by the ways in which contemporary Black scholars have taken up the mantle of their predecessors, continuing to conceptualize emancipatory pedagogies that are

necessary for Black students not only to achieve academic success but also to navigate life in a social landscape in which racism is so commonplace that it is frequently not recognized as such (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). I finish the chapter by discussing the ways that Black teachers have historically engaged emancipatory pedagogies and reviewing contemporary studies that focus on Black teachers who practice emancipatory pedagogies.

Conceptualizations of Emancipatory Pedagogy

Views of Early Theorists

Less than two decades into the twentieth century, George W. Ellis (1917), a scholar whose work focused on the people of Africa and the diaspora, called for Black students to receive an education that focused on truth, development, freedom, and Black

Americans’ contributions to society. He felt this would help the United States attain “the

New Democracy, where all [people] and races are in fact free and equal before the law”

(Ellis, 1917, p. 488). He knew that the educational system of the United States, particularly that of the southern states, was a hegemonic structure designed to keep

Blacks in a subservient position socially, economically, and politically. In fact, Ellis referred to the tactics employed by Whites to oppress Blacks as a new form of slavery, which he believed spread from the South to the North as Black Americans migrated to the North in pursuit of economic opportunities. Although Ellis issued a call for this emancipatory education, he did not believe it was likely to take place in the political climate of the early twentieth century South.

Anna Julia Cooper (1930), one of the leading Black scholars of the early twentieth century, wrote that Black students needed an educational program that was suited to fit their particular needs due to their unique history and condition in the United States.

Cooper noted that any educational plan designed for Blacks needed to take their past and present oppression, as well as the barriers they faced in fighting that oppression, into account. She also argued for an education that focused on the whole child, preparing the entire human being to live in the world, as opposed to merely teaching a student a trade that he or she would perform to earn a living upon leaving school. Cooper wanted all

Black Americans, whether they attended a traditional college or an industrial school, to first learn about and focus on being a citizen who is able to think independently and critically and participate in democracy. This notable early feminist scholar felt that this type of education would allow Blacks who held service jobs to “refute pre-judgments, allay opposition, and mold favorable sentiment without ever opening [their] lips on the

Negro problem” (1930, p. 254). Such an education, Cooper argued, would afford Blacks of various social and economic statuses the opportunity to fight back against their oppression.

In his well-known book, The Miseducation of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson

(1933) argued that Black students needed a program of study that was based on their study of themselves. The goal of this educational program would be for Black students to uplift themselves and develop their own power, as their oppressors would never be willing to elevate them. Woodson also believed that Black teachers needed to be revolutionaries and that Black students needed an educational program that allowed them to interact with an Afrocentric curriculum. This curriculum would include African

17 folklore, proverbs, writers, and history, as opposed to the curriculum during his time, in which Black students learned exclusively about the accomplishments of Whites.

Woodson argued that teaching Black students about the accomplishments of their race, instead of allowing them to accept the pervasive messages of inferiority that Black people had been inundated with for centuries, would lead them to aspire to equality and justice.

Woodson wanted Black students to participate in an educational experience that showed them that they were capable of greatness and not destined for inferiority, as they were frequently led to believe by the dominant society. He wanted this kind of education to spark a fire within Black students that would drive them to uplift themselves and the larger Black community, no longer accepting the oppression that had tormented Blacks in

America for centuries.

W.E.B. DuBois (1903; 1935), one of the most forward-thinking scholars of the twentieth century, agreed with Woodson (1933) that Blacks needed an education that would allow them to believe in their own strength and ability. DuBois (1935) explained that in an ideal world, Black and White students would receive the same education in the same classrooms. However, because Blacks lived in a state of oppression at the hands of

Whites, failure to obtain an education that encouraged self-confidence would allow

Whites to continue their oppression of Black people for their own advantage. Like

Cooper (1930), DuBois (1935) noted that Black students needed an education that was tailored to fit their needs because of their history and group experiences, but unlike

Cooper, DuBois questioned the industrial school movement. He critiqued the industrial school movement for not being a solution for the “permanent uplifting and civilization of black [people] in America” (1903, p. 78), as he believed that those who were behind the

movement sought to keep Black people in a position of subservience. He also stressed the need for Blacks to have faith in each other and in their institutions, because “if the

American Negro believed in himself…he would bend his energies…to seeing that his group had every opportunity for its best and highest development” (DuBois, 1935, p.

331).

Like many other Black scholars of his time, DuBois felt that Black students needed to learn that their race was capable of achieving great feats. A strong advocate of

Black elementary schools and universities (DuBois, 1903), he believed that if Black students were armed with the knowledge of what their race could accomplish, they would take action and seek to break down the structures that their oppressors put in place to keep them in a subordinate status (DuBois, 1935). This scholar believed that if Black students knew that they were just as capable of achievement as members of any other race, not only would they strive to achieve success, but they would also fight against the oppression that hindered them. Additionally, DuBois (1935) thought that this could only be achieved with the use of a curriculum in which Black students could see themselves, noting that Black students needed to learn about their history and study the works of

Black authors. DuBois (1935) believed that Black students needed to have a firm grasp of who they were and what they were capable of doing if they were going to face a world riddled with racist images and structures and still attempt to succeed. The following section highlights the ways in which Black scholars have continued to theorize and conceptualize the emancipatory pedagogies that they believed were best for Black children in the middle of the twentieth century.

19 Thoughts of Mid-Twentieth Century Scholars

As the middle decades of the twentieth century approached, and civil rights activists were setting the stage for the Civil Rights Movement, many Black educational scholars turned their gaze away from what teachers needed to do to help Black students in elementary and secondary schools navigate and excel in a racist society and moved their efforts towards focusing on ways that education could aid in “the improvement of racial relations” (Clement, 1944, p. 316). This included ideas like intercultural education, which had the aim of helping students learn “appreciation for the contributions of representatives of multitudinous racial or nationality groups” (Wright, 1946, p. 217).

Many scholars also focused their efforts on school desegregation, including how and why school districts should go about the process and the status of desegregation in different states (Bond, 1952; Clark, 1954; Wright, 1954). After the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and schools desegregated in the following decades, the Civil Rights Movement came to a close and the Black Power movement began to take hold. As Black students found themselves in classrooms with

White students and White teachers, largely for the first time due to forced desegregation,

Black scholars once again found themselves conceptualizing the kind of education that would be necessary for Black children to break free from their oppression.

Ernest Washington (1973), a professor and educational scholar, argued that Black children needed to undergo the process of political socialization if Black Americans were going to transcend the position of oppression they had occupied for centuries.

Washington suggested that this political socialization take place in Black studies programs that were run by Black people and began at the preschool ages. Believing that

20 traditional public schools have perpetuated the suppression of Black people, Washington advocated that these programs take place in independent venues outside of traditional schools, referring to the Mississippi Freedom Schools as a model for the Black studies programs to follow. The Mississippi Freedom Schools were part of a larger Freedom

Summer campaign that was created and executed by the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee. In the Mississippi Freedom Schools, students studied Black history, civics, and a number of other subjects from a curriculum that was based on asking critical questions (Adickes, 2005; Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999; Etienne, 2013; Street,

2004). The Black studies programs that Washington proposed would allow Black children to learn the history of Black people and have a focus on both radical and nonradical approaches to change. Specifically, the focus of these programs would be to help Black children deal with what Washington (1973) referred to as “the first question of their lives” (p. 6), which is “how to survive as a black person in a white-racist country”

(p. 6). Noting that this kind of program is “the key to our long range survival” (p. 6),

Washington also explained that attending these programs would benefit Black children by teaching them that they have a heritage of which to be proud, encouraging them to spark change in the traditional school curriculum, and helping them to deal with institutional change.

Having noticed that the idea of helping students attain a “quality education” had become popular, Asa Hilliard (1978a) sought to redefine the term. Hilliard advocated for

Black students (and all students) to receive an education that helped them to develop a cultural identity, engaged both students and teacher in a search for the truth as opposed to perpetuating privilege, and helped students analyze social and political problems. He

21 also argued that Black students needed a “decolonized, desegregated, integrated education for the truth” (p. 105) that focused on helping students build a critical consciousness (Hilliard, 1978b). Pointing out that most of the scholarship regarding educating Black students at the time came from a deficit perspective, Hillard (1978b) contended that an educational climate that allowed Black students to receive an inequitable education meant that White students were also receiving an education that was inequitable. This scholar believed that educators needed to work to understand the ways that racism and domination influenced the curriculum-making and schooling processes and confront that racism head-on if they were going to provide all children with the education they needed (Hillard, 1978b). In the next section, I will discuss the conceptualizations that have appeared as Black scholars have continued to theorize emancipatory pedagogies at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

Late Twentieth Century Theorists

Building on the work of the scholars who preceded her, Beverly Gordon (1985) proposed a two-pronged method to emancipatory citizenship education for Black students. In the first segment of this pedagogy, Gordon calls on Black intellectuals to gain a thorough understanding of the scholarship that Black intellectuals have produced in the past to create our own knowledge base, explaining that Black scholars need to

“return to [our] own traditions, history, and cultural thought, and begin to articulate [our] own cultural mode of rationality, independent of Western European domination”

(Gordon, 1985, p. 16). The synthesis of this body of knowledge would make way for a

22 Black epistemology, which this scholar lists as the first step towards emancipation. This portion of Gordon’s theorization also calls on teacher education programs to help preservice teachers gain a critical awareness. The other prong of this approach suggests that teachers allow students to use their authentic voices, ridding themselves of the colonial voices frequently perceived to be “normal,” and engage them in coursework that uses their own cultural capital. This approach also asks contemporary Black intellectuals to promote the work of historical Black intellectuals throughout the community.

Molefi Asante (1987; 1991a; 1991b) is known for introducing the critical perspective known as Afrocentricity to the scholarly literature. Afrocentricity works in opposition of the White supremacist Eurocentric perspective by centering African ideals and perspectives in analyses regarding African people and culture (Asante, 1987).

Rooted in the work of Woodson (1933), the Afrocentric approach to education centers

African people, culture, and ideas in the curriculum, allowing Black students to see themselves reflected in the curriculum as “subjects rather than the objects of education”

(Asante, 1991, p. 171). The Afrocentric approach can be applied to all subject areas, including history, biology, and literature, giving Black students the opportunity to see themselves not merely as consumers of knowledge but creators of it (Asante, 1991b).

Additionally, Asante (1991a) notes that the centrist paradigm is supported by research that shows that students learn best when the groups to which they belong are placed at the center of the context of knowledge, indicating that the Afrocentric idea is the most effective way for Black students to learn curricular content.

Lee, Lomotey, and Shujaa (1990) also proposed the implementation of an

African-centered pedagogy for Black children. They argue that this is necessary to

counteract the Eurocentric hegemonic practices and attitudes that dominate the educational landscape. Lee, Lomotey, and Shujaa also contend than an African-centered pedagogy would legitimize African stores of knowledge, support cultural continuity, and help students develop a critical consciousness. In addition to requiring that teachers hold knowledge of Africa and the diaspora, an African-centered pedagogy necessitates teachers’ understanding of the positive pedagogical implications of African American

English and the Black community’s need for political and community organizing.

Additionally, the implementation of an African-centered pedagogy requires that teachers believe that all students are capable of learning and be willing to utilize whatever time, resources, and strategies are necessary for students to succeed. While these scholars argue that this pedagogy should be implemented in public schools, they explain that this pedagogy is already in motion in Black independent schools and other Black institutions, including churches, social organizations, and community groups. They also issue a call for scholars to collaborate with practitioners in independent settings.

Black feminist scholar bell hooks (1994) draws on her time in a segregated school to theorize what she refers to as “education as the practice of freedom” (p. 4). She explains that having Black teachers in the Jim Crow south allowed her to experience teaching as a revolutionary act, as it was clear to her as a child that her teachers’ practices were firmly rooted in an anti-racist struggle. hooks notes that education can either foster freedom or reinforce domination, and educators who employ education as the practice of freedom can help their students liberate themselves from societal oppression. To employ education as the practice of freedom is “to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students” (hooks, 1994, p. 13), and it also incorporates an engaged

pedagogy, whereby teachers are actively engaged in self-actualization. It is important that teachers undergo the process of self-actualization, because they will not be able to view their students as whole people and empower them without their own self- actualization. Additionally, Black teachers who practice education as the practice of freedom understand teaching to be a political act, and they make their Black students aware that their learning is a counterhegemonic act. These educators also make sure that the voices of everyone in the classroom can be heard and that everyone in the room is responsible for the class environment and the learning of everyone else in the class, not just the teacher.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994; 1995) has proposed that teachers of Black students practice what she calls a culturally relevant pedagogy. The purpose of this pedagogy is to

“assist in the development of a ‘relevant black personality’ that allows Black students to choose academic excellence yet still identify with African and African American culture”

(Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 20). While teachers who practice culturally relevant pedagogy may have teaching styles that are incredibly different, they do hold some common beliefs and take some common actions. To practice culturally relevant pedagogy, teachers must believe that all students are capable of academic success. In addition to that, teachers must also believe that their students already hold knowledge and that it is the job of the teacher to draw knowledge out of the student. They must also see themselves as part of the students’ community and think of teaching as a way to give back to that community

(Ladson-Billings, 1995). Additionally, teachers who practice culturally relevant pedagogy cultivate a classroom learning community and have a connection with each of their students. They have a critical lens through which they view knowledge, scaffold to

25 facilitate learning in their classrooms, and incorporate multiple kinds of assessments in an effort to gauge student knowledge. Figure 1 illustrates where culturally relevant pedagogy and a few other selected late 1990s and contemporary pedagogies are positioned under the umbrella of emancipatory pedagogies.

Emancipatory Pedagogies

Emancipatory Educa3on as the Culturally Afrocentrism/ Culturally Ci3zenship Prac3ce of Relevant African-Centered Responsive Educa3on Freedom Pedagogy Pedagogy Teaching

Hip-hop Pedagogy

Reality Pedagogy

Figure 1. Selected contemporary and late twentieth century emancipatory pedagogies.

Contemporary Theorists

Black scholars have continued to theorize and conceptualize emancipatory pedagogies for Black students just as their predecessors had. Geneva Gay (2000) writes about a pedagogy that she refers to as culturally responsive teaching. This method of

26 teaching is emancipatory, because “it releases the intellect of students of color from the constraining manacles of mainstream canons of knowledge and ways of knowing” (Gay,

2000, p. 37). Culturally responsive teaching takes the home cultures of students into account, providing them access to the content of the curriculum, and thus, providing students who are frequently marginalized the opportunity to achieve academic success.

Additionally, culturally responsive teaching allows students to question and to understand that no single truth is unconditional and permanent. It also affords students of color the opportunity to gain knowledge from scholars of their racial or cultural group, showing them that their group is capable of producing knowledge.

Even more recently, scholars have begun to look to hip-hop in education as a method to empower Black students to work towards emancipating themselves from their oppression. Hip hop music is “a constructive and contested space for the historically oppressed and marginalized to both resist and challenge social ideologies, practices, and structures” which created and continue to perpetuate their oppression (Land & Stovall,

2009, p. 1). It seems, then, that a hip-hop pedagogy would be appropriate for emancipatory purposes. Incorporating hip-hop pedagogy allows Black students to interact with counterstories from oppressed groups, and it destabilizes the idea of meritocracy (Baszile, 2009). Hip-hop pedagogy also provides Black students with an opportunity to develop their own critical voices and challenge dominant discourses

(Love, 2014). Emdin (2009) adds that the use of hip-hop pedagogy allows students to gain full citizenship in their classrooms, providing students with the opportunity to take ownership of their learning. Although some hip-hop education scholars explain that their work is an extension of Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy (Hill, 2009; Land

& Stovall, 2009), other scholars argue that their work stems directly from that of Freire

(1970). Akom (2009) has proposed a Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) for use in teacher education, which creates opportunities for preservice teachers to analyze diverse data sets, including field notes, video, interviews, and artifacts from popular culture to begin working towards solving oppressed communities’ problems. Turner, Hayes, and

Way (2013) introduced Critical Multimodal Hip Hop Production (CMHHP), which entails critical pedagogy, critical media literacy, hip-hop music production, and student research projects. These scholars assert that CMHHP is a counterhegemonic tool that allows students to deconstruct schools as sites for the reproduction of inequality, disrupts

Standard American English as a site of power and dominance that is used to oppress others, and creates spaces for other social justice possibilities through action research

(Turner, Hayes, & Way, 2013).

