BlackFootnote 1 women from all walks of life have historically been freedom fighters and catalysts for societal, institutional, and individual change. However, discourse on Black women’s contemporary resistance tends to focus on public political activity (i.e. protests), overlooking the countless and varied ways in which Black women engage in less visible, yet no less significant change-making efforts (Collins, 2009, 2013; Wane & Jagire, 2013). Accordingly, Laubscher (2006) asserts that “resistance can issue rhizomatically from anywhere and everywhere” (p. 208). For example, Black women are and have historically been at the forefront of liberation efforts through both formal and informal education where they have engaged in what Rochelle Brock (2005) has termed a “pedagogy of life,” teaching resistance in various capacities as community activists, ministers, midwives, artists, and healers, and in a plethora of settings such as in homes, churches, schools, parks, community centers, libraries, museums, on street corners, and through media (see, e.g., Payne & Strickland, 2008; Hine & Thompson, 1998). As such, Black women have been instrumental to the cultivation of liberatory pedagogies purposefully designed to transmit oppositional knowledge to counter white supremacist and patriarchal hegemony , and to create positive, deep structural shifts in the ways of being, worldviews, and actions of those under their tutelage (Henry, 1998; Johnson, Pitre, & Johnson, 2014).

Teaching, in all of its forms, has historically been an integral part of Black women’s struggle for social justice . The connection between early Black women educators’ justice work and their pedagogies can best be described as “a collective, strategic, multidimensional pedagogical approach committed to liberation, equality, representation, participation and actualization in education and society though critiques and transformation of institutions, curriculum and epistemologies” (Gist, 2015, p. 51). Indeed, Black women have made tremendous pedagogical contributions toward Black liberation particularly where educational opportunities have been denied and/or there have been vast disparities (Clemons, 2014; Delpit, 1995; Fairclough, 2007; Foster, 1997; Phillips & McCaskill, 1995; Siddle-Walker, 2005). Black women educators of today join a river of Black foremothersFootnote 2 whose pedagogies not only served as resistance to white supremacist and patriarchal domination, but as healing and empowerment particularly for Black community members (Baker, 2011; Beauboeuf-LaFontant, 1999; Dixson, 2003; Giddings, 1984). However, because much of the pedagogical literature tends to center whiteness and/or maleness,Footnote 3 the subjugated knowledge of Black women educators who have done and are currently doing important work remains largely invisible. As such, this volume fills an important gap in the literature as it aims to illuminate, contextualize, and complicate Black women’s liberatory pedagogical approaches, both within and beyond higher education.

As Joy James (1993) maintains, “We [Black women] tell our stories to illuminate the paths we travel and to share humor, courage and wisdom in this liberation struggle” (p. 31). In keeping with James’ insight, this anthology takes an assets-based approach where authors present counterstories that serve to challenge deficit thinking surrounding Black women’s intellectual production (Bay, Griffin, Jones, & Savage, 2015), to push back against those who seek to define and exclude Black women’s voices, and to heal, inspire, and transform others. Specifically, the authors share their wisdom through a wide range of sentiments as they document their challenges, triumphs, and the ways in which their Black womanhood (as well as their culture /ethnicity, class background, sexuality, etc.) has informed their unique pedagogies and praxes. In so doing, many of the authors also present model(s) for pedagogies, curriculum development, and frameworks based in Black/African indigenous knowledge systems. Thus this volume celebrates Black women’s ancestral ties to Africa and the power that this yields, while simultaneously offering culturally-specific tools to build a body of emancipatory wisdom, which reaches across disciplines, institutions, and populations.

In an effort to expand the literature on Black women’s pedagogies, this volume incorporates a plethora of voices, theoretical and pedagogical frameworks, as well as a variety of disciplinary locations and teaching/learning environments. Through a multidimensional lens, the authors present pedagogy as a political endeavor aimed at decolonizing and redefining the ways we think about teaching, learning, and praxis . Notwithstanding differences in ideological and political underpinnings, the contributors to this volume are all committed to a praxis of liberation in which the transformative and healing power and potential of Black women’s pedagogies is highlighted. As such, the authors move beyond victimhood to embrace the notion of Black women educators, scholars, and activists as active agents in the creation and maintenance of “cultures of dissent” (Mohanty, 1994, p. 162), in essence transforming the academy and/or society itself.

