Abstract
Using a youth-centered approach to urban teacher education, the authors present data from two qualitative studies investigating Black youth’s critical literacy practices to understand Blackness, antiblackness, and curriculum in U.S. schools. These studies explore how youth from schools identified as “urban” geographically and ideologically use a Black educational consciousness—an awareness of Black education's historical and contemporary realities—in their engagement with the curriculum. Framed through theories of humanization and intersectionality, the research reveals two key themes: Confronting Black Marginality and Seeing Blackness in the Curriculum and Beyond.
Keywords
Black Youth Humanity and the Boundaries of Curriculum: An Introduction
Davena: What about the unit? You kinda spoke about this a little bit, so I want you to elaborate more when you said that it was empowering for you.
Casey: It's just like after reading [The Hate U Give, THUG] and doing the lessons and going through the unit and talking about how amazing it is to be Black and how there are so many strengths that come with it. It really helped to build my confidence in that…Because I don’t think it's fair that Black people go through all that they do…and reading literature such as The Hate U Give and watching the TED Talk about the [danger of a] single story [by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]…helped me to feel more comfortable and prepared to be the Black woman that I will be one day.
Truncated from an exchange between Casey, a Black girl, and a high-school student (all names are pseudonyms) who participated in Davena's research project, this excerpt demonstrates the power of centering Blackness and Black youths’ humanity in the curriculum. In the planned English Language Arts (ELA) unit from which Casey's words emerged, Blackness takes precedence over anti-Blackness in an English classroom (Jackson, 2020). Black people's responses to antiblackness do not solely define Black people's humanity. For instance, “antiblackness permeates schools and other nested systems,” but “it does not remove agency from Black individuals, or indeed those racialized in other ways, in navigating those systems” (Marcucci & Elmesky, 2024, p. 2861). Casey described how reading The Hate U Give (Thomas, 2017) and watching Adichie's (2009) The Danger of a Single Story captures the strength and beauty of being Black while challenging an anti-Black narrative (e.g., Black people are outside of the normative conceptions of humanness and thus exist in a perpetual state of suffering). Being exposed to these perspectives allowed her to see her Black girlhood as a strength rather than a deficit, reinforcing the significance of cultivating spaces where Black girls can thrive (Andrews et al., 2019; Butler, 2018; Hill, 2019). By connecting girlhood to Blackness (and later boyhood as well), we focus on providing opportunities for students like Casey and the other Black students who participated in our projects to express their truths and challenges relative to their lived experiences, education, and racial-gender identities to unpack how intersecting forms of oppression impact their lives. It is essential to point out that viewing Adichie's (2009) The Danger of a Single Story represented one of many literacy activities in which Casey and the students in Davena's study participated during the project. They viewed the TED Talk before Adichie's problematic public remarks. Given our focus on humanization in this manuscript, we refuse to be complicit in how some people incite dehumanization. For clarity, a detailed analysis of her remarks or politics is beyond the scope of our article. However, we do want to mention that we do not endorse Adiche's ideological stance about gender since there has been criticism around her positioning of trans women as not being “real” women (Camminga, 2020, p. 817). Thus, we reject definitions of womanness (and girlhood, given our focus on youth) that fail to be inclusive of the multiple representations of gender identities. We see Casey's Black girlhood as a continuum from Black girlhood to Black womanness (i.e., womanhood). Brown (2013) shared that the vision for “Black girlhood is freedom, and Black girls as free” (p. 1). Smith (2019) also aptly pointed out that a Black girlhood pedagogy is about creating spaces where Black girls’ lives can be centered, ensuring that there are opportunities for “uplifting their narratives and voices, giving them the power to define their own lives” (p. 38). We define Black womanness as how Black girlhood and womanhood converge at the intersections of race and gender, creating a complex identity politics and social positioning in a cis-hetero-patriarchal, anti-Black society (Allen, 1998; Hill, 2019).
Finally, drawing attention to the verbal exchange between Davena and Casey, we highlight the significance of Casey's ability to express her thoughts openly. This opportunity is often lacking in classrooms, where students’ experiences and identities can be overshadowed by the intense focus on student achievement. Thus, the exchange illuminated her positive feelings about reading a text by a Black woman that centered on Black youths’ experiences, boosting her confidence and affirming her humanity as a Black girl.
The Relationship Between Black Humanity and Consciousness: A Research Note
We build on Grant's (2021) understanding of Black humanity as representing Black people's traditions, narratives, rituals, beauty, knowledge, experiences, languages, backgrounds, and the nuances and complexities of Blackness. Historically, Black people have been denied their right to humanity through colonialism, slavery, segregation, and other forms of oppression. Camangian (2021) argued, “how education for humanization helps remedy anti-Black racism in schools when students are provided spaces and opportunities for them to read, write, speak in their own image, in their own voice, and in their own interests” (p. 262). So, we intentionally acknowledge and honor the power and agency of Black students’ ways of knowing and being, a counter record of hegemonic productions of humanity. Adopting a humanizing stance benefits Black youth, which disrupts Black youths’ suffering (Dumas, 2014) and the suffering of other marginalized communities, by intentionally challenging deficit narratives and racialized and gendered traumas. Moreover, we approach this paper with a focus on centering Black youths’ voices to highlight their humanity to inform the humanizing-oriented development of curriculum approaches and teacher ideologies and pedagogical practices, which directly inform relationships with students, deepening the ways we prepare current and future teachers for justice-oriented solidarity (Jackson, 2020).
We seek to explore Black youths’ lived and schooling experiences while critiquing schooling and curriculum and educational sites that do not prioritize Black knowledge production. We explore the racial and gendered experiences while taking into account how intersecting forms of oppression impact Black girls and boys. We concentrate on their consciousness-raising by examining Black youths’ narratives and prioritizing their voices. We acknowledge that they also possess other identities, adding to their intersectional identities. Still, we are primarily focused on how Black girlhood and boyhood are represented in our data. In alignment with Hooks (1994), both of our projects aimed to raise the broader socio-political consciousness of our Black students by understanding how their reflections on US schooling and curriculum influenced their identities. This understanding led us to merge our projects around the broader framing of youths’ Black educational consciousness. We are committed to supporting Black youth in opportunities to theorize, question, and dismantle hegemony and explore how the intersection of race and gender impacts their lives as a means to engage in criticality–“seeing, naming, and interrogating the world to not only make sense of injustice but also work towards social transformation” (Muhammad et al., 2020, p. 12).
