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This paper contributes to the discourse on the role of critical pedagogy in the U.S. education system. The paper is inspired by the story of a participant from a larger ongoing phenomenological study designed to explore the experience of immigrant teachers in the United States. The participant was selected because she gained prominence in the larger study as the only teacher who reported that because of the injustices she experienced (personally and vicariously) during her K-12 education, she was inspired to pursue teaching as a career. The participant is a Black female teacher who immigrated from England to the United States, and who has taught for approximately 30 years between both countries. Her experience as a student and her work as a teacher, are reflective of, and analyzed through the lens of critical pedagogy. The participant's experience was carefully and respectfully crafted into a profile that produced three major themes: (1) Racial injustice as an altruistic inspiration to becoming a teacher; (2) the work of the immigrant Teacher of Color in the United States necessarily involves actuating an inclusive and racial justice curricular agenda; and (3) what it means to be an immigrant Educator of Color in the United States is to conceptualize your practice as a deliberate political act that counteracts racial injustice and inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black educators represent a small percentage of the educator workforce. In this manuscript, we examine the institutional and leadership conditions which contribute to the liminal presence of Black women educators specifically. We nuance the discussion about Black women educators to help educational leaders gain a deeper understanding of their: commitments to Black students, experiences with organizational oppression, and navigational techniques. We outline the ways that four Black women educators center religio-spiritual praxis in their classrooms. We use a phenomenological case study design to explore the narratives and religo-spiritual perspectives of four Black women educators. The authors leverage womanist theology to examine Black women educators' work, commitments and ways of knowing. This manuscript utilizes interviews, artifact and document collection to paint a holistic picture. There are three major themes: strength, peace and womanist activism. These findings suggest that Black women educators are uniquely positioned to navigate, and help their Black students navigate, oppressive schooling conditions. This manuscript nuances the discussion about Black women educators in three key ways: (1) repositions their expertise in supporting Black students, (2) can increase educational leaders' understanding of their commitments and realities, and (3) expands the teacher turnover discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of two African American women literacy educators who engage in literacy teaching and learning with fourth-grade African American boys to cultivate their intellectual curiosities and joy. It mentions that inquiry-driven and interdisciplinary exposure helps African American boys to find their place in the world and experiment with creative solutions. The radical imaginations of African American literary societies helped in literacy teaching and learning.

As education reform continues a seemingly endless cycle of incremental advancement for students and teachers of color followed by the inevitable White-centric backlash threatened by ideas like equity and anti-racist curricula, it is essential to consider perhaps now more than ever, what the past has to teach us all. Inspired by three voices from the past in particular, this article seeks to begin a conversation to bring back, to recycle what has been too often side-aside at the intersection of racism and sexism: the powerful lessons we may learn yet from African American women teachers. This article represents the beginning of such an effort to bring forward ideas that we already knew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henryism as a construct draws comparisons to what is commonly referred to as respectability politics, or the active adoption of standards rooted in whiteness as a regulatory instrument of one's behavior and emotions. This manuscript will bring Henryism and respectability politics into conversation in an effort to illuminate the paradox of achievement for Black educators and professionals. By examining the experiences of Black women in higher education wrestling with racial battle fatigue, I uncover the essence and possibilities of what E. Frances White calls the 'double-edged nature of the politics of respectability', recognizable as organized anxiety, a discourse of resistance and simultaneously an investment in stereotypes about Black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses topics within the issue including experiences of African American women in education, emotional stress faced by African American teachers; and critical race policy framework.

Research has documented that effective Black educators ignite the torch and light the path toward effectively meeting the needs of all students, particularly African American. However, descriptions of "highly qualified" teachers often ignore the critical insights and practices that undergird the success of Black teachers, and one consequence of this pedagogical negligence has been the professional alienation of effective Black female educators. This article shares findings from a study with five community-nominated Black female teachers, and uses the theories of intersectionality and positionality, along with discourse analysis, to investigate the groups' perceptions of their professional positionality. Findings reveal a distinctive narrative in which participants expressed being positioned in ways that reflect negative stereotypical images of Black women despite their effectiveness in promoting student success. Implications and recommendations for teacher effectiveness research, teacher preparation, and teacher quality policy are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss the various articles published within the issue on such topics as teacher education, workforce diversity in education, and pedagogical excellence among African American women teachers.

