Centering Black women’s ways of knowing: A review of critical literacies research in early childhood

Design

Because the purpose of the study was, in part, to inform future empirical research, I limited the scope of data search to include only empirical research that has already been conducted and published in the field of critical literacies as it relates to Black women educators. Similarly, because my research questions identify a target population and context, I focused the data search by using terms such as critical literacies, Black, African American, Teacher, Primary, and Elementary. I also used Boolean operators to help further clarify relevant research terms and the thesaurus function to capture all terms related to grade level context.

I used a compounded search to simultaneously query databases PsycInfo, Academic Research Complete, and ERIC via EBSCOhost for terms that are explicitly or inferentially related to critical literacies. This search produced 2783 results. After the initial search, I refined the search string to further narrow the component of study by explicitly requiring the presence of terms “Black,” “African American,” or “Women,” and requiring it to be paired with the terms “Teacher” or “Educator” or “Instructor.” Black Feminist theories use the term Black to include various groups throughout the African diaspora which includes participants who may have been classified as “African” or “African American”. The search yielded 396 articles.

I used search filters to further narrow the number of results. Filters provided results that were empirical, peer reviewed, conducted in an early childhood/elementary/primary school setting, included the term teacher/educator, and published between 1990 and 2019. The year 1990 captures the simultaneous entry of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory into legal scholarship and Patricia Hill Collins’ publication of scholarly literature on Black Feminist Thought. Both are historical markers of significance because Black Feminist theories and theories of intersectionality were made available to be used in critical literacies research; although intersectionality-like thought has been part of social and intellectual theorizing for many years (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Stewart, 1987; Truth, 1998). The filtered search yielded 84 articles.

I also sorted articles to distinguish between critical literacies research that only mentions Black women’s social locations or demographics and those that integrate their everyday experiences on account of race and gender into the core of the research. Because the focus of this review is on the integration of Black women educators’ as participants in critical literacies research, theoretical and conceptual articles were also excluded from the component of study. The sort yielded six articles. A full list of inclusion and exclusion criteria are listed in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Criterion	Inclusion	Exclusion
Time period	1990-2019	Studies outside of these dates
Language	English	Non-English
Type of article	Empirical research published in a peer review journal	Research that is not empirical or peer reviewed
Participants	Black women (BW) educators	Participants who are not BW
Literature Focus	Meaningful use of CL or related term	Meaningless use of term
Study Focus	Participants’ literacy practices and social locations	All other CL topics (e.g. students’ practices and curriculum design

Articles met the inclusion criteria, particularly by having Black women as participants, but they varied in the degree to which they included information about Black women’s social locations. I put them into one of three categories. (1) Mention: for articles in which the authors used the terms “critical literacy” or a similar term and identified participants’ social location(s) at least once in the article. For this category, some studies only mentioned Black women’s race and gender in the sections describing participant demographics while others explained how their identities mattered for their critical literacies practices. I did not assume that the researcher did not carefully consider social locations in their work, but was looking for explicit integration that demonstrated a centering of Black women’s standpoints through a Black Feminist epistemological orientation. (2) Integral: for articles in which the authors met the criteria for the category mention and provided additional information or discussion about participants’ social locations beyond one mention. I describe this category in more detail in the next step; (3) Different Context: for articles that use the terms “critical literacy” or a similar term and do not provide any specific information about participants’ social locations. The articles that are the focus in the findings come from the integral category, which resulted in a focus on empirical articles that integrate examinations of Black women’s critical literacies practices with how their social locations inform their resistance to dominant and harmful ideologies. As part of the iterative process of data analysis I selected two of the three articles, those specifically focused on work with students in primary and early grades educational settings, that integrated examinations of critical literacies practices and Black women educators’ social locations to address the following analytic questions: How are Black women educators represented as participants in critical literacies research, and professional literature? In what ways do authors draw upon Black Feminist epistemologies when writing about Black women educators in critical literacies research?