In doing so, we engaged in Black consciousness building. We understand Black consciousness to be a socio-political standpoint epistemology that advances and affirms Black humanity through understanding and countering anti-Black racism, focusing on creating new ways of being that center on Black pride, empowerment, and self-determination in an anti-Black world (Biko, 1978; Gordon, 2022; Rickford, 2016). Lastly, we theorize the significance of centering Blackness in teacher education programs, as this approach is crucial not only for fostering Black consciousness among students and within classrooms but also for helping teachers and teacher educators create the conditions necessary for cultivating such a consciousness. To guide our theorization and analysis of Black youth voice and centering Blackness in educator preparation, we ask the following questions:
As two Black youth-informed teacher-researchers who identify as social justice scholars, our background, teaching, and critical research contribute to our arguments’ cogency and significance. We also have experience teaching in urban districts across PK-12 and instructing pre-service teachers in various institutional settings. As a result, we have determined that educators and scholars must acknowledge the critical urgency for creating opportunities for pre-service teachers to explore transformative approaches to teaching and learning.
Our Shared Experiences in a Teacher Education Program: A Relational Positionality
Davena has endured symbolic violence (Coles, 2016) in both school and community contexts, contributing to her Black consciousness-raising. Justin uses the term to describe subtle violence that manifests through unawareness in an anti-Black educational landscape (Coles, 2016). For example, in her youth, Davena became aware of police brutality through high-profile cases like Malice Green and Rodney King, which exposed the racialized harm and violence resulting from systemic violence against Black people and their communities. Symbolic violence also includes school-based assaults—such as teacher biases, curriculum choices, and student internalized racism—that often go unnoticed because educational institutions are perceived as inherently supportive (Coles, 2016). Attending a predominantly Black high school, Davena encountered a curriculum lacking a more diverse representation of Black authors and stories and critical conversations about race and racism relative to her lived experiences, contrasting sharply with Casey's classroom experience. This erasure in curricula, with a heavy emphasis on canonical texts, highlights how teachers often fail to create spaces for disruption, joy, and humanization (Jones, 2022). Her social realities and teaching experiences have underscored the need to cultivate spaces for Black education and to raise consciousness in teacher education programs. Leaving K-12 as an English Language Arts (ELA) teacher to pursue a doctorate, which is where Davena met Justin, she sought to garner a deeper understanding of how she might impact more pervasively the persistent challenges in literacy and English education—the ongoing marginalization, silencing, and devaluation of Black students in and across literacy classrooms.
Justin's understanding of how schooling negatively impacts Black children was shaped by his experiences with primarily white teachers amid predominantly Black peers. He questioned the lack of Black educators and how his experience might differ with a more substantial Black presence. His Black educational consciousness aimed to understand how institutions marginalize certain knowledge under the guise of universal standards, often dominated by whiteness. Pursuing a PhD, he sought to explore how schooling marginalizes Blackness and how critical research can counteract this. His doctoral experience revealed the institutionalization of this marginalization, prompting his commitment to centering Blackness in teaching and learning processes.
By merging our intersectional and intergenerational experiences, we recognize that despite attending K-12 in different eras, we confront the same racial realities in U.S. modernity. Informed by our experiences, we aim to reduce the dissonance between prescribed U.S. schooling and the need to affirm Black youths’ identities (Ross, 2021). We acknowledge the necessity of an intentional focus on Black educational consciousness.
Teacher Education's Relationship with Blackness and Anti-Blackness
Anti-Blackness as a component of US schooling has been well documented (Brown & Brown, 2021; Coles, 2019, 2021; 2023a; Coles & Powell, 2020; Dumas, 2016; Gilmore & Bettis, 2021; Jenkins, 2021). More recently, scholars committed to Black youth educational experiences have further contributed to this knowledge base (Griffin & Turner, 2021; Martin et al., 2019; Nxumalo, 2020; Watson & Baxley, 2021), including us in our scholarship. What we have gathered from this expansive record of research is that schooling is an institution of socialization, marred by the socio-political legacies of racial capitalism and white (settler colonial) supremacy (Benson & Dumas, 2021; Wright, 2022), which all contribute to an arithmetic that ensures anti-Black racism will be enacted in schools. A significant way anti-Black racism is meted out in the PK-12 landscape is through the everyday, mundane pedagogical practices of teachers in classrooms (Coles, 2016). As an ever-present social phenomenon and regime, anti-Blackness does not only come to be via the actions or inactions of teachers. However, we zero in on teachers and teacher education, as this is where our analysis focuses.
In thinking through teacher education's relationship with anti-Blackness, we highlight Muhammad et al. (2020), who noted the absence of “the intentional study of Black theorists and educators who have shaped the history of our country and the current state of education” (p. 419). They amplify how teacher education prepares future teachers and teacher-researchers to understand the teaching and learning process primarily through the gaze of white men educational theorists (e.g., Vygotsky, Dewey, Maslow, Erikson, and Piaget). To counter the whiteness of teacher education, programs must prepare pre-service teachers to create inclusive learning experiences for Black students at the intersections of all their identities. This expansive body of research highlights the voices and educational experiences of Black youth and other youth of color through a myriad of theoretical standpoints (An, 2020; Brown, 2023; Callier, 2020; Coles, 2019, 2023b; Green, 2013; Jackson, 2023; Jones & Adair, 2024; Love, 2017; Player, 2022; Templeton, 2025), underscores the importance of learning from intersectional youth narratives. This understanding equips teacher education programs with the tools to help all pre-service teachers engage with topics related to urban education, race, racism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression.
We understand that engagement with Black students in classrooms is often shaped by a teacher's primary understanding, which research has documented is typically meted out through the lens of white thought or whiteness more broadly. Beyond simply understanding anti-Blackness and the ways it may inform one's teaching practices, what is left out when Blackness is marginalized in teacher education is that it limits the ways teachers and students see themselves as educators / educated and distorts what possibilities may or may not be achievable.
Centering Black Youth Voice in Teacher Education
In response to the pervasiveness of antiblackness in teacher education and the lack of a focus on Blackness, we argue that teachers need opportunities to center Black youths’ consciousness to foreground their humanity in teaching and learning. Antiblackness in pedagogy and curriculum renders Blackness, and specifically Black youth, as marginal, contributing to their dehumanization. Engaging in Black educational consciousness-raising enables youth to challenge and refute antiblackness broadly, including in teacher education. To this end, by lifting Black youths’ voices, we highlight their Black consciousness building and examine how their stances can shape teachers' pedagogies in ways that foster humanizing learning environments. Without paying close attention to the voices of Black youth, teachers may continue to center dominant narratives while reinforcing anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism. While working alongside a Black woman high school teacher, Ms. Thomas, in prior research (Jackson, 2020; 2022; 2023), Davena acknowledged that the teacher provided opportunities for students to become vulnerable, sharing their experiences collectively without judgment. Davena also shared with Ms. Thomas that everyone, not only the teacher but also the students, brings “experiential knowledge, that this knowledge can indeed enhance the learning experience” (hooks, 1994, p. 84). On one occasion, Ms. Thomas remarked the following: As a teacher, I recognize that students from marginalized groups enter classrooms within institutions where [their]voices have been neither heard nor welcomed, whether these students discuss facts—those which any of us might know—or personal[ly] experience, my pedagogy has been shaped to respond to this reality.
