Improvisation Within Structure: Making Visible the Polyrhythms of Black Educational Practice

• In Event: Black Schools, Black Teachers: Understanding a Legacy of Black Educators and Black Educational Practice

Abstract

RRacial inequalities and racism are historical issues that African American youth and families have struggled with relative to education (Ladson Billings, 2006; Morris, 2002; Wells & Crain, 1997). In a post-Brown v. Board of Education context the myriad expressions of dissatisfaction with and/or decisions to opt out of traditional public school options by African American families should be a call to educators and educational researchers to rethink the “problems” of education and reconsider how African Americans students’ academic and non-academic needs in schools.
Pedagogies developed by African Americans have a history of addressing marginalized youth’s needs by recognizing that students’ opportunities to learn are deeply intertwined with how students are perceived, both because students are aware of these perceptions and because they influence how students experience schools. These pedagogies frequently aim to develop students’ strong academic base through cultivating students’ positive self-worth and racial and cultural identities (e.g.Asante, 1991; Ladson Billings, 1992; Mudhabuti & Mudhabuti, 1991).
For example, culturally relevant pedagogies seek to address issues of inclusion and racism in schools by empowering “students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson Billings, 1992, p.382). Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s (1999) notion of “politically relevant teaching” recognizes this tradition and pushes us to understand the commitment and political intentionality of African American educators’ to contest the “racist premise” (p. 708) of African Americans’ ineducability and misrepresentation in society.
The “political clarity” of these educators shapes how they prepare African American students for what they will encounter in and beyond school walls. These educators serve as teachers, counselors, community liaisons, activists, advocates and “gate openers” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999, p. 708) who share their cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) with their students despite financial and other constraints (Walker, 1996). The segregated past is replete with Black educators who fought for control of their schools, their rights, and simultaneously prepared their students for a world in which racial separation wouldn’t exist (Walker, 2009). Today, Black educators juggle similar roles despite being continually faced with new and lingering social issues. Nonetheless, they remain steadfast and unified in their commitment to collective racial advancement in and through schools.
Still needed are conceptual tools that nuance our understanding of how African American educators enact these pedagogies. This paper examines historic and contemporary accounts of African American educators to explore both the diverse ways in which these pedagogies are enacted (i.e. how what is done or how it is done may differ from educator to educator) and the overlapping threads across these enactments that bind them together. As the paper title suggests, Black educators may be unified in their political clarity, but often adhere to and improvise upon different pedagogical traditions based on their own training and upbringing. This paper examines how much like the unique patches on a quilt, or the syncopated beats that constitute a song, African American educators’ pedagogy is diverse in its individual patterns but harmonizes together in a unified struggle against oppression.

Author

• Maxine Ramona McKinney de Royston, University of California - Berkeley