Cry Loud, Spare Not: Protecting the Dreams and Visions of Our African American Children

• In Event: 72.060 - Reaching Students Whose Dreams Won't Matter: Reflections From Educators of Black Children

Abstract

From years of experience working with African American students in both the PK-12 and higher education settings, I know that the presence of dreams and hope undergirds African American students’ everyday existence. Sometimes African American students, who live in the most precarious of conditions, hope against hope in an effort to create and then to enact a counter-hegemonic reality. Such a reality, grounded in a counter-narrative, is replete with visions of prosperity, achievement, and accomplishment. The vision and dreams of many African American students are disruptive, radically innovative, and subversive because they dare to create a reality that can be perceived to be next to impossible to achieve due to all kinds of systemic, power-dominated, societal preserving reasons. And yet, African American students hold fast to their dreams and visions for a brighter future for themselves, their families and their communities.
Even in the midst of an often oppressive institution, such as schools, African American students, nonetheless, see education as an instrument for achieving their dreams and visions. How oxymoronic it is for children and their families to place their faith in an institution rife with practices and policies aimed to mis-and under-educate especially African American and children of poverty. King, Akua, and Russell (2013) rightly assert, “While education for Black people in the north was not faring much better then (or now), and has certainly advanced beyond the post-Reconstruction nadir Murphy reported 150 years after our ‘emancipation’ African Americans’ aspirations for social, political, and economic justice by means of liberating education remain largely unfulfilled” (p. 24).
What becomes imperative, then, for educators who are aware of this overarching hope for the fruition of dreams through education to do, is to engage critically and to disrupt unabashedly, the forms and rituals of the oppressive education system through a prophetic discourse of anger and love (Dantley and Green, forthcoming). This paper will explore how that fearless prophetic voice will denude the multiple ways in which the education system inhibits the achievement of dreams and will also offer ways in which transformative instructional leadership (Dantley, 2011) can be used to facilitate those dreams through a critical and spiritual engagement. What this paper will ultimately argue is that the tried and true methods of schooling that eschew ethereal or counter-positivist ways of educating must be embraced if our goal is to see the dreams and visions of all children and especially African American children in urban settings come to pass.

Author

• Michael E. Dantley, Miami University