"Power to the Providers”: Black Home-Based Child Care Providers Are Educational Powerhouses

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

Abstract

We use a womanist framework to illuminate how Black women-led, home-based child care programs (0-3 years)--Family Child Care programs–in the U.S. South exist at the intersection of community work, place-based pedagogy, racial and cultural sustainability, and liberatory praxis. Through the intimacy and creativity of the “activist mothering” and “othermother work” executed within their own private homes, Black women foster the formation of homemade pedagogies, kinship networks and customs of care that enable ongoing access to invaluable material and socioemotional resources.
Utilizing workshop dialogues and field narratives as case studies, we argue that Black women-led, family child care providers are community gatekeeping institutions. They are actively nurturing entire communities by grounding their children in a collective consciousness via Black cultural traditions. By centering entire families concentrically inside a domestic, communal, and political learning space, providers move whole communities against further marginalization.

Author

• Cheryl A. Fields-Smith, University of Georgia