Black1 women from all walks of life have historically been freedom fighters and catalysts for societal, institutional, and individual change. However, discourse on Black women’s contemporary resistance tends to focus on public political activity (i.e. protests), overlooking the countless and varied ways in which Black women engage in less visible, yet no less significant change-making efforts (Collins, 2009, 2013; Wane & Jagire, 2013). Accordingly, Laubscher (2006) asserts that “resistance can issue rhizomatically from anywhere and everywhere” (p. 208). For example, Black women are and have historically been at the forefront of liberation efforts through both formal and informal education where they have engaged in what Rochelle Brock (2005) has termed a “pedagogy of life,” teaching resistance in various capacities as community activists, ministers, midwives, artists, and healers, and in a plethora of settings such as in homes, churches, schools, parks, community centers, libraries, museums, on street corners, and through media (see, e.g., Payne & Strickland, 2008; Hine & Thompson, 1998). As such, Black women have been instrumental to the cultivation of liberatory pedagogies purposefully designed to transmit oppositional knowledge to counter white supremacist and patriarchal hegemony , and to create positive, deep structural shifts in the ways of being, worldviews, and actions of those under their tutelage (Henry, 1998; Johnson, Pitre, & Johnson, 2014).
Teaching, in all of its forms, has historically been an integral part of Black women’s struggle for social justice . The connection between early Black women educators’ justice work and their pedagogies can best be described as “a collective, strategic, multidimensional pedagogical approach committed to liberation, equality, representation, participation and actualization in education and society though critiques and transformation of institutions, curriculum and epistemologies” (Gist, 2015, p. 51). Indeed, Black women have made tremendous pedagogical contributions toward Black liberation particularly where educational opportunities have been denied and/or there have been vast disparities (Clemons, 2014; Delpit, 1995; Fairclough, 2007; Foster, 1997; Phillips & McCaskill, 1995; Siddle-Walker, 2005). Black women educators of today join a river of Black foremothers2 whose pedagogies not only served as resistance to white supremacist and patriarchal domination, but as healing and empowerment particularly for Black community members (Baker, 2011; Beauboeuf-LaFontant, 1999; Dixson, 2003; Giddings, 1984). However, because much of the pedagogical literature tends to center whiteness and/or maleness,3 the subjugated knowledge of Black women educators who have done and are currently doing important work remains largely invisible. As such, this volume fills an important gap in the literature as it aims to illuminate, contextualize, and complicate Black women’s liberatory pedagogical approaches, both within and beyond higher education.
As Joy James (1993) maintains, “We [Black women] tell our stories to illuminate the paths we travel and to share humor, courage and wisdom in this liberation struggle” (p. 31). In keeping with James’ insight, this anthology takes an assets-based approach where authors present counterstories that serve to challenge deficit thinking surrounding Black women’s intellectual production (Bay, Griffin, Jones, & Savage, 2015), to push back against those who seek to define and exclude Black women’s voices, and to heal, inspire, and transform others. Specifically, the authors share their wisdom through a wide range of sentiments as they document their challenges, triumphs, and the ways in which their Black womanhood (as well as their culture /ethnicity, class background, sexuality, etc.) has informed their unique pedagogies and praxes. In so doing, many of the authors also present model(s) for pedagogies, curriculum development, and frameworks based in Black/African indigenous knowledge systems. Thus this volume celebrates Black women’s ancestral ties to Africa and the power that this yields, while simultaneously offering culturally-specific tools to build a body of emancipatory wisdom, which reaches across disciplines, institutions, and populations.
In an effort to expand the literature on Black women’s pedagogies, this volume incorporates a plethora of voices, theoretical and pedagogical frameworks, as well as a variety of disciplinary locations and teaching/learning environments. Through a multidimensional lens, the authors present pedagogy as a political endeavor aimed at decolonizing and redefining the ways we think about teaching, learning, and praxis . Notwithstanding differences in ideological and political underpinnings, the contributors to this volume are all committed to a praxis of liberation in which the transformative and healing power and potential of Black women’s pedagogies is highlighted. As such, the authors move beyond victimhood to embrace the notion of Black women educators, scholars, and activists as active agents in the creation and maintenance of “cultures of dissent” (Mohanty, 1994, p. 162), in essence transforming the academy and/or society itself.
Ultimately, this book serves to reclaim educational spaces for Black women’s knowledges, identities, and realities to emerge, providing important subtext for decolonizing pedagogy. Employing ancestral ways of knowing and the potency of narrative, the themes of this collection draw on community, collaboration, and consciousness-raising in order to create stories of resistance , transformation, and healing . In so doing, we have positioned Black women at the center in an effort to challenge our objectification and invisibility, (re)claiming a radical Black female subjectivity (hooks, 1989, 1992). We therefore anticipate that this volume will do far more than provide an academic scope. Rather, we hope to invoke perspectives that unbind pedagogy from the academy and white supremacist education, while simultaneously celebrating the rich rebellious resistance of each narrative voice within this work.
Stretching the Notion of Pedagogy
The term “pedagogy” has traditionally referred to the art or science of teaching, and, particularly in the professional field of education, tends to encompass instructional analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of student learning. However, as Ellsworth (2005) notes, “our very frameworks for understanding what pedagogy is extends from our own cultural constructs of what counts as teaching and learning in institutional settings—constructs that reify traditional forms of intellectual activity as the only possible mode of critical intervention” (p. 5). Thus, our conceptualization of pedagogy interrogates the above definition which excludes and negates pedagogies that do not fit neatly into this rigid, limited, and very technical view of what pedagogy is and should be. Instead, this volume rests on the assumption that education is a process rather than a product, expanding the concept of pedagogy beyond one’s teaching practices to more holistically encompass the “meaningful interaction between teaching and learning” (Wink, 2011, p. 47), and the entire process of knowledge production and consumption. As such, liberatory pedagogy denotes a less formalized process illustrating a “collectively produced set of experiences organized around issues and concerns that allow for a critical understanding of everyday oppression as well as the dynamics involved in constructing alternative political cultures ” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1993, p. 27). Accordingly, in this volume we explore the multiplicity of meanings, forms, and outcomes of pedagogy, including unearthing the hidden or unacknowledged pedagogies of liberation that Black women engage, within and beyond a higher education setting.
While we acknowledge hooks’ (1994) contention that the classroom can be a site f...