Conceptualizing "the Black" in Critical Policy Scholarship: Implications for Teaching and Teacher Education

• In Event: Transforming Teacher Education: Policy Life Rafts as Consequential Intervention During a Time of Global Chaos

Abstract

Efforts to transform Black children’s schooling experience in the United States require policies that refuse myopic conceptions of blackness. Put differently, problem definition, policy development, implementation, and evaluation are impaired without deep meditation on the relationship between blackness and “humanity.” Because scholars insist that to be Black in the United States is to be broadly understood as nonbeing or without the possibility of human beingness/personhood (Moten, 2013; Sexton, 2008; Sharpe, 2016; Walcott, 2014; Warren, C. L. 2018), this project queries the utility of (critical) education policy to radically improve Black educational outcomes without also wrestling with the philosophies of race, and of blackness, that drive how educators engage with and make important professional decisions about the education of Black students.

Critical policy scholarship (Horsford, Scott, & Anderson, 2018; Young & Diem, 2018) has maintained hegemonic ideologies of race and “humanity” that affect how Black people and blackness are conceptualized in the policymaking process. As such, a “spatial imaginaries” theoretical perspective (Lipsitz, 2007; Watkins, 2015) is deployed to discern how policy scholars comprehend blackness in their research, formation, and evaluation of education policy. Moreover, this paper extends Jenkins’ (2021) theorizing of the anti-black spatial imaginary to explore the consequences of first noticing and then rejecting mainstream constructs of “right” or “good” when pioneering a new policy effort. Such commonsense values are racialized and therefore drive racial disparities that sustain Black students’ school experience as fundamentally dehumanizing despite earnest efforts to counter such trends. The primary aim of this paper, then, is to describe how critical policy scholarship might be elaborated and enhanced to better account for “the Black,” and the implication of such policies to enable teacher education programs to produce candidates who are better prepared to subvert racial harm commonplace in the schooling of Black youth.

Recommendations for teaching and teacher education emerge from examination of two prominent areas of critical policy scholarship: school discipline policy and school closure policy. Research analyses of rhetoric/discourse in the written policies of several major school districts, popular press, and other print media reveal how Black youth and Black families are generally devalued in policy decisions that have long lasting impacts on their communities. Furthermore, examination of these policies demonstrate how they work to maintain Black people’s racial subordination and the important role of teachers to build solidarity with Black communities in efforts to refuse “solutions” that exacerbate Black pain and suffering. The paper’s conclusions insist that doing any (policy) work on behalf of or in service to Black people necessitates an expansive understanding of blackness, and awareness of both the problem(s) being encountered and Black people’s cultural intelligences, histories, and possibility. Capacious understandings of blackness that refuse flattened, or essentialized views of Black people are foundational for visioning policy that advances the structural change Black youth need and deserve. [word count 467]

Author

• Chezare A. Warren, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author