Guiding Theories
Given our focus on documenting Black youths’ educational experiences at the intersections of race and gender—specifically, their orientations toward a Black educational consciousness and how their perspectives can help disrupt anti-Blackness in teacher education—we are guided by the following theories: Humanization and Humanizing Pedagogies and Intersectionality.
Humanization and Humanizing Pedagogies
Humanization is at the crux of Black liberation and centering Black youth's humanity. We explicitly highlight Black consciousness and capture students’ voices across our educational settings. Camangian (2015) argued for a humanizing education for students that provides them with opportunities to express aloud their social realities–particularly their experiences with or witnessing oppressive practices–within their communities and beyond while challenging and disrupting dehumanization. Dehumanization arises when people are not allowed to think and act for themselves and are placed in conditions where their voices are silenced, made invisible, or outright erased. We highlight the research of Camangian and Cariaga (2022), who built on Paris and Winn (2014) by asserting that humanization is “teaching and learning (or, research in their case), [which means] always being mindful of how critically important it is to respect the humanity of the people inviting us into their worlds and helping us answer questions about educational, social, and cultural justice” (p. 10). Connected to humanization is the concept of humanizing pedagogy (Bartolomé, 1994; Camangian, 2015; del Carmen Salazar, 2013; Carter-Andrews et al., 2019; Freire, 2000). Humanizing pedagogy captures the essence of teaching and learning situated in youths’ lived experiences, identities, languages, literacies, and knowledge at the intersection of liberation, power, and consciousness building. Therefore, we acknowledge that teachers should be intentional in their approach regarding the humanization of youths’ existence, especially noting that identities are intersectional.
We declare that an approach to teaching and learning that is not humanizing is dehumanizing. Thus, dehumanizing approaches (e.g., racially, culturally, and linguistically unsustaining, and other problematic practices) can harm Black youth and other youth of color (Alim & Paris, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 1994). For example, Muhammad (2020) pointed out that teachers’ use of deficit language is not only specific to Black students but to all students of color and results in teachers characterizing students’ lives as “at risk, defiant, and disadvantaged” (p. 41). Schools are beset with deficit practices, ultimately contributing to students’ silencing and internalized failure (Au et al., 2016; Kirkland, 2013). We align with Muhammad's (2023) call for “humanizing pedagogies that center genius, justice, joy, love, and humanity of our children” (p. 21). Our interest in humanizing pedagogies is directly tied to centering Black students’ humanity, amplifying their voices, and contributing to the transformation and liberation of teacher education. Consequently, we stand together in maintaining that humanizing pedagogies can raise the consciousness of Black youth and support their multiple and intersecting identities.
Intersectionality
For our theory, we use intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis “to explicitly challenge the status quo” of teacher education in hopes of “transforming power relations” in schools (Collins & Blige, 2020, p. 40) with an intentional focus on the intersections of Black girlhood and boyhood. Crenshaw (1991) coined the term intersectionality and conceptualized it as a way race and gender intersect in impacting “structural, political and representational aspects of violence against women of color” (p. 1244) in the U. S. legal system. Outside of legal scholarship, Collins and Bilge (2020) saw intersectionality as complexities (e.g., race, class, and gender) across human differences while “mutually shaping one another…toward understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences” (p. 2).
We recognize that there are nuanced and complex portrayals of intersectionality and multiple marginalities relative to racial and gendered experiences of Black boys (Carey, 2019; Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Kirkland, 2013) and Black girls and women (Carter et al., 2019; Patton et al., 2016). Because of the context represented across our studies, we use an intersectional approach as critical inquiry and praxis to highlight the lives of six Black youths concerning race and gender, noting how these dynamics can affect their full humanity under racialized and hetero-patriarchal oppressive conditions. For example, Barton and Tan (2018) offered the perspective that intersectionality “foregrounds the multidimensionality and complexity of forms of oppression that can operate in concert but in varying degrees, subjugating people and groups” (p. 767). Muhammad et al. (2020) also confirmed the importance of acknowledging and addressing intersectionality, especially in “how their student's experiences represent their social locations, and their place in school and the broader society” (p. 423), which is why we highlight the intersectional narratives of the six Black youth from our studies. Muhammad et al. (2020) further pointed out that not many teacher education programs examine closely how the nuances and complexities of students’ intersectional identities are shaped by dominant narratives and social locations, thus requiring a focus on intersectional theory. Whereas Muhammad et al. (2020) highlighted Black women educators’ work (e.g., Sister Mary McLeod Bethune and Sister Nannie Helen Burroughs) and their impact on the lives of Black children during their time period, we focus on the Black humanity of six Black youth in present day.
Moreover, we present their intersectional narratives. We argue that they can inform teachers and teacher education programs about the importance of building on Black youths’ Black consciousness (e.g., their sensibilities and ways of knowing and being) towards helping them to understand the precariousness and dangers of systems and structures so that they can be prepared to interrogate and dismantle them during their lifetime. By integrating theoretical conceptions of humanization and intersectionality to examine the educational experiences and the Black consciousness of Black girls and boys in schools, we acknowledge that centering their voices can contribute to transforming educational institutions entrenched in the status quo.
Research Design and Method/Ologies
Cross-Study Research Analysis
This research combines two data sets (see Table 1 for cross-study participant demographics) from two distinct qualitative studies by Davena and Justin. Thus, this research represents what we refer to as a cross-collaborative/cross-study design of two research projects. We determined that we desired to make sense of our collective research that would focus on Black youths’ intersectional voices, given our reflections on how we have experienced schooling at the intersection of our identities. We met several times and discussed our collective experiences navigating the same predominantly white institution (PWI) for our graduate studies. Our time sharing our experiences led us to engage in critical discourse, where we broadly examined the benefits and limitations regarding the teaching and learning of teacher education programs. As a result of seeing how our educational experience was shaped by both our race and gender and the ways the youth we work with inhabit the world with intersectional identities, we decided that intersectionality as a critical inquiry would be our method of choice. Thinking collectively as a Black woman and as a Black man, we came to a consensus that our unique positionalities and the positionalities of our students, who experience schooling, like us, from both racial and gendered perspectives, were worthy of further inquiry.
Participant Identity Table and Schools.
Rather than launch a new research study, we decided to use the data and depth of experience that we already had materially at hand to revisit and re-analyze existing data that could serve as a rigorous and reflective site of research. In other words, while the data for each study already existed separately, we thought each set of data could benefit from being in conversation with another data set. Coming from Black study/thought orientations, we were inspired by the collective work required of Black justice movements and pedagogies to be communal and strengthened by the multiple, rather than by the individual. In particular, to think through a Black youth-informed teacher education, we knew that this could not be birthed from one social context alone nor solely from our own racial and gendered experiences. Given this, we also offer this work as an example of merging praxis, and we invite others to see how their work with Black youth, across all identity markers, furthers the merging, making the framework we provide a living, collective praxis–one that grows with each new Black youth voice.
