“Motownphilly’s Back Again”: Learning From Culturally Responsive Discourses of Black Male Activist Teachers in Detroit and Philadelphia

• In Event: Multivocal, Multilingual, Multimodal, and Multicultural Literacies in Contested Spaces

Abstract

Purpose
This research contributes to a knowledge base about Black male teachers in the United States. Furthermore, this research points to the need for further empirical investigation into the pedagogies and professional strategies of selfhood of African American male teacher-activists who take a reflective inquiry stance on their own practice.

Theoretical framework(s)
What is known about the professional experiences and culturally responsive practices of African American male teachers is limited, especially considering the vast amount of research conducted on and about African American students, particularly Black boys and young men. However, the existing literature reflects the diversity of African American male educators’ philosophies of teaching, lived and intellectual ideologies, and professional lives (see Brown & Butty, 1999; Delpit, 1995; Foster, 1997; Gay, 2000; Henry, 1995; Irvine, 1988, 1989, 2002, 2003; James, 2002; Jackson & Moore, 2006; King, 1993; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Lewis, 2006). Too often, Black men’s perspectives about teaching and teacher education have been relegated to the margins and silenced (Delpit, 1988). This research purports to amplify previously silenced discourses.
Data Sources & Analysis
The research is conceived as part of a larger study focused on an emerging literacy teaching-learning-research partnership between the principal investigator’s university department at a top research university and one of the participating teacher’s West Philadelphia middle school.
Data includes videos of three focal class periods in the literacy lab, videos from three days per week in the library media center, videos and/or audiofiles from the formal interviews conducted with participating students at the beginning and the end of the study, artifacts from the literacy class and library media center, and ethnographic fieldnotes from the principal investigator, project manager, and student researchers. The principal investigator takes an emic approach to her work, using both friendship and mentorship to facilitate the research process (described in detail in (Sassi & Thomas, 2013).
Data analysis is an ideological dilemma analysis framework that I have theorized in previous work. The ways that adolescents construct historical metanarratives after choosing, reading, and responding to African American children’s and young adult literature can be identified, described, and theorized through the use of a process that I am calling ideological dilemma analysis: 1) analysis of text, 2) analysis of context, and 3) analysis of dilemmas or disconnection, theorized in African studies as décalage (B. Edwards, 2009).
Results
Considering today’s contested teaching and learning contexts has import beyond research on urban education and/or the study of the experiences of Black male teachers. Although research has shown that the race of a teacher does not necessarily indicate their effectiveness or student achievement in their classrooms (Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1994), this study showed the special interactive and linguistic strategies that Black male teachers used in their practice.
Significance
Teaching practices that are culturally responsive and relevant can be efficacious for educators across racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, case studies of teachers like the practitioner-researcher studied have the potential to expand our knowledge about what culturally responsive pedagogy and social justice education look like in practice.

Author

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania