The Souls of Black Teachers: Spirituality as an Aspect of Black Teachers' Ontoepistemologies

• In Event: The Answers We Seek Are Within Communities We Research: Reimagining Schooling Through Black Communal Knowledge

Abstract

When the U.S .Census Bureau (2010) posted the startling statistic that Black teachers make up only 8% percent of the United States K-12 teacher workforce, the data stood in stark contrast to the history of the Black teacher population before Brown v. Board of Education (Morris & Monroe, 2009). Recent research suggests that all students benefit from teachers of color because they often teach in culturally relevant ways, develop more trusting student-teacher relationships, serve as cultural ambassadors for students, and believe in the academic success of their students (Dilworth & Coleman, 2014; Partelow, Spong, Brown & Johnson, 2017; Wright, 2015).
Recognizing the dearth of Black teachers in the profession, efforts to recruit and retain them have been generic, grounded in Eurocentric notions of teaching and learning (Cross, 2005) and do not speak to the culturally grounded epistemologies and ontologies of Black people. Spirituality has historically been the backbone of Black education rooted in both why and how teachers teach, yet it is missing from current conversations about Black K-12 teachers’ engagement with culturally relevant and critical pedagogy as well as how they navigate structures that do not support them or their approaches to teaching.
This paper draws upon three core concepts: Dantley's (2003) conceptualization of spirituality, onto-epistemology (Boveda and Bhattacharya, 2019), and Crowley’s (2017) Blackpentacostal breath to frame our conversation about the centrality of spirituality in the lives of Black teachers. More specifically, we juxtapose the spiritually grounded practices of three historical Black women educators, Mary S. Peake, Anna Julia Cooper, and Septima Clark, with the whiteness of teacher education. By doing so, we position spirituality as a challenge to white supremacist ideologies and practices in teacher education programs, including programs that are branded as having a social justice focus. While asset pedagogies such as culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2014), and humanizing pedagogies (Salazar, 2013) have found a home and taken root within some teacher education programs, Dillard (2021) reminds us that we need spiritual health and wellness to engage in culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies.
We close by offering suggestions for how Black pre-service teachers can be better prepared within the profession in ways that honor their spiritual ways of knowing and being. Elucidating the spiritual ways of knowing and being of Black teachers and the threats to their onto-epistemologies from within teacher education enable us to humanize and engage Black teacher candidates in life-affirming ways as they pursue becoming teachers.

Author

• Keisha McIntosh Allen, University of Maryland