Teaching While Black Archives

Education

A Black Pedagogy Is an Engaged Pedagogy

How an American Studies professor went to law school and became a teacher for the twenty-first century

April 28, 2022 • by Duchess Harris

Why did I become a student again when I could have more easily turned my attention only to the research and writing that would have advanced my chosen academic career? The answer is simple: I felt it was time to apply my political and theoretical beliefs to action-oriented work that ...

Education

Are You Sure?

Asking white students to question their own innocence

April 28, 2022 • by Charles I. Nero

My pedagogical task in a situation such as this is to encourage students to recognize how devious, yet seductive, white supremacy can be when it erroneously conflates innocence with wisdom....

Education

Generations

Toward a Black Love Teaching Ethic

April 28, 2022 • by Terrance Dean

I fell in love with Black writers who were telling me their variations of Black love. How it showed up. How it looked. How it engaged, fought, struggled. Black love about the streets reminded me of my family members. I saw them, regular Black folk loving, cursing, drinking, and ...

Education

Black Is in the Job Description

Or: whatever I am doing, I’m probably doing it wrong

April 28, 2022 • by Erica L. Ball

I’m not ashamed of my background. Besides, I happen to know what my more pedigreed colleagues do not: there are many other Black faculty like me hiding in plain sight. I also recognize that these sorts of perceptions actually depend on the context. On any working-class campus, with a significant ...

Education

I Want to Know Who I Am At Work When I Am Not Under Duress

Riffs on Boundaries, Protection, and Inspiration

April 28, 2022 • by Gina Athena Ulysse

Survival is not guaranteed. In between the invitation to participate in this special issue and sitting down to write, bell hooks and Valerie Boyd joined the realm of ancestors. When Black women in the academy die, Black women in the academy take notice. ...

I Want to Know Who I Am At Work When I Am Not Under Duress

Education

Just Say No

Why saying no allows you to say yes to the work that can make a difference

April 28, 2022 • by Dorothy Brown

Often, they do not want Black faculty there to hear our views; they want us there either to stay silent or validate theirs. But they need our Black faces present in order to feel good about themselves. They are after all, on a diverse faculty! They like sitting in diverse ...

Education

Teaching and Modeling Freedom

As a Black artist and scholar, bringing my whole self to the classroom teaches students how to live

April 28, 2022 • by Lisa B. Thompson

I teach freedom as both an artist and a scholar. I could have settled on the life of an English professor with an unfinished novel in my desk drawer (next to the half-empty bottle of scotch), but I decided that the world would have to refuse all my dreams. When ...

Education

“‘Look, a Negro’ … in the Academy”

When white students say what they really think, our Black bodies become a battlefield

April 28, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin and Bridgette Baldwin

I was not prepared for the lesson the students would teach me. “Professor Baldwin is the worst professor I have ever had, and she is Black, enough said.” Did I just read that correctly? Am I the absolute worst professor? Is it because I am Black? Is my Blackness a ...

Education

Leading While Black

An introduction to the special issue, “Teaching While Black”

April 28, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

Indeed, the sad truth is that many of the slights, insults, and aggressions experienced by the dedicated teachers collected here (I don’t think of the casual ugliness which many of us navigate as “micro-aggressions”) are duplicated within higher education’s administrative spaces....

Education

How They See Us—and How We Learn to See Ourselves

The importance of mentoring for Black students

April 28, 2022 • by Sylvester A. Johnson

Mentorship, in which I reassure students that we inhabit the same reality when it comes to racism, is an especially personal and rewarding aspect of my professional life. I approach mentorship through emphasizing to every student that they have unique potential and absolutely belong in the academic world, regardless of ...

How They See Us—and How We Learn to See Ourselves

Education

Building the House You Want to Live and Teach In

How women’s studies nurtured radical transformation at Spelman College

April 28, 2022 • by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Even though I was an untenured professor I decided that I would position myself as a “radical” teacher who would try and disrupt some of the “mis-education” that the curriculum which at the time, mirrored the traditional higher education curriculum throughout the United States. ...

Building the House You Want to Live and Teach In

Education

Becoming Un-Disciplined

What it takes to make a university community where Black faculty and students–and all of us—can thrive

April 27, 2022 • by Cathy J. Cohen and Claire Potter

Part of what I find amazing about being a professor at this moment is watching the change that’s coming, not always from institutions, but from young people and their demands on institutions. Their demands for a different type of faculty in terms of demographics. Their demands for different types of ...