We Been Relevant: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Black Women Teachers in Segregated Schools

Abstract

This paper considers how the practice of culturally relevant pedagogy may have predated the theory’s coinage. Using scholarly accounts of Black women teachers in de jure segregated Black schools in the Jim Crow South, the authors suggest that these educators engaged a critical, politically and culturally informed pedagogy; their praxis built on and affirmed their students’ cultural, racial, and political knowledge, worldviews, and assets. Despite the white supremacist regime of antiBlack terrorism that hampered many material aspects of Black segregated schools, this paper documents intangible dimensions that partly defined during the Jim Crow era the tradition of African American pedagogical excellence. Demonstrating pedagogical alignment across each of the theory’s three propositions, we use scholarly examples to indicate how in de jure segregated Black schools, Black women teachers’ praxis reflected culturally relevant pedagogy before the label was introduced to the education research community. Highlighting what Black women teachers’ historic labor offers the current educational landscape, this paper’s implications call for education researchers to excavate this rich site of knowledge to inform and enhance the current education of students of Color broadly and Black students specifically.