The Black Women’s Gathering Place: reconceptualising a curriculum of place/space

ABSTRACT

This article de-centres imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal traditions of critical approaches in Curriculum Studies via an examination of experiences shared at The Black Women’s Gathering Place (BWGP), a non-traditional space where a diverse, intergenerational group of Black women engage with each other through the sharing of stories. In the BWGP, we enact components of Pinar’s [2004. What is Curriculum Theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum] concept of currere, simultaneously re-entering our collective and individual pasts and re-imagining our futures in an effort to reconcile our public and private selves. Taking up tenets of Black feminist theory, theoretical framings of hidden curriculum, and components of Ng-A-Fook’s [2007. An Indigenous Curriculum of Place: The United Houma Nation’s Contentious Relationship with Louisiana’s Educational Institutions. New York, NY: Peter Lang] ‘Curriculum of Place,’ we reconceptualise a curriculum of place/space that negotiates dominant norms expressed in social environments. In this space, we validate traditional knowledges upheld in communities of Black women across the Diaspora. The BWGP allows us to argue for a re-presentation of extant knowledge by and about Black women.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• race and ethnicities
• pedagogy
• women
• embodiment
• curriculum
• narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Collins' (2000) defines oppression as ‘any unjust situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group access to the resources of society’ (4).

2. Each story, unless otherwise noted, is a re-presentation of a speaker's utterances. We aim to disrupt practices of presenting the recollected experiences of others as their own, deleting any trace of the voice of the researcher. We evoke, instead, the practice of re-storying (see Connelley and Clandinin 1990; Kinloch and San Pedro 2014; McCormack 2002). In re-storying, we evoke the essence of a speaker's experience, as the exact words and nonverbal interactions have since faded from memory.

3. These vignettes were transcribed from an audio-recording of this meeting.

4. Pseudonym, as are all other names of BWGP participants whose commentary is shared here.

5. Pseudonym.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Corporation of National and Community Service: Learn and Serve Program.