“Nobody’s Mule”: Black Womanist Caring-Agency, Urban Charters, and the Choice to (Not) Teach

ABSTRACT

Urban charter schools targeting Black communities struggle to recruit Black teachers and even more to retain them. At the same time that scholarship has begun to recenter Black and Brown teachers’ lives, the narrated perspectives of Black women teachers are often drowned out in urban educational reform’s Hollywoodization. In this article, we story Nina Sinclair’s 7-year teaching trajectory across five urban charters in two states to examine her layered Black womanist caring-agency. As our analysis demonstrates, for Sinclair, it was not enough just to teach. She wanted the autonomy to create motivating and engaging instruction to inspire her students and herself to do and be more. She wanted to be in a place where she could grow professionally; where she would be mentored, supported, and challenged; and where she could enjoy being Nina Sinclair with like-minded people. All of these things mattered because she mattered. Organizing Sinclair’s pivots in and out of the charter school classroom through a quare framework, we theorize her shifting professional movements for being whole. Our findings frame Sinclair’s self-care—her freedom to choose what she wanted to do, to be, to stop, to slow down, to picture what if and what else—as the legacy her ancestors had bequeathed her and as an underexamined but no less important dimension of her agentive caring.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For confidentiality, we adjusted or fictionalized the names of people, places, and institutions across this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tracey A. Benson

Tracey A. Benson, EdLD, is an independent scholar whose research focuses on addressing structural and systemic racism in K-12 school systems.

Spencer Salas

Spencer Salas, PhD, is a professor in the Cato College of Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Tia Dolet

Tia Dolet is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle, Secondary, and K-12 Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Bianca Jones

Bianca Jones is an independent scholar whose engagement in schools and communities courageously centers Black and Brown lives.