Learning From Ancestors and Elders: Utilizing Pedagogical Wisdom From Black Educators Across Time to Instruct K–12 Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Black Teacher Educators Centering Black Intellectualism and Humanity in Their Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis

Abstract

This paper will describe and synthesize the development of and pedagogical approaches and methods of a teacher education course entitled “Black Education: Theories, Pre-K-12 Practice & Pedagogy.” The purpose of the course is to introduce the range of educational contributions by Black people in the U.S. Through an engagement with a variety of Black scholars, students excavate the historical and contemporary teaching methods, theories, and pedagogical practices that Black people employed to successfully educate themselves and cultivate learning opportunities in their communities. Informed by the historically responsive literacies framework (Muhammad, 2020) as well as culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), the course addresses the following guiding questions: 1) What is the history and lineage of Black education in the U.S.?, 2) What can be gleaned from the contributions of Black educators to U.S. intellectual life and public education across time?, and 3) How can Black communities' approaches to teaching and learning combat antiblackness and promote joy, healing, and wholeness for marginalized students in K-12 classrooms?

The course operates from the following fundamental premise: in order to teach Black children well, educators must wholeheartedly believe that they deserve an education that centers their histories, needs, identities, and honors the fullness of their being. Moreover, the process of learning to teach often requires re-examining (and possibly revising or affirming) familiar ideas, biases, beliefs, and ways of working. The course is designed to lay the groundwork for reflective engagement with future educators’ developing practice that aims to center Blackness and affirm Black people’s humanity. By mining the intellectual legacies of Black educators through the scholarship of Black researchers, this paper will feature examples of students’ work (e.g., Zines) that demonstrate the ways that the course provides space to reflect on and understand how to enact pedagogies that are asset-based, antiracist, as well as that which rebukes the anti-Blackness that pervades and shapes K-12 school contexts (Author 3, 2023).

Author

• Wintre Foxworth Johnson, University of Virginia