Urban Teaching and Black Girls’ Pedagogies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menah Pratt-Clarke ◽  
Andrea N. Baldwin ◽  
Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Educators ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Urban Teaching ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Gender Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Black Women Educators

To discuss and understand urban teaching and Black girls’ pedagogies, the fundamental premise is that Black girls are not monolithic, but complex and nonhomogenous. Black girlhood studies recognize that, because of their intersectional race, class, and gender status, Black girls have different experiences than Black boys and White girls. Core themes in Black girlhood include self-identity and socialization; beauty and self-expression; popular culture, hip hop, and stereotypes; violence; systemic discipline in schools; and resiliency and survival. Responding to the unique experiences of Black girls, Black women educators developed and adopted a pedagogy that focuses on and centers Black girls and Black girlhood in all their complexity. Using a strengths-based approach, Black girls’ pedagogy is built on a Black feminist and womanist framework that recognizes the need for culturally informed curriculum and classroom experiences, more Black women educators, and a commitment to an ethics of care.

Centering “Grace”: Challenging Anti-Blackness in Schooling Through Motherwork

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Terri N. Watson ◽  
Gwendolyn S. Baxley
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
School Leadership ◽  
School Leaders ◽  
Black Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Patricia Hill Collins ◽  
Educational Advocacy

Anti-Blackness is global and present in every facet of society, including education. In this article, we examine the challenges Black girls encounter in schools throughout the United States. Guided by select research centered on Black women in their roles as mothers, activists and school leaders, we assert that sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of Motherwork should be an essential component in reframing the praxis of school leadership and in helping school leaders to rethink policies, practices, and ideologies that are anti-Black and antithetical to Blackness and Black girlhood. While most research aimed to improve the schooling experiences of Black children focuses on teacher and school leader (mis)perceptions and systemic racial biases, few studies build on the care and efficacy personified by Black women school leaders. We argue that the educational advocacy of Black women on behalf of Black children is vital to culturally responsive school leadership that combats anti-Blackness and honors Black girlhood. We conclude with implications for school leaders and those concerned with the educational experiences of Black children, namely Black girls.

Womanist Inquiry for Social Justice in Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina N. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Women Educators ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Multiple Systems ◽  
Informal Curriculum ◽  
Black Women Educators

Womanism is a social justice-oriented standpoint perspective focusing on the unique lived experiences of Black women and other women of color and the strategies that they utilize to withstand and overcome racialized, gendered, class-based, and other intersecting forms of oppression for the betterment of all humankind. Much of Womanist inquiry conducted in the field of education focuses on mining history to illuminate the lives, activism, and scholarly traditions of well-known and lesser-known Black women educators. Womanist inquiry focusing on the lives and pedagogies of Black women educators serves as an important corrective, adding to official historical records the contributions that Black women and other women of color have made to their schools, communities, and society. By providing insight into the ways in which processes of teaching and learning are understood and enacted from the perspective of women navigating multiple systems of oppression, Womanist inquiry makes a significant contribution to studies of formal curricular processes. Womanist inquiry related to informal curriculum (i.e., educational processes understood broadly and occurring outside of formal educational settings) is equally important because it offers alternative interpretations of cultural productions and lived experiences that open up new spaces for the understanding of Black women’s lived experiences. A common theme of Womanist curriculum inquiry for social justice involves physical and geographic spaces of struggle and possibility. Indeed, many of the culturally derived survival strategies articulated by Womanist scholars focus on the possibilities of working within the blurred boundaries and hybridized spaces of the in-between to achieve social justice goals. In addition to the provision of culturally congruent survival strategies, Womanist inquiry also provides sources of inspiration for contemporary Black women and other women of color engaged in curriculum work for social justice. The diverse forms of and approaches to Womanist inquiry in curriculum point to the fruitfulness of using Womanism to understand the intersectional thoughts and experiences of Black women and other women of color in ways that further social justice goals.

Envisioning Black Girl Futures

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aria S. Halliday
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Fertile Ground

Black girlhood exists in a world that is constantly trying to negate it. Black vernacular traditions, too, allow girls to be considered “fast” or “womanish” based on their perceived desire or sexuality. However, Black girlhood studies presents a space where Black girls can claim their own experiences and futures. This essay engages how Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda” is fertile ground to help demystify Black girls’ possibilities for finding sexual pleasure and self-determination. Using hip-hop feminism, I argue that “Anaconda” presents a Black feminist sexual politics that encourages agency for Black girls, providing a “pinkprint” for finding pleasure in their bodies.

scholarly journals Are Black Women and Girls Associated With Danger? Implicit Racial Bias at the Intersection of Target Age and Gender

