Traversing Educational Landscapes: Exploring the Histories of Black Teachers in Canada and the United States

• In Event: Black Educators and the Struggle for Educational Justice

Abstract

Few studies have sought to compare the experiences of Black teachers in Canada and the US, this study seeks to interrogate the placement and role of persons of African descent within North American educational systems. This analysis discusses the fractured ways in which educational policies rejected, adopted, and responded to public outcries for Black educators and created limited forms of access within public schooling institutions that kept systemic forms of anti-Blackness intact and limited Black teacher retention in Canadian and US schools. Although Canada and the US varied in their educational histories, we hope instead to point to the processes by which anti-Blackness became embedded within school structures that systematically excluded Black teachers from the development of professional workplace cultures.

Authors

• Christopher J. Cormier, Stanford University

• Funke Aladejebi, University of Toronto

• Mildred Boveda, The Pennsylvania State University