Building on the concepts of both critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy, Emdin (2011) has introduced the idea of reality pedagogy. Unlike the predecessors on which it builds, reality pedagogy provides teachers with concrete tools that they can use and apply in their classrooms. These tools are known as the five C’s:

Cogenerative dialogues, coteaching, cosmopolitanism, context, and content.

Cogenerative dialogues are rooted in a hip-hop communicative structure known as the cypher and allow students the opportunity to critically reflect on classroom happenings and instruction to provide teachers with their insight regarding the ways students learn.

Coteaching alters the roles of the students and the teacher, affording students the chance to teach the teacher about their culture and the best ways to teach the students who are in the classroom. Cosmopolitanism is a concept that involves the students selecting roles

28 and responsibilities that help the class run smoothly, while context involves bringing the context of the surrounding community into the classroom. Content, the final C of reality pedagogy, refers to the academic topics that the teacher is assigned to cover over the course of the academic year. In reality pedagogy, however, the teacher is not the sole arbiter of knowledge, as teacher acknowledges her content limitations and teachers and students work together to explore disciplinary content.

As one can see, Black scholars have conceptualized emancipatory pedagogies for well over a century. While early Black theorists wrote about the kinds of education that would best suit the needs and condition of Black children, contemporary Black scholars have continued to do so, naming the pedagogies that they have conceptualized for Black students. While some Black scholars are theorizing hip hop pedagogy as an emancipatory educative tool in numerous ways, other Black scholars continue to conceptualize different teaching methods and philosophies through which Black students can work towards emancipating themselves from their oppressed positions in the dominant culture. The next section illustrates the ways in which Black teachers and learners have employed emancipatory pedagogies in an effort to resist their oppression throughout the history of the United States.

Engaging Emancipatory Pedagogies

During Slavery in the U.S. (1619-1865)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of African descent living in the

United States implemented emancipatory pedagogies in the most literal sense. Blacks who lived under the institution of slavery knew that learning to read and write could aid

in acquiring their freedom (Cornelius, 1983; Williams, 2005). Slave masters and state governments were also well aware of the link between literacy and liberation, as many states enacted anti-literacy slave laws in response to slave revolts (Gundaker, 2007;

Williams, 2005).

Although the climate in which they learned was undoubtedly hostile, laws forbidding slaves from learning to read did not end Blacks’ desire for literacy. Some slave owners willingly taught their slaves how to read. In a few cases, slave owners found it useful to have a few of their slaves able to read so that they could perform business duties for them (Bly, 2008). In the majority of these cases, however, masters believed that it was their Christian duty to teach their slaves how to the Bible, and many used the Bible to reinforce the institution of slavery, pointing out passages that glorified slavery or encouraged subordination. Unbeknownst to these slave owners, their attempts to reinforce involuntary servitude actually armed their slaves with a sense of liberation.

While being able to read the Bible did allow slaves to read passages that supported slavery, reading the Bible for themselves allowed them to read passages about liberation as well (Cornelius, 1983).

In many more cases, however, slaves utilized their creativity and resourcefulness in their efforts to learn both reading and writing. Many domestic slaves either taught themselves or tricked others into teaching them how to read and write, while others, usually males, were able to convince Whites outside of their master’s home and to teach them to read and write in exchange for bread or beer (Cornelius, 1983). Once a slave learned to read and write, he or she went to great lengths to make sure other slaves were able to have access to literacy. Family members taught each other how to read and write,

with grandparents and parents teaching grandchildren and brothers and sisters teaching each other. This was the case even when the entire family did not live together

(Cornelius, 1983; Williams, 2005). Additionally, in some areas, slaves and free Blacks set up clandestine schools in which dozens of people would gather and learn to read and write (Cornelius, 1983; Williams, 2005).

Literacy skills were instrumental in the lives of the slaves and free Blacks who were able to attain them. Perhaps the most important reason for this is because a slave who was able to write would be able to forge a pass to his or her emancipation. Some slaves did use their ability to write for this purpose, and they were able to use their writing abilities to emancipate themselves (Cornelius, 1983; Williams, 2005). Even for slaves who were not able to physically emancipate themselves, acquiring the ability to read and write provided important changes. Slaves were well aware that their owners only taught them what they wanted them to know, and learning to read and write, in spite of their owners’ opposition, gave them a sense of pride (Cornelius, 1983) and dispelled myths of Black intellectual inferiority (Williams, 2005). Literacy also represented power and liberty (Bly, 2008). Slaves were able to tap into other liberating qualities of literacy by learning about the fight for abolition. C.L. Hall, a slave in Maryland, noted that reading made him want to fight against slavery (Gundaker, 2007). Literacy gave Blacks, both free and enslaved, access to ideas like those in David Walker’s Appeal To the

Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the

United States of America, which Walker first printed privately in 1829. In this text,

Walker espouses abolitionist ideals and provided a de facto instructional manual for self- liberation (Gundaker, 2007). Slaves’ access to literacy also had the ability to change the

31 relationship between slave and slave master. Williams (2005) describes how Mattie

Jackson, a slave in Missouri, used her literacy skills to read the newspaper and gain information about the Civil War. Jackson used her reading and writing abilities to embolden herself, utilizing the information she read about the Civil War against her owners. She ended up leaving her master’s property on her own will. Other slaves used literacy to destabilize the relationships they had with their slave owners as well. Finally, literacy allowed Blacks to engage in intellectual dialogue and raise moral challenges to slavery (Williams, 2005). This was not the only time period during which Blacks would use methods of teaching and learning to fight racism and change the power relationship between themselves and Whites, as they continued to do so after the Civil War ended.

The next section includes a discussion of how Black people continued to use education for emancipatory purposes after the Civil War and the institution of American slavery ended.

Teaching Freedpeople

As the Civil War ended, and Reconstruction began, education for Blacks began to move towards formal schooling (Anderson, 1988; Fairclough, 2007; Williams, 2005).

While it is commonly known that White teachers traveled from the North to the South to teach Freedpeople, the newest American citizens did not wait on Northerners to come and rescue them. When the northern teachers arrived, they found that Black Americans were teaching each other. Although their reading and writing skills may not have been extensive, they took it upon themselves to teach each other what they knew in an effort to lift the race out of the social and political bondage in which it had been held for so long

32 (Fairclough, 2007; Williams, 2005). Additionally, many of the teachers who came from the North to teach Freedpeople were Black (Fairclough, 2007; Williams, 2005). Northern

Blacks felt a racial bond with the Freedpeople, and they felt that they had a duty to work with Freedpeople in acquiring an education (Williams, 2005). This is likely due to the notion that although they originated from different regions and had lived vastly different lives, being Black in the United States meant that they had a shared fate (Williams, 2003) and that they needed relationships of interdependence to survive. Both Black teachers and the newly freed people saw education as a means to end oppression and its effects.

While these teachers’ pedagogical methods frequently included copying letters and memorization, they were still able to practice an emancipatory pedagogy. They did so in holding high standards for their students, as White teachers frequently held low expectations of their Black students. Black teachers also practiced emancipatory pedagogy in the selection of books and readers that they utilized in teaching. As

Williams (2005) documents, there was a continual shortage of readers and textbooks, but

Black teachers refused to teach their students using materials that conveyed messages of

Black inferiority. Black teachers saw teaching as a political act that challenged slavery’s mandate on illiteracy and southern Whites’ attempts to maintain the antebellum power structure. They were not going to use instructional materials that suggested that slavery was best for Black people, regardless of the severity of their desperation for materials.

Instead, they used readers and textbooks that did not send messages of inferiority while teaching their students that they were just as capable as Whites (Williams, 2005). The next section focuses on the ways Black teachers engaged emancipatory pedagogies in the era of Jim Crow.

33 Upon Meeting Jim Crow: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Segregated Schools

As the social and political gains that Blacks made during Reconstruction were taken away and Jim Crow legislation was passed throughout the South, racially segregated schools came to be legally mandated throughout the southern United States

(Anderson, 1988; Williams, 2005). While it is commonly known that Black segregated schools lacked financial resources, it is here that Black educators practiced an emancipatory pedagogy similar to that theorized by Ellis (1917), Cooper (1930),

Woodson (1933), and DuBois (1935) more completely than ever before. Vanessa Siddle

Walker (1996) writes that at Caswell County Training School (CCTS), the Black segregated school in the North Carolina community where she grew up, Black teachers had incredibly high expectations for their students. Just as early scholars wanted Black students to know that they were capable of accomplishing great feats, these teachers conveyed this message by letting their students know that they were expected to do great things because they were capable of such. Not only did teachers at CCTS teach students to have high expectations of themselves, but the principal did not allow elementary classes to be grouped by intellectual ability level, because he did not want students of lower ability levels to have low expectations of themselves. Black teachers saw their job as one of “collective racial uplift” (Walker, 1996, p. 149), and they knew that students would have to believe in themselves to uplift the entire race. Like the northern Black teachers who traveled south to teach Black people who had recently been emancipated

34 from slavery, the teachers at CCTS embodied the concept of Ubuntu (Battle, 2009) and understood their fate to be shared with the fate of their students (Williams, 2003).

The narrative that the larger, White culture created and spread pervasively sent disparaging messages not only about the status of Black people, but also about their value

(Foster, 1997; Walker, 1996). In an effort to help students realize the greatness within themselves, teachers in Black segregated schools constructed a counternarrative about

Black Americans (Walker, 1996). The Black teachers in segregated schools knew that their job was a highly political one, so they constructed a narrative that told their students they could be anything they strove and worked to be, as opposed to remaining “in their place.” The narrative that Black teachers constructed “gave students no permission to view themselves as limited because of race” (Walker, 1996, p. 152). The idea that students were capable of doing anything that White students could do was instilled in them throughout their schooling (Foster, 1997; Walker, 1996). Like Woodson (1933) and DuBois (1935), these teachers knew that Black students would have to have faith in their own capabilities if they were going to break the invisible, yet very real, shackles of their oppression.

In addition to maintaining high expectations and constructing a counternarrative, many Black teachers in segregated schools taught their students about the cause of their oppression and their relationship to their oppressors (Foster, 1997; Walker, 1996). After discussing the root of their oppression, some teachers taught their students to ignore their oppressors and continue to push toward their goals (Foster, 1997). Other teachers, however, taught their students that White students were their competition and that they needed to be better than them if they were going to work against their oppression (Foster,

35 1997; Walker, 1996). This was a method that Black teachers used to help their students confront the racist society in which they lived. They wanted their students to be aware that they would have to be better than Whites not only in school but also throughout life, if they wished to break down the racist structures used to oppress them. This could only have been accomplished, however, in conjunction with the high expectations and counternarratives that teachers used to encourage Black students to believe in their own abilities.

Yet another way that Black teachers in segregated schools employed an emancipatory pedagogy involved changing the curriculum. Some teachers changed the curriculum to give it an Afrocentric focus, meaning they centered their curriculum around

Black people of Africa and the diaspora. Many teachers engaged an Afrocentric curriculum even if it was not a part of the school district’s mandated curriculum (Foster,

1997). This gave Black students the opportunity to learn about their history, and it also provided a counternarrative to White society’s notion of Black inferiority. Foster (1997) writes of one such teacher, Ora Benson. This teacher recalls creating a pan-African curriculum in Michigan after finding that her Black students did not find beauty in

African features. Benson realized that if her students did not see beauty in African features, they would not find beauty in themselves. She created a curriculum in which all subjects revolved around Africa and the diaspora, which allowed her students to learn about the accomplishments of Africans all over the globe, as she knew that her students would embrace their heritage if they were given the opportunity to learn about it (Foster,

1997). Additionally, it is worth noting that emancipatory pedagogies were not exclusive to the Jim Crow South. Although racial segregation was not legally mandated in northern

states, many northern schools were in fact segregated. As was the case with Benson, many Black teachers in the northern states practiced emancipatory pedagogies, as their students also suffered at the hands of racist structures (Douglas, 2005).

Although they did not take place in traditional, state-sanctioned schools, the

Mississippi Freedom Schools were also an example of emancipatory pedagogy being put into practice with Black students. In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC) created a program for Black children called the Mississippi Freedom

Schools, as a part of their Freedom Summer (Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999; Perlstein, 1990).

The ultimate goal of the Freedom Summer projects were not only to increase the number of Black people who were registered to vote in Mississippi, but also to increase Black activism in local, state, and national matters (Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999; Perlstein, 1990).

In the Mississippi Freedom Schools, Black students had the opportunity to experience a curriculum that focused on the positive changes that had taken place when Black people worked together for justice and equity, and the curriculum also revolved around open- ended questions (Adickes, 2005; Chilcoat & Ligon, 1999; Fusco, 1991). Students were encouraged to ask critical questions, and the goal of the planners, directors, and teachers was to have students learn to question why things took place as they did in society.

Learning about the history of their race allowed Black students to see themselves as a part of a group that could produce heroes. Students were able to make connections between Joseph Cinque of the Amistad and their own struggle for freedom in Mississippi

(Fusco, 1991). They also debated the merits of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

DuBois, leading students to question why they were familiar with Washington but had not learned about DuBois until they attended the freedom schools (Fusco, 1991). In

37 Stokely Carmichael’s freedom school class, students questioned and discussed the relationship between language, power, and resistance (Schneider, 2006). The freedom schools sparked a spirit of activism in local, state, and national matters with Black students, and many of those who attended credit the freedom schools for their continued activism as adults (Etienne, 2013). Although most of the freedom school teachers were

White, the conception, planning, and curriculum of the freedom schools came from Black

Americans. Additionally, many of the freedom school teachers were Black (Chilcoat &

Ligon, 1999; Cobb, 2011; Rothschild, 1982). The next section focuses on the ways in which Black teachers enacted emancipatory pedagogies after legally mandated school segregation ended.

After Desegregation (1954-1990)

After the United States Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of

Education decision in 1954, the racial segregation of schools was rendered unconstitutional (Brown et. al v. Board of Education of Topeka et. al, 1954). While the initial ruling was handed down in 1954, many school districts did not desegregate until well over a decade later (Morris, 2009). This hesitance is what led to my parents’ segregated schooling experiences, as they attended school over a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision was handed down. While teaching in desegregated schools, Black teachers understood that teaching was a political act, just as teachers in previous eras did. It appears, however, that practicing an emancipatory pedagogy became increasingly difficult, as the desegregation of schools created different structural barriers that Black teachers were now forced to navigate. These barriers

38 included job losses that decimated the number of Black teachers and administrators

(Irvine & Irvine, 2007), in addition to the racism that Black teachers now faced from coworkers and parents (Foster, 1991, 1997).

Although these barriers were in place, Black teachers were aware that they needed to engage their students in emancipatory practices as they experienced racism in new forms and contexts. Teachers practicing emancipatory pedagogies continued to hold the highest expectations of their students in the classroom, but they sometimes had to create alternative spaces to help their students see what they were capable of achieving. This included encouraging students to participate in extracurricular activities and creating programs outside of school that encouraged Black students to excel academically (Foster,

1997). Black teachers continued to talk about the root of their oppression and its continued existence, but these discussions no longer took place in classrooms, because both Black and White students were now present in those classrooms. These discussions had to take place individually and in small groups, with teacher-created afterschool venues also serving as a site for discussions about the oppression of Black people and resistance strategies that they could choose to implement (Foster, 1997). In the next section, I will highlight research studies that focus on Black teachers practicing emancipatory pedagogies from the 1990s through the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Contemporary Studies on Emancipatory Pedagogies (1990-present)

Just as Black scholars have conceptualized multiple forms of emancipatory pedagogy and Black teachers have engaged these pedagogies in different historical

39 contexts, researchers have studied teachers’ implementations of these pedagogies in their classrooms (Casey, 1993). The most widely known of these is Ladson-Billings’ (1994) study of teachers who were successful in teaching Black students, out of which Ladson-

Billings cultivated the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy. Culturally relevant pedagogy refers to teacher dispositions and instructional methods that affirm students’ cultural identities while also allowing students to develop a critical consciousness that would challenge societal inequity (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Some of Ladson-Billings’ study participants were Black, but many of her participants were White teachers who taught

Black students and used culturally relevant teaching in their classrooms.

