Understanding the Black Teacher Through Metaphor

• In Event: Growing and Sustaining Black Teachers: Examining the Intersection of Identity, Professional Development, and School Context

Abstract

Teacher education scholars have long used the literary device of metaphor to describe the work of teachers. Metaphors offer colorful descriptions about the teacher and the profession of teaching. What also undergirds the use of metaphors about teaching is the underlying philosophies about the purpose of the teacher and teaching. We argue however, that race and culture inform the kind of metaphors one might use to describe the teacher. In this sense, racialized sociohistorical forces (Omi and Winant, 1994) envelope the discourse of the teacher—particularly when deconstructing the metaphoric meaning of the “Black Teacher.” Drawing from racial formation theory, we argue that contingent socio-historical rules of race have helped to define how the Black teacher was discussed in schools and society. Omi and Winant (1994) define racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed (p.55).”

This paper employed historical inquiry to examine the contexts that informed the metaphors on Black teachers. In keeping with our theoretical framework, we argue that Black teachers in the U.S. were conceptualized in the socio-historical process by which race and racial categories have taken shape. We drew from a variety of historically situated discourses (e.g. journals, books, teacher memoirs, and book chapters) to identify and categorize the most pervasive metaphors. This inquiry process yielded six recursive metaphors about the Black teacher—Black teacher as role model, magician, worker, family member, political activist, and cultural translator. In this paper, we show how these metaphors took shape within historically racialized situated contexts, including the context of enslavement, emancipation, Jim Crow, Civil Rights Era, and post-Civil Rights Era.

For example, the concept of “role model” as it is frequently used particularly for African Americans suggests that the way one looks and/or speaks is more important than what it is these individuals have actually experienced or know. In some ways “role model” is a proxy in educational programs and policies for one who is black, brown and/or male. There is little in these initiatives to suggest that curriculum, assessments, or evaluation will be re-visited to include that which these groups know and understand that is different from the norm.

The significance of understanding Black teachers through the literary device of metaphors is that it helps to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of conceptualizing the Black teacher. The use of metaphors helps to capture the long-term historical work and conceptualization of the Black teacher over time. It also helps to challenge the idea that Black teachers can be understood as one undifferentiated mass. Social theorists have explained for decades that no category or group of people can be completely reduced to a set or similar traits and characteristics. This of course would apply to understanding Black teachers, who offer varied experiences and pedagogies to the teaching profession beyond the stock stories and metaphors that guide the public perception of the role and expectations of the Black teacher.

Authors

• Anthony L. Brown, The University of Texas - Austin

• Mary E. Dilworth

• Keffrelyn D. Brown, The University of Texas at Austin