Black Feminist Thought: The Lived Experiences of Two Black Female Science Educators

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Building Solidarity Among Black Women and Black Men Scholars in Researching Black Women in STEM

Abstract

As Black females from working class origins in the rural South, we encounter a myriad of challenges and tensions in science education, a field that is predominantly White, male, and middle class. Even in writing this chapter, we struggled: Are we at liberty to use the communicative practices of our cultural communities? Do we structure our sharing in a manner that is more acceptable to the field? We decided to employ both communicative repertoires in the form of personal stories and conversation framed by theory. Within our stories, we relay episodic snippets of our childhood and adolescence as well as our years as undergraduates at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In our conversation, we discursively discuss our careers in relation to our worldviews. At the outset, we conform to the standard in the field by contextualizing our personal histories and dialogue within a conceptual framework

Author

• Felicia Moore Mensah, Teachers College, Columbia University