Schoolteacher Maritcha Lyons was among the pioneering African American women who, in 1892, built one of the first women's rights and racial justice organizations in the United States, the Woman's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn (WLU). The WLU is recognized for its antilynching work in alliance with Ida B. Wells, and as an organizational springboard to the National Association of Colored Women. This essay examines struggles on "the color line" by Lyons, other WLU members, and women educators, through their community's engagement in 1880s and 1890s Brooklyn and New York contention over school integration, and a 1903 debate on the founding of the Brooklyn Colored Young Women's Christian Association. These women's and their community's battles against segregation and for separate institutions reveal lesser known aspects of WLU women's activism, and the complexities of urban racism and Black resistance in the "Progressive Era" that witnessed Reconstruction's dismantling, lynching, and "Jim Crow". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study examines the learning experiences of 11th- and 12th-grade Black girls participating in a precollegiate program committed to increasing the number of Teachers of Color entering the profession by viewing a teaching career as an act of social justice committed to educational equity. The pipeline functions as an education reform structure to disrupt pedagogies and policies that push Black girls out of educational spaces at disproportionate rates by instead pushing Black girls to teach. Critical race and Black feminist theories are utilized to analyze interviews from Black girls over a 5-year period of the program and composite characters are developed to spotlight key findings that allow us to (a) better understand and amplify the collective learning and social-emotional experiences of Black girls in the program, (b) highlight and critique the challenges and possibilities for positively pushing Black girls’ intellectual identities as students and future teachers via pedagogies and supports, (c) identify spaces and structures in schools that can resist and combat the marginalization of Black girls’ agency and genius, and (d) consider implications for the development of Black Women Educator pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to investigate Black teachers' perceptions of their impact on Black student achievement. Study participants included teachers with 2-15 years of experience from neighboring school districts in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Data were collected during school-year 2011-2012. Methods included journal writing, focus groups, interviews, and a questionnaire. Findings reveal that teachers found it difficult to positively impact Black student achievement because of frustrating situations they faced, including institutional, pedagogical, relational, positional, and cultural frustrations. The findings complicate the portrayal of Black teachers as culturally synchronized othermothers, mentors, and role models for Black students and highlight the negative, unintended consequences of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including international education, African American woman educators, and teacher education in South Korea.

In this case study of a young Black woman educator from the southern United States, I examine how her engagements with Africa and African knowledges, culture and womanhood in Ghana, West Africa substantively transformed her selfhood and her ability to respond in cultural relevant and accurate ways in her teaching of Black children. From her story and the larger data corpus of this study, I argue for the notion of (re)membering as endarkened feminist processes. The power of these processes illustrate clearly how encounters with the African continent and peoples can heal, humanize and ultimately transform teaching, learning and teachers' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the twentieth century Negro Rural School Fund, Inc., also known as the Jeanes Fund, established in 1907 by Quaker philanthropist Anna T. Jeanes to promote education of African Americans in Southern States, focusing particularly on the career of Jeanes teacher A. Wells Henderson in Alabama. Topics considered include African American women professionals, vocational education, and elementary education and its curriculum.

This paper examines the life stories of two Black women teachers from the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools. It begins with a historical overview of the impetus for organizing the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and chronicles the Freedom Schools movement and its educational ideologies. Following the historical overview, the author describes her experiences with data collection and research methodology. The narratives or life stories presented reflect each woman's teaching experiences in a very critical time in American history. They expose themes of anger, fear, pride, community involvement, activist education, and collective memory. Finally, this paper examines African American women teachers 'pedagogical mission to educate students who participated in the Freedom Schools in 1964 and what that work means in the present context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses how African-American Female Faculty (BFF) and university officials must move towards a greater articulation of BFF roles in the success of the university since they are charged with institutionally answering the question "What have you done for me lately?" during the tenure and promotion (T&P) process. It notes that the absence of BFF leaves those present in limited numbers in "outsider within" positions which is referred to as those who serve various university functions but without access to culturally centered mentoring power. It suggests for African-American female faculty to approach T&P unashamed at having engaged in research, teaching and service that are culturally centered.

