Desegregation Pioneers: Teaching With an Epistemology of Navigation

• In Event: Embracing Soul Work: Black Educators Teaching for Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This paper focuses on three desegregation pioneers, seventeen year old Josephine Boyd Bradley, who desegregated Greensboro High (now Grimsley High) in Greensboro, North Carolina on September 4, 1957; six year old Ruby Bridges, who integrated William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 14, 1960 and fifteen year old Millicent Brown, who was selected to integrate Rivers High in Charleston, South Carolina on September 3, 1963. Their narratives illustrate three distinct modes of navigation, all of which suggest that these young public intellectuals operated with an epistemology of social agency that later informed their teaching and inspired them to teach for justice.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The role of Ruby Bridges, Josephine Boyd Bradley and Millicent Brown in desegregating public schools whether conscious and/or unconscious resulted in a pedagogy of survival worth noting and examining in our post-civil rights educational discourses. Their narrative accounts speak to the intersection of race and navigation. The ways in which they journeyed through desegregation challenged then prevalent beliefs from some that African American children were inferior. Their respective journeys influenced their teaching such that they each question the role of current public educational practices in shaping a moral dimension of learning that inspires young people to embrace principles of equity and justice.

Methods, techniques or modes of inquiry
I utilized narrative research methods (Riessman, 1993 & 2007) to examine the experiences of these social agents. In this process, I identified core themes that emerged from each narrative, core concepts that emerged as patterns across narratives, and I explored the interplay between all concepts.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
This paper uses first person interviews, all of which were video-taped and transcribed. Each participant was interviewed four or five times. Participants also participated in a panel discussion. The transcript of that discussion also served as a data source for this work.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments /point of view
Their experiences represent three distinct modes of navigation as Black pedagogues: 1) A Pedagogy of Socratic Questioning, 2) A Pedagogy of Politics and Protection, and 3) A Pedagogy of Humando and Symbolic Schizophrenia. The act of integrating was their educative work, a lesson that teaches us the “meaning of a profound commitment to fight social injustices in our struggle to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings” (Freire, 2002, p. 25).

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
The experiences of Bridges, Boyd-Bradley, and Brown provide an epistemology for others who experience trauma such that they can work with that trauma as an “instrument for…critical discovery” (Freire, 2002, p. 48). Their narratives provide a model of endurance, much needed in today’s society inundated with incidents of bullycide , school violence, student disengagement and marginalization.

Author

• Karen Meadows, Guilford County Schools