Xu, Coats, and Davidson (2012) studied the culturally relevant practices of exemplary Black science teachers. They found that their participants had a genuine love for teaching science, which they believed was necessary to drive student interest in science. The teachers also established caring and trusting relationships with their students, connected science content to students’ lives, and exposed them to new aspects of science. Finally, teachers garnered students’ interest in science by providing them with hands-on activities, incorporating technology in their science classrooms, encouraging students to use a variety of forms of expression (including rap, movement, group work, and dance) to convey their understandings, and involving community members outside of the school building in science lessons.

In his study of four Black teachers who taught primarily Black students and practiced culturally relevant pedagogy, Tyrone Howard (2001) found that the teachers used holistic teaching strategies to teach their students about character traits and citizenship. In an effort to teach these things, one teacher took her students on trips to

retirement homes and soup kitchens. While on the trips, this teacher discussed stereotypes about Black people and the importance of not reinforcing them. Like their forebears who taught in Black schools during the era of legally mandated school segregation, these teachers held the highest expectations of their students, and they taught their students to hold high expectations of themselves. While these teachers expected their students to perform well academically, they did not attempt to change the speech patterns of their students, and they actually planned lessons that allowed students to incorporate verbal skills. Realizing that her Black students communicated better orally than written, one teacher moved back and forth between having her students talk, listen, and write in the same lesson to allow them a better opportunity to explore their thinking.

Johnson, Nyamkye, Chazan & Rosenthal (2013) studied a Black algebra teacher who held high standards for his students, both academically and behaviorally. This teacher expected his students to complete their work and perform well in addition to respecting him, each other, and themselves. He made them aware of his expectations on the first day of school. Throughout the school year, he would give the class what the researchers refer to as “speeches” in between portions of his algebra lessons, and he frequently incorporated Black English Vernacular (BEV) in his speeches. The topics of these speeches included the distinction between work and play and how student behavior transfers to a work setting and disproving those who thought that Black students were not academically capable of success. This teacher also talked to his students about the abilities of Black people, assuring them that being Black does not make them any less capable, and encouraging them to do their best to succeed, as it may allow them to overcome the oppression they feel afflicts them.

41 David Stovall (2006) conducted high school social studies classes that focused on hip-hop lyrics. The nineteen African American and Latino/a students in his class conducted historical research and penned reflective writings. They used song lyrics to provide social and historical context for their work. Stovall and his students held discussions as they analyzed lyrics from artists including Black Star and OutKast. The class also used the rappers’ lyrics as a springboard to discuss issues involving the schooling context, including deception, authority, and oppression. Additionally, the class used rap lyrics to question whose story is most often told in social studies classrooms and whose stories are omitted. Following these discussions, students used books, articles, and other resources to construct their own history curricula to propose to the school.

In another study involving hip-hop pedagogy, Marc Lamont Hill (2009) writes about his experiences using hip-hop in an alternative high school English classroom. The course took place during a high school night school program, so most of the students in

Hill’s classroom were students who had been labeled as being at-risk for dropping out of high school. Using hip hop lyrics instead of canonical English texts, students learned to identify literary devices, but they also began to critique their own notions of authenticity and gain a sense of racial pride, labeling Hill’s hip-hop literature course as a “black space” (Hill, 2009, p. 55). Finally, while Hill’s students believed themselves to be morally inferior to the generations of people who came before them, they were able to make a connection between the structural conditions in which they lived and their perceived generational moral lapse, believing that structural conditions were responsible for this change in moral standards.

42 Lynn (1999) conducted a study of Black educators who were “educators who expressed a commitment to issues of social justice and had a fairly well-defined sense of political, social, and ethnic/racial identity” (p. 612). While his study did not focus explicitly on emancipatory pedagogies, he found that engaging in such practices was incredibly important to his participants. After interviewing eight Black early career teachers, he found that their emancipatory teaching practices included teaching Black students about Africa, helping students develop a critical consciousness though reflection and dialogue, engaging students in self-affirmation exercises in an effort to empower them, and in some cases, confronting school administrators about issues of justice and equity.

The racism that both students and teachers of African descent face is not unique to the United States; therefore Black teachers practice emancipatory pedagogies throughout the diaspora. Howard (2014) found that Black educators in Montreal, Canada used

African-centered pedagogies to support Black students and resist structural racism in a context that values colorblindness. The teachers in Howard’s study engaged these practices in classrooms where Black students were the minority, and they faced resistance from students, parents, colleagues, and administrators.

In studying the emancipatory pedagogy of a Black teacher at a private middle school, Lynn, Johnson, and Hassan (1999) found that this teacher’s pedagogical practices aligned with Cornel West’s (1988) notion of Black prophetic practices. Like West, this teacher believed teaching to be a form of ministry. He had students compare their experiences as Black Americans to the conditions and experiences of oppressed groups in other countries, and he used students’ comments and contributions to strengthen his

lessons. Additionally, this teacher used pessimism, the understanding that his actions may have little impact on society-at-large, to drive his pedagogy, explaining that his pessimism is what led him to return to his classroom each day.

Milner (2014) studied the ways in which a Black social studies teacher invoked culturally relevant pedagogy to help her students develop a sociopolitical conscience. He found that this teacher made a concerted effort to cultivate relationships with her students, and she saw both teaching and learning as a mission-oriented responsibility.

The teacher in this study also wanted her students, who were primarily Black, to think about race both contemporarily and historically, finding a connection between the role race has played historically in the United States and contemporary race relations.

Additionally, this teacher worked to make sure that her students focused less on material belongings and more on improving the larger society and helping people. This teacher served in a variety of roles beyond that of social studies teacher, including parent and friend as students’ needs changed. Finally, she fostered a sense of both self-pride and school pride in her students.

Esposito and Swain (2009) also found that Black teachers used a variety of instructional methods in their efforts to implement emancipatory pedagogies. Many of the teachers in this study used both the prescribed curriculum and purchased curriculum materials to teach their students to think critically. One of these teachers told the researchers that she made a point to incorporate multiple perspectives when teaching history, and another taught his students to critique the reading passages and questions in their textbook. These teachers felt it was important that their students learn to think critically, because it gave their students a sense of agency. This group of Black teachers

44 also felt that it was important for their students to have a positive image of their race, so they provided their students with these images. One teacher did this by posting pictures of Black civil rights and political leaders including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Malcolm X, and Shirley Chisholm around her classroom. Another teacher taught his students about Africa, providing them with details far beyond what was printed in the textbook, and connecting Africa to their present lives. This teacher was aware that he was fighting against Eurocentric constructions of Africa, and essentially, he worked to decolonize the minds of his students.

Dixson (2003) studied how Black female teachers used race, class, and gender issues to inform their pedagogy. Dixson situates her participants historically within a long line of Black feminist activists, examining how they used aspects of culturally relevant teaching in their classrooms. Focusing on the political implications of her participants’ pedagogy, this researcher found that the teachers believed it to be their duty to advocate for their Black students, and they also built strong, positive relationships with students and their families, leading students and parents to trust them. Like the generations of Black teachers before them, they embodied the interdependent ideals of

Ubuntu (Battle, 2009) and understood their fate to be shared with that of their students

(Williams, 2003). These teachers also held high expectations of their students, made them aware of racial and gender oppression, and encouraged a critical consciousness in their students. Dixson notes that although these teachers did not self-identify as feminists or Black feminists, their work is part of a long history of Black feminist activism.

45 Conclusion

In the last two decades, scholars have increased the study of the ways that Black teachers engage emancipatory pedagogies in their classrooms. Some of these studies focus on how teachers use emancipatory pedagogies to make course curricula more accessible to Black students, and other studies focus on how teachers with social justice aims enact these pedagogies in their classrooms.

Black scholars have long understood that Black students needed a specific kind of education that was suited to fit their specific social position. Just as Ellis (1917), Cooper

(1930), Woodson (1933), and DuBois (1935) theorized about what kind of pedagogy was best for Black students, Black scholars have continued to conceptualize different forms of emancipatory pedagogy that they think will best serve the needs of Black students. Also,

Black teachers have engaged in emancipatory pedagogies throughout the history of the

United States, even as social, political, and historical contexts have changed drastically.

Researchers are studying the ways in which Black teachers practice emancipatory pedagogies in a number of ways, but they have not yet addressed what Black teachers feel are their responsibilities regarding teaching Black students about the racist society in which they live.

This study adds to the corpus of literature that focuses on Black teachers who practice emancipatory pedagogies with the purpose of addressing the racism their students face all while working in a teaching context that focuses so heavily on measures of standards of accountability. As the United States has moved to a social climate in which racism is simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, it is imperative that researchers understand the role that Black teachers play in helping Black students

46 navigate this difficult terrain, as well as the ways in which measures of the contemporary standards and accountability teaching context help or hinder teachers’ engagement of these practices.

47 CHAPTER 3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

“Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

-African proverb

In this chapter, I discuss the methodological approach and theoretical perspective that helped me to construct this narrative study, as well as the research design of the study of Black teachers who engage emancipatory pedagogies with the purpose of addressing racism with their students. I have included here a discussion of how my positionality as a Black woman with a particular set of beliefs, life experiences, and family history influenced my choice of research topic, analysis of the data, and my relationship with the participants of this study.

The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to understand the role that Black teachers play in helping Black students navigate their lives in a society where they will face racism at multiple levels (Harris & Lieberman, 2015; Ikuenobe, 2011; Scheurich &

Young, 1997; Wiecek, 2011). More specifically, I sought to understand how Black teachers used emancipatory pedagogies to help Black students navigate their lives in this racist American society and how Black teachers used these pedagogies to address the oppressive, racist structures that seek to constrain their students. I employed narrative methods of inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) as I sought to answer the following research questions:

48 1. How do Black teachers use emancipatory pedagogies to teach their students about

racism in in an effort to help them to navigate life in a racist society and oppose

racist structures?

2. In what some describe as a post-racial United States (despite the omnipresence of

racism), what do Black teachers view as their responsibility in teaching Black

students about racism?

3. In the current teaching context of standards and accountability, what do Black

teachers who utilize emancipatory pedagogies see as challenges or constraints to

teaching their students about racism and how to cope with it?

Theoretical Framework

Theories are lenses that we use to identify and solve problems and understand and explain social reality (Schwandt, 2007). Because this study focuses on the experiences of

Black teachers as they prepare Black students to live in a society in which they will encounter racism in many forms and at many levels, I knew that critical theoretical perspectives would be most suitable to frame this study. Ultimately, I wanted to incorporate a theoretical perspective that included a focus on race, valued my participants’ knowledge as well as my own, and provided my participants with the opportunity to tell their own stories. These priorities led me to utilize critical race theory

(CRT) in constructing this study.

Originating in the field of legal studies, CRT challenges the notion that racism exists solely within individuals’ beliefs and understands it to occur at a structural level where oppressive group relationships are maintained (Taylor, 2009). Critical race

49 theorists view race as the single most important issue in American society, and they seek to transform the relationship between race and power (Bell, 1988; Crenshaw, 1988;

Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995).

This study was rooted in CRT’s first tenet, that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, p. 7) in American society and “so enmeshed in the fabric of our social order, it appears normal” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 11). As this study sought to understand how Black teachers help Black students navigate life in a racist society, I was operating under CRT’s definition that racism is not simply an individual act, but it is also systemic and institutional—so commonplace in our society that it is perceived to be the normal order of things (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-

Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Taylor, 2009). It is this tenet of CRT that helped to generate the research questions for this study, in addition to guiding the data collection methods, tools, and analysis.

Additionally, CRT uses counterstories or counternarratives to encourage members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups to use their voices and speak back to their oppressors (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate,

1995; Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). This tenet of counterstory was also influential in the design of this study, as it led me to select narrative inquiry as the methodological direction of the study.

While CRT is commonly used to analyze legal matters and educational policy, it was useful in this study because it created a frame through which I could understand how

Black teachers view oppressive racist structures, particularly in the contemporary “post- racial” social context, as well as how they address these structures with their students.

50 CRT also provided a useful lens for understanding how the reform measures of the current teaching context (many of which were enacted under the auspice of closing the

“achievement gap” between Black and White students) either contribute to or inhibit

Black teachers’ efforts to prepare their students to fight their oppression. In short, CRT allowed me to comprehend how participants understand the structures that oppress them and what actions they take to work against these structures.

In the next section, I will discuss the critical race theory tenet of counterstory and why these stories are so important. As mentioned earlier, this theoretical construct drove the methodological direction of this study.

The Importance of (Counter)Storytelling

The epigraph that opens this chapter refers to the different ways in which history is told from different perspectives. As long as humans have attempted to oppress other humans, the oppressor has constructed stories about the people they have oppressed. As these stories are created and perpetuated by the dominant group, they usually paint a negative picture about the oppressed and become part of the master or grand narrative, which is the central message behind the stories, images, and messages that construct a society’s reality (Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). Members of the dominant class frequently then uncritically accept the stories created by the oppressor, but they are not seen simply as stories—they are taken as truths. In this case, because the hunter tells the story of his experience with the lion, the story that the hunter constructs by about the lion becomes the grand narrative and is accepted as the singular, universal truth.

Stories are tools that people use to construct and frame reality (Zamudio, Russell,

Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). In the case of the hunter and the lion, the hunter’s story becomes the grand narrative, and that story creates the larger society’s knowledge, and therefore truth, of both the hunter and the lion. The hunter is perceived to be a victorious hero, and the lion is likely to be perceived as weak, unworthy, or somehow destined to be captured or killed by the hunter. The grand narrative reminds the dominant group of its identity as captors and creates a reality in which “its own superior position is seen as natural” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2412). Throughout history, oppressors have constructed such grand narratives about the people they have oppressed, and the historical and contemporary contexts of the United States are no different.

The grand narrative posits the United States as a place of equal opportunity for achievement and a nation that has God on its side, picking and choosing facts to include in an effort to construct a particular reality. What the grand narrative does not do, however, is include the ways in which the United States has marginalized and nearly eradicated entire populations, including Black Americans, American Indians, Latino/as, and various other groups throughout its history. Thus, the grand narrative positions

White, middle- and upper-class maleness as normative, and it positions racial and ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups who have not had the American Dream materialize for them as lazy, inferior, or subordinate, either for biological or cultural reasons. Essentially, the grand narrative attempts to prescribe an identity onto our bodies.

For members of the dominant class who accept the grand narrative uncritically, and sometimes for members of oppressed groups who do the same, these negative perceptions of racial and ethnic minorities and other oppressed groups become universal truth.

52 Those of us who live in society’s margins and hold experiential knowledge of what life in an oppressed group is like are well aware that our realities and experiences and identities are different from those prescribed about us and for us in the grand narrative. Critical race theory scholars use counterstories or counternarratives to tell stories of experience that differ from those created by the grand narrative (Delgado, 1989;

Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995;

Solorzano & Yosso, 2009; Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). Solorzano and

Yosso (2009) define counterstory as “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told” (p. 138). Thus, counternarratives speak of the realities of marginalized groups, allowing us to name our own realities, as opposed to having reality defined for us by the grand narrative. While the grand narrative justifies the existence of inequality (Delgado, 1989; Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011), counternarratives “seek to interrogate why things are the way they are” (Zamudio,

Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011, p. 124). In essence, counterstories give the lion in the proverb above the opportunity to tell its history or reality.

