Complicated contradictions amid Black feminism and millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls

ABSTRACT

Millennial Black women teachers wrestle with two simultaneous burdens: disrupting the racist and sexist status quo of schooling through curriculum, and employing tactics to survive school politics among their majority White women colleagues. This article describes how the Sisters of Promise (SOP) curriculum aligned with Black feminism and Black feminist pedagogy, and how it did not. This curriculum was created for Black girls within the margins of school by a millennial Black woman teacher and other Black women teachers. Analysis of the SOP curriculum revealed that even with the best of intentions, and even for relatively self-aware millennial Black women teachers, it is possible to present Black girl students with contradictory messages, due to a lack of exposure to Black feminism, Black feminist pedagogy, and the work of Black women educational scholars, in their curriculum studies. Included are implications and recommendations for millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls.

KEYWORDS:

• Femininities
• critical pedagogies
• difference and diversity
• girls
• gender mainstreaming
• race and ethnicities
• pedagogy
• teachers/educators

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Tiffany M Nyachae http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8420-3638

Notes

1. I use the identifiers Black and African American interchangeably throughout this article to mean individuals who are descendants of US slaves and socially constructed as Black based on an African phenotype. However, Black is usually used to identify people worldwide who are of African descent and phenotype, whereas African American refers to Black people born in the USA.

2. According to Black educational theorist and feminist-womanist Henry (2005), herstories tell how Black women educators fought to transform the social conditions of Black people. In other words, herstories centre the activist work of Black women teachers. Educational scholars Alston and McClellan (2011) described herstories as the history of Black women activists (e.g. Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Angela Davis). In contrast, freelance writer Lewis (1988) conceptualised herstory as Black girls' perceptions of their realities. Lewis promoted the use of herstory to inform Afrocentric work and programming with Black girls. Building on each of these understandings, I use herstories here to describe the relationship between one Black woman's reflection on her identity, activism, personal history, and interactions with others, as connected to the intergenerational history of Black women. Herstory is important in Black feminist pedagogy because it centres on the standpoints of Black women and helps us to (re)member our legacy (Dillard 2012).

3. Pseudonyms are used here.

4. Loud Black girls is used here to convey Fordham’s (1993) notion of loudness to mean the insistence of Black girls to be seen in their full Black girlhood. Loud Black girls refuse to be considered powerless or viewed as ‘nothingness’ (Fordham 1993, 25). Therefore, they bear their culturally specific identities of womanhood as resistance and struggle.