Toward a Curriculum of Stay: How and Why Black Women Teachers Remain in Urban Classrooms

• In Event: Temporal Geographies of the Teacher Education Curriculum: Interrogating Past-Future Curricular Worlds

Abstract

A “curriculum of stay” is defined as the resources, both tangible and intangible, that enable Black women teachers to remain in urban classrooms despite the factors that threaten their persistence in the profession. A “curriculum of stay” is not a formal or prescribed curriculum given to teachers at the beginning of each school year, nor one they engage in their teacher education programs. With the concept “curriculum of stay,” I am concerned with Black women teachers’ lived experience of education―that is, with the “curriculum-as-lived,” which, as Aoki (1993) argues, always accompanies and creates tension with any planned curriculum. I posit that this curriculum of stay accounts for the geographies of Black women that include knowledges, negotiations, and experiences (McKittrick, 2006).

Author

• Dowan A. McNair-Lee, University of the District of Columbia