The counterstories told by oppressed groups serve multiple purposes and speak to different audiences. Perhaps the most obvious purpose for counterstories is to provide the dominant group with stories that interrupt the message conveyed by the grand narrative in an effort to deconstruct it and introduce the dominant group to the different realities that exist for members of marginalized groups. Those who tell counternarratives attempt to build a bridge between their realities and the reality of the dominant group, hoping that members of the dominant group will meet them halfway (Delgado &

Stefancic, 2012). As Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) explain, “most oppression does

53 not seem like oppression to the perpetrator” (p. 57), and counternarratives allow members of racially oppressed groups to demonstrate how so-called colorblind, meritocratic attitudes and mindsets negatively affect them, while simultaneously making White people aware of their privilege (Solorzano & Yosso, 2009).

Another reason that members of oppressed groups tell counternarratives is that counterstories are a vehicle for “psychic self-preservation” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2436). As the grand narrative is so astoundingly pervasive and frequently taken to be universal truth, members of oppressed groups sometimes internalize the stereotypical images and messages assigned to them by the grand narrative (Delgado, 1989; Ladson-Billings &

Tate, 1995). Members of oppressed groups who undergo this internalization often feel demoralized, feeling shame and self-hatred for themselves and other members of their group. The opportunity to hear another group member’s counternarrative can lead those who have internalized the grand narrative to understand how their group came to be oppressed and that the groups’ social, economic, and political status is indeed not due to the factors implied (or directly told) by the grand narrative (Delgado, 1989).

Counternarratives also aid in “psychic self-preservation” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2436) in other ways when told to other members of the storyteller’s group. Counternarratives empower the storyteller, allowing someone from a group who is typically silenced to use his or her voice. They also empower the listener, as this person may have had similar thoughts and experiences as the storyteller but did not feel powerful enough to give them voice (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Additionally, counterstorytelling affords groups the opportunity to name their oppression, which is the first step in addressing it (Delgado &

Stefancic, 2012). Because these counterstories keep oppressed groups from having to

54 suffer their oppression in silence, group members can come to understand that their oppression is common. These stories of opposition also relieve marginalized group members from the burden of believing that their predicament is solely their fault, as they understand that many of their experiences are the result of membership in a group that is oppressed by the dominant society (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012).

As one can see, stories are an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to either oppress or emancipate. Grand narratives can perpetuate both racial privilege and racial stereotypes, constructing a reality that makes structural and institutional racism invisible to members of the dominant culture and allows both forms of racism to be maintained.

Counternarratives, on the other hand, allow oppressed people to give voice to their life experiences while reaching out to both members of the dominant group and members of their own oppressed groups. According to Delgado (1989), these two stories are at war, fighting for the hearts and minds of Americans in an effort to either maintain the status quo or create a new, more equitable and understanding reality. Ultimately, although stories can marginalize and stereotype people, they can also be used to build bridges, combat oppression, and humanize those who are often seen as less than.

Narrative Inquiry as Methodology

I utilized narrative inquiry as the methodology to understand how Black teachers use emancipatory pedagogies to prepare Black students to navigate and work towards dismantling the racist structures that oppress them. Narrative inquiry is a methodology that involves the “study of activities involved in generating and analyzing stories of life experiences” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 203). Although narrative inquiry is fairly new

compared to other qualitative methodologies, it is rapidly gaining ground in the social sciences and humanities (Xu & Connelly, 2010). Narrative inquiry focuses on participants’ experiences and how those experiences help participants come to view the world (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), and it allows the participant and the researcher to co-construct a story (Phillion, 2008). Through narrative inquiry, researchers explore a three dimensional space in which they look backward and forward in time, inward and outward regarding social and personal relations, and locate themselves in place

(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).

There are several reasons as to why narrative inquiry was a useful methodology for this study. I used critical race theory (CRT) as the theoretical framework for this study, and narrative inquiry’s focus on stories and experience works well with CRT’s tenet of counterstory or counternarrative. Critical race theorists use counternarratives to deconstruct the grand narrative that was constructed in an effort to oppress marginalized groups (Delgado, 1989; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Zamudio,

Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). The counterstories told by CRT scholars, like the stories of narrative inquiry, focus on the experience of the research participant. In fact, the use of narrative in qualitative research “has become more prevalent as researchers draw on critical race theory to bring forward silenced narratives of underrepresented groups” (Phillion, 2008, p. 283).

Recently, there has been a shift within the realm of narrative inquiry that has allowed the field to gain a critical focus. As mentioned above, this methodology is increasingly used to provide a platform for the voices of those who have historically been silenced because of their membership in racial, ethnic, or linguistic minority groups. This

56 critical shift in narrative inquiry allows both the researcher and participants to be critical and study the experiences and perceptions of a racial group that has historically been marginalized and continues to be marginalized. The particular type of raced narrative inquiry I have utilized with this study is specific to Black researchers and Black participants. I have worked with the participants of this study to co-construct narratives, completing four in-depth cases. Through these cases, I have worked to represent my participants’ stories in a manner that that honors their specific experiences while honoring mine as well. Regarding using narrative inquiry to study the work of Black teachers, Milner (2007) explains that “these teachers’ texts are rich and empowering” (p.

591). Because Black teachers are frequently perceived to be too radical, narrative inquiry can break down barriers for them to use their voices and be heard.

Finally, narrative inquiry is a fitting methodology for this study, because of my interest and passion for this topic. “There is no other [methodology] that makes the researcher…so transparent” (Phillion, 2008, p. 290), as narrative inquiry focuses not only on the experiences of the participants, but it also includes the experiences of the researcher. This has allowed me to delve incredibly deep into the stories and souls of my participants and tell rich stories regarding how Black teachers use emancipatory pedagogies to help Black students navigate their lives in a racist society. As noted previously, I am a Black teacher who used emancipatory pedagogies with the goal of helping Black students navigate their lives in a society plagued by many forms of racism.

Employing narrative inquiry as a methodology allowed me to be fully present as I co- constructed narratives with my participants. Just as narrative inquiry is being marshaled to conduct research that focuses on the experiences of oppressed people, researchers who

conduct raced or multicultural narrative inquiry frequently act as advocates because of their strong commitments to both the people and the research topic (Phillion, 2008), which aligns well with my positionality regarding this research study.

Researcher Positionality

As Denzin (1986) notes, “interpretive research begins and ends with the biography and self of the researcher (p. 12). As a Black woman, I approached this study understanding Ubuntu (Battle, 2009) as a cosmological space in which Black Americans live. Ubuntu is an African spiritual concept of interdependence, and Black people in the

United States (and throughout the world) embody this concept, because we understand that our oppression stems from our common group membership and interdependence is vital to our survival on these shores and throughout the world. Because of this cosmology and my lived experiences as a Black woman in a White patriarchal society, I also approached this study employing a Black feminist epistemology (Collins, 2000).

Operating from this epistemological standpoint allowed me to understand that the knowledge of Black people, particularly Black women, is subjugated, which required me to value the knowledge and ways of knowing of my participants. I also understood that their knowledge did not need to be filtered through institutions like the academy in order to be considered valid or valuable.

In addition to bring a Black feminist epistemology to this study, my position as a

Black feminist was important to this study for several reasons. The first reason is Black feminism allowed me to come to this study with the metaphor of research as responsibility in mind (Dillard, 2006). The notion of research as responsibility helped to

58 generate my research questions, as I believed it would have been irresponsible to ask research questions that focused on deficits or portrayed Black people problematically.

For this reason, I decided to ask research questions that highlighted how Black teachers went about engaging in practices they hoped their students would benefit. Additionally, the metaphor of research as responsibility helped me select a methodological direction that would honor my participants’ experiences and place their voices at the center.

Finally, the metaphor of research as responsibility serves as a reminder to myself to use this research to push the field of education forward in new ways. A responsible researcher does not simply publish research and leave it sitting idly, instead, she uses her research findings to work towards helping teachers provide the best education possible to the Black children they teach each day.

Site of Research

All of the data for this study was collected in College Town, GA (a pseudonym).

A medium-sized city known for being home to White liberals and a large university, I chose to collect data here largely because of convenience. All of my participants lived and worked in this area, and I also lived in this area while collecting data. The geographic location of the southeastern United States provides a context that is ripe with a historical legacy of overt racism, and the struggle for equity continues as the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) announced just before I began this study that the local school district (where each of the participants taught) needed to hire more Black teachers (Shearer, 2014). Additionally, College Town has been listed as having one of the largest wealth disparities in the United States (Aued,

59 2011; Bloomberg.com, 2014; Frohlich, Sauter, & Stebbins, 2015), and all of the public schools in the local school district have been designated as Title I schools, meaning that they serve high numbers of students who live in poverty. The next section includes an explanation regarding how I recruited the participants for this study.

Recruitment and Selection of Participants

To recruit and ultimately select participants, I contacted both university professors and middle and high school administrators in the local area via email. I told them what I was studying, and I told them that I was looking for teachers who engaged in the following practices, which was based on the work of Ellis (1917), Cooper (1930),

Woodson (1933), and DuBois (1933):

1. Held high expectations of their students;

2. Employed a curriculum that allowed Black students to become knowledgeable of

the positive contributions of their race;

3. Worked to help their students gain a critical lens to examine the root causes of

their oppression and develop ways to end it.

While I did not receive a response from all of the administrators I contacted, I did receive enough recommendations to proceed with participant recruitment. Upon receiving recommendations, I contacted the prospective participants via email letting them know that they had been recommended to participate in my study by someone who was familiar with their teaching practice. I also alerted them that I was looking for participants who incorporated the practices listed above in their teaching practice. Of the 5 teachers that I contacted, 4 responded saying that they were willing to participate in this study.

60 Relationship to Participants

In any research study, regardless of whether the study is quantitative or qualitative, the researcher should have at least an amicable relationship with her participants. With the use of narrative inquiry, however, the relationship between the researcher and the participants becomes even more important, as the researcher and the participant must work together to co-construct the narrative. With narrative inquiry, the researcher does not observe the participant from a distance, but the researcher becomes part of the participant’s experience and enters the participant’s narrative life space, creating narrative unity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Researchers enter all three dimensions of a participant’s narrative life space, making our relationships with participants pivotal in the data collection process.

The relationships I held with my participants were undoubtedly positive. Although

I did not know three of them personally before asking them to participate in this study, the fact that I had taught in the same school district as all four participants just two years before conducting this study allowed the participants to have a sense of familiarity with me. Because I had taught in the same school district as all of the participants and the same school as one of them, they knew that I was familiar with the joys and frustrations they experienced each day. This also gave me credibility in the eyes of my participants and allowed me to building trusting relationships with them quickly. Participants’ comfort and familiarity with me was apparent not only in the ways that they talked to me, but it was clear in the ways that they addressed me. Although I always introduced myself by my first name, the three participants that I did not know before conducting this study referred to me by my last name, just as they did with the people they worked with each

day. I had worked closely with the fourth participant in my last year as a classroom teacher, so we had a positive relationship long before I began collecting the data for this study. We had been colleagues as we taught seventh grade social studies at the same middle school in College Town. At the time of this study, she was still teaching at this school.

Data Collection

The ultimate goal of narrative inquiry is for researchers to study the storied lives of participants, create field texts, and co-construct, along with the participant, a narrative account (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). In creating field texts, or collecting data, narrative inquirers employ numerous methods including interviews, journal entries, field notes, pictures, and various other methods (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly &

Clandinin, 1990). Because participants’ stories emanate from both their experiences and their identities, researchers using narrative inquiry should employ data collection methods that allow their participants to tell their complete stories, not capturing merely glimpses or snapshots.

The difference between narrative inquiry and most other methodologies is that after the interviews have been transcribed, the researcher and the participant each review the transcripts, with the discussions about the transcripts becoming a part of the narrative

(Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). With most other methodologies, the participant is finished with the interview as soon as the researcher presses “stop” on the recorder.

Here, the participant is not excluded from the research process but is allowed to revisit the data with the researcher. Field notes also operate differently within a narrative inquiry framework, as they are co-constructed by both the researcher and the participant

62 (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Like interview transcripts, these mutually constructed field notes become part of the narrative that is shared between the researcher and the participant. As mentioned above, these new experiences in co-constructing field texts, allowing the participant to use her voice, affirm the participant’s identity and ultimately, allow her to tell a story of empowerment. Unlike other qualitative methodologies, the data collection methods employed in narrative inquiry seek to have researchers and participants create experiences that humanize participants, affirm their identities, and give them a sense of agency.

Individual Interviews

I conducted informal, semi-structured interviews with each participant. In qualitative interviews, “meanings and understandings are created in an interaction, which is effectively a co-production, involving researcher and interviewees” (Mason, 2002, p.

63). I interviewed each participant on four separate occasions, with the interviews ranging from thirty to sixty-five minutes in length. Each interview was audio-recorded.

Fifteen of the sixteen interviews took place in participants’ classrooms, and one individual interview took place in my home. While my initial plan was for these interviews to occur away from school grounds, my participants were incredibly busy, and they found that conducting the interviews in their classrooms best accommodated their busy schedules. Each of the participants in this study had responsibilities within the school building after school, so some individual interviews began as late as 6 p.m. This was beneficial because it was convenient for participants, but I do believe that participants sometimes censored themselves, because they were in the school building

63 and felt a sense of surveillance. Some participants would look around the room during individual interviews, even though we were the only people in the classroom and the door was closed, whenever they made comments that were unfavorable to the school, administration, or school district. Additionally, I had to make changes to my interview protocols, as I initially did not plan to discuss current events with participants until the third interview. The shooting death of seventeen year old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson and the ensuing events in Ferguson, Missouri (which occurred a few weeks before I began data collection) dictated that I address the ways participants incorporated current events in their classrooms sooner rather than later.

Group Interviews

In addition to interviewing participants on their own, I also conducted group interviews. All four participants were present at the first group interview, and three of the four participants were present at the second group interview. I completed a follow-up interview with the fourth participant after the final group interview. Each of the focus group interviews took place in my home, around my kitchen table, as I could not think of place where each participant would be more comfortable than my home. I recorded each of these interviews with a video camera. Both group interviews lasted just over one hour.

Artifacts

In addition to individual and focus group interviews, each participant supplied me with artifacts of her or his emancipatory practices. These artifacts include (but certainly are not limited to) lesson plans, class handouts, and assignment sheets. While I broadly

64 asked participants to provide me with any artifacts that they felt embodied their emancipatory practices, I usually learned about the artifacts as participants mentioned them in interviews. After they mentioned something they used with their students, I asked them to provide me with either an electronic copy or a paper copy of the artifact. I also continuously asked them to send me artifacts that they felt represented their emancipatory pedagogies as they came across them.

Data Analysis

I engaged in thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) in my efforts to analyze the data I collected. Thematic analysis is “a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 79). This process began quickly after collecting data, as I began to analyze one set of interview transcripts in preparing for the next set of interviews. Also, after I transcribed each interview, I sent each transcript to the participant or participants involved in that interview to ensure that I had accurately interpreted the words and meanings of participants’ stories. After collecting all of the data, I spent copious amounts of time reading transcripts, looking at artifacts, and listening to and watching the interviews, asking questions such as, “What exactly is she doing?” and “How are her views regarding racism influencing her pedagogical decisions?” After familiarizing myself with the data, I was able to generate codes, and eventually I was able to align those codes into themes. When I reviewed my initial set of themes, I found that some of the themes were not in alignment, so I revisited the codes I generated earlier and created a second set of themes. For example, with the

CRT tenet of counterstory in mind, I generated the codes “listening to students’ voices,”

65 “encouraging students to question,” and “encouraging students to talk back.” These codes led to the theme “Teachers encouraged students to use their voices and other platforms to speak about their oppression.” I reviewed these themes to makes sure they formed a clear pattern, and I also re-read the entire data set to make sure they aligned with all of the data.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed the theoretical perspective, methodology, and research design of this study. Using critical race theory to frame this study allowed me to make methodological decisions about this study that focused on centering the perspectives and experiences of my participants while providing them with a platform from which to tell their stories. This theoretical perspectives also allowed me to center concepts like counterstory while analyzing the data generated from this study. Narrative inquiry is different from some other qualitative methodologies in that the researcher is not some foreign observer who merely collects data from a distance and leaves to write about it. This particular methodology is both a phenomenon and a method, in which researchers study the storied lives of participants and work with participants to co- construct a product, which takes the form of a narrative. Finally, I used individual interviews, focus group interviews, and a collection of artifacts to collect data from participants. In the next chapter, I present narratives of each of the participants, the major themes that were present in the data after analysis, and a discussion of the research findings.

