Towards a Curriculum of Stay: How and Why Black Women Teachers Remain in Urban Classrooms
Open AccessAs suggested by the title of the project, this research is an effort to move toward a “curriculum of stay” for Black women teachers in urban schools. This means that, through my own currere (Pinar, 1975) and the currere journeys of my participants, I am creating a means for Black women to speak to other Black women about how and why we have remained teachers in urban school spaces despite displacement and other factors. For the qualitative study, I used traditional currere tools that are fused with cultural knowledge to create a shared narrative (Cruz et al., 2019; Evans-Winters, 2021). I pursued this goal by conducting a study of four Black women teachers in cities that have experienced high percentages of displacement of Black women teachers. Those cities are Washington, DC, Philadelphia, PA and New Orleans, LA, and the percentages are discussed briefly in this chapter and more robustly in Chapter 2. Currere style interviews that invited the participants to consider their past, present, and future as educators took place over a month during the summer of 2021. I also responded to the questions as a participant researcher. These teachers also participated in literature groups where we discussed the text Eloquent Rage: How a Black Feminist Discovered her Superpower by Brittany Cooper (2018). These literature groups allowed us to engage with four chapters in Cooper’s text and identify the push factors that threaten to displace Black women teachers from urban classrooms, such as institutional racism and sexism, neoliberal practices that favor institutions over community, and the “adultification” of Black children (Morris, 2016). The purpose, however, was not just to think about those factors. We also wanted to understand, as a collective, the pull factors that keep Black women in the space of the urban classroom despite those forces that attempt to remove us from those spaces. Using collective Black feminist currere as both theory and method, I extracted themes from the interviews and discussions and interpreted those themes through the aforementioned theoretical frame that provides space for the participants and myself, as a participant researcher, to carefully consider our past, presents, and futures as Black women and educators in urban schools. After analysis of the data, a “curriculum of stay” is now defined as the ability as Black women to create, sustain and pass on resources that allow us to remain in school spaces despite the concerted and intentional efforts of hegemonic power structures to remove us from those spaces. This “curriculum” is self-determined, that is, Black women take from it what is needed and add what they believe is missing. We know this “curriculum” without learning it in formal ways. It is, as the church mothers would say, “in our bones.” Our connection to the space and place of the urban classroom connects us to the specific histories and legacies of those who have gone before us, and we are able to re-member that which we have not been formally taught. The “curriculum of stay” provides us with an anchor and with wings. We are enabled to stay and empowered to grow.
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