More Than Black Maled: Faculty of Color Teaching Social Studies in an Era of "Post-Truth"

• In Event: Faculty of Color Counternarratives, Lessons, and Disruptions: Examining Truth, Praxis, and Erasure in Teacher Education

Abstract

Social studies is a core subject area in many teacher education programs and it prepares pre-service educators to interrogate history including what is truth, who defines the version of history that we tell, and who has ownership of that narrative. Black male faculty of color who teach social studies to pre-service educators can face a unique set of challenges that are different than white faculty, and often have to teach what the history textbooks have never included about their own sociohistorical and racial heritage. All while having to navigate and maintain their own racial, gendered, and intersectional identity as Black man. Social Studies research indicates that the pedagogical moves teachers of color use to challenge dominant narratives within the curriculum are situated within their lived experiences as racialized non-White subpersons (Mills, 2014). The salience of lived experiences as subpersons throughout childhood played a significant role in the pedagogical practices and curricular decision-making processes of social studies teachers of Japanese American (Branch, 2004), African American (Pang & Gibson, 2001), and Native American (Fickel, 2000) cultural backgrounds. Social studies teachers of color are also more likely to affirm students’ diverse cultural backgrounds (Salinas & Castro, 2010). Increasingly, the field is recognizing the significance of decentering the centrality of Whiteness within social studies methods courses (Hawkman, 2018). Black teacher education programs understood this to be an essential civic task and have been engaging in counter-hegemonic practices to upend the racial contract within this discipline for over a century (Givens, 2021; Walker, 2001).

While researchers have tried to better understand how social studies teacher educators, in general, decenter whiteness to concentrate on racial pedagogical content knowledge within their methods courses little research has illuminated the specificity of how Black male social studies teacher-educators are making sense of and enacting counter-hegemonic practices within their social studies method’s courses (Aronson et al., 2020; Demoiny, 2018). As a Black male social studies faculty member I have to contest what knowledge constitutes truth and in what ways does truth constitute knowledge. Collectively, truth, identity, the lives of P-16+ educators, and their own journeys are all distinctly different yet racially discernible across key subject areas in teacher education programs like social studies.

The purpose of this presentation is to disrupt discourse on how teacher education programs prepare teacher educators when being instructed by a Black male faculty member at a PWI. This presentation examines the lived experience of a Black male faculty member teaching social studies to predominantly white students, and the challenges as well as successes of using racial contract theory as a framework for preparing undergraduate students to teach social studies for equity, and justice. Furthermore, on what truth means, what constitutes “truth” in social studies, and the responsibility of maintaining truth in educational spaces that oppose equity and justice.

Author

• Daniel Josiah Thomas, Texas A&M University
  Presenting Author