66 CHAPTER 4

RESEARCH FINDINGS, THEMES, ANALYSIS, & DISCUSSION

“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”

-Angela Davis, 1970

This chapter includes a display of the data collected, the themes that emerged from analysis, and a discussion of the findings. First, I present a narrative of each participant to help the reader gain an understanding of each participant’s identity, dispositions, and instructional methods. Each participant’s name has been replaced with a pseudonym. Following the narratives of the participants, I convey the themes that emerged from analysis of the data and display a discussion of the findings.

Participant Age Years of Teaching Grade Level Subject Area Experience

Destiny 37 11 7th Social studies

Sharhonda 37 12 9th Social studies

Xavier 31 5 7th Mathematics

Emily 27 5 9th Mathematics Table 1. Participants’ Information

67 Destiny

I first met Destiny a little over three years before our first interview. On the day of our first interaction, she was a teacher whose career had landed her in a new school after teaching at different schools in different southeastern states. More importantly, on this day she was the newest seventh grade social studies teacher, which meant that she was the person I would work most closely with as I also taught seventh grade social studies. Three years later as I interviewed Destiny for this study, a lot had changed, but a lot had remained the same. She was still teaching seventh grade social studies in the same classroom she was in when I resigned from my teaching position. Her inviting spirit and warm smile were still the first to greet me as I walked into her classroom, which was filled with brightly colored posters. Each of the posters had either a motivational message or photos of the faraway African and Asian lands students learned about in Destiny’s social studies class, like Egypt, South Africa, and Japan. It was as if the room was saying, “Come in! You are capable of achieving great feats, and your efforts can even get you to these cool places!” In addition to having had her braces removed by the time we began our interviews, Destiny was no longer the newest teacher in the building. Instead, she had been promoted to seventh grade team leader about a month before I began collecting the data for this study. This meant that in addition to teaching social studies to over one hundred students each day, Destiny was also responsible for handling the disciplinary issues of the entire seventh grade.

From the warmth of her smile and the calmness of her demeanor, it could be difficult to detect just how busy and active Destiny was in her school and community. In addition to her instructional and disciplinary responsibilities, she served on the school’s

68 positive behavior team, tutored students after school and on Saturdays, and had taken on the role of data team leader for social studies at her school. She even served as the cheerleading coach. Despite all of these commitments and responsibilities, her classroom was meticulously organized, with the sole exception of her desk. A self-described

“outgoing, creative, engaging educator,” Destiny was a petite woman with mocha skin and a smile that could be mischaracterized as sheepish. She was in her eleventh year of teaching at the time of this study.

Foundation for Emancipation

Born and raised in a midsized, southern town that is located about two hours away from College Town, Georgia, Destiny’s early schooling experiences set the foundation for the teacher should would later become. She credited her teachers for her career and life success. She noted,

I just remembered that our teachers always had high expectations of us. Most of

my teachers were African American. They had high expectations of us. I grew

up in a very poor neighborhood. We didn’t realize how poor we were, of course,

as children, but I never remember any teachers making excuses for us because of

that. They always had high expectations. We had Black history programs every

year. Those teachers had high expectations of us and they cared about us.

She also credited her teachers and their emancipatory practices with helping her fall in love with learning early in life. She explained:

I remember the teachers that actually practiced emancipatory pedagogy were

mainly my elementary school teachers. I think those were the teachers that had

69 the high expectations of us, that we knew supported us, that embraced us and also

celebrated our culture, let us know a little bit about our history. As I went further

on—middle school and high school—I saw less of that.

Teaching Toward Freedom

Destiny was able to develop a love of learning at a very early age, and this love of learning has stayed with her throughout her life. In addition to helping her develop this love of learning by engaging her in emancipatory pedagogies as a child, Destiny’s elementary school teachers also served as her inspiration for choosing teaching as a career. She explained that she has:

A heart and a passion for the young people that I teach, realizing that as educators

we are people of influence. Whether we choose to use that influence or not is up

to us, but we have an opportunity to impact students.

It is this heart and passion of which Destiny spoke that led her to teach in schools with predominantly Black student populations. The school where she taught at the time of this study was predominantly Black, but it also served a significant number of Latino students (College Town School District, 2015a). It is also this passion and concern for her students that led her to engage her students in emancipatory pedagogies in an effort to prepare them to live in an undoubtedly racist society.

A lot of my students over the years have told me they have really been

discouraged by their learning opportunities, or they’ve had people in the past to

say so many negative things about them being able to learn. It’s important to me

to be there to push and encourage and also help them deal with people that think

differently about them. I have to tell my students, even today, not everyone will

talk to you the way I do. Not everyone will care enough to try to keep you out of

trouble. Some people are expecting you to behave another way.

As a social studies teacher of primarily Black and Latino students, Destiny believed that implementing an emancipatory pedagogy was pivotal to the lives of her students. Although I was initially seeking to understand how Black teachers engaged emancipatory pedagogies to prepare Black students for life in a racist society, Destiny pointed out that such pedagogies were necessary for most of her students, as her Latino students would also be subjected racism. As she discussed why such pedagogies were beneficial to nearly all of her students, she explained:

In addition to understanding the standards and the curriculum, I think students

need to understand their role in society and understand that there are various

perceptions of them by others in society. A lot of the things that we talk about in

social studies have to do with society. Oppression, citizenship, rights, and all of

those things, so I think it’s important for them to understand that we live in a

society where they will face, or already face, different kinds of oppression so

they’ll be prepared to deal with it and to also find ways of challenging it as well.

One of the ways that Destiny engaged her students in emancipatory pedagogies was by incorporating hip-hop pedagogy into her social studies instruction. Having first learned of this method of teaching in a graduate school course, she liked to implement hip-hop pedagogy in her classroom, because hip-hop is a language that most of her students were familiar with, and it provided her class with a way to discuss issues of social justice.

Additionally, because the content of her course focused on the continents of Africa and

71 Asia, she frequently found herself discussing the international presence of hip-hop with her students. Because many of her students knew that hip-hop is an art form that originated from Black and Latino youth in New York, they found its global presence to be a point of pride. Destiny explained:

One of the main reasons I try to use hip-hop pedagogy is for social justice issues.

So it’s not just to listen to the music. It’s not just to celebrate the fashion and

other things, but there are a lot of ways that you can use it for social justice.

Knowledge of self and community is an element that allows the students to

celebrate who they are, to celebrate where they are: Their community, their

history, their heritage, and to also encourage them to be impactful in their

community, to let them know they have a voice.

In her incorporation of hip-hop pedagogy, Destiny had her students use graffiti to express their opinions on economic issues and concepts, and she also had students engage in a project that required they connect what they learned about Africa to the origins of hip- hop. Destiny noted that students responded well to these kinds of assignments, explaining that hip hop “is a language they’re already using.”

Keeping it Real

Destiny taught in a school where standards and accountability were not just part of the culture, they were paramount. Two years before her arrival, the school made adequately yearly progress as measured by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 for the first time ever. Prior to this, the school had been listed on the state of Georgia’s list of schools that needed improvement for six years and had at one point been taken over by

the Georgia Department of Education. For this reason, school and district administrators thoroughly monitored teachers’ lesson plans and observed classrooms monthly. In this context, administrators made it crystal clear to teachers that whatever they addressed in their classrooms had to be related to, and could not veer from, the state’s curriculum standards for that subject and grade level. Being the master teacher that she is, however,

Destiny did not allow this heightened climate of standards and accountability deter her from incorporating the current events that she felt were critical for her students in her instruction. Although the curriculum that she was charged with teaching focused on the geography, governments, and recent histories of Africa and Asia, Destiny was able to connect current events involving race to curriculum standards.

I really try to tie things in to our society, the current events. So even if we’re

talking about the governments of the Middle East, one of the things that we were

discussing today was the difference between Saudi Arabia and the United States.

And we talked about the fact that you have the right to protest the government in

the United States. You do have the right to protest against injustices as well. And

one of the things that we talked about was what’s going on in Ferguson, Missouri,

the Michael Brown case. That’s just one example of where citizens have shown

lack of trust in the government or being unhappy with what was going on. So I

think you can make connections and compare and contrast as you’re talking about

other places in the world. They need to hear about their own real life situations.

Destiny had to adjust her approach when she began teaching at this school, because of the focus on standards and accountability. Because discussing these issues with her students is so important to her, she searched until she was able to find ways to connect important

73 racial current events, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric

Garner to the curriculum she was tasked to teach.

I think that there are many, many opportunities inside of the curriculum. I think

we don’t always see those opportunities. We don’t always naturally make those

connections. So I say that I try to do it fairly often. For instance, when we start

discussing the history of Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians and the

Israelis, I still think that there’s room to look at people in the U.S. that suffer

persecution, that feel as if they don’t have the equal access and equal opportunity.

So I think there are a lot of places where we can do it. It’s just the matter of being

strategic about it and making sure that you are focusing on things that are of

student interest that they feel strongly about. And they are interested in the

events, even if they don’t look at the news as much as you would like them to.

But if you start exposing them to some of the current events, whether it’s just

through conversation, CNN News or other things, I think they really appreciate it,

because it opens their eyes to some of the larger issues in society.

In addition to helping her students synthesize and deconstruct current events that deal with race and racism, Destiny also has what she refers to as “real talk” moments with her students. Real talk is a phrase commonly used in the hip-hop community when someone is about to provide another person with unbridled truth. While the listener may not have solicited this truth telling, the speaker may feel an obligation to provide the listener with this truth and cautions him or her by using the phrase “real talk” before articulating said truth.

74 I usually just spend some time, I call it real talk, just having real talk

conversations with them about what other people may expect of them, what they

expect of themselves, what do their parents want from then, and what their

potential and ability is. A lot of teachers lower their expectations of certain

African American students, so I try to enforce the importance of academics with

them and also about not living up to some of the negative images or stereotypes

that people have.

Destiny engaged students in real talk moments either individually, in small groups, or as an entire class, depending on the situation. Although she had been engaging students in real talk moments long before this study began, she noted that she engaged students in real talk moments more frequently as she took on the responsibility of handling student discipline for the entire grade level. Her position as seventh grade team leader gave her remote access to other teachers’ classrooms as she dealt with incidents that took place in classrooms besides her own. Having access to additional information regarding what was happening in other teachers’ classrooms gave Destiny a greater understanding of what her students needed.

I think it’s really hard, because sometimes you have to have those hard

conversations with the students. The students that do great in the African

American teachers’ classrooms but they show out in the Caucasian teachers’

classes. But I think that a lot of times, as an African American teacher, I’m able

to pull a student to the side and not just talk about behavior, not just talk about

content, but just talk, you know, just real talk. Like what are you doing? What do

you want for yourself? What kind of grade do you make in my class? What kind

of grade do you make in that class? You know I had a conversation with a

student, I said, ‘You go to classes, and the teachers are inferring that you can’t

learn, that you don’t know anything. But then you come in my class, and you

make A’s and B’s.’ I said, ‘That is a problem.’ So we can have those kind of

conversations, and we’ve even had conversations about people in the dominant

society expecting them to fail. They will expect you not to know anything. And

in a lot of ways, a Caucasian teacher can’t have those kind of conversations. And

I have those with my African American and my Latino students as well.

Facing Resistance

It is these real talk conversations that Destiny was able to have with her Black and

Latino students, amongst other things, that led to conflict and tension between Destiny and her White colleagues. Although her essence was warm and inviting, she was certainly skeptical of the methods and motives of some of the White teachers she worked with. She explained that of many of her White colleagues had the attitude that “certain

Black people are okay, but most Black people I don’t wanna deal with.” As Destiny was protective of her students, she understandably found this attitude to be troubling. With the same token, Destiny’s White colleagues found fault in her emancipatory practices and expressed their displeasure through direct action and inaction.

Some teachers see it as if we are being too friendly towards the students, because

we actually have conversation with the students when they’re not in trouble or we

actually talk to students that we don’t teach. And then there are some teachers

that will not even bring students to me that they’re having an issue with but will

76 come up with a plan on their own and will not even allow us an opportunity to

have some kind of intervention with the student.

Because she sought to listen and understand first, Destiny understood that her colleagues’ negative position toward her pedagogy was not simply because they disliked her or how she interacted with students. She felt that the White teachers with whom she worked simply did not understand what she was doing or why it was necessary. She also felt, however, that their lack of understanding (and perhaps unwillingness to do so) created problems for everyone involved, including her, the students, and the White teachers themselves.

There are some teachers who may not come to me until something is really blown

out of proportion. And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ve been having trouble with this

student for two weeks!’ Students respond well to me and the other African

American teachers, even when we have to discipline and correct them. And I

think some teachers don’t allow me that opportunity to have an influence, which

thereby is providing support for them in the classroom as well. If I know what the

student is doing in the classroom, what’s actually going on, then I can intervene

and talk to the student, talk to the teacher, and do things in a more productive

way.

Despite the fact that Destiny wanted to work more closely with her colleagues and was willing to do so, many of them were resistant to her engagement of emancipatory pedagogy and her position as team leader. Some of the ways her White colleagues resisted included breaking the school’s disciplinary chain-of-command by walking past her classroom to take students to the office and by directly approaching her with vitriol.

77 She described one incident she had with a colleague who was having difficulty with a

Black student:

She comes up to me, and she says, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do with him!

He’s just taking over my class!’ So I told her I was working with the assistant

principal to find ways to resolve the issue, because we want him to be in class.

She said, ‘Well I can’t keep him in my class!’ and she continued speaking in this

raised voice. So I turned around and I walked off, because I’m not gonna have an

adult yelling at me in the hallway when I’m trying to help you with your behavior

management. She comes to my class later and she says, ‘I was just trying to talk

to you and you walked away.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you this. I will not be

disrespected by you. You were raising your voice and yelling at me when I was

just trying to help you.

While Destiny was proud of the emancipatory pedagogies she engaged her students in, she confided that participating in this study made her realize how those practices had changed over the course of her career and that she was not fully providing what she felt her students needed. She explained that as the years progressed, the focus on high-stakes testing became more intense. As a result of increased pressure to help students succeed on high-stakes exams, she had abandoned many of the emancipatory practices she engaged earlier in her teaching career. As she took time to reflect, she vowed to begin the next academic year engaging emancipatory practices as she had in years past.

78 Sharhonda

While I had not met her before I began collecting data for this study, I knew who

Sharhonda was long before I began this study. The middle school where I once taught fed into the high school where she taught, and when I asked my former students who their social studies was, the ninth graders frequently responded with, “Miss Snelling.”

While I never asked much beyond that, my students spoke favorably about her and seemed to enjoy taking her class, and I could appreciate that.

My first time meeting Sharhonda was when I first interviewed her. I felt my spine straighten and my eyes open wide as I entered her classroom. While the classroom décor was not extravagant by any means, something about this classroom, located in the bottom corner of the school building in the Freshman Academy, made me feel that this was a place where I could be proud, where I needed to be proud. The back wall of the classroom featured pennants from different colleges and universities, and a large bulletin on a different wall asked students if they were aware of their rights and how to utilize them. Additionally, one classroom wall featured newspapers from the civil rights era that had photos of foot soldiers who had been arrested in pursuit of social justice, and

Sharhonda had a bookcase near her desk that, in addition to holding social studies textbooks, featured a number of symbols of Blackness, including a statue of Queen

Nefertiti and the West African Adinkra symbol Gye Nyame, which means “Except God.”