Our process continued as we examined our own data and then identified where the data converged. Specifically, we found convergence across these data sets, revealing the importance of and critical need to forefront Black youths’ ways of knowing and being to inform teacher education and praxis broadly, engage in humanizing practices, and focus on Black liberation. We initially considered how Black youths’ collective voices could inform teacher education and enhance teachers’ understanding of how best to center their students’ full humanity in humanizing ways. We had been conversing regularly about our research interests for over a decade, with several academic and personal connections overlapping (e.g., the same doctoral program and professional organization affiliations). This specific work originated during an informal conversation. Davena discussed some data highlights with Justin, particularly focusing on a data excerpt from Casey, which we used earlier to introduce this article. Justin was intrigued and found students engaged in similar critiques of schooling within his study. Thus, we considered questions and theories that would help connect our data and facilitate a sound process of reanalysis that upheld the principles (centered on race, gender, and Black educational consciousness) of the separate studies, while also carving out space for new directions and findings to emerge. For instance, before we even began the process of merging our data, we asked ourselves preliminary questions such as: How do Black urban youth navigate classrooms based on their racialized and gendered experiences? What might we learn from connecting youth voices and experiences across social contexts? Theoretically, is intersectionality the framework to use, or are there other frameworks that would have us think more deeply about our participants’ race and gender as it relates to the teaching and learning process? These questions, while not exhaustive, formed the initial wonderings that led us to engage in a cross-collaborative merging of data.
As we will outline in more depth in the next section, we selected six students (three from each study) whose data we felt reflected our focus on Black youth intersectional voices and helped us answer the new research questions that would guide the processing of our preexisting data. Given the fullness of our two studies, we used our merged research questions and theoretical frameworks as tools to examine data that demonstrated Black youth speaking directly about what we position as Black educational consciousness–an awareness of the historical and contemporary realities of Black education. Finally, we engaged in shared open coding and axial coding, an analysis process influenced by a collaborative qualitative analysis approach (Richards & Hemphill, 2018). Our collaborative method involved several analytical steps: preliminary organization and planning, open and axial coding, the final coding process, and finalizing the themes.
Merging Projects: Intersectional Black Youth Voices at Sutton Academy and Uptown High
The two research sites include a high school English classroom in a predominantly Black suburb in the midwestern US (Sutton Academy) and an inner-city high school in the eastern part of the US (Uptown High). Sutton Academy's setting is urban characteristic, and Uptown High is considered urban intensive (Milner, 2012). Understanding how the term urban can be mis/used in educational research or cause confusion when it is not clearly defined, we define urban education as encompassing both formal and informal learning, shaped by locales impacted by historic and ongoing socio-political challenges, such as racial segregation and systemic economic insecurity. For us, this encompasses city centers that have historically been associated with urban life, where there are high concentrations of people, often with infrastructures and systems that may privilege some but often further marginalize minoritized residents along lines of race and economic status. We also understand the ways urban renewal and gentrification are working to redefine urban, causing issues that typically occur in densely populated urban geographies expanding beyond city centers to impact youth, of all races and economic backgrounds, in ways that are similar to those faced by youth living in what may be considered tractional urban areas. Taking all this together, in this article, we want to emphasize urban education's potential to transform harmful educational geographies by centering students’ cultural richness (regardless of whether they are in an urban characteristic environment or urban intensive), reframing schooling as a collaborative process rather than an imposition. Our perspective on urban teacher education highlights the resistance and resilience within urban spaces, challenging narratives that depict them solely as obstacles to educational progress. With this, it is also important to note that as consistent with the literature we use the term Black urban youth or urban youth to name the social location of the youth we are discussing as for us, geography matters and quite literally informs the teaching and learning experiences of students. We do not see “urban” as a derogatory term. Thus, our naming of urban is a reclamation of space, particularly as it pertains to Black youth, understanding the importance of place for shaping and affirming one's identity.
According to Milner (2012), being in an urban characteristic environment means that Sutton Academy does not necessarily experience the many challenges schools face in urban-intensive areas. However, urban characteristic spaces do face issues that come with densely populated cities on a smaller scale (e.g., scarcity of resources). In the case of Uptown High, which is located in an urban intensive locale, students and surrounding communities experience many “outside of school factors such as housing, poverty, and transportation” that usually arise in densely populated cities with more than 1 million people (Milner, 2012, p. 559). In merging Black youth data from Sutton Academy and Uptown High, we are attentive to the complexities of Black boys’ and girls’ experiences across urban landscapes. We take note that work with Black youth in urban areas is often focused on a single-sex analysis, boys or girls. So, we discuss students of both genders to bring these together, emphasizing the differences and similarities that arise through their consciousness and voices across our projects. In particular, we understand the ways Blackness intersects with urban life (Haymes, 1995)—whether urban characteristic or intensive—in ways that birth anti-Black politics grounded in racialized images of Black youth in US cities being classified as criminal and uneducable.
Davena's Project Context
Davena, a teacher-researcher, worked alongside a Black woman (Ms. Thomas), a teacher at Sutton Academy, which is a public high school in a metropolitan area in the Midwestern US serving students from grades 8-12. The project (Jackson, 2019) focused on one 11th-grade English classroom across 6 months. The data for this study was part of a larger research project in which she explored the teaching and learning of students in an eleventh-grade ELA classroom where Blackness took precedence over anti-Blackness. Data came from semi-structured interviews with the teacher and students who participated in a dialogic group, audio and visual recordings, artifacts (e.g., student work), memos, and classroom observations (see Jackson, 2020).
In this paper, Davena highlights the intersectional voices of three Black youths (Casey, Shayla, and MJJ) in the context of a dialogic group that gave them and other Black girl and boy students the opportunity to share their perspectives and attitudes on learning in an ELA classroom where Blackness is centered. Davena chose to call attention to Casey's, Shayla's, and MJJ's responses because they offered rich and robust insights into their racial and gendered experiences. Moreover, by creating opportunities for students to engage in discourse that fostered their racial and gendered experiences, Davena amplified their voices while remaining attuned to their evolving Black consciousness.
