Building a Case for Black Liberatory Professional Development: Lessons and Opportunities

• In Event: The Exploration of Black Liberatory Education in Practice

Abstract

The Black Teacher Collaborative (BTC) Teacher fellowship was designed as a multi-year professional development opportunity for Black teachers in the South who teach predominantly Black students. The overarching goal of the intended professional development program is to ensure Black teachers can (1) expertly maximize their shared racial identity with their students and (2) have access to the liberation-based instructional pedagogies, non-western philosophies, and ancestral orientations and commitments that contribute to the success of excellent Black teachers. In the words of Dr. Joyce King, BTC aims to ensure our fellows can recover and use “liberating heritage knowledge, cultural memory, and historical consciousness.” (King, 2017, p. 212) in their teaching.

Building on Black people’s historical efforts to educate our own, BTC has been actively developing professional development opportunities for Black teachers in the South, and majority Black urban areas outside of the South. It is with this goal that BTC launched their flagship Black Teacher Fellowship in July of 2019. The Fellowship aims to leverage the unique potential found when Black educators teach Black children. This 2-year program focuses on shifting Black teacher beliefs about Black children, by increasing knowledge about the Black teaching tradition, and supporting the implementation of Black Liberatory Pedagogy (BLP). The design and delivery of the fellowship aligned with BTCs overarching mission to create conditions for Black children to achieve academically while participating in the advancement of their communities.

BTCs goal is for Black Liberatory Pedagogy to document what excellent Black teachers believe, know, and do in shared racial identity educational settings towards the liberation of Black students, families, and communities. BTCs focus on collective liberation as the outcome of Black education stands in contrast to the framing of success in education in the U.S. as a matter of individual achievement. Counter to Western ideology, BTC is operating from the core belief and the well documented premise that education in the Black tradition is about the advancement/freedom of the Black community. This orientation led to the development of not just teaching pedagogy but a Black liberatory pedagogy (BLP). This framework acted as the instructional core of the teacher fellowship and served as the foundation for future BTC programmatic initiatives. Teacher fellows provided their feedback on their experience through surveys, interviews and focus groups. Results of our program evaluation indicate that across 76 educators from 6 schools, at least 98% of participants either "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that the training workshops and coaching sessions covered useful material, met their needs and interests, and provided useful resources (e.g., handouts). A subset of fellows (88.2%) participated in focus group sessions at their respective schools. Qualitative feedback suggests that the majority of participants felt that the training workshops were effective at creating a safe learning community where educators can talk freely and honestly.

References
King, J. E. (2017). 2015 AERA presidential address morally engaged research/ers dismantling epistemological nihilation in the age of impunity. Educational Researcher, 46(5), 211-222.

Author

• Charisse N. Southwell
  Presenting Author