Returning to the Source: Black Teachers Centering Justice for Black Students in Chicago Public Schools

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

Abstract

As the Black population in Chicago swelled during the first part of the twentieth century, so did the Black teaching population. These Black teachers, particularly those teaching following the first and second world wars, were politicized by their experiences in the world and often used their classrooms as spaces to do the same. Through their pedagogies and curriculum, these teachers created space for their students to make sense of themselves in the complex world around them. They embodied what emergent scholarship has termed justice-centered teaching (Ayers et al, 2017; Morales-Doyle, 2017).
In 1996, Dr. Timuel D. Black conducted oral histories with alumni and current students and staff (at the time of the study) from DuSable and Phillips High Schools, Chicago’s first two all-Black high schools. Several of those interviews were with alumni who returned to their alma mater as teachers. Drawing on analyses of interview transcripts and other primary source data, this study sought to reveal the educational practices of these Black teachers and the influential factors that contributed to their praxes. Analyses reveal that these alumni, students and staff contributed to the uplift Black people by infusing Black liberation into their educational experience.
Findings from analyses indicate that these Black educators had:
developed systemic analyses of race, class and gender through their experiences growing up and living in the same neighborhood as their students that moved their pedagogical aspirations away from deficit and individual notions of educational success;
recognized their roles as educators shaping the ideological perspectives of their students and the ways that they read and rewrote the world around them;
important memories of the past that were recreated in their various classroom curricula and pedagogies; and
Provided important mentorship for future Black teachers during their K-12 experiences in schools.
Implications from this historical study have relevance for contemporary P-20 educational settings. The author hopes that this study adds to the emergent literature on Black liberatory pedagogies and equips readers with empirically based analyses to continue to situate said pedagogies in their own educational contexts. Additionally, the author hopes to provide educators and education scholars with pedagogical and curricular roadmaps—memories of the past—that illuminate what has occurred in hopes of supporting the actualizations of contemporary dreams and aspirations for educational justice.
References
Ayers, W., Kumashiro, K., Meiners, E., Quinn, T., & Stovall, D. (2017). Teaching toward
democracy: Educators as agents of change. Routledge.

Morales‐Doyle, D. (2017). Justice‐centered science pedagogy: A catalyst for academic
achievement and social transformation. Science Education, 101(6), 1034-1060.

Author

• Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author