Black Liberatory Educational Policy: A Systematic and Unapologetic Literature Review on the Advancement of Black Teachers’ Pedagogies and Practices

• In Event: Critical Educational Policy Analysis: Attending to Equitable Power Analysis in Scholar-Practitioner Knowledge Co-Creation

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: Our paper explores the extent to which Black teachers and their knowledge co-creation activities have offered a guide to Black liberatory futures in educational policy– Black liberatory educational policy (BLEP). Then, we show how Black educational policy actors may negotiate aims in pursuit of equity using the Reality-Imaginary Spectrum (RIS).
Methods: Our systematic review gathered and synthesized Black educational policy knowledge that has advanced liberatory practices. In turn, drawing implications and co-imagining toward codifying Black teacher and student thrival at systems or structural levels. We asked how educational policy scholars, and their knowledge contributors have conceptualized systems-level infrastructure that advances Black liberatory practices. Our four-staged review strategy and selection criteria finalized the inclusion of 51 peer-reviewed articles.
Results: To answer the guiding questions, we found a collection of BLEPs that we organized within the classroom, district/school, and federal/state levels. We forward the Reality-Imaginary Spectrum (RIS) as a conversational tool that may help BLEP advocates more effectively reconcile tensions across our nuanced stances, and explicitly name the power-hoarding that halts Black liberatory practices at different levels.
Significance: Our review is important because it demonstrates simultaneously divergent and convergent stances present in Black liberatory pedagogies and practices. Black teacher advocates have made practicality-oriented arguments focused on improving the “ability to develop more positive perceptions of education as a welcoming profession” (Young & Easton-Brooks, 2020, p. 395). Simultaneously, Black-focused, educational policy researchers illuminate the complexities in how laws and structures obstruct, bolster, and/or omit Black teachers’ pedagogical acts (White et al., 2020). Black teachers, educators, and policy researchers continue to negotiate policy aims. Our Review’s Black liberatory educational policy framework contributes to Black-focused knowledge co-creation demanding both critical praxis (Hayes et al., 2014; Carruthers, 2018) and Black freedom dreaming (Dumas, 2014; Kelley, 2022; Lorde, 2012) because our Black children, our babies need our liberatory practices (Goss, 2015; Madkins, 2011). Our systematic, unapologetically, Black-focused review illuminated and reaffirmed how Black liberatory educational policy scholars and our Black teacher knowledge contributors can and have simultaneously developed practical solutions to resist anti-Black realities and co-imagined freeing policy, beyond. The Reality-Imaginary Spectrum, mentioned in the symposium overview, is a policy tool that stems from this systematic review of literature.

Author

• Nathaniel D. Stewart, University of Minnesota