“When I Became a Black Woman:” Ethnopoetry and Curricular Unforgetting for Social Studies Education

• In Event: Emotion, Justice, and Curriculum

Abstract

This study employs ethnopoetry as a storytelling method for the affective and relational dimensions of Black (mis)education. It draws on poetic findings to extend scholarship on Black (mis)representation in curriculum, or “Black flattening,” by exploring the internalization of educational harm. Analyzing an original ethnopoem as a record of a core educational memory, I examine how intra-racial Black relationships present something else to notice about Black (mis)education and ethnopoetry as a methodological addition to critical Black curriculum inquiry. Through three poetic movements, I demonstrate how the poem's formal features embody knowledge. Where existing scholarship largely documents textbook exclusions through content analysis, ethnopoetry reveals how exclusions script intra-racial relations, suggesting new directions for Black curriculum studies through unforgotten memory.

Author

• Danielle Charlemagne, University of Georgia