It is important to note that regarding analysis, I am aware that the articles in the sample were published under certain circumstances and conditions, and with respect to specific guidelines and requirements. I approached this analysis in the spirit of Bridges-Rhoads et al.’s (2016: 12) methodological transparency which reminded me that “any reading is situated in a network of epistemological, political, and practical factors” and that it is important to give “authors the benefit of the doubt when judging methodologies” because authors produced the text with a specific kind of transparency in mind. In my analysis, my aim was not to judge or evaluate these articles–rather, I bring questions to them about how methods and methodologies are working to center Black women and their critical literacies practices.

An analytic for integration

I take up the analytic questions using four tenets of Black Feminist epistemology (Collins, 2000), each related to knowledge production or possession. The four criteria of Black Feminist epistemology may be met by either researchers, participants, or both. As summarized by Dotson (2015), they are criteria:

1. On meaning, which takes lived experience and ‘practical images’ as important for grounding and making knowledge claims (Collins (2000): 276);

It is important to note also that these criteria are not mutually exclusive nor do they occur discreetly separate from one another. Rather, they work in tandem to increase the visibility of Black women’s standpoints on critical literacy as a method of resistance.

Study one

In their article entitled, We’ve Been Doing it Your Way Long Enough: Syncretism as a Critical Process, Susi Long, Dinah Volk, Janice Baines, and Carmen Tisdale (2013: 430) use “classroom illustrations” and “teaching and learning examples” to explore the critical pedagogy and culturally relevant practices of Carmen and Janice, two African American elementary teachers in South Carolina. The researchers analyzed data collected through conversations with Carmen and Janice and artifacts from their instruction such as lesson plans and materials that they used to supplement their curriculums to complete this study. Findings represent the teachers’ work to help students make connections to their African heritage, after the teachers engaged in a month-long professional development experience in Sierra Leone. Carmen and Janice are also co-authors of this study and identify throughout with pronouns she/her. The other co-authors do not disclose their racial or gender identities but identify as university educators and refer to the collective authorship team as “we” throughout the article. The article focuses on how Carmen and Janice used their personal experiences abroad as a catalyst for implementing instruction that was culturally relevant for their African American first and second grade students. The professional development focused on making connections between language, knowledge and cultural traditions of Sierra Leone and the United States, and the teachers used concepts of critical pedagogy and critical syncretism to shift the power from their white, middle-class curriculum to incorporate elements that more closely resembled the histories and identities of their students and school communities.

This study integrates Black women’s ways of knowing in two main ways, by including the participants in roles as co-researchers and by foregrounding their historical and current experiences in their explanations of critical pedagogy practices. Integration is also demonstrated by the co-researchers’ attention to the ways that participants’ emotions/feelings and ethical and moral commitments influenced their instructional practices and curriculum choices. As I describe below, all of these decisions are important for demonstrating Black women’s ways of knowing.

First, as stated above, the co-researchers in this study identify participants’ roles by stating that “[t]he authors of this article [are] two classroom teachers (Carmen and Janice) and two university educators (Dinah and Susi)” (Long et al., 2013: 419). Because the focus of the data collection and analysis is on Carmen and Janice, this dual role as both researchers and participants allows the integration of their knowledge as Black women into the article in multiple ways. The researcher-participant role allows the authors to prioritize a reflexive stance in their work, for instance, by examining and writing about how the author’s own positionalities matter for the research that they conduct. Throughout the article, for example, it is clear that Carmen and Janice’s commitments to creating contexts that value and cultivate the knowledge and background that students bring to their classrooms comes from a place of personal responsibility and accountability because the researchers share their goals with the readers. When discussing Carmen and Janice’s own educational encounters, personal feelings of pride framed how they made sense of and used the trip they took to Sierra Leone to inform their desire to educate their students about African heritage. They state, for example:

Carmen and Janice were dedicated to using the Sierra Leone experience to contradict negative and inaccurate stereotypes about Africa for their students and for them to build a sense of pride in their heritage. Recognizing this as a missing piece in her own educational life, Carmen explained that while she has a very strong sense of family and pride in being African American, her schooling did not provide her with a sense of her African heritage. It was this feeling of connection with and pride in heritage that Janice and Carmen wanted to bring to their first and second graders, African American students who were regularly seen through a deficit lens by the community outside their own. As Carmen said: ‘It will make a difference for my students and how they feel their significance in the world.’ (Long et al., 2013: 425)