Justin's Project Context
Justin, a youth-informed teacher educator, engaged in a critical race ethnography (Coles, 2018) with nine Black youths at an inner-city high school called Uptown High in Philadelphia, PA, USA. The arts-based and critical literacy-driven project focused on Black youths’ sensemaking of anti-Blackness as it operated in their lives. The ethnographic social location of the study was a monthly after-school space, co-created by the students and Justin, where students were engaged in a critical literacy curriculum that explored the relationship between Blackness and schooling. In this ethnography, data came from life history interviews, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, academic and disciplinary records, multimodal identity artifacts, digital dialogic journaling, and social media engagements/posts. Outside of classroom observations and interviews, all data was created and collected with youth at the school site in the after-school space.
Interviews were conducted after school on days the group did not meet, during study hall, or lunch periods. In this article, Justin draws specifically from semi-structured interview data from three of the nine students (Calvin, Khalif, and Sasha) to analyze how their intersectional voices inform educator preparation, with an explicit focus on centering Black humanity. Data from Calvin, Khalif, and Sasha were chosen to be introduced to the data blending that forms this article for their rich and precise critiques and documentation of their experiences with anti-Black schooling moments, which are displayed here through semi-structured interview data. Grounded in an exploration of Black youth educational experiences, particularly relevant to the interview were the connections between youth's race, gender, socioeconomic status, and geographic location (e.g., a major urban intensive city).
Data Analysis
To begin our cross-collaborative study coding process, we first shared the raw transcripts from semi-structured interviews from both of our studies. We then took time to read all semi-structured interviews individually to engage in an initial reading of the data, which also allowed us time to process learning about the other researcher's participants without any commentary from our research partner (e.g., Davena read Justin's transcribed interview data alone, without any clarifiers or input from Justin and vice versa). We then met and shared our notes from the individual readings. At this stage in the process, we also decided on our focus students, the six students who comprise this collaborative study. We then engaged in another initial reading that we did together. We collectively read six interview transcripts out loud as we took notes, stopping to provide reflections, pose questions, and connect our understandings to our initial wonderings, which we later reframed and strengthened to formulate research questions.
After this second initial read, we launched our open coding process (Miles et al., 2014), which included going back to highlight key phrases and statements (many of these were easily accessible from our notes from the 1st and 2nd initial readings). At this first stage of open coding, we sought to identify meaningful concepts related to our research literature (e.g., Black youth educational experiences in school and out-of-school), teacher education, theories (e.g., intersectionality), and research questions. We specifically noted when students connected their experiences to race or gender in the context of schooling, particularly when comments appeared to cause discomfort or harm, even if this was not explicitly stated. Given that we were not merely looking for harm, we also noticed when students mentioned ways their Blackness was or could be affirmed in their learning environments by teachers or their peers. Next, we moved to axial coding (Creswell, 2006) to organize the larger concepts from open coding. Here, grouped codes into larger thematic categories (i.e., Seeing Blackness in the Curriculum and Beyond and Confronting Black Marginality), which also helped us to organize our data presentation in this manuscript. To determine which data would be used to demonstrate the themes and answer the research questions, we focused on sections of the six student transcripts that were most representative of Black youth's intersectional experiences and explicitly embodied the two larger themes that guided our joint analytical process.
We understand Black youths’ ability to see themselves in the curriculum and beyond as their capacity to acknowledge the absence of Blackness while also recognizing its presence and envisioning pathways for its greater inclusion (e.g., Casey highlighting how Black youth are negatively portrayed and demonized, MJJ acknowledging the monolithic negative narrative of Black boys and erasure in the media, and Calvin discussing the limits of Black youth receiving a full quality education given the lack of Black teachers). For our research, we define confronting Black marginality as the Black youth naming and critiquing the ways schooling and curriculum work to position Black knowledge and Black people as less than and thus on the periphery of mattering in educational matters (e.g., Shayla's acknowledging of Black Language 1 being devalued, Khalif discussing his Black peers internalizing anti-Black narratives in the classroom, and Sasha feeling disconnected from her white teachers and naming the lack of knowledge of Black history of some white students).
Humanizing Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry and Praxis: A Data Note
We address the complexities that shaped the youth's experiences and understandings of their lifeworlds with attention to gendered and racialized identities (Harris & Leonardo, 2018). Building on claims offered by Harris and Leonardo (2018), we were not only interested in urban youth social identities (e.g., gender and race), but we also strived to examine the “interplay between social organization and power” (p. 5) and the nuances and complexities of their shared experiences. Like Harris and Leonardo (2018), we acknowledged that their experiences relative to oppression may not always be parallel. However, we intended to show how each Black youth experienced and interrogated various challenges and moved forward.
We draw on our varying experiences to disrupt current hegemonic, anti-Black practices in teacher education by uplifting and centering Black youth voices. Artiles (2019) argued that understanding the nuances and complexities of learning through an intersectional lens could benefit teacher candidates’ learning. We extend Artiles’ (2019) argument to foreground Black youths’ identities and their lived experiences. As youth-informed teacher educators, we acknowledge that Black youths’ stories matter. By examining their narratives, we can illuminate their intersectional experiences, focusing on race and gender, as they navigate classrooms and beyond–highlighting the importance of this work for teacher educators. To engage in this work, we use intersectionality as a form of a critical praxis, which refers “to the ways in which people, either as individuals or as part of groups, produce, draw up, or apply intersectional frameworks in their daily lives” (Collins & Bilge, 2020, p. 38). Critical praxis, as a conceptual and analytical tool, helped us understand how Black boys and girls critique racism and anti-Blackness, and how their voices can contribute to illuminating power relations in teacher education. Thus, central to the manuscript is Black youth speaking about how oppressive systems and unequal power dynamics impact their lives. In what follows, we emphasize the urgency to center Black youths’ intersectional voices by describing their experiences with racial and systemic oppression and the importance of impacting Black youths' humanity in transformative ways.
Findings and Discussion
Black Youths' Educational Consciousness: A Humanizing Lens for Teacher Education
Our joint analysis suggests that teacher education programs create offerings that foster a humanizing education for pre-service teachers (PSTs), cultivating an ecology where they can see positive portrayals of Blackness in the curriculum and beyond. It is essential for PSTs to have opportunities to critique and challenge the emphasis on Eurocentric ways of knowing and being, as well as engage with curricular texts that present narratives affirming Black humanity. Also, equipping students with the tools to understand the impact of Black marginality on Black youths’ lives–an issue driven by white supremacy and anti-Black racism–should be an integral part of a humanizing pedagogy in teacher education programs. Thus, the following discussion of the data highlights two recurring themes across our data: Seeing Blackness in the Curriculum and Beyond and Confronting Black Marginality.
Davena's data analysis examines Black youths’ intersectional narratives (e.g., relation to curriculum and media), while Justin explores Black accounts (e.g., relation to schooling environments and demographics). By sharing our data, we move back and forth between our findings and analysis, allowing us to capture these data sets more efficiently. We highlight a humanizing path forward for youth-informed teacher education that considers Black youths’ intersectional voices and Black consciousness. Our practices entail intentionality and illustrate why teacher education programs should consider Black youths’ consciousness and experiences in navigating the world.
