“Learning at the Knee”: Intergenerational Practitioner Knowledge of Black Girls in ECE

• In Event: Beyond Degrees: Making Space and Policies for Generational Knowledge in the Early Childhood Care and Education Workforce

Abstract

When researchers intentionally account for the complexities of identity, intersectionality, and intergenerationality in the knowledge production of Black women early childhood education (ECE) teachers, they disrupt historical and systemic practices that silence and render invisible the onto-epistemological processes of Black teenage girls in becoming future ECE practitioners. Drawing on findings from a larger three-year project, this paper traces how Black teenage girls living in the Deep South and aspiring to ECE careers come to know and understand childcare practices during their own childhoods, especially from close women relatives. The study employs black feminist epistemologies and narrative inquiry as both theoretical and methodological approaches and in so doing, gives voice to the gendered, classed, and racialized counterstories and memory-work of study participants (Dillard, 2021). The analysis of data involved an iterative and recursive process of attending to the “three-dimensional space” of interaction (personal and social), continuity (past, present, and future), and place (spatial context) (Clandinin & Connely, 2000). The authors use interview, video, and document data gathered from four (n=4) Black teenage girls enrolled in high school early childhood career pathway programs in two, separate public-school districts.

Findings reveal the influence of family lessons through direct observation and interaction with mothers, grandmothers, and other community women in participants’ foundational understandings of ECE. Participants’ (re)collections of family lessons via their communal participation in the caretaking of younger children alongside relatives within the context of historically and predominantly Black neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions aid in the (re)production of norms and values associated with “othermothering” (Case, 1997) and “mother wit” (Dundes, 1973) as commonsensical knowledge. While the literature is replete with evidence showing the marginalization of Black girls in school, our findings show that coupling family lessons with culturally responsive formal training positions low-income Black girls to gain career savviness while becoming empowered advocates particularly for young children of color.

Mainstream discourses discount the role of socialization and intergenerational transmission in the knowledge production of Black women and girls however, this paper roots out the tacit, caretaking knowledge of Black girls and distinguishes that which is learned and reproduced culturally and communally from that which is learned by and within formal training. This study is particularly timely and significant in an age where political forces seek to gut programs for child care and early learning and to erase the race, class, and gender subjectivities of ECE practitioners. The paper concludes with implications for ECE teacher education research, practice, and policy.

References

Case, K.I. (1997). African American othermothering in the urban elementary school. The Urban
Review, 29(1), 25-39.

Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly, F.M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative
research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Dillard, C. B. (2021). In the spirit of our work: Black women teachers (re)member. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.

Dundes, A. (1973). Mother wit from the laughing barrel. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of
Mississippi.

Authors

• Morgan Faison, University of Georgia

• Stacie Abdallah, University of Georgia