Teaching Otherwise: Black Women Educators’ Collective Resistance and Communal Care

• In Event: Women of Color Leading: Decolonizing Resistance and Radical Care

Abstract

This study examines how Black women educators push against dominant educational systems by drawing on culturally grounded practices of care, resistance, and spiritual labor (Collins, 2022; Dillard, 2022). Guided by Black feminist theory and critiques of racial capitalism, it reframes teacher development through cultural integrity, community accountability, and historical consciousness (Woodson, 2006; Brewer, 2020). Rather than seeking reform, it answers AESA’s call to “agitate paradigms” and engage in “repair and reconstruction” by naming education as a site of ideological struggle. Using interviews, reflection journals, and archival work, this research privileges knowledge born through relationship, not extraction (Clemons, 2019; Collins, 2022). It centers Black women not as data points, but as theorists and visionaries who protect, sustain, and imagine liberatory education in the face of erasure (Rodney, 2018; Givens, 2021). As Cabral urged, teachers must serve the people, not the system. This work takes that call seriously (Freire citing Cabral, 2020).

Author

• Bisola A. Wald, University of Minnesota