Seeing Blackness in the Curriculum and Beyond
In this section, we highlight the voices of MJJ, Casey, and Calvin, sharing a presentation of data and analytical discussion on how their data engagements embody a Black educational consciousness. Central to all three students across both studies was their commitment to being interested in and advocating for a Black presence in curriculum and beyond, including the ways Blackness may be represented in the demographic makeup of teachers.
One of the questions asked of the Black youth in Davena's project was why they felt there should be opportunities to engage in critical discussions and classwork relative to disrupting anti-Black racism and white supremacy while simultaneously centering Blackness in their English classroom. Casey, Shayla, and MJJ all expressed a desire to question, interrogate, and dismantle forms of oppression, reflecting on how such oppression had impacted their lived experiences as Black youth–something they had not explored in previous ELA classes.
MJJ
In a conversation with MJJ, Davena was concerned about MJJ sharing that he felt there was not enough Black representation with which he could identify in his schooling and beyond. Because MJJ did not have the opportunity to see positive portrayals of Black boys in the media, he shared that he found that, at times, he would compare himself to white youth, which contributed to feelings of erasure. Camangian (2021) posited: As a result of anti-Black racism in society and schools, Black students are conditioned to value themselves based on the material possessions they have - and are alienated from - and how they look externally when compared to Eurocentric standards of humanity, over what they think and how they feel internally as Black people. (p. 262)
Given the history of the U.S. regarding the perpetuation of whiteness and racial inequality, the conversation underscores the critical need to advocate for centering Black boyhood in educational spaces (Carey, 2019; Clark et al., 2024; Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Warren, 2021). For example, MJJ offered his viewpoint on the over-representation of whiteness and the perpetuation of anti-Blackness: Davena: So, you don't see a lot of Black representation? MJJ: Well, I've noticed how I’ve kind of compared myself to a white teenage [male] movie star [rather than a Black one] because I do not see many Black teen stars.
Then, at another time, MJJ expressed similar sentiments when he shared having discussions that center on the Black experience, as seen in the novel The Hate U Give (THUG), which highlights Black youths’ stories and lives. MJJ also emphasized the importance of avoiding a single narrative about people in general. He explained: MJJ: I've learned from THUG to be an advocate for yourself and standing up for what you think is right is always more important.
Disrupting white supremacy, which fuels anti-Black racism, while simultaneously centering Blackness is vital since it can reinforce and contribute to a positive racial identity for Black boys and girls. MJJ's sentiments underscored the absence of Black stories and images of Black boys and how it could weaken his sense of self. The limited visibility of Black celebrities in popular culture is of grave importance, as it could negatively impact Black youths’ self-perception and identity formation. Thus, we emphasize the need to create Black Educational Spaces (Warren & Coles, 2020) where Black youths’ hopes, aspirations, and Black consciousness can be made visible, acknowledged, and celebrated, particularly in a world that seeks to erase their Black humanity, which can contribute to feelings of inferiority.
Black boys like MJJ should have opportunities to identify with Black people rather than mostly with white images, which often leads to the marginalization of Blackness. Delgado and Stefancic (2012) stated, “Whiteness is also normative; it sets the standards in dozens of situations” (p. 84), as represented by MJJ's thoughts. They further argue that the dominance of whiteness has affected American culture (especially media, film, and literature). Thus, the influence of multiple visual images that decenter Blackness seems to have affected how MJJ perceives himself. In fact, Lee (1991) argued, “Young Black males in contemporary American society face major challenges to their development and well-being” (as cited in Kirkland, 2009, p. 377). As a result of MJJ's seemingly overexposure to white images, he was positioned to be in situations in which Blackness was not affirmed. Thus, for MJJ and other marginalized Black boys who could have similar experiences and dispositions about themselves, Black embodiment and Black life should serve as an antithesis to anti-Black ideas and narratives (Givens, 2021). Simply put, MJJ's comments speak to the greater need for resistance against anti-Black racism and more representations of Black scholarship and positive portrayals of Black life.
Casey
We share a brief conversation between Casey and Davena to reflect on the importance of seeing self and black girlhood in the curriculum. While interviewing Casey, she revealed her excitement about the novel (THUG) and how her self-worth is tied to her feelings about being a Black girl. For example, she shared implicitly how sometimes dominant forces (e.g., racial inequality) beyond her control may impact her negatively. For instance, Casey stated: I feel like I can be more comfortable with myself if I don’t put myself in a box. And I think it's [the novel] interesting because for me, I can relate it to my life and how I can be, Starr. I can feel some of the same type of aggression—people holding you down.
In the above example, first, Casey began by expressing her desire not to be stereotyped or limited by society's expectations, whether related to her race, gender, or any other intersecting identity. In all likelihood, she finds pleasure in exploring and defining her own identity, which suggests a desire for the freedom to be her authentic self.
Second, although she did not go into detail about how she might overcome racial inequality, Casey acknowledged how aggression, and in the case of the novel, racial violence and intolerance can disempower people, including herself. She seemed to relish connecting with a character who looked like her (both Black and a girl). Starr and Casey have similar life worlds (e.g., living in a predominantly Black community and witnessing and being affected by racial inequality). In the novel, Starr and her Black friends experience racial violence and school inequity. For example, Starr's unarmed friend is shot by a police officer. In addition, Starr acknowledges the differences in the schooling opportunities between the school she attended in her neighborhood and the school across the city, which is predominantly white. Given Casey's understanding of her intersectional identity as a Black girl, she also seemed to address her awareness that Black youth are not always portrayed fairly and do not always have equitable schooling opportunities as their white counterparts. The novel's implicit messages about societal and systemic racism, police brutality, racial intolerance, classism, and various forms of oppression can catalyze the need to engage in critical intersectional work and conversations with Black youth. Finally, Casey calls our attention to how a teacher's curricular choices can affirm Black girlhood and create opportunities for Black girls to voice their experiences with oppression.
Calvin
At the onset of the interview, Calvin clearly spent time reflecting on his Black boyhood, as it informed his education and its quality prior to the project. The following interview excerpt reveals Calvin's Black educational consciousness through his engagement with thinking about how he understood himself in his schooling curriculum and the broader US curriculum. Calvin: What it means to get a quality education is to not only learn something like arithmetic or literature, but they also teach you how to be like a person. Not necessarily a person, but develop you and help you mature as a young adult and basically in the world. And um it's like quality. It's like you can go on after–you can go on after high school, college, and live perfect. And it's not perfect, but live a sustainable life. Justin: So, based off your definition then, how does your current education–does it equal to that? Are you getting the quality? Calvin: Yeah. It's alright. But it's like I’m not, kind of, getting what I’m, what I need because I don’t have - Justin: Wait, how is it quality if you’re not getting what you need? Calvin: It's quality. The curricular. The curriculum is quality, but the teachers aren’t because I just wish. Like I really do want Black teachers. And it's so upsetting because it's just like why can’t I have a Black teacher? What is so wrong with that? What's so wrong with me being a majority? What's so wrong with me being the majority and not being represented? Like that doesn’t make sense. So it's, it's upsetting.
