Black Women Teachers: Acknowledging Within-Group Connections and Diversity

• In Event: Homogenizing Characterizations of Teachers of Color: We Must Do Better

Abstract

We study the experiences, assets and struggles of three Black women teachers and the ways that their identities enable and/or constrain their abilities to take up race in their teaching practice. These three teachers entered the field of teaching approximately thirty years ago in a midwestern school district during an important moment of district-led focus on integration when the district sought both to bring students from different neighborhoods together and to hire teachers of color. While the three teachers brought similar generational awareness to their reflections on their experiences as teachers of color, they also brought unique perspectives informed by varied aspects of their identities.

In our intersectional analysis, we explore two key questions. First, we investigate the similarities and differences across these women’s experiences. Second, we focus explicitly on when and how these teachers take up race in their teaching. We analyze the differential ways they take up race and the variable potential of their race-conscious practice to be productive or dangerous. Although our paper focuses on Black women teachers, we situate our paper within a larger conversation about teachers of color and the need for attention to heterogeneity.

Our study is nested within a larger ethnography focused on school-family relationships in a racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse school in a mid-sized midwestern city. Ethnography enables examination of “how the social world is constructed by people [and] how they are continually striving to make sense of the world” (Woods, 2001, p.2). Our research site constitutes a critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006), as the school demographics and the heterogeneity of feeder neighborhoods represent a microcosm of the diversity that currently marks the U.S. In addition to serving African-American, Latinx-American, Asian-American, Arab-American, White, and multi-ethnic families, 35% of students are low-income, and 17% are English-language-learners.

Our project rests upon the assumption of critical race (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) and racial stratification theorists (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Omi & Winant, 2014) that race is a central component (Burton, et al., 2010) of the social organization of schools (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006; Lewis & Diamond, 2015). Of particular importance is the theorization that the instantiation of race in institutional policies, practices, and interactions produces and rationalizes racial categories and inequalities (Lewis, 2003).

Leveraging grounded theory (Glaser & Straus, 2009) and iterative comparative analysis (Corbin & Straus, 2008), we analyze the data to determine how personal and professional experiences of individual and systemic racism affect three Black women teachers, and impact the ways in which they teach students and partner with families. We find that these three women share common identities and contexts (generation, race, gender, school context), yet, each draw from their experiences with racism in different ways – either by explicitly naming, pushing back, and disrupting racist school-based practice, or by insisting that race should not guide their focus and in fact that it is critical not to attend to race. Our study adds critical nuance to understandings of what teachers of color bring to the field of education, given their own personal experiences with racism.

Authors

• Simona Goldin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Debi Khasnabis, University of Michigan

• Jennifer Sawada Vega, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Ebony Perouse-Harvey, Southern Connecticut State University