Black Women, Truth, and Racial Lies: Assessing the "Truth" About Teaching Diversity Courses in Teacher Education at a Predominantly White Institution

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

Abstract

Black women faculty in teacher education programs have to battle their presumed incompetence from pre-service educators while being subjected to white supremacy and racism at PWIs (author, 2019; Patton, Haynes, 2020). The intersectionality of their identity as raced and gendered beings makes Black women more vulnerable to antiblack microaggressions that suggest that they are inherently and systematically erased from the academy. For teacher educators in P-16+ educational institutions like teacher education departments, white pre-service teachers often encounter few faculty of color unless they are taking a required diversity course. Still, Black women remain more than “mules of the world” in teacher education programs and often have to navigate their lives, journeys, and identity as Black women who are socially positioned in spaces to maintain inequality while lacking the resources necessary to have their voices heard and brought to the forefront (Collins, 2020).

In this presentation, the author impenitently contends that Black women faculty in teacher education programs are being more than erased and disregarded -- they are being dehumanized and deregulated to an inhumane status. In this presentation, I draw on Black Feminist Autoethnography (Griffin, 2012) to highlight how my identity impacted the ways that I pushed against traditional norms for Black womanhood while teaching diversity courses in teacher education, and how such transformative practices can encourage abolitionist frameworks for uprooting racial inequity in teacher education programs. I too “talk back” (hooks, 1989) to educational research that seeks to quantify an experience that can only be felt, heard, birthed, and loved, but can not be fully felt with numbers and statistics alone. It is imperative that research conducted with faculty of color who teach diversity courses in teacher education no longer fail to give credence to our daily lives and journeys. Such knowledge about the lives of Black women faculty is imperative to understanding, and radically changing systematic factors that color the classroom space (virtual classroom and in-person classes during Covid-19).

This presentation also draws from Black Feminist Methodology (Evans-Winters, 2019) and case study (Yin,2009) to examine my experiences as a Black woman faculty member teaching a required diversity course centered on race, equity, and inclusion. I use qualitative data through journaling of my experiences during my first four years teaching in a teacher education department in the Midwest. I conclude the presentation with a new epistemology for educational researchers to recess and revalue the lives, humanity, and journeys of Black women faculty instructing diversity courses in teacher education.

Author

• Dorothy E. Hines, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author