“Can I Be a Black Feminist Theorist?” A Case Study of Critical Teacher Education

• In Event: Applying Critical Methodologies to Curriculum by Male Educators in Predominantly Female Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

Objective. Public schools are becoming increasingly culturally, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse. Yet, the diversity amongst the pool of prospective pre-service teachers is disproportionately low (NCES, 2005; Nieto, 2010). Certainly, a major challenge is how to prepare pre-service teachers to work across racial, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic differences (Ladson-Billings, 2009). While teacher education programs spend countless hours preparing teaching candidates to meet academic content standards/assessments; they seldom prepare teachers to work within the context of a school community and with students’ families (Baker, 2000). In particular, teacher education programs rarely provide pre-service teachers the space to examine how power, privilege, and the intersections of race, class, and gender impact their ability to work within urban communities (Lynn, 1997; Murrell, 2001).
This paper examines the experience of a white male, teacher educator leading an alternative teacher education program that prepares teachers to work in urban schools. The Urban Parent-Teacher Education Collaborative (UPTEC) is a programmatic effort designed to implement and test a critical teacher education model that includes urban parents as teacher educators of pre-service teachers. The author team taught the program with an African American, female, grass-roots parent organizer. This paper will document the author’s experiences and his critical personal narrative within the context of a five-year longitudinal UPTEC study.

Theoretical frameworks. Grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and a Black Feminist framework (Collins, 2000), the paper describes efforts by the author to create spaces to deconstruct power and privilege and to examine the multiple intersections of race, class, and gender (Bell, 1995; Matsuda, 1993; Solorzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001). CRT seeks to understand race, class, and gender within educational settings and commits to empower marginalized groups (Crenshaw, 1995; Delgado, 1995; Tate, 1997). Black Feminist Thought, while originally situated in the experiences of African American women and their unique positionality in American society, provides a powerful framework for all students with the UPTEC program (Collins, 2000).
Methods/Results. This study draws on 5 years of qualitative longitudinal data gathered through interviews, participant observations, personal and student reflections, email correspondence, and 240 hours of graduate classroom taped sessions. Most significantly, 82% of UPTEC graduates (2007-2012) currently teach in K-12 schools or are working toward advanced degrees in education—80% of those graduates work within urban schools and/or with marginalized students. This paper examines how a purposeful inclusion of CRT and Black Feminist Thought within a critical teacher education program provided multiple theoretical lenses for pre-service teachers and educators to deconstruct the role of power and privilege within schools.
Scholarly significance. Through his critical personal narrative and case study data, the author documents how CRT and Black Feminist Thought provide a theoretical framework to engage pre-service teachers and educators in discussions of privilege and examinations of intersectionality. The author posits that these critical theoretical frameworks provide university teacher educators, regardless of their positionality and privilege, the optimal opportunity to help students recognize how their own positionality or privilege inform their relationships with students and their experiences as teachers in urban schools and communities.

Author

• Anthony Collatos, Pepperdine University