Like their sisters and brothers on the African continent, many of Sharhonda’s students assigned her given roles, referring to her as “mama” or “auntie.” In addition to taking on the roles that her students gave her, Sharhonda had many responsibilities within the school building. She served as the cheerleading coach, tutored students after school

and on Saturdays, and she sponsored a service-learning group for the girls at her school.

On top of all of this, she was the coach of the school’s mock trial team, which she participated in because she wanted her students have exposure to the law and legal proceedings from multiple angles. She was in her twelfth year of teaching at the time of this study.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Sharhonda’s aura mirrored that of her classroom. Upon first glance, it was obvious that she was confident in her positionality as a Black woman and that she backed down to no one. It was if she said, “I’m good at what I do, and I know it!” without ever opening her mouth, dancing on the border of confidence without ever actually crossing over into the territory of cocky. I could imagine students in the hallway whispering to each other as she walked by, “She don’t play!” As she moved her arms to direct me towards the chair where I would sit for our interview, the arms of her jacket moved up and an ankh tattoo peeked through the edge of her sleeve. The curls of her black hair bounced as she sat down, and we began our first interview.

Sharhonda was born and raised in College Town to parents who she described as

“old Negro spiritual parents.” Her parents attended segregated schools and made sure she knew about their experiences living in a racially segregated society. She explained:

I come from parents that had me know. My parents would be very candid. They

went to segregated schools. They came up through the segregated system. They

remember when you better not cross that university arch being Black, because

80 they were from here. And they remember Black people being followed across

town and lynched.

Sharhonda gained this understanding of the experience of previous generations of Black people not only from her parents. Her teachers were also highly influential in this process. Many of her teachers attended segregated schools and instilled the lessons they learned in Sharhonda in her classmates. She noted:

I know from both of my parents. They had a stronger knowledge of self than

these kids do today. The only reason we got it is because we still had the residual

teachers from that era. We had teachers from that era.

Sharhonda also modeled her teaching after those who taught her. Her path to becoming a teacher was quite untraditional, as she began her first teaching position before earning a teaching certificate of any kind. Also, when she completed her student teaching experience, she had the opportunity to select her mentor teacher, so she selected one of her high school teachers, an older Black woman who was a few years away from retirement. Sharhonda described how her teacher education experiences influenced her emancipatory practices:

So when I came into education, the people who taught me came from segregated

backgrounds. They attended segregated schools. They started teaching in the

early years of integration, some of them before that. So their pedagogical

practices were that of teaching the Black child and what was best for teaching the

Black child. And so I adopted those teachings: Never address your colleagues by

their first name, be a master of your content and not just your classroom, have

higher expectations of students, regardless of their background. Those are the

things that they came from, teachers of color. It’s the way I was taught. I

handpicked my model and that is my style.

Not only did Sharhonda learn how to teach from her teachers at the high school she attended, but at the time of this study, she was also teaching at the high school she once attended as a student. After teaching at different schools in rural and urban areas, she decided it was time to come home and make a difference for the children in the community in which she grew up.

Because she initially wanted to be a lawyer, had worked in the court system, and held a history degree, social studies was the natural disciplinary fit for Sharhonda. She had taught nearly every secondary social studies course offered in the state of Georgia, and at the time of this study, she was teaching a government course. While she enjoyed teaching other social studies disciplines, she felt government was especially important because it was immediately applicable to the lives of her students.

With me being an American government teacher, what better tool do I have to

prepare African Americans for a racial society than teaching them how the law

will affect them due to color? When I introduce concepts like due process or the

Fifth Amendment rights, the kids—especially the African American males—ask

questions about the experiences they’ve had. I always have the students in the

classroom who ask those type of questions about searching property or

questioning or being unjustly harassed, because it came from real life experience.

I usually like to use those real life experiences to teach them to understand that

this is the society you live in and this is how you protect yourself.

82 Sharhonda used her American government course as a tool to help students analyze the previous experiences that they and those closest to them have had with police officers and other governmental agencies. She also wanted her class to arm students with the tools that they would need to protect themselves from a government that has harmed Black people since before its founding. She added:

I would like to best prepare them on how you’re going to deal with those

situations when they do come, ‘cause they’re gonna come. And usually, our kids,

by the time they reach fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old—when they get to me,

they already have enough war stories to tell that they understand that this is the

way the world is, but I need help understanding how I’m going to react to it. And

when you—especially the class that I teach—when you approach that American

government, yes we are talking about a bunch of old, White people who wrote a

bunch of old laws that benefit old, White people. But how do you best prepare

yourself to protect your Black skin from these old White laws that are written

mostly to oppress you?

It is this approach that allows students to enjoy her class. Students know when they enter her classroom each day that they are going to leave with knowledge that they can apply to their lives in a society that is plagued with racism, particularly as governmental structures go. Additionally, the dialogic nature of Sharhonda’s class allows students to speak about their experiences and contribute to the classroom conversation. She mentioned that:

This class is really an enjoyable class for students, especially students of color,

because they are provided the tools to apply to their life. They have the tools to

say hey, Friday night when I leave the football game and I’m riding in the car

83 with my brother and his friends, I know what to do. I need to listen to what the

police officer is asking me, and I need to be aware of what is going on.

Keeping Up

Like Destiny, Sharhonda found it imperative to introduce and discuss current events that dealt with issues of race and racism with her students. In the year that I collected the data for this study, Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren

Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Sharhonda took a calculated risk and began the school year engaging her students in this topic, although the school district’s pacing guide began the year focusing on a different topic. Sharhonda noted:

At the beginning of the year, Ferguson was still fresh. Michael Brown was killed

the Saturday before the first day of school, so some of the kids had not even heard

about it. We brought in a current event clip, and we started talking about it. We

began talking about the role of the police. What branch of government did they

fall under, and what is that branch of government’s job or responsibility? And

how were those responsibilities violated and the citizen’s rights violated? They

had no idea about American government. They knew that we live in America;

they knew that we have a government, but they had no concept of what this class

was about. So it was an excellent teaching tool, because they started out not

really understanding. What branch of government does the police work under?

They didn’t know; they just knew they’re the police. Well that’s the executive

branch. Their job is to carry out the law. What part of the law was carried out in

Ferguson? What law was broken? Where was his due process? It started making

84 them question the whole situation, and they started to come to me with different

angles, different stories. It also started having them thinking, questioning: Okay,

what did he do wrong?

This class discussion of Michael Brown’s death and the role and responsibilities of the police started a dialogue amongst students that led students to draw some troubling but necessary conclusions. Many of Sharhonda’s Black male students began to understand that they could have easily been standing in the shoes that Michael Brown wore on that fateful day. As she continued the class discussion on Michael Brown and Ferguson, students approached her in the hallway or after class asking questions about personal situations where they or their family members interacted with police officers. Although the school district’s pacing guide required her to wait until the spring to discuss the judicial branch of the government, Sharhonda felt a sense of urgency and decided to discuss it as the events in Ferguson unfolded. In addition to engaging students in discussions about policing and the judicial system, she provided her students with handouts letting them know what to do when interacting with police officers. The dialogue generated, as well as their own life experiences, led Sharhonda’s students to ask critical questions:

Ferguson sparked a lot of discussion about kids and government. A lot of them

did not trust government. If they trusted before, they questioned it now. They

wanted to know why there was deadly force used. We watched as a class the best

friend’s account of what happened, and we also looked at the autopsy report, so

we matched the account from the friend to the autopsy report, and they began to

question. ‘Well if he had his hands up, why would they use deadly force?’ They

85 also formulated their own theories. They were like, ‘He had to have his hands up,

because of where the bullet wounds were placed.’ So those types of things, it

sparked a discussion. Some already had distrust for police. Some start to

question police a lot. And that’s where the dialogue kinda started. Because you

know what the police are there for. You get in trouble, you’re supposed to be able

to call the police, and they’re supposed to be there to help you. But now, they

were looking at police as maybe they’re not so helpful or I fear the police for

whatever reason. It just started a lot of conversation: A lot of conversation about

the law, a lot of conversation about the state, a lot of conversation about racism.

It sparked a lot of questions. They were glued to the news for two weeks.

While her students did not automatically attribute Brown’s death to racism, Sharhonda and her students inspected the demographic information of Ferguson, Missouri. Students began to understand the importance of race when they saw that although the majority of the town’s citizens were Black, there were very few Black people working for the

Ferguson police department and other governmental agencies. Students continued to use the critical questioning skills that they developed in their conversations about Ferguson as the school year progressed, particularly as the Ebola virus became part of the 24-hour news cycle. Sharhonda’s students, with a heightened awareness of the role that racism plays in the world and critical questioning skills to match, were critical of the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention and other global health organizations, because Black people in Africa were suffering and dying at the hands of the Ebola virus while Whites who contracted the disease were flown to the United States and provided with a cure.

Additionally, Sharhonda encouraged her students to find news from multiple sources,

86 including international news outlets. Although students did not initially understand the reason for her suggestion, they were more than willing to oblige her requests after learning that news corporations were actually business that could be purchased and sold.

Haters Gonna Hate

Sharhonda was the only Black woman social studies teacher at her school. In fact, most of the teachers in the social studies department at her school were White men.

Because the teachers in her department mostly worked autonomously, she did not spend a lot of time interacting with them. Her school district, however, required that teachers who teach the same courses collaborate on lesson planning and work together as data teams to analyze student assessment data. The teacher with whom Sharhonda worked most closely was a young White male who was in his second year of teaching at this time of this study. In a discussion her interaction with this colleague, she explained:

He questions a lot of things that I do, and it’s funny. I know where the root of the

questioning comes from, but my stuff is effective. I mean, I don’t have to worry

about whether or not I’m liked or do all that extra stuff to build a relationship with

the kids. It’s almost like he views me as not doing enough or being inadequate.

Sharhonda was careful to note that most of her colleagues liked her and appreciated the work she did for her students. When she discussed the colleague with whom she worked most closely, however, she said again:

The way I teach government—I mean, I’m hated on. I’m just gon’ say it. They

hate on me! They wanna know why kids do for me when they don’t do for

anybody else. Well they can’t do for you, ‘cause you don’t do it like I do it.

Views on Teacher Education

This tenuous relationship with her White male colleague also led Sharhonda to become critical of traditional university teacher education, as he had matriculated through a teacher education program at the nearby university. While she believed that engaging students in emancipatory pedagogies and preparing students for the racism they will face were not just important but necessary and vital to Black students’ survival, she did not think these ideas could be taught in a traditional teacher education program. In fact, dozens of student teachers have their field placements at the high school where she teaches each year, and nearly all of them are White. Sharhonda once jokingly referred to her school as a “puppet factory” because so many preservice teachers spend time at her school. Although she learned her style of teaching from her mentor teacher and believed that the school where she worked was the perfect place to learn to teach, she was critical of the student teachers who she considered to be parasitic, noting that upon their arrival, student teachers often “act like they arrived in hell.” She also noted that “them babies gon’ take them degrees and go back to where they come from and where they’re comfortable.”

As I stated earlier, Sharhonda’s aura is one of confidence. Her presence will quickly make you assess your posture and stand up straight. After interviewing her on six different occasions, it was clear that she had both the knowledge and the experience to carry herself with such pride. It was also clear that she knew down in her gut what was best for the Black children who sat in her classroom each day, and she was incredibly critical of anyone who did not exhibit the same care for Black children.

88 Xavier

Xavier reminded me of a really cool high school kid who, despite his popularity, was interested in things that most people would consider to be nerdy. Xavier, like this archetypal high school student, was not at all ashamed of it. His posture and demeanor alerted passers by that he was confident and that no one defined his identity except for him. His smile, like his classroom, however, was warm and welcoming. The walls of his classroom were covered with brightly colored motivational posters that served as reminders to students that they were capable of achieving great things in his seventh grade mathematics course. In the front of the classroom, pictures of students that Xavier had taught in previous years hung above the Smart Board, and examples of student work were plastered to the walls.

Xavier was one of few Black teachers in the middle school where he taught, and he was the only Black seventh grade teacher. The student body at this school, however, was predominantly Black (College Town School District, 2015b). Like Sharhonda, he was born and raised in College Town, and he attended the middle school where he was teaching at the time of this study. Because he was so incredibly invested in his students and the community in which his students lived, Xavier could be found supporting students in their recreational activities or delivering presentations on changing mathematics curriculum in the evenings or on weekends. In addition to this, he tutored students after school and led his colleagues in using assessment data to inform the instructional planning process through data teams.

89 Learning to Teach

The son of a teacher, Xavier was the youngest of seven siblings, all of whom went to college. Such an accomplishment makes the high expectations that his mother had for each of her children easy to see. He explained, “My mom was my biggest, my main focus for education . In that household, it was either you go to school or you’re out. That was it.” He also lists his mother as being the first activist he knew of:

My mom was very involved in the educational system. She would always go to

the board meetings and raise concerns and questions and invite the superintendent

and principals to our home and have discussions at hour house. She was an

advocate for the whole community and not just her own students. She’s a very

firm believer in parental involvement and community involvement. Her

principles are the same as mine.

Although his father died when Xavier was a young child, his mother and older siblings made sure that he knew that his father also served as an advocate for social justice, working on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement in College Town.

In addition to serving as a model for activism, Xavier’s mother was also the inspiration behind his decision to become a teacher. While his road to becoming a teacher had a few interruptions, he knew that he was not mature enough to become a teacher at the age of 22, when many teachers first enter the field. Entering the field in his mid-twenties allowed him to have experiences that helped him develop new perspectives about life that he could apply to his teaching experience.

Xavier worked diligently to make the mathematics concepts that he taught applicable to his students’ lives. While he was critical of much of the lyrical content of

90 commercial hip-hop music, he did occasionally incorporate it into his lessons, because he knew that it played a significant role in the lives of his students. One example of an activity that he did with hip-hop involved breaking down sixteen bars, the length of a standard rap verse, to help students understand the concept of fractions.

Hide-n-Seek Curriculum

During each of my interviews with Xavier, he mentioned the notion of a hidden curriculum. His biggest concern was not with the Common Core curricular mathematics standards that he was charged with teaching over one hundred seventh graders. He was concerned with what students were learning from school rules and policies, and he worked actively to counteract the harm he felt the hidden curriculum inflicted upon Black students. The first issue dealt with the portrayal of Black men. As Xavier was one of few Black male teachers in the school, and the overwhelming majority of his students lived in poverty, Xavier knew that his students did not know many Black men with professional careers, so he worked to provide them with the image of a professional

Black man.

Not only am I trying to teach the curriculum, but I’m trying to put a whole

community, city, people, on my shoulder and to always lead and model through

examples. Number one, I always dress in suit and tie. That’s what they need to

see. They need to understand that professionalism, it’s in dress, too. So you have

to be dressed or people won’t take you seriously.

Xavier believed that having so few Black teachers in his school building was harmful to students and sent students destructive messages regarding who is professional and who is

capable of holding knowledge. He noted, “I feel like kids are feeling withdrawn in the classroom, because they don’t see enough representation that’s teaching them.” He was also critical of school discipline policies that absolved students of personal responsibility, expressing that he believed such policies ultimately set his students up for failure.

Another way that Xavier worked against the hidden curriculum was by encouraging students to pursue their passions, even if other teachers had advised them to the contrary. One of Xavier’s students, the only Black girl in his advanced math class, wanted to study the Black Lives Matter movement for her social studies fair project. Her social studies teacher, however, suggested that she change her topic, because she thought some people would be offended by her studying and presenting a project on the Black

Lives Matter movement.

Her social studies teacher told her that it wasn’t a good idea because she might

offend some people. I told her that it was interesting. I said you have to do what

you think is right. And I was really impressed that she went through and

presented the information at the social studies fair. She did a really good job. She

had a lot of facts. I got to look over it. I liked it, and I told her she inspired me!

