Black teachers in white spaces: Rupturing reproductions of Anti-Blackness in preservice social studies education

ABSTRACT

While states, educational agencies, and colleges of education across the United States seek to recruit more Black social studies teachers, the authors of this study—two former social studies teachers turned social studies preservice educators—raise caution to how limited these efforts are in transforming the anti-Black conditions that often contextualize teacher education programs. Using duethonographic methods, the authors reflect and analyze their experiences as undergraduate preservice social studies educators in predominately white institutions. In doing so, they construct letters to influential educators in their lives. As the letters and related analyses reveal, they had influential Black radical educators in and out of the academy that supported their justice-centered pedagogical and curricular development, as well as their survival in anti-Black preservice contexts. The authors conclude by putting forth a conceptualization of BlackCrit in preservice social studies education that they hope will aid educators and students alike in locating and utilizing support systems rooted in Black love and unapologetic praxes to both interrogate and dismantle the structures of anti-Blackness present in their preservice social studies programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Blackness
• BlacCrit in social studies
• duoethnography
• preservice teacher education

Acknowledgments

To Drs. Baszile and Watkins, our parents, families, and communities who have supported our survival in the academy and in schools.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Throughout this manuscript we capitalize Black to reference, as Dumas (2016) reminded us, “a self-determined set of histories, cultural processes and imagined performed kinships” (pp. 12–13). We also capitalize Black to honor the years of struggle and resistance for Black people to be recognized as human in U.S. society. Alternatively, we do not capitalize white in this manuscript as whiteness is defined by what it is not and additionally, capitalizing the term runs the risk of supporting the historical and present aims of white supremacy and white supremacists.