Harvesting Seeds: Engaging Black and Brown M(other) Work in the (Re)Imagining of Educational Leadership

• In Event: Black Mamas Teach: Leaning on, Learning From, and Centering Black M(other)work as Educational Praxis

Abstract

The beliefs we hold about race, class, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, citizenship and other ways of being, come together in how we teach, fund, and lead in our schools. COVID-19 and recent (and ongoing) racial reckonings have forced us to come to terms with who and how we serve as educators, scholars and concerned community members. In the field of educational leadership we (scholars and practitioners) continue to grapple with explicitly preparing preservice leaders with innovative and critical forms of leadership that exist outside of white supremacy. For these reasons, I argue the need to (re)imagine the field of educational leadership through the centering of the experiences and contributions of Black women (Dillard, 1995; 2000; 2012).
Black women school leaders have demonstrated the relentlessness it takes to combat systems of oppression as they converge in our schools for more than 100 years (Alston, 2012; Reed, 2012). Much can be learned from Black women who are mothers, educators, leaders and scholars to guide this critical moment we’re in to help us (re)member that we have the tools to (re)build our schools that are socially just (Dillard, 2012). Through learning more about their legacy of resistance, thoughtfully engaging critical hope and acknowledging the need for healing from the ways that systemic oppression seek to maintain their subjugation in the field of education, we intentionally create a table where Black women serve as experts in the field and not clean up women (Peters, 2012).
In addition to centering of Black women’s experiences, we must also give Black women the space to share their innovative and holistic ways of engaging in their work. For example, one of the ways that Black women school leaders have navigated the field of educational leadership is through m(othering) (Watson, 2020). As school leaders, their efficacy comes from their ability to humanize their school community members and this feeling translates into learning environments for their students and teachers. Black women school leaders, just as mothers (and parents), must nurture, engage in difficult conversations, make unpopular decisions, and model the behaviors they wish to see, all in the name of service. To do this they have to engage in their leadership practice from the stance of critical hope, which in return means their communities are worth investing their time, professional and emotional capacity. Black motherhood is just that--- critical hope (Watson, 2020; Duncan-Andrade, 2009). Whether or not Black women school leaders have birthed children from their own bodies is not what is being presented. It is the ways in which their ability to m(other) has impacted their leadership, outcomes for historically marginalized youth and overall school community as critical hope personified. I argue that this form of leadership is necessary for the (re)building of schools that are rooted in educational justice.

Author

• Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker, University of Toronto