Questioning Loyalty

This incident, whereby Xavier found himself giving a student advice that contradicted the advice the student’s social studies teacher had given her was not the first situation where Xavier disagreed with his White colleagues about what was best for the

Black students they all teach. In fact, he was highly critical of the approaches many of

92 his colleagues took with Black students as well as their motivation for teaching in the school where he worked.

I feel like it’s kinda hard to have the best interest of somebody that doesn’t look

like you. And I feel that a lot of our children are not invested in from teachers of

different cultures. They don’t invest in our children the same way that we would

invest in other people’s children.

Xavier had learned a lot about how desegregation negatively affected Black students from his parents and older siblings. Understanding that Black students faired better when schools were legally segregated, Xavier blamed forced desegregation for the lack of understanding between Black students and many of their White teachers. He also questioned the authenticity and beliefs of some of his White colleagues, posing the question, “Are you like this with me now, but then you go home and you’re totally different?” These questions and criticisms led Xavier to engage in his emancipatory practices primarily in secret. He explained:

I don’t voice it out. I don’t really say much about it, because it’s very personal

with me. What I’m trying to say is I just don’t wanna hear it. Because at the end

of the day, do you really have my child’s best interest at heart? It’s not about just

staying and grading this and grading that. I’m talking about do you really have

my child’s best interest at heart? I mean, will you come out to the community if

we have an event? And you have some that I feel like are scared to come out.

Like, ‘I don’t wanna go there,’ but yet you’re willing to be paid to teach that

community. There’s no connection. Like I said, there’s a disconnect between the

teachers and the community.

93 Although he felt like his colleagues would be critical of or fail to understand the ways he engaged emancipatory pedagogies in his classroom, Xavier did mention that he and some of his Black male colleagues supported each other in their efforts to engage their students in this manner. They met during planning periods to discuss their support for students and sometimes visited each other’s classrooms. Their bond was so strong that frequently, as they passed each other in the hallway while leading students in different directions, they simply made eye contact to express their frustrations and encourage each other to keep going.

Living in This Moment

Although the topics typically did not align with the seventh grade mathematics curriculum, Xavier made a point to discuss racially charged hot news topics with his students. He did not reserve these conversations for Black students and instead had them with entire classes of students. He felt that it was important that all of his students have an understanding of what Black people endured at particular moments in time.

I told them it’s very scary. I said I’m very scared. I feel that they’re targeting our

children. They’re targeting us, our young men. And I said, ‘You’ve already got

two strikes being Black and being a male. And I said you get a third strike when

you become education, because they know that you can be organized and you can

have a lot of power through organization. So you can’t get all this knowledge and

not do anything.

94 In moments like these, Xavier sought to encourage his students to achieve academic success and get involved in social justice pursuits. In discussing events like Ferguson, however, he also exposed his vulnerability and let students know that he was afraid.

You wear a suit and they pull you over and they start questioning, ‘What do you

do?’ or ‘How can you afford this?’ You gotta be kinda weary. Now I feel

comfortable in my neighborhood and wherever I go in [College Town], because

my lineage has been here. I feel comfortable here, but what if I went somewhere

else and they look like that and I get targeted? You gotta be very cautious.

Because his students are only twelve years old, he does not believe that they understand the heavy weight that racism bears on their lives and the role it plays in incidents such as the death of Michael Brown and the ensuing events in Ferguson, Missouri. As he discussed his concerns with his classes, however, students began to ask questions that let him know that racism had made its way onto the radar of many of his students, Black and

White.

Moving Forward

Throughout our time together, Xavier expressed interest in lots of community issues and policy changes that were taking place within the school district where he worked. Shortly before our first interview, the superintendent had announced his interest in having the district become a charter school district. Xavier was incredibly concerned with how this transition would affect both students and teachers. He was more concerned, however, that the parents of his Black students were uninformed regarding the issue, and he felt that he did not have enough knowledge to assist them in any kind of

95 advocacy. He also informed me that his participation in this study made him reflect more on his teaching practice and how it affected Black students. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that the public school system was too restrictive and would not solve the structural problems that perpetuated the poverty that his students endured. He decided that he could better provide his students with the tools they would need to thrive in the face of racism and work towards dismantling it in either a charter school or a private school. In our final focus group interview, Xavier attempted to recruit the other participants to join him in this endeavor. He told them that the school would have an

Afrocentric curriculum and that students would trace their ancestry so that they could have a better understanding of who they were. Following his family’s legacy of activism and advocacy, he also discussed the possibility of running for county commissioner.

Emily

At first glance, Emily could easily have been confused for one of the high school students she taught. Petite in stature with a youthful face, she embodied a quiet confidence that someone could have mistaken for a lack thereof. While I did not know her personally before our first interview, her reputation preceded her, as she was known as being one of the best high school mathematics teachers in her school district. The middle school where I taught served as a feeder school for the high school where she taught ninth grade Algebra, and my former students told me that they thoroughly enjoyed the time they spent in her classroom. In fact, Emily and Sharhonda were colleagues, and they both taught ninth grade at the same high school. The youngest of the participants,

96 she was twenty-seven years old at the time of this study, although she carried herself as if she were much older.

In addition to being one of her school district’s most successful math teachers, she also served her school in many different capacities. Her plate was so full that when I asked about her school involvement beyond classroom teaching, she told me, “I might need to pull up my resume.” Emily served as the team leader for the freshman academy, tutored students afterschool and on Saturdays, and worked as the head coach for the girls’ tennis team. In addition to all of these roles, she served on several school committees, including the positive behavior team, the response-to-invention committee, and the professional learning team. She also helped out with the school’s marching band.

Having so many commitments made it clear that Emily liked to be involved in the school community. In fact, she openly admitted to getting involved in some of these positions because she felt that the leaders who were in place were ineffective.

Early Encounters

Emily’s understanding of and response to racism had evolved quite a bit over the course of her life. Although she was born and raised in a rural, south Georgia town where an annual celebration involved her White neighbors (some of whom were her friends) riding around in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, she was not always able to recognize racism for what it was until she was older and began to analyze the experiences of her youth. She described one experience she had as a child:

I remember the worst situation was in elementary school. I had all A’s and I was

getting recognized for it. I got the top awards in all the classes and one of my

friends did, too. We were both Black. And so on the playground, a bunch of

White people tried to jump us. So then a lot of Black people tried to get involved.

This was in the third grade. The teachers broke it up, but no one was punished for

jumping on us. The teachers were also White.

This would certainly not be the last time that White teachers passively allowed students to inflict violence on her. She credits these teachers and their passive nature for her dislike of history and social studies classes. All of these events took place in a high school where the majority of students were White, but there was also a significant Black student population. She discussed how she frequently left her high school social studies classes riddled with anger:

I felt like the teacher should not have let them say the things they did. But instead

of correcting them for being wrong or even correcting some of us, they kept

trying to play a neutral thing and then we left the class mad, with it unaddressed.

Even when we watched in US History all these people getting beat, and it’s just

like why are you showing us this? I know you wanna get your point across about

slavery, but how much did we really have to watch during class of them being

beat? You could see some of us were in tears or hurting and other kids smirking

or not being bothered. That was probably one of the worst experiences ever.

Instead of believing that her teachers were racist, Emily referred to them as “trying to play neutral,” not addressing the students who were hurting from exposure to the images or by addressing those who appeared to find pleasure in the images. Instead of blaming her teachers, she explained that she “felt like they never understood. I barely understood.” She also explained that the first time she fully recognized her classmates’

98 words and actions as racist came as her high school graduation approached. After she was announced as the salutatorian of her class, many of her classmates did not believe she was deserving of the honor, even though she had taken advanced and Advanced

Placement courses and succeeded.

A Whole New World

Emily had very few Black teachers over the course of her K-12 education, and none of them were math teachers. She frequently saw her classmates struggling and offered to help them, eventually tutoring local college students. She wanted Black students to know that they, too, could be successful in the field of mathematics which is why she decided to become a math teacher. She attended a large predominantly White university, where students in teacher education courses questioned her presence as having been the result of affirmative action. She recalled, “That was the first time realizing maybe my dad is right. Racism is still going on.” Additionally, as a mathematics education major, she also combated the beliefs of professors who doubted her ability because she majored in mathematics education and not simply mathematics. Emily held a firm belief that she needed to defy stereotypes about Black women and therefore worked tirelessly to achieve the highest grades possible.

As she approached the end of her teacher education process, she was assigned to complete student teaching in the school where she worked at the time of this study.

Shockingly, student teaching in this school was the first time that Emily found herself in an environment that was predominantly Black. Juxtaposed with the overwhelming

99 Whiteness of the university that sits in the center of the town, Emily found herself in awe when she arrived at the school for the first time.

When I started teaching and I saw this many Black people, I was like, ‘What?’

Where have all these Black people been this whole time? I only saw Black

people when you go to [the student union]!

Algebra with a Side of Anti-Racism

Although this context was new for Emily, she felt that God called her to this school to teach. Also, while her overall mission was to help Black students understand that success in mathematics is not exclusive to White and Asian students, she quickly explained that she also engaged Latino students in her emancipatory work because they also suffer at the hands of multiple systems of oppression.

Just as Emily worked voraciously to counter the stereotypical beliefs that others placed on her Black female body, she encouraged her students to do the same. She frequently found herself having individual conversations with students, particularly as she saw students shut down and refuse to engage in the classrooms of teachers who had low expectations of them. She described how these conversations usually went:

I’m always trying to talk to them about people already see you in a certain way.

Let’s prove them wrong. ‘Oh, I don’t like this teacher.’ Well if you don’t like

this teacher, then prove to them that you can do it, because you’re already going

in class and they’re thinking this is how you’re going to act. This is how you’re

going to do your work. You’re not going to pass this class. They’re already

having that stereotype.

100 Because she taught mathematics, and students frequently struggled in that subject area, Emily worked tirelessly to stay within the school district-mandated pacing guide and testing windows. She also kept her class focused on Coordinate Algebra topics during instructional time, as she explained, “you never know when they’re coming.” In that statement, Emily was referring to school district and school building administrators, as they observed teachers at least monthly, just as they did at the school where Destiny taught. On top of this, the state changed the curriculum for the course she taught a year or two prior to this study, as she explained, “I felt like with the changes in math in the last three years, it’s been really hard for me to do the things I used to do.” Before the changes in curriculum, Emily teamed up with one of the social studies teachers in her school to have students complete an interdisciplinary unit that incorporated Black history and mathematics. With a changing curriculum that required more time to plan instruction, however, Emily simply could not find the time to collaborate and incorporate this unit.

Because of these obstacles, she reserved most of her emancipatory work for before and after school, lunchtime, and individual conversations with students. The omnipresence of administrators who expected her to deliver mathematics instruction at all times, however, did not deter her from discussing topics that she believed were vitally important to the lives of her students. Included in these important topics were the death of Michael

Brown and the subsequent incidents of police officers killing Black people that comprised the 24-hour news cycle during the year I completed this study. In discussing these events with her students, she shared her own harrowing police interaction with her students:

101 I had to have the conversation with them. I’ve been there before, too. Because

even in college a cop tried to put out a warrant for my arrest and say that I had

someone slash his tires, because I said I was putting the situation in the hands of

God. What happened was we were standing outside our apartment and the cop

told us to stop soliciting and that we couldn’t be hanging around. We were like,

‘We live here!’ And he really just gave us a hassle and arrested one of our

friends. Meanwhile, a White guy was in his face, fussing at him. So at that point

I started feeling a certain way towards policemen as well.

Although she shared this negative police encounter with her students, Emily also cautioned them that they could not assign a negative label to all police officers because of the actions of a few. This seemed somewhat fitting, because she had spent her entire life working to shake the labels that other people placed on her because of her positionality as a Black woman.

Though many of her emancipatory pedagogies took place outside of instructional time, Emily did find ways to incorporate concepts of race and social justice into her mathematics instruction. When teaching a unit on data, Emily included criminal justice statistics in her lesson, and when she taught AP Statistics, she had her students statistically analyze the words in Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

When I asked her if I could see handouts that included this data that sometimes sparked class discussions or led to students to ask critical questions, Emily told me that she did not keep any of this information in writing. Her explanation was that “I don’t necessarily type out everything I say, ‘cause I’ve learned that anything you put in an email or

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anything you put anywhere in writing online can easily be pulled up like this,” as she snapped her fingers.

Emily described herself as a “student advocate” on several different occasions.

Although she had the respect and admiration of her students, she told me in our first meeting, “I get really offended. More students like me than teachers.” While Sharhonda, her colleague, worked to prepare Black students for racism outside of the school building,

Emily was working to dismantle it within the school building. She added:

I get very frustrated when I hear certain teachers say, ‘This kid can’t do that,’ or

‘They’re gonna drop out before they’re sixteen.’ And that is one thing that pushes

me and motivates me even more.

Not only did Emily feel pressure to work against her White colleagues’ low expectations of their Black and Latino students, but she also struggled to gain their respect. Although her students scored higher on state-mandated tests than students anywhere else in the school district, Emily’s colleagues refused to give her credit for a job well done. Instead, they dismissed her instructional efforts, telling her, ‘Oh, they just do good for you because you’re Black.’

Sharpening the Lens

While the other three participants in this study were relatively advanced in their emancipatory practices and their beliefs about racism, I would describe Emily’s engagement with emancipatory pedagogies as emerging. As she described her development, both as an educator and as a Black woman, it appeared as though she had developed a critical lens as she grew older. She also noted that participating in this study

103 helped her to sharpen that critical lens and reflect on how to incorporate it into her teaching:

I think, because of a lot of bad experiences I’ve had, I try to ignore racism. I’ve

tried to—going to college, growing up in the country, playing on the tennis team

with all white folks, I had forgotten at one point that Black is beautiful.

Sometimes I used to get embarrassed about who I was. I didn’t understand why

people thought all Black people were a certain way. I would laugh at the

stereotypes. I would make White folks feel comfortable with talking about us in

front of me. This study made me realize that I need to start back paying attention

and not get too comfortable. I already have those sneaky conversations on the

side with my Black kids, like “They already think you can’t do it. Just because

you don’t like ‘em, that doesn’t mean you go in there and prove to them that you

can’t do anything!’ So I do have those conversations on the side, but I need to be

doing more. I’ve reflected quite a bit on some of your questions. It’s got me

thinking.

Analysis

Using critical race theory as the theoretical perspective that guided this study allowed me to the ways that participants responded to the permanence of racism and the ways in which they told their counterstories. With these ideas in mind as I analyzed the data, five themes were generated: (1) teachers sought to keep their students grounded by alerting them of the inevitability of racism, (2) teachers sought to interrupt the racism that their White colleagues’ exhibited, (3) teachers learned to engage in emancipatory

104

practices from their past experiences, (4) teachers encouraged students to use their voices and various platforms to speak about their oppression, and (5) teachers engaged emancipatory pedagogies in overt and covert ways depending on the social context and the teaching context.

Theme 1: Teachers sought to keep their students grounded by alerting them of the inevitability of racism.

While some people believe that children should be sheltered from the evils of the world, the teachers who participated in this study believed it was their responsibility to alert students of the racism that they believed would inevitably find its way into the lives of the Black students they taught. Participants felt so strongly about this that when I asked the group for their thoughts on the role of Black teachers teaching Black students about racism, Sharhonda’s immediate response was to say, “It would be irresponsible not to.” Following her comment, the rest of the group nodded and hummed in agreement as if she were a pastor preaching the gospel on a Sunday morning.