In this sense, the authors use their role as both researchers and participants to write with their privileged status as outsiders-within (Collins, 1986) because they are speaking from a place of knowledge about their own practices, histories, and beliefs. At the same time, as researchers, they can locate how their experiences are meaningful and where they fit into ongoing conversations in education that are outside of their immediate context, which in this case relates to practices of culturally relevant pedagogies and critical literacies in early childhood and elementary education. This is related to a criterion of assessment (Collins, 2000) because it demonstrates how personal morals and ethical responsibilities may be incorporated into research in ways that address the fact that who produces ideas matters just as much as the ideas themselves. It is a way to make visible that this type of reflexive and historical knowledge that is specific to Black women in dual roles as researchers and participants is valid and should be integrated into the research process.

In the excerpt, the authors also draw attention to how Carmen and Janice’s personal connections to their African heritage propelled them forward in their work against the dominant narrative perpetuated by school curricula that did not acknowledge African heritage. The authors make evident, through their discussion, how these personal experiences also informed Carmen and Janice’s engagement in critical literacies practices and presented their students with alternative perspectives of Africa as well as their own neighborhoods. The authors further connect their experiences to their work in critical literacies, for example, by integrating how Carmen and Janice express that their goals to support students’ pride in their heritage, particularly in school settings, stemmed from their own lack of exposure to African heritage during their schooling years, suggesting that their critical literacies practices are in fact related to their experiences as Black women:

The students’ African American neighborhood of low-income housing projects was typically defined by the wider community in terms of poverty, gang presence and drug use, rather than by its history as a community of influential artisans, politicians, activists and professionals. Creating contexts in which community knowledge – from the local community to West African heritage – were valued as essential rather than incidental to curricular design led to and reinforced students’ pride in self, family and heritage. (Long et al., 2013: 431)

The use of experience to inform critical literacies reflects a criterion of meaning by demonstrating how the co-researchers and participants used their experiences to produce knowledge about how to create a teaching context in support of critical practices. Carmen and Janice’s experiences also contribute to demonstrating a criterion of one’s own community as their professional development trip is connected to their feelings of pride about their heritage and their desires to create supportive contexts for their students.

Although the authors integrate Carmen and Janice’s ways of knowing throughout the text, the nondisclosure of the racial identity of Dinah and Susi, the other co-researchers, raises questions about how their positionality matters for their work with Black women teachers. As an example, when discussing the authors’ aims to analyze critical pedagogy and culturally relevant practices in relation to the classroom practices, the authors include a collective statement about the literature and point to “what we believe” (Long et al., 2013: 419) about the necessity of attending to power structures. Unpacking the “we”, by disclosing how Dinah and Susie’s social locations informed their work with Carmen and Janice may have provided additional opportunities to further integrate Susi and Dinah’s perspectives. The extent to which “we” reflects normalizing epistemologies and subsumes Black Feminist epistemologies is unknown; therefore, revealing differences among the two may have provided additional insight into the unique ways that Black women’s ways of knowing informed this critical literacies research.

Study two

Enacting Critical Pedagogy in an Emerging South African Democracy: Narratives of Pleasure and Pain, by Juliet Perumal (2016) occurred in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa and focuses on examining the tensions between the expectations of teachers to teach for a democratic education, such as through critical literacies pedagogies, and their personal experiences of oppression and marginalization. Perumal analyzed data from 90-min-long interviews conducted with 18 teachers and principals who she identified as African and people of color and who worked in the South African public schooling system with students in primary grades. I focus my analysis on the participants who either self-identity or are identified by the author as Black women, in part, through use of she/her pronouns. In the author biography, Perumal uses the pronouns “she” and does not further describe her social locations including her race and gender. The broad goal of Perumal’s study is to take up tensions that educators experience between critical literacy theory and practice, particularly the “discourse on critical pedagogy that urges teachers to denounce feelings that render them weak in the face of hardship or feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of transformative teaching” (p. 79). She examined teachers’ lived experiences through their personal narratives of pleasure and pain to form an argument for a “re-visitation of the tenets of critical pedagogy” (p. 761).