The author discusses her approach to academia as a tenured African-American female professor of West Indian descent which has significant undertones of her parents' philosophy. She refers to L.A. Baxter's approach from a relational dialectics perspective as useful in understanding an African-American female professor's struggle between navigating institutional expectations of collegiality and her desire for independence, agency and voice. She notes that her discursive struggle of integration are with her institution rather than the African American community. She indicates that she and other African American women have to do more than what is possible and should not get tired but continue what they do.

In 1933, Ethel Thompson Overby became the first African American female principal in Richmond, Virginia. Her motto was “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” (Overby 1975, 1). Before becoming principal, Overby had been a teacher in the southern urban de jure segregated schools of the city. How did the racially segregated context impact her understanding of democracy as an African American woman? As a teacher, what educational practices did she subscribe to? What educational theorizing underpinned her educational practices as a teacher and as a principal? Who was she? These were the questions that guided this research into the educational theorizing of Ethel T. Overby. This research seeks to further the understanding of the theorizing that underpinned the educational practices of African American female teachers and principals who taught and led in public urban de jure segregated southern schools (Charron 2009; Johnson 2000; May 2007; Walker 2009). This historical qualitative research provides knowledge about the educational theorizing of African American educators and how past practices can support the educational fortitude of African American students today. “To be a teacher, you had to be a good citizen.”—Ethel Thompson Overby (1975, 10). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, based on archival research and oral interviews, examines the personal and professional impact of desegregation on African American teachers in an urban southern setting by focusing on the life stories of two public school teachers, Kathleen Crosby and Bertha Maxwell-Roddey. Both taught in segregated schools, helped to desegregate Charlotte's public schools, and later forged successful career paths as administrators from 1946 to 1986. Focusing on the motivating factors and educational theories of these exemplary womanist teachers offers a window into the lives of educators who forged new avenues for advancement in the urban South. This article also analyzes how the professional careers of Crosby and Maxwell-Roddey are emblematic of Tamera Beabuboeuf-Lafontant's theoretical concepts of womanist teaching. Patricia Hill Collins also argues that womanists strive to ensure group survival while pushing for institutional social change. Desegregation-era teachers such as Crosby and Maxwell-Roddey exemplify this dual purpose by expanding their mandate to serve to encompass political action as they challenged discriminatory school administrators and parents. These teachers practiced a form of caring activism that not only encouraged gender equality, but also adopted concepts of cultural nationalism to help Black children develop a positive self-identity (Beauboeuf-Lafonfant 2005, Collins 2000). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement (CRM), describe divergent and convergent social and historical contexts that shaped their professionalization, as well as their relationships with and perceptions of Black students and parents. Participants across generation theorize that teaching and leading are activist practices in their own right, which entail clandestine support and silent protest, intergenerational bridge-building, and debunking the myth of Black inferiority. Post-CRM educators, in particular, expressed ambivalence about their urban students’ futures. I conclude that multigenerational perspectives should figure more prominently in the scholarship on Black education in the US South. This emphasis could spark new directions and strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators, thereby maximizing opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for transformative change in urban education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What occurs when an African American woman professor and a European American woman professor review narrative data and interpret what the students write differently? This research illustrates how race and the experience of two ethnically different female researchers impact data analysis of teachers’ interactions with narratives of personal past experiences. These interactions exposed multiple voices and intrapersonal as well as interpersonal contexts, resulting in a dialogue which embraced multiple equally valued individual voices, interwoven yet distinct – a contrapuntal orchestration. This resulting contrapuntal orchestration suggests the importance of intentionally creating a dialogic space which includes researchers of diverse theoretical backgrounds within diversity discourse in education classes, and within that space providing for self-awareness of the cultural attributes we use to construct cultural meaning of everything around us. This paper explores how analyzing teachers’ autoethnographies challenged the researchers’ own construction of culture and what it meant to provide for dialogic space in that construction process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a profile of the African American teacher and civil rights activist Septima Clark, highlighting her personality and accomplishments during the height of her career in the mid 20th century. Accounts are drawn from interviews and other oral history sources describing Clark. Several social initiatives led by Clark are mentioned, including her work teaching citizenship after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, her involvement with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and her campaigning in the civil rights movement. Comments on her life are also provided from her own words.

