Distractions Cannot Be Bigger Than the Mission: Black Women's Motherwork in Urban Education

• In Event: Black Mother Educators as Protectors of Black Students in Higher Education

Abstract

In recent years, more schools/colleges of education have espoused a focus on social justice. Program and research awards from national organizations recognize social justice efforts and outcomes. Subsequently, it appears that more and more schools/colleges of education have put forward a focus on urban education inclusive of school/college-wide focus across all programs, individual program focus, endowed professorships, and centers. Ironically, even those not geographically located in urban areas say they “do urban education.” One such school of education located in a rural area offers students the opportunity to have an “urban” student teaching placement in a metropolitan city akin to a study abroad experience. Despite scholarly attempts to define urban education (Milner, 2012b), we know that “urban” is often a code word for Black, Brown, poor, and any other sociocultural identity marker that means non-white.

Narratives of the lives of Black women faculty in schools/colleges of education where Black women and their experiences are the unit of analysis, and not peripheral to another story, are few. Ladson-Billings’ (2005) work points to the scarcity of biographies of the lives of Black teacher educators. She uses the metaphor of the “Big House” to symbolize the racial and social conditions of the academy for Black professors. While Black faculty may have access to prestigious positions in the academy, these spaces are still undergirded by “plantation politics” (Squire, Williams, & Tuitt, 2018) that pigeonhole Black academics as diversity experts and exceptions to their race while discounting their “too Black” scholarship (Ladson-Billings, 2005). Author 1 and colleague build upon Ladson-Billings’ (2005) biographical narratives of Black teacher educators and examine the positionality of Black mother scholar-activists within teacher education. Specifically, they posit that Black mother teacher educators can confront racism through teaching, community engagement, and public scholarship as they “bear the heavy responsibility to teach ‘others’ how to teach our children” (p. 31). In this account, we add to the voids in the literature and intentionally explore our narratives as Black mother educators within the context of urban education. Moreover, we use Collins’ (1994) construct of motherwork to expand the scope of our work as academics to be inclusive of our identities as Black mothers.

In this paper our intent is to center our experiences as Black mother educators within the contexts of schools/colleges of education at predominantly white institutions that espouse a commitment to urban education. In so doing, we explicitly focus on the ways in which our positionality as Black mothers informs our praxis in these spaces. Specifically, we provide analysis of critical incidents and the ways in which we navigate these spaces from our positionality as Black mother educators with the goal of protecting Black children and our own sons. We highlight three aspects of our praxis (centering Blackness, urgency, and spirituality) and discuss the implications of lessons that can be extrapolated for the protection of Black children--Black mothers’ sons-- in schools.

Authors

• Tambra O. Jackson, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis

• Ayana Allen-Handy, Drexel University