Black Educator Memories: Providing Power and Possibilities

• In Event: Bodies at the Intersections: Dreaming Through the Bloodiness

Abstract

This study examines the schooling memories of African American educators and how these recollections may provide a framework for re-envisioning U.S. public schooling toward educational equity. While much has been written about the persistence of race-based educational inequities, less examined is the way that collective remembering and self-identification are linked and help to perpetuate or challenge existing inequitable social arrangements. This study’s close reading of schooling memories may serve as a learning tool for better understanding how push toward more equitable schooling for all by drawing on the reconstruction capacity carried by collective remembering through the interlocking relationships between individuals and social memory that continuously recreate a sense of the past and redefine future aspirations.

Authors

• Cleveland Hayes, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

• Brenda Gayle Harris, Georgia College and State University

• Christie Hayes