Destiny went about alerting her students to the inevitability of racism by having what she referred to as “real talk moments” with her students. In the hip-hop community,

“real talk” is a phrase that is used to caution the listener that the speaker is about to provide unbridled truth, regardless of whether or not this brutal honesty was solicited. In these moments, Destiny made students aware of the lowered standard that society set for them because of their race, and she had them compare their abilities to the expectations that the larger society had for them. She took the time to have these “real talk moments” with her students, because she believed that in addition to learning the prescribed

105 curriculum, Black students needed to “understand that there are various perceptions of them by others in society.” She also explained, “…I think it’s important for them to understand that we live in a society where they will face, or already do face, different kinds of oppression.” Destiny believed that helping students understand the inevitability of racism would ultimately help them deal with it and find ways to challenge it.

While she did not refer to them as such, Emily also had “real talk moments” with her students. Whenever she saw students performing at levels much lower that what they were capable of, Emily would pull those students to the side and have conversations with them. These brief conversations focused on the idea that although the student did not realize it, he or she was performing to the low levels expected of him or her by society and in many cases their White teachers. She also let these students know that by performing at levels far lower than what they were capable of, they were perpetuating negative stereotypes of Black intellectual inferiority, and challenged them to “prove to them that you can do it, because they’re already going in thinking this is how you’re going to act and this is how you’re going to do your work.”

Like Destiny and Emily, Xavier also spoke to students in small groups about the ways that racism would inevitably affect their lives. One week when he was tasked with supervising the students who had their recess privileges revoked, he spoke with students about the stereotypes they were unknowingly perpetrating about Black people. He asked the students to look around the room, and after he pointed out that all of the students who were being punished were Black, he spoke with students about the low academic and behavioral expectations that society held for them simply because of their race. In addition to keeping students grounded by discussing the ways racism affects them in

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small groups, Xavier also discussed racism with large groups of students. Because these groups were racially mixed, Xavier turned the focus on how racism affects him, hoping to help his students understand how racism affected the Black students in the room. In these spaces, he told students that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown scared him, and that he felt Black children were being targeted.

Sharhonda actually used the inevitability of racism as the framework for her

American Government course. She let her students know this, posing the question, “With me being an American government teacher, what better tool do I have to prepare African

Americans for a racial society than teaching them how the law will affect them due to color?” She also explained that her motto for the course is a reminder to students that regardless of what the law says, they cannot legislate people’s feelings toward them. She added, “I want them to understand, even though this law is on the books, if someone feels a certain way about you because of your race, because of your gender, because of your sexual preference, those types of things are going to come.” Sharhonda also noted that once students realized that the goal of her course was to help them protect themselves from the discrimination that they would surely face, they began to view the course more positively and they were more receptive of what Sharhonda had to say. She explained:

When you approach that, that American government, yes we are talking about a

bunch of old, White people who wrote a bunch of old laws that benefit old, White

people. But how do you best prepare yourself to protect your Black skin from

these old White laws that are written mostly to oppress you? And when they

understand that’s my purpose of this class, it kinda changes the dynamics of what

they feel like I expect of them.

107 Theme 2: Teachers sought to interrupt the racism that their White colleagues’ exhibited.

Whereas the Black teachers who taught in the Jim Crow South only had to concern themselves with racist ideals and attitudes outside of their school buildings, this was certainly not the case for the Black teachers who participated in this study. While the majority of their students were Black or Latino, these teachers worked in schools where the overwhelming majority of teachers were White. Because of this, they had to work not only to address the racism that students faced out in the world, but they also had to address the racism that their White colleagues expressed regarding themselves and the

Black students they taught.

Sharhonda worked well with most of her colleagues, but she faced lots of tension from the colleague she worked most closely with, a White man who also taught

American government. Although Sharhonda’s students scored higher on school district benchmark tests than the students of any other teacher in the school district, Sharhonda noted that this teacher continuously questioned her teaching methods and whether or not the practices she engaged were effective, although she was in her twelfth year of teaching and this teacher was only him his second year. She explained that “it’s almost like he views me as not doing enough,” which she attributed to his racism towards her. She also noted that this particular colleague refused to acknowledge anything that she did well, and he frequently implied that students only performed better for her because she is

Black.

While Sharhonda worked to interrupt the racism that her colleague directed towards her, Xavier worked to interrupt the racism that his White colleagues directed towards the Black students they taught. Xavier and many of his Black colleagues

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frequently held workshops for parents in the impoverished communities where their students lived. He frequently invited his White colleagues to these workshops so they could build stronger relationships with the Black students they taught each day. His colleagues always declined the invitations, telling him that they would prefer not to enter

“those neighborhoods.” Upon hearing their responses, Xavier consistently reminded his

White colleagues that he attended the middle school where they taught at the time of this study, and that the communities to which they referred to as “those neighborhoods” were indeed his community. These responses also led Xavier to become critical of his colleagues, explaining, “You’re willing to be paid to teach that community, but you don’t wanna go out and show your face out there. There’s no connection.”

Destiny also worked to interrupt the racism that her White colleagues exhibited toward their students. As the seventh grade team leader, Destiny handled discipline for the seventh grade, which gave her new insight into the expectations and opinions that many of her White colleagues held regarding their Black students. Destiny mentioned that many of the White teachers that she worked with frequently refused to follow school discipline protocols when seeking to discipline Black students. In these instances, other teachers sought to discipline students in ways that were much more punitive than school policies and procedures allowed. Because all discipline procedures were supposed to go through her as the grade level team leader, Destiny frequently found herself interrupting her colleagues’ attempts to discipline students severely, particularly when she believed the situation could have been handled differently. Occasionally, however, Destiny’s students brought her colleagues’ racism to her attention, as she mentioned that they would tell her, “This teacher doesn’t like Black students.” While she did maintain her

109 professional demeanor and refused to discuss her colleagues with her students, she did pay extra attention to the way these teachers related to and disciplined Black students.

Referring to herself as a “student-advocate” on more than one occasion, Emily believed that her attempts to interrupt her White colleagues’ racism led to tension and strained relationships with her colleagues, as she painstakingly told me, “I get really offended. More students like me than teachers.” Most of Emily’s work to interrupt her colleagues’ racism involved working to change their expectations of Black students.

After learning that teachers in Response-to-Intervention meetings spent copious amounts of time discussing what they believed to be their students’ shortcomings, Emily joined the Response-to-Intervention team in an effort to change these teachers’ expectations of their Black students and help them focus on what students would be capable of with the proper interventions. Ultimately, she took on another task at school to help her colleagues raise their expectations of Black students and change their misguided beliefs that Black students only perform well for her because she is Black.

Theme 3: Teachers learned to engage in emancipatory practices from their past experiences.

Of the four themes generated from the data, this is the only theme that occupies the backward space that narrative inquirers seek to understand when co-constructing narratives with participants (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). As opposed to having learned these practices in a teacher education program, each of the four participants in this study expressed that they engaged in these emancipatory practices because of people who had

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been influential to their lives or experiences they had that led them to believe such practices were vital to the lives of Black children.

Xavier attributed his decision to engage in emancipatory pedagogies to the educational activism that his mother engaged in during his childhood. Not only was his mother an educator who advocated for the children she taught and the children she raised, she also served as an advocate for all of the children of the community. Xavier explained that his mother was so dedicated to making sure that the Black students of the College

Town community received the kind of education that would be useful to their lives that she frequently attended school board meetings and regularly hosted the superintendent and school principals in their family home. He also added that his mother was purposeful in teaching him important aspects of Black history as well of stories of his father’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

Destiny credited her elementary school teachers as being the people who first exposed her to emancipatory pedagogies. She expressed having fond memories of elementary school teachers who high expectations of her and her peers, despite the fact the fact that she and her classmates lived in poverty. She explained that her elementary school teachers celebrated students’ cultures and taught them Black history. She also mentioned that after she left elementary school, this kind of teaching was noticeably absent from her educational experience. Her middle and high school teachers did not seem to care about the backgrounds of their students, so when Destiny became a teacher, she wanted to follow the model that her elementary teachers exhibited.

Sharhonda’s first encounters with emancipatory pedagogies came during her experiences as a high school student. Many of her teachers attended segregated schools

111 and began their teaching careers just after schools in the South desegregated. Sharhonda attributes their experiences with leading her to focus on “teaching the Black child and what was best for the Black child.” In addition to having been exposed to these practices as a student, Destiny had the opportunity to select the mentor teacher under which she completed her student teaching. She selected one of her teachers who embodied this model, because she felt that this particular style of teaching was successful in reaching her and many of her classmates. Selecting a mentor who engaged emancipatory pedagogies and spending an entire academic year in this teacher’s classroom gave

Sharhonda an inside view as to why and how one engages in such practices. She stated,

“Those were the things that they instilled in us becoming teachers, especially teachers of color. And they looked out for teachers of color in that same aspect,” referring to the ways that older Black teachers mentored her and other new and incoming Black teachers to engage emancipatory pedagogies.

While the other three participants practiced emancipatory pedagogies because they had seen these ideas modeled in some capacity, Emily’s experience was just the opposite. Instead of having teachers who affirmed her as a cultural or racial being, many of Emily’s teachers created classroom environments that allowed students to openly express their racist beliefs, which resulted in students engaging in arguments with each other. She described her time sitting in those classrooms as “one of the worst experiences ever.” She also noted, “We left angry. Black people were mad and White people were mad.” In addition to these heated classroom arguments, Emily had a chemistry teacher who doubted her ability and repeatedly told her that she could not believe that Emily understood the content as well as her test scores demonstrated. One of only three Black

112 students in her chemistry class, Emily explained that this teacher’s doubts regarding her abilities are what ultimately led her to perform her best, as she went on to earn a grade of one hundred in the course. These negative experiences with teachers who were either insensitive to race or held onto stereotypical beliefs about Black people are what led

Emily to engage emancipatory pedagogies with her students when she became a teacher.

Theme 4: Teachers encouraged students to use their voices and various platforms to speak about their oppression.

In addition to speaking to students about the racism they would inevitably experience, the teachers in this study also encouraged students to speak about their experiences of oppression. While some teachers provided students with a platform for going about this, others encouraged students to platforms that were already available to them elsewhere.

The moments when Emily was most comfortable encouraging her students to use their voices to speak about the oppression they faced were usually outside of instructional time. Because Emily made a conscious and sincere effort to build strong relationships with her students, and she had “real talk” moments with students in which she had frank discussions about racism, they felt comfortable discussing incidents in which they understood themselves to be victims of racism. Occasionally, the experiences her students had with racism affected them during their instructional time in Emily’s classroom. It is during these moments that Emily gave her students an opportunity to discuss the their experiences with racism during instructional time. Beyond that, Emily spoke with her students about the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri and

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Baltimore, providing them with further opportunities to speak about the racism they had experienced while living in College Town.

Destiny, like Emily, primarily encouraged students to use their voices to speak about their oppression to her. She frequently provided a listening ear to students as they told her about the racism they experienced in an attempt to process it and fully understand what was happening to them. Destiny encouraged her students to use her classroom as a space where they could speak out about the injustices they suffered, and they also used her classroom to think about experiences they had in an effort to determine whether or not the experiences they knew were negative were related to racism. It was through her students, in fact, that Destiny first learned about the racism that her colleagues exhibited, as they felt comfortable enough with her to tell her about their experiences in other teachers’ classrooms.

Like Emily and Destiny, Sharhonda cultivated a classroom environment in which students felt comfortable enough to talk to her about experiences in which they believed they had experienced discrimination. Because she taught American government, however, Sharhonda was able to use her students’ experiences as a framework for her class, explaining, “I use those real life experiences, ‘cause that’s the majority that I teach.” She liked for her students to tell these experiences for many reasons, one of which is that other students may have experienced something similar without fully understanding what happened. She explained:

They all have stories. You would be surprised. You think that a ninth grader

doesn’t have stories, but they have already experienced racial profiling. Either

114 they’ve been in the car and witnessed their cousins or their parents [be racially

profiled] or they were party to it already as fourteen, fifteen year olds.

She used the stories that her students told to frame the perspective from which she taught

American government to a room of Black and Latino teenagers. She taught them what laws were violated when they experienced discrimination, and she helped students understand which aspects of the law were supposed to protect them from such discrimination. She also discussed with students how to protest racism and oppression in ways that were within the law.

Sharhonda expressed strong views about helping her students develop their voices to speak about their oppression. She noted, “My role is to develop the voice and encourage the voice. Your voice needs to be developed. That’s my job as a Black teacher.” Essentially, Sharhonda believed that because she was a Black teacher she had a duty to teach students how to use their voices to speak about oppression and engage in activism. She held this belief, because she, like Black teachers of previous generations, embodied the African spiritual concept of Ubuntu and recognized that her relationships with her students needed to be interdependent.

Although the other participants provided students with platforms to speak about their oppression, Xavier encouraged his students to use the platforms that were available to them elsewhere. The best example of this involves his Black female student who wanted to study the Black Lives Matter movement for her social studies fair project.

Although this student, who was the only Black student in Xavier’s advanced mathematics course, felt strongly about studying and presenting information on the Black Loves

Matter movement, her social studies teacher, a White woman, suggested she select

115 another topic for fear that a presentation on the Black Lives Matter Movement may offend people. Xavier expressed a belief that “we need to have more outlets for students to be able to speak without any repercussions or consequences coming behind it,” telling this student:

You know, you have to do what you think is right. If you feel like this is a cause

that you’re willing to fight [for]…if you believe in it that much, you gotta fight

for it. You can’t be scared.

In this moment, Xavier encouraged this student to use a platform that was already available to her to speak about the oppression that Black people face across the United

States. The student followed Xavier’s advice, presenting her project on Black Lives

Matter, and Xavier expressed his pride in this student for standing up for herself and using her voice.

Theme 5: Teachers engaged emancipatory pedagogies in overt and covert ways depending on the social context and the teaching context.

Whereas enslaved Africans on American soil engaged in emancipatory pedagogies primarily in covert ways (Williams, 2005) and their descendants in all-Black segregated schools engaged in emancipatory pedagogies using overt and explicit methods

(Walker, 1996), the Black teachers who participated in this study vacillated between the two, depending on both the social and teaching contexts. They engaged in explicit emancipatory practices when they believed they were least likely to be subjected to surveillance at the hands of school administrators or when they were least concerned about receiving backlash from their White colleagues. They engaged in covert

116 emancipatory practices when they believed they were likely to be subjected to surveillance from administrators or receive the most resistance from their White colleagues.

Because she taught an American government course, Sharhonda was easily able to blend contemporary racial issues with the content of her course. In fact, she viewed her social studies course as the optimal tool to discuss issues of race and racism with her students, explaining that, “The state of Georgia does tell us how to teach those standards.

It just tells us those standards have to be met.” She then went on to pose the question,

“With me being an American government teacher, what better tool do I have to prepare

African Americans for a racial society than teaching them how the law will affect them due to color?” Sharhonda was able to tie the content standards of her American government course to contemporary issues of racism, as her students regularly came to her discussing interactions they had with police officers or other government officers.

Her engagement of these practices was so overt and explicit that each year she discussed with her students what they should and should not do if there were to be pulled over by the police. The year of this study, she actually provided her students with a handout titled

“What the ACLU says to do if pulled over by the police.” Sharhonda also noted that school administrators rarely entered her classroom.

Because the standards and accountability context was a little more intense in the school where Destiny taught than it was for Sharhonda, Destiny had to be a little more creative to engage emancipatory pedagogies in her social studies classroom. The curriculum she was tasked with teaching focused on the geography, economics, governments, and recent histories of Africa and Asia, so she worked to connect the state

117 standards to contemporary American issues of racism. Because she was so familiar with the curriculum she taught, Destiny discussed the death of Michael Brown and the ensuing events in Ferguson, Missouri by comparing the rights and freedoms of U.S. citizens to the rights and freedoms of citizens of Saudi Arabia. Engaging in this way allowed her to still technically be teaching the standards assigned in the school district’s curriculum guide if an administrator were to enter her classroom to observe her teaching the assigned curriculum standards.

Unlike Sharhonda, Xavier typically kept his emancipatory practices to himself.

While he did openly discuss these practices with the few Black teachers that the worked with, he avoided discussing the ways he engaged emancipatory pedagogies with his

White colleagues, noting