Calvin emphasized the necessity of developing the person or the human being in education to determine what constitutes quality education from his perspective. He immediately oriented the conversation toward a humanizing outlook: Quality education is about creating the conditions for people to live sustainable lives while engaging with the curriculum and beyond. Acknowledging the content areas of the curriculum that also determine the quality (e.g., arithmetic and literature), Calvin's definition centers more on a student-centered approach to teaching and learning, emphasizing that the development of people beyond their content knowledge is paramount. In a societal context marred by ideological and structural anti-Blackness, the education of Black youth, like Calvin, must take this perspective into account and work to teach them how to live lives that sustain their Black humanity.
The theme of seeing oneself in the curriculum and beyond becomes even more evident when Calvin discusses the lack of Black teachers in his schooling experience. For decades, research has highlighted the lack of Black teachers and, more so, the disproportionate number of white teachers teaching Black students in majority Black schools (Hyland, 2005; Irvine, 1990; Milner & Howard, 2004). Understanding Calvin as both Black and a boy, his expression for seeing teachers who look like him is further complicated by the small percentage of Black male teachers in the workforce (Jeter & Melendez, 2022) and the ways Black male teachers are portrayed in the media (Thomas et al., 2022). Overall, Calvin's advocating for more Black teachers makes sense, especially when we understand that Black teachers may have a stronger desire to create schooling spaces that lessen the impacts of anti-Blackness on student experience, given their own experiences with anti-Blackness. Calvin hints at how Black teachers may be well positioned to create counter spaces where Black students thrive and their Blackness is celebrated (Stovall & Sullivan, 2022).
A key concept that we gather from Calvin's Black educational consciousness, through his intersectional voice concerning his understanding of education quality, is that educator preparation that takes the equity of Black youth's schooling experiences seriously understands how curriculum must center and affirm Black humanity. Moreover, for a Black boy student like Calvin to truly see himself in the curriculum would also mean that he would need opportunities to see himself in the teaching force, as teachers engage in pedagogical practices through their unique racial and gendered experiences. How might educator preparation see curriculum beyond the confines of disseminating information to the broader confines of who can and who actually does get to disseminate information in classrooms? Such an orientation would catalyze and uplift the personhood of Black students who would go on to use what they learned in humanizing ways.
Confronting Black Marginality
In this section, we discuss data on Shayla, Khalif, and Sasha, demonstrating how they leverage their distinct schooling experiences to confront how their Blackness and Blackness more broadly are routinely marginalized in their curricular experiences.
Shayla
Black Language (BL) speakers experience marginality regarding their speech. Baker-Bell (2020) emphasized that the Black Language “has always reflected Black people's ways of knowing, interpreting, surviving, and being in the world” (p. 2). However, Baker-Bell argued that many Black language speakers not only experience Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in schools but also at home, resulting from the privileging of White Mainstream English. Baker-Bell defined Anti-Black linguistic racism as linguistic violence resulting from the marginalization and dehumanization of Black Language speakers. Baker-Bell, citing Smitherman (2006), stated that White Mainstream English is a form of English regarded as the “Standard” that has been normalized and valued by the “dominant, race, class, and gender in the U.S. society” (p. 4). In an interview, Shayla revealed to Davena her conversation with her mother about BL: Davena: At any point in your conversation with your mom, were you able to share how we talked about [linguistic] shaming and how it affects the way students feel about themselves about their language use? And was there any conversation around the whole point of our class engaging in a discussion about Black Language being tied to Blackness? Shayla: Yes, [I shared that] the more we begin to accept [linguistic] diversity in terms of language use among Black people, our people, that the more acceptance we – you know, we – the more people will feel accepted, rather than feeling as though that we’re not accepted…And she really got upset, like she was listening and she was shaking her head.
Ms. Thomas and Davena supported Shayla and her classmates in understanding sentiments like those expressed by Shayla's mother due to the standard ideology and the influence of educators who valorize White Mainstream English and cultural norms that reify the status quo. They also helped them see how these ideas have shaped and continue to impact classrooms negatively. We believe that Shayla's mother deserves grace. Living in an anti-Black society often means experiencing Black marginality resulting from Anti-Black linguistic racism. The parents of Shayla and other youth, as Baker-Bell acknowledged, may feel the need to shield them from experiencing linguistic violence in school settings while unknowingly perpetuating Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and Black Language speakers internalizing their speech as inferior, which can ultimately impact literacy learning and their well-being. Affirming Blackness (as seen in Shayla's example) is deeply connected to sustaining and affirming all intersecting dynamics of Black humanity. This effort is inherently tied to maintaining and embracing Black Language and challenging Black marginality.
Khalif
Khalif demonstrates Black educational consciousness as one coming to be aware of how the world around them structures power and privilege along the lines of race, with keen attention to how that organizes the lives of Black people, specifically. In the interview excerpt that follows, Khalif discusses the broader “disgusting history” (directly confronting Black marginality) of America that he sees as being grounded in creating a default system of inequality that positions people against each other in negative ways. Given the complexity of the history Khalif works to explain, it makes sense that he needed time to take a break in his thinking, noting that it is hard to explain. Due to the pervasive presence of Black suffering that youth experience in school and society, it makes sense that confronting this suffering out loud may require careful thought to articulate it, transforming it from an everyday occurrence into something that can be named as dehumanizing. Khalif was using the broader socio-political climate of society to analyze the socio-political nature of his curricular environment.
During the interview, Justin took a moment to remind Khalif of the basis of the question, using a tone that communicated that he was on track with his response. As Justin started to detail further where Khalif was originally going with his reply, it was clear that a flood of Khalif's thoughts returned to him, and he jumped to pick up where he had left off. Khalif: And I feel as though due to disgusting history America has and then just them putting the thought inside Americans mindset that you know we’re not all equal. And that some is better than others and–Alright so it's kind of like a grow in progress, but it's not. It is hard, kind of, to explain this. Can you ask me the question one more time? Justin: Just basically what's the diff-based off your definition of education and quality, does it look different for Black students? And then you started talking about- Khalif: This is why it's different. So, if I'm in a classroom right? And I’m actually tuned into what a teacher is teaching and I want to get great insight on it, I will…but my peers will laugh at me. Why are they laughing at me? Cause, it's been planted in their brains that we’re nothing more than what somebody tells us to be. No matter what's our potential, we’ll always be less than the white groups. And it's not really…It's not at all a great way of thinking. But that's just how we was taught. That's literally what we raised off of. If we was taught differently, if we was raised in a fixed world where we was all equal and we taught ourselves the difference in race and it wasn’t any negative aspects on it, then maybe I wouldn’t come to school and say “well no matter how hard I try, I will always be two steps down from this person or that person. Or maybe I gotta try this, that and other.”
