This chapter presents decolonized research methodologies that interrogate the profile of a conscientized teacher, qualified and prepared to teach Black and Brown children within the African Diaspora. Based on research spanning more than twenty years at three school sites, this chapter identifies five specific qualities that characterize a teacher who is conscientized into a historical consciousness that goes beyond narrow margins of the socially constructed race and geographic borders to embrace the humanity of the children within classrooms across the globe. Methodologies and theories including reflexivity, auto-ethnography, life stories, student narratives and social media inquiries are central to the research design that enabled this interrogation of education beyond borders. This international inquiry led to the uncovering of a worldview of what constitutes effective education and who qualifies as an effective teacher. Social media facilitated the crossing of borders and allowed space for collaborative inquiry that touched upon the anxiety and tensions educators face in their practice. It also highlighted the potential international collaborative inquiry holds as a site for creativity which speaks to what is possible in global education that promotes conscientization of the curriculum. In this examination of transnational approaches to educational equity this research has revealed the significance of knowledges beyond the textbook, including stories, spiritual knowledge, and ceremonial practices. Of special importance are transgenerational stories of strength, endurance, and survival transmitted by the students in global classrooms. This research has demonstrated it is impossible to create a model of the good teacher without taking issues of culture and community context into account. The result is a set of strategies that provides insights into how educators may re-conceptualize and reconstruct the classroom as a borderland, a site for both critical analysis and as a potential source of experimentalism that engages the student as central to classroom pedagogy.
TopIn Search Of Truth And Justice In The Global Classroom
The enslaved engaged their minds as a powerful weapon against chattel slavery mastering acts of resistance that befuddled their oppressors and weakened the institution of slavery.
Teaching is a political act which demands a balance between the emotional and the practical; the transformative and the transactional; the personal and the public. The pervasive statistics about the failure of Black and Brown children in school is disturbing. Knowing as I do, that these children possess critical thinking skills which have allowed them to successfully navigate themselves within a world that constantly seeks to constrain and cast them out, I am preoccupied with my responsibility to find answers. How can we harness their insight and skills in the classroom to prevent their disengagement? What drastic actions can we take to disrupt the movement of our children into gang membership and embrace them instead into a place of inclusion? Why aren’t more teachers working to place our Black and Brown children into universities instead of prisons? For decades, the USA has reported that Black/Brown students lag behind their Anglo counterparts and now, their Asian peers as well.
“In school year 2018–19, the national adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for public high school students was 86 percent, the highest it has been since the rate was first measured in 2010–11. Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest ACGR (93 percent), followed by White (89 percent), Hispanic (82 percent), Black (80 percent), and American Indian/Alaska Native (74 percent) students” (NCES, 2022).
While I acknowledge that discipline is a major concern at schools worldwide and I agree that students must be held accountable for their behavior in school, this chapter does not address that issue. In keeping with Freire (2005), the lenses of this research initiative are focused directly on the skills, creativity and responsibility of educators to take all relevant issues into account and teach the children in their schools for success.
This chapter poses an invitation to educators worldwide, to engage in a reflexive practice that includes and interrogates ways in which new narratives of belonging and achievement can be constructed at the school site to disrupt normalized recounts of history and empower theeducational community with a truthful narrative that acknowledges both student’s and teacher’s vulnerabilities while at the same time celebrates their strengths as contributors to global educational culture (Freire, 1993). This self -study draws (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Schon, 1983) parallels between the author and the Black and Brown children in 21st century classrooms, asserting that in much the same ways ancestral stories shaped my subjectivities and nurtured my identity, contemporary students will also benefit from tapping into this reservoir of their cultural retentions and history. This investigation honors the survival stories that have sustained the people of the African Diaspora through the trauma of oppression, slavery, and colonization that continue to wreak an influence on their lives. Stevenson (2015, p. 5) affirms, “Still the records of natural increase, long-term marital relations, vibrant cultural expression, unrelenting and diverse challenges to white authority, and creative and courageous acts that led to self and sometimes group emancipation document the slaves’ determination to assert their agency against tremendous odds in order to control important aspects of their private lives, working conditions, and human expression.”
Unfortunately, too many of our children are not embraced into an understanding of their historical and cultural background. It is cast aside, excluded. African American children in particular, have been systematically deprived of a rich cultural legacy of rites of passage, rituals and ceremonies which are useful to root them in their heritage and provide guidance on how to be in this world. Their rich history has been ignored and undermined. If we do not help our students to understand, respect and admire their place in history, what can we expect?