Centering and Developing Black Liberatory Practices in English Education Programs

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

Abstract

Anti-Blackness is woven into education. It began during chattel slavery when white landowners recognized that academic learning would spoil enslaved subservience. Black people fought to read and write as tools to actively subvert their subordination and take back control of their bodies and minds. U.S. schooling systems have inundated Black minds with deficit perspectives about their academic abilities, language, and presence, which stunts their political, economic, social progress and freedom. Black students internalize anti-Blackness, which contributes to white supremacy. Schooling crushes Black genius by making students feel that their race is inferior to whiteness. Educators are vulnerable to internalizing anti-Black messages that unconsciously shade the unfortunate professional decisions that lead them to reproduce harsh, inhumane policy and practices documented by over a half century of Black education research. This is exacerbated when Black excellence is not explicitly taught and embedded in the culture of teacher education programs and K-12 classrooms.
Researchers argue that the only way forward in education liberation is to center Blackness. There is an overwhelming presence of theories created by white men and Eurocentric approaches to teaching and learning in English Education programs. Experiences of Blackness are surface level diversity and multicultural literature courses. Anti-Black linguistic violence takes place in English Education programs, in the acknowledgement of other languages and dialects, but still teaches Mainstream English. The future of Black education research and practice hinges on documenting barriers to Black student school success and identifying promising pathways to actively dismantle such barriers. Teachers must create a space of intellectualism where students see themselves as the next generation of thinkers. This will come through in their study of Black history and thinkers, language use, topics taught, and the texts they engage with in English Education programs.
This study (1) explores the ways that Black English Teacher Educators center Blackness in theoretical and pedagogical practices; and (2) develops a framework to center Black theorists and Black Liberatory pedagogical practices in English Education programs, as a way forward to disrupt anti-Blackness in English Education programs. This qualitative research addresses the research questions:
In what ways can centering Blackness in English Education in theory (Black theorists and ways of knowing) and practice (teaching & best practices from the Black community) disrupt anti-Blackness in English Education programs?
In what ways does centering Blackness in English Education in theory and practice, prepare preservice teachers to teach Black students in K-12 English Language Arts classrooms?
Results: Findings will be shared during the symposium.
Conclusion: In order to enact social justice in English Education, we have to explicitly acknowledge anti-Blackness. We enforce invisibility through silence, to allow the Black body shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. Understandings of race and racism in the U.S. are severely limited without direct interrogation of social conditions that facilitate Black dehumanization. More specifically, in English Education programs, with literacy and anti-Blackness intricately linked for centuries, and left unpacked, we will continue to struggle to make sense of how race operates in our learning, teaching and research.

Author

• Kisha M Porcher, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author