In this excerpt, we see how a Black boy student may ask a teacher a question to deepen their knowledge, but their peers laugh, suggesting that learning is not something Black people, especially Black boys, can pursue. Illuminating intersectionality along Khalif's race and gender is crucial, given how constructions of Black male masculinity are shaped by systemic racism, including the ways Black culture may be seen as at odds with mainstream, white culture, resulting in Black youth equating school-based success with whiteness (Fordham, 1988, 1996). Harden and Zeigler (2022) noted that “the theoretical construct of intersectionality as applied to Black boys and men (masculinity) can provide insight into social context, identity, and behaviors” (p. 17). Summarizing Unnever and Chouhy (2021), Harden and Zeigler (2022) explained that Black boys engaging in “Cool Pose”—an expression of strength to combat oppression—“may be a normative response to the aggression they face” (p. 71). In Khalif's classroom, Black boys may feel pressure to disengage or perform disinterest as social control. Thus, Khalif's active participation may contradict these masculine scripts, grounded in internalized anti-Blackness at the intersections of race and gender. There is a subtext positioning Black boys as being in schools because they have to, not because they desire to be there and that, regardless, they will never be on par with non-Black peers. Khalif's confrontation of the anti-Black structures behind this scenario (“But that's just how we was taught. That's literally what we raised off of.”) demonstrates an example of Black educational consciousness. All too often, Black youth may be victims of systems without understanding why things play out as they do, further contributing to their marginalization. Khalif reveals how anti-Blackness functions on interpersonal levels (e.g., student and teacher), urging educators to break down these levels to create more effective interventions.
Sasha
In the exchange with Sasha that follows, it was evident that she was working to center Black ways of knowing and being through her advocacy of white students to be educated on Black life in ways that Black students are educated on white life, by nature of living in a society guided through logics of whiteness and white supremacy. Sasha's Black educational consciousness is explicitly grounded in identifying what she perceives as the absence of Black life in the curriculum, explaining that all students should learn through various racial and cultural frames, not just their own. She opens this segment of her interview around her views on quality education by noting the efforts of her white teachers to be inclusive and how, most times, that can lead to feeling uncomfortable. For instance, Sasha discussed the way two of her white woman teachers routinely use the word “we” in class. In the case provided here, Sasha noticed an overuse of the word “we” when her teachers were discussing matters of race/racism, during a focus on Black Lives Matter at school. While the teachers may have the best of intentions, not understanding the ways race structures the lives of the teachers and their students (i.e., white women teaching a Black girl) in dramatically different ways can come off as insensitive. Sasha's awareness of how the everyday language of teachers can create a false sense of racial and gender solidarity represents a Black educational consciousness thought process where mundane acts are made noticeable. To avoid the ways she may feel uncomfortable from the language or actions of her white teachers, Sasha discusses her interests in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where she feels like educators will be able to say “we” given what she assumes their racial background may be. Sasha hints at her belief that an HBCU would have more Black educators than her current high school–a demographic shift she feels she and her peers deserve. Sasha: We did like this Black Lives Matter week, and they’ll [white women teachers] be just like ‘we’. It's like you’re not Black. I get what you’re trying to say, like ‘we’ as a group. But you just can’t say that…it rubbed me the wrong way. So like I just feel like at an HBCU, you’ll be able to say ‘we.’ I feel like white people should know black history, too. And I feel like they don’t at all white schools or at primarily white schools, they probably joke about it. I feel like they need to learn too because maybe they’ll have more respect. I remember a while ago, I was talking to some girl…and she went to a predominantly white school. And she was saying they were talking about slavery and one of the girls asked her ‘you know how was that? And what did your grandmother go through?’ and it's like they- you’re so uneducated…it's just ignorance. So to answer, maybe everybody does deserve the right to the same education. But I feel like it should be the same, equal education. Whites should know about Blacks just as much as Blacks know about Blacks. Blacks should know about whites just as much as whites know about whites. Do you know what I mean?
Concluding Thoughts and Implications
We opened this article with an exchange between Davena and Casey, highlighting the significance of centering Blackness and incorporating an intersectional analysis of race and gender within the curriculum. For Black students like Casey, Shayla, and MJJ, being in a classroom environment where their full Black humanity was respected and acknowledged was foundational to our understanding of Black educational consciousness. Their voices, grounded in direct experiences, serve to disrupt deficit-oriented pedagogy and epistemological stances antithetical to their Black identities, often leading to harm and trauma in their Black lives. Similarly, Justin explored the schooling experiences of Black students, maintaining an intersectional lens at the broader level of schooling environments. Justin's data reflected the perspectives of Calvin, Khalif, and Sasha on what constitutes a quality education for Black students, addressing factors such as teacher demographics and peer interactions. By synthesizing these data sets, we recognize the benefits of connecting qualitative research across studies and urban contexts. From our analysis, we identified two major themes emerging from students’ perceptions: 1) Seeing Blackness in the Curriculum and Beyond and 2) Confronting Black Marginality
Engaging in humanizing practices, prioritizing Blackness, and being mindful of the intersectional identities of Black youth can lead to a more natural and sustained affirmation of their identities. Black youth in urban settings deserve an educational experience in which educators are committed to their racial and gendered realities, ultimately contributing to cultivating a flourishing Black life (Grant, 2012). We argue for a disruption in the teaching and learning landscape that is transformative and liberatory. We propose one pathway to this disruption: centering Black youth voices in educator preparation, particularly with their understanding of systemic barriers that Black boys and girls face in schooling. As Justin (Coles, 2023c) stated, critiquing anti-Blackness and its effects on education is essential to grappling with the “Black dangers of the past and anti-Black dangers of the present and future” (p. 5). This perspective aligns with Camangian's (2015) and Carter-Andrews et al. (2019) arguments, emphasizing the need for humanizing pedagogies that advocate for the historically dispossessed. Teachers play a significant role in affirming and sustaining Black youths' humanity, providing opportunities for their perspectives to be heard rather than silenced. We advocate not only for a curriculum that embraces diverse stories and ideas (Au et al., 2016) but also for “an education that nurtures their personalities, intellects, and interests, and ensures universal freedom” (Kinloch et al., 2020, p. 4). Humanization involves building relationships among all key stakeholders, such as youth, teachers, and researchers–to foster collaboration and collective learning, as demonstrated across the projects.
The work reported here has not been previously published or is it being considered for publication in other venues. The manuscript will not be considered for alternative venues before notification of an editorial decision by Urban Education.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
