(Re)turning to Our Homeplace: Home Education as a Praxis of Black M/otherwork

• In Event: Looking Back and Moving Forward: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Today’s Black Home Education Movement

Abstract

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting school disruptions, home education amongst Black families increased drastically in the United States, going from 3.3% to 16% (Eggleston & Fields, 2021), with Black mothers at the fore (Stewart, 2020). The motivation for this choice includes a desire to keep their children safe from both the spread of Covid-19 as well as the pervasive and institutionalized anti-Black racism in both public and private school settings (Johnson, 2022; Adams, 2023). The pandemic served as a catalyst for Black parents and guardians to seriously explore home education as a viable educational option for their children. Home education, then, serves as a form of racial protection (Mazama & Lundy, 2012) for the mind, bodies, and spirits of Black children. While the longevity of this phenomenon in our contemporary times is yet to be seen, this paper serves as a departure to document the ways in which home education has always been a significant part of Black educational history, and more specifically, a significant site of Black mothers’ educational activism. This is noteworthy as it looks beyond the current context of the homeschooling movement to document a remarkable ancestral connection. We argue that home education has been and remains a liberatory site of Black education, with Black mothers leading the charge.

Using archival data, we offer Black herstory lessons across time, from slavery to the present, to intentionally (re)member (Dillard, 2012) and trace Black mothers’ lineage as home educators. In doing so, we honor the legacy of Black mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters, and othermothers, including our own, who played a significant role in teaching Black children the values and skills often absent from mainstream schools (Coleman-King et al., 2022, p. 119). We simultaneously contest mainstream ideologies of Black parental (un)involvement and challenge deficit, dominant narratives of Black mothers. We likewise expand notions of what an educator is, what learning entails, and how pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal, 2001) developed and evolved over time. By documenting this maternal legacy, we demonstrate that there existed, and still exists, a radical tradition of Black mothers being the vanguard in the fight against educational exclusion, mis-education, and racialized trauma in schools, starting in the home.

Authors

• Amber Neal-Stanley, Purdue University

• Renee Serrell Gibert, Purdue University