Unlike the previous study, the researcher does not also engage in the study as a participant; however, she integrates Black women’s ways of knowing in a number of ways, first and foremost in her theoretical and methodological framing that aims to highlight participants’ sense of moral obligation as educators as well as their emotions tied to their experiences. For example, Perumal grounds her study in hooks’ (1994) and Yoon’s (2005) conceptions of critical literacy as related to teachers’ emancipated identities that require teachers to identify their own internalized feelings as they engage in critical literacy work alongside their students. It is from this orientation, one that values emotion, morals and ethics, that she designed her research study to foreground the ways that teachers’ social locations matter for their practice by exploring the relationship between their experiences of marginalization, emotional stances, moral positioning, and ethics to their experiences with critical literacies instruction.

For example, (Perumal, 2016: 751) accessed participants’ experiences through interviews in which participants “recounted first-hand experiences of race, class, and gender discrimination”. She used narratives of pain to make visible the difficulty of critical literacies work for marginalized educators of color. Exposing participants’ narratives supported Perumal’s claims for a re-envisioning of critical literacies that integrates teachers’ personal experiences of marginalization and the need for their emotional and spiritual support. When talking about the implication of her finding, she states that it:

implies the urgency for educational stakeholders and partners to provide the material, emotional, and spiritual support requisite for educators to service their pedagogical calling with ethical fidelity. Attention not just to the minds but to the body, soul, and spirit of teachers and their holistic wellbeing should constitute an integral part of continuous teacher professional development and care. (Perumal, 2016: 761)

The recognition of the importance of emotion in the participants’ ways of knowing is reflected in a criterion of one’s community which Perumal (2016) heavily relies upon to make visible the experiences of Black women who participated in her study. She also ties the emotional to spiritual in important ways that make visible how cultural and traditional practices contribute to knowledge production. As another example, Perumal (2016) also highlights the ways that participants invoked their own personal literacy practices such as “interceding with prayer requests of teachers and students, reading motivational literature, and prayer for wisdom and guidance” (Perumal, 2016: 761), and she calls for a reconsideration of critical literacies tenets that reflect their personal experiences and practices.

Additionally, Perumal includes dialogue between participants about their experiences as central to the work; for example, in her analysis she provided what appears to be a conversation between two participants, Freda and Leslie. Although Perumal does not specify the extent of Freda and Leslie’s conversation, the excerpts allude to participants’ shared discussions about the context in which they teach. One of the main purposes of dialogue according to a criterion of knower adequacy is the outcome of constructing new knowledge within a “community of knowers”. The extent to which Freda and Leslie constructed new knowledge about their shared work/school environments is unclear; however, additional insight into interview transcripts could further reveal the depths of this conversation.

Finally, Perumal writes about the empathy and compassion that she had for the participants in this study as they shared with her very personal and painful stories of their lives. For example, she shares:

Many times, I had to turn off the audio recorder because of the pain that these educators reflected on during their interviews. Less often they would laugh through their tears as they reflected on the joy, triumph, and pleasure that they derived from their work. (Perumal, 2016: 750)

This attention to Perumal’s empathy raises questions about the role of Perumal’s social locations in her expressions of empathy. It brings to light questions about the ways that participants’ stories are told, given the researchers’ positioning as a white woman. Ultimately, I wonder how Perumal’s social locations may have impacted the ways in which Black women’s knowing is presented in this study.

Perumal (2016) also discloses how participants themselves evoked an ethic of caring and moral obligation. For example, she shares, “Many of the participants felt passionate about their jobs and were driven by a moral obligation to intervene positively in the lives of the children” (Perumal, 2016: 754). This is an additional example of the interconnectedness of the criterion of a Black Feminist epistemology. Perumal and the participants in this study share their experiences of pain and also provide comfort to one another through their dialogue. Similarly, their conversations about their passion for education and excitement about teaching occur simultaneously with their revelations of their moral and ethical obligations as educators.