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (10) ◽  
pp. 1427-1439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsey C. Thiem ◽  
Rebecca Neel ◽  
Austin J. Simpson ◽  
Andrew R. Todd
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Black Boys ◽  
Age Bias ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Implicit Stereotyping ◽  
And Gender

We investigated whether stereotypes linking Black men and Black boys with violence and criminality generalize to Black women and Black girls. In Experiments 1 and 2, non-Black participants completed sequential-priming tasks wherein they saw faces varying in race, age, and gender before categorizing danger-related objects or words. Experiment 3 compared task performance across non-Black and Black participants. Results revealed that (a) implicit stereotyping of Blacks as more dangerous than Whites emerged across target age, target gender, and perceiver race, with (b) a similar magnitude of racial bias across adult and child targets and (c) a smaller magnitude for female than male targets. Evidence for age bias and gender bias also emerged whereby (d) across race, adult targets were more strongly associated with danger than were child targets, and (e) within Black (but not White) targets, male targets were more strongly associated with danger than were female targets.

Race and Gender Intersectionality and Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venus E. Evans-Winters
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Personal Community

When recognizing the cultural political agency of Black women and girls from diverse racial and ethnic, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic backgrounds and geographical locations, it is argued that intersectionality is a contributing factor in the mitigation of educational inequality. Intersectionality as an analytical framework helps education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners better understand how race and gender intersect to derive varying amounts of penalty and privilege. Race, class, and gender are emblematic of the three systems of oppression that most profoundly shape Black girls at the personal, community, and social structural levels of institutions. These three systems interlock to penalize some students in schools while privileging other students. The intent of theoretically framing and analyzing educational problems and issues from an intersectional perspective is to better comprehend how race and gender overlap to shape (a) educational policy and discourse, (b) relationships in schools, and (c) students’ identities and experiences in educational contexts. With Black girls at the center of analysis, educational theorists and activists may be able to better understand how politics of domination are organized along other axes such as ethnicity, language, sexuality, age, citizenship status, and religion within and across school sites. Intersectionality as a theoretical framework is informed by a variety of standpoint theories and emancipatory projects, including Afrocentrism, Black feminism and womanism, critical race theory, queer theory, radical Marxism, critical pedagogy, and grassroots’ organizing efforts led by Black, Indigenous, and other women of color throughout US history and across the diaspora.

More than Sass or Silence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nicole Brown
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Girls Studies

This chapter presents a soundtrack of Black girls' expressive culture as ethnographically documented in SOLHOT in the form of original music. To think through the more dominant categorizations of how Black girls are heard, as both sassy and silent, this chapter samples Andrea Smith's (2006) “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing” to offer a new frame called “The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood.” Music made from conversations in SOLHOT is used to emphasize how three logics of the creative potential framework, including volume/oppression, swagg/surveillance, and booty/capitalism, amplifies Black girls' critical thought to document the often overlooked creative process of Black girl music making, demonstrate how hip-hop feminist sensibilities inform girls' studies, and, most importantly, move those who do Black girl organizing toward a wider repertoire of actions and conversations that affirm differences among Black girls and differently sounding Black girl knowledge.

Black Women Remember Black Girls

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nicole Brown
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Made In

This chapter shows how Black girlhood must be made—in SOLHOT the space of Black girlhood is made through time, a timing that is infused with the sacred and spirit. In SOLHOT, to “homegirl” means engaging Black girls in the name of Black girlhood as sacred work that implicates time. Sacred work acknowledges the ways spirit moves one to act, often beyond the material conditions of one's immediate circumstance. The chapter considers how homegirls remember SOLHOT as a sacred experience that makes Black girlhood possible. It then features a creative and collective memory constructed from the interview transcripts of eight SOLHOT homegirls and M. Jacqui Alexander's (2005) Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. The memory shows how homegirls' labor constructs SOLHOT as a methodology and cosmology that makes Black girlhood possible, affirms Black girls' lives, and enables personal and collective transformation.

Tiara

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nicole Brown
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
After School ◽  
School Program ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
After School Program ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Women And Girls

This chapter features a scene from a play entitled Endangered Black Girls (EBG), based on the lived experiences of Black girls the author has worked with in an after-school program (not SOLHOT) and has learned about through news stories. Theorizing the process of writing and performing EBG on through to subsequent productions made possible only because of the show's original cast, this chapter illustrates how creative means of expression make it possible to fully capture the complexities of Black girlhood and that attending to the complexities of Black girlhood is necessary to affirm Black girls' daily lives. Importantly, performances of EBG generated new ideas for ways Black women and girls could be present with each other, and the play was a primary catalyst for suggesting and co-organizing Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) as transformative collective and creative work.

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