“Unsuited for the Times”: Edward K. Weaver’s (1913-1984) Conceptual Personae and Black Liberatory Science Education

• In Event: Genealogies of Black Possibility within 20th Century Black Education

Abstract

Objectives
In the mid-20th Century, Black educators faced challenges as dominant narratives deemed their teaching methods inadequate (Meyer, 1958) and questioned their commitment to Black liberation (Fairclough, 2009). These discourses misrepresented Black educators, relying on normative teaching expectations and activism approaches. Hence, Loder-Jackson (2020) recommends their intellectual activism, which inspired resistance among Black youth, be honored. However, prevailing discourses created a rigid dichotomy between teaching and activism, taking-for-granted the complexities teachers faced. This paper explores this historical context in science education, focusing on Edward K. Weaver (1913-1984). I examine what his legacy as a science teacher, researcher, and activist makes possible by asking, how does his historical positioning unsettle normative constructions of the science teacher and extend understandings of Black liberation?

Theoretical Perspectives
Wynter (2015) discusses the autopoetic turn as a conceptual and perceptual knowledge system that defines being human beyond biological terms (e.g., historical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, cosmological, and material) to conceive of and appreciate humanity beyond the Western knowledge system. These expanded dimensions provide access to more ways of connecting to Black living and personhood, which unsettles forms of disciplining that overdetermine Black death and suffering (Okello, 2024). To explore this, I reinterpret E.K. Weaver as a conceptual personae (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994)—a figure of thought—whose historical positioning in education and activism stimulates otherwise possibilities of science teaching beyond conventional disciplinary expectations. Weaver’s conceptual persona is a window into the Black image-making and world-making practices of the science teacher.

Modes of Inquiry and Sources
As a genealogy of Black possibility, this study moves from a linear biographical storytelling of Weaver as an individual, but abstracted to consider Weaver’s embodiment of the science teacher. I approach this study by drawing on primary and secondary sources about E.K. Weaver. Sources include journal articles, magazines, newspaper clippings, and professional organization meeting notes published between 1944-1984. Data was acquired from library databases, Black Teachers Archive, and other archives.

Substantiated Conclusions
Weaver's political action out/inside the classroom resonates with practices of Martin Luther King Jr., Horace Mann Bond, and W.E.B. Dubois, with whom he communicated. Weaver’s practices unsettle lines of demarcation that function to divide, rank, and control Black (science) teachers by depicting an inseparable personal-professional-political relationality that challenges the prevailing depoliticized and antiblack compulsory educational approaches. Examples include:
Weaver’s recognition as the school teacher who led a group of teenagers to Capitol Hill to urge Congress officials to pass anti-poll tax and anti-lynching laws.
Weaver explained how pseudoscience, white supremacy, and racist dogma negatively impact Negro science programs as they do Negores' lives.
Weaver promoted science and education as “instruments for realization of the democratic aspirations of the Negro people,” given their social acceptance.

Scholarly significance
Weaver’s persona gives attunement to Black possibility in science education, a historically disregarded intersection that Carter G. Woodson (2011) identifies as contributing to the mis-education of the Negro. Tracing Weaver illuminates a pedagogical lineage of Black world-making practices essential to political clarity and necessary for liberatory science education today.

Author

• Curtis O'Dwyer, University of Wisconsin - Madison