The article discusses the participation of African American women in mentoring programs in professional and graduate schools. The author comments on research which suggests that the academic success of African American women may be partially due to mentorships with other African American women due to their shared cultural experiences. The characterization of mentoring as similar to parenting and the value of interactions between female professors and students are noted. She suggests African American college teachers limit their career advancement and research productivity due to mentoring, though mentoring can aid the career advancement of their students. She considers mentoring experiences from the perspective of black feminist thought (BFT).

The article explores the development of a legal strategy in a campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to equalize the salaries of African American teachers. The author reflects on the role of African American women educators in the U.S. civil rights movement and racial inequalities in education. Emphasis is given to the litigation of lawyers Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall against the school district of Little Rock, Arkansas. Other topics include teacher Susie Morris, salary schedules, and evaluation of teachers' performance.

This paper presents the views and educational experiences of two African American female scholars, from a critical race and black feminist theorist perspective, teaching in the area of social justice to predominantly white female pre-service teachers. These testimonies reveal the struggles encountered by these scholars when engaging students in a historical and contemporary examination of race, privilege, and systemic inequalities. The objectives of this paper are to expand on the literary dialogue of such resistance and attempt to bring awareness into the arenas that need the most exposure, i.e. departmental, faculty, and tenure review meetings. It is commonly written and verbalized that institutions are interested in attracting and retaining faculty of color. We argue that the ways we are supported must shift. This problem of student resistance, who they resist and why, should become open for discussion on college campuses across the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating poetic portraits allows scholars to communicate research findings in multi- dimensional and more accessible ways. The author explores womanist theory and two dimensions of portraiture research-context and voice-used to create poetic portraits about the experiences and practices of three Black women teacher educators. Research participants included Olivia, an assistant professor at a predominately White, comprehensive higher education institution; Tulip, an associate professor at a liberal arts and predominately Black higher education institution; and Tulani, an associate professor at a predominately Black research institution. Data were collected through interview, observation and shadowing, and document review to answer two research questions: In what ways do the participants' experiences as outsiders-within inform their practices? and How does the theme of race uplift inform the participants' pedagogy? Examples are presented of poetic techniques from research. The author discusses the use of poetry as a means for educational scholarship to influence wider audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that Afro-American families in Georgia in the 20th century devised a method to educate their daughters so that they could stay in school and eventually work as teachers in black communities. Black women's adaptation to economic and social oppression; Definitive cultural values in black women.

The purpose of this study was to understand how the societal position of African American women affects their experiences when teaching mathematics to adults in postsecondary institutions. A qualitative research design used in-depth interviews and classroom observations with 7 African American women teachers in technical schools and community colleges. The results were that the teachers' positionality affected their experiences by (a) producing a teaching philosophy based on a history of marginalization, (b) raising issues of credibility with students because of the teachers' race and gender, and (c) directly affecting their classroom interactions and teaching strategies. It was concluded that there are no generic teachers but, rather, teachers whose experiences are affected positively and negatively by their positionality in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on a decline in the number of women of color in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the U.S. A U.S. Census Bureau survey in 2000 indicates the underrepresentation of African American, Asian, Hispanic American and Native American women in STEM occupations and in academia. As a solution, the author recommends reconsidering the recruitment, advancement and retention of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty as well as URM students who may someday decide to teach.

This article presents statistical information concerning African-American teachers employed in the U.S. between the period of 1890 and 1990. In the census years of 1890, 1900, and 1910, black teachers represented about 45 percent of professional blacks. In 1910, 76 percent of black teachers employed were women. According to the 1990 census, there were 439,176 black teachers, of which only 91,026 were male. In northern cities, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Chicago, it was customary to assign black teachers to predominantly black schools or to restrict them to particular grades, usually elementary. It was not until 1935 that the first black teacher was appointed to a junior high school, and not until 1947 that the first black teacher was assigned to a high school. Black teachers were earning $339 in the mid 1930s.