The Pedagogical Provocateur: Portrait of an Antiracist Teacher Educator's "Real Black" Curriculum and Pedagogy

• In Event: Refusing Anti-Blackness in Curriculum Studies: Curricular Confrontations in “the Wake”

Abstract

Black humanity is paradoxical in the Western world. This is because to be Black is to be “the very antithesis of a Human subject” (Wilderson, 2010, p. 9). In this paper, I paint a portrait of a Black teacher educator’s pedagogy. I juxtapose his theorizing of antiracist pedagogy, as shaped by racial memories (Dillard, 2008) of lived experience, with observations of his practice. I find that his teaching affirms Black (human) beings, thus provocatively defying the Whiteness—and anti-Blackness—pervasive in teacher education curriculum and pedagogy (Oyler, 2011). This study is situated at the nexus of BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016)—as extension of/response to Critical Race Theory—and (Black) feminist theories of meories, embodiment, and affect. I hear my participant’s voice by inviting his storytelling, thereby invoking a tenet of CRT—the “centrality of experiential knowledge” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 26). As an analytic lens, (Black) feminist affect theories orient my analysis of the sounds, silences, and sights of racialized “movements, flashes, or outbursts of feelings” (Figlerowicz, 2012, p. 4) that surface during the research process. I employ portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), and qualitative research methods—namely, two in-depth semi-structured phenomenological interviews; 15 hours of ethnographic participant observations; and document analysis—to gather data and then first, extract themes from my participant’s theorizing of his antiracist pedagogy; second, tie that theorizing to his racial memories of lived experience; and third, interrogate how those theoretical threads are woven into practice based on observations and analyses of two racialized affectively-intense encounters in his classroom. Data collection occurred over 6 months. I maintained field notes and audio-recorded classroom discussions during observations. I supplemented data gathered through interviews and observations by collecting documents like course syllabi. The data used for this portrait consisted of transcripts from interviews, audio-recordings and transcripts of classroom discussions, my structured field notes from observations wherein I descriptively detailed my instinctual impressions (Huberman & Miles, 2002), as well as the body and oral language of both pedagogues and students, my “impressionistic records” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), and my researcher journal. The participant theorizes his antiracist pedagogy as humanizing and expressive. For example, he states: “I’m deeply aware of who I speak to and from...Like Paul, [a Black, male student] for example, I’m talking directly to Paul. I’m talking to Paul like I’m talking to my boy on the block... I’m speaking to him.” I find that the participant’s teaching fuses such theory and practice in the cultivation of a classroom that affirms Black (human) beings. This portrait offers insight regarding how teacher educators’ antiracist pedagogies that are explicitly Black-centric might transgress the mores of Whiteness that define curriculum and pedagogy in teacher education, and hence, might serve to attract, retain, and sustain Black students in these suffocatingly White spaces. Hence, it adds to the field’s knowledge regarding how teacher educators’ pedagogies might pedagogically respond to the “overwhelming presence of whiteness” (Sleeter, 2001) permeating teacher education programs in “the wake” (Sharpe, 2016).

Author

• Esther Oganda Ohito, Mills College