A Pedagogy to (Re)Member: Black Identity, Culture, and the Spirit of an Endarkened Feminist Practice in Education

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

Abstract

Contemporary discourses of privatization frame education and schooling with a seeming disregard for the civic, moral, and ethical function that education serves in a democracy (Collins, 2009). Despite efforts to ensure educational equality for all, Blacks in the U.S. continue to be marginalized in both schools and society. From slavery to Emancipation, Jim Crow to re-enslavement (Blackmon, 2009), and continued contemporary struggles in the New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2012), Blacks are disproportionately affected by failures of society to address these inequities in public education (Anderson, 1988; Books, 2007; Butchart, 2010; Daniels, 2004; Delpit, 1995; DeParle, 2004; Irvine, 1990; Ladson Billings, 2006; King, 2005; Morris, 2009; Siddle Walker, 1996; Wald & Losen, 2007).
This paper situates these inequities in Black education and opportunity in the U.S. within the body of knowledge that has framed thought and research about Black heritage peoples (Morrison, 1992; Smitherman, 2006). One need only examine the literature cited above to argue that implicit and explicit white supremacy and racism has dominated educational experiences of Blacks worldwide (Ani, 1994). Understanding those most marginalized in the U.S. must begin with an alternative orientation to traditional education: It must embrace a new world sense (Oyewumi, 1997, 2004) both for the teacher but also for those whom s/he teaches. (Re)membering the historical legacy of injustices suffered by Black people -- and the brilliant strategies of resistance from the African continent throughout the diaspora -- has the potential to engender forms of education within local communities globally that can serve as bridges to understanding one’s responsibility and knowing one’s legacy (as a Black person of the world) as a fundamental human right (Dillard, 2012). Such understandings arise through critically examining the knowledge and cultural productions of Black people’s historical, political, economic and cultural stories and struggles in context. While such productions occur in both formal and informal pedagogical spaces within and beyond school settings, the focus of this paper is on the ways African centered pedagogies and contexts of a study abroad program in West Africa cultivate a deeper understanding of the connected cultural contributions and engagements of Black peoples for preservice teacher educators (Collins, 2009; Levine, 2007; Palmer, 2011). Designed as a short-term study abroad, curriculum and pedagogies employed in this program and concomitant research study explicitly highlight the distinct and connected heritage of Black culture, ways of being and learning. Further, the stated goals of this study abroad program are to help students develop perspectives and pedagogies that explicitly make historical and cultural links between continental African, African American and diasporic Africans in ways that are historically accurate and culturally relevant to their education and in the education of the students they will teach. These endarkened feminist pedagogies of (re)membering (Dillard, in press, 2014; Dillard & Okpalaoka, 2011) will be highlighted in this paper as both appropriate pedagogical practices as well as spiritual necessity for educators that addresses the social and educational inequities within the educational system, an education that provides transformational possibilities for a more just education for Blacks.

Author

• Cynthia B. Dillard, University of Georgia