Ultimately, this book serves to reclaim educational spaces for Black women’s knowledges, identities, and realities to emerge, providing important subtext for decolonizing pedagogy. Employing ancestral ways of knowing and the potency of narrative, the themes of this collection draw on community, collaboration, and consciousness-raising in order to create stories of resistance , transformation, and healing . In so doing, we have positioned Black women at the center in an effort to challenge our objectification and invisibility, (re)claiming a radical Black female subjectivity (hooks, 1989, 1992). We therefore anticipate that this volume will do far more than provide an academic scope. Rather, we hope to invoke perspectives that unbind pedagogy from the academy and white supremacist education, while simultaneously celebrating the rich rebellious resistance of each narrative voice within this work.

Stretching the Notion of Pedagogy

The term “pedagogy” has traditionally referred to the art or science of teaching, and, particularly in the professional field of education, tends to encompass instructional analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of student learning. However, as Ellsworth (2005) notes, “our very frameworks for understanding what pedagogy is extends from our own cultural constructs of what counts as teaching and learning in institutional settings—constructs that reify traditional forms of intellectual activity as the only possible mode of critical intervention” (p. 5). Thus, our conceptualization of pedagogy interrogates the above definition which excludes and negates pedagogies that do not fit neatly into this rigid, limited, and very technical view of what pedagogy is and should be. Instead, this volume rests on the assumption that education is a process rather than a product, expanding the concept of pedagogy beyond one’s teaching practices to more holistically encompass the “meaningful interaction between teaching and learning” (Wink, 2011, p. 47), and the entire process of knowledge production and consumption. As such, liberatory pedagogy denotes a less formalized process illustrating a “collectively produced set of experiences organized around issues and concerns that allow for a critical understanding of everyday oppression as well as the dynamics involved in constructing alternative political cultures ” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1993, p. 27). Accordingly, in this volume we explore the multiplicity of meanings, forms, and outcomes of pedagogy, including unearthing the hidden or unacknowledged pedagogies of liberation that Black women engage, within and beyond a higher education setting.

While we acknowledge hooks’ (1994) contention that the classroom can be a site for the transmission of liberatory pedagogies (as many authors in this volume demonstrate), we also argue that meaningful teaching/learning exchanges should not be limited to the classroom, or to formal education/educators (Roman & Eyre, 1997). Indeed, for Black people, pedagogy cannot be synonymous with the classroom or with schooling, because we have systematically been denied access to both, especially to higher education. Furthermore, the notion that our teachings should be bound to the classroom is not only elitist, but also oppressive (Freire, 1970).

Conversely, in opposition to Western epistemology that dichotomizes theory and practice, the concept of praxis —the process by which education leads to action—is central to liberatory education (Freire, 1970). We therefore argue that we must reframe our pedagogies as liberatory, regardless of the site in which teaching/learning occurs. For example, foremother and public pedagogue Septima Clark saw pedagogy as an active, communal, democratic, and dialectical process involving all different types of learners and society as the classroom, asserting:

The school in which the Negro must be educated is the shopping center he is boycotting, the city council chamber where he is demanding justice, the ballot box at which he chooses his political leaders, the hiring offices where he demands that he be hired on merit, the meeting hall of the board of education where he insists on equal education. (Evans, 2009, p. xvi)

Many Black women bring multilayered and complex notions of pedagogy to their work, both inside and out of the classroom, informed by a history of resistance and a commitment to the liberation of Black peoples and humanity as a whole, which is particularly reflective of our relational community-oriented ontology (James, 1993, 2013; John, 1997; King & Swartz, 2014, 2016). Thus the majority of the authors in this volume (academics and practitioners alike) engage various educational contexts, practices, and sites beyond the classroom, with the understanding that we, as Black women, are inextricably linked to our communities.

Decolonizing and (Re)Claiming Pedagogy

At the heart of white supremacy and colonization is the sustained practice of cultural theft (Ani, 2000; Diop, 1974; DuBois, 1920; Emeagwali, 2006; Fanon, 1967). Thus many of the “innovative” pedagogies that white educators in the Western academy have claimed as their own such as cooperative/communal, experiential, active, student-centered, social-emotional, and service learning, as well as scholar-activism and social justice education, have been appropriated from precolonial Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Orelus & Brock, 2014; Hilliard, 1998; King & Swartz, 2014, 2016; Reagan, 2004). For example, mainstream pedagogical literature continues to deny, omit, and erase the foundational contributions of indigenous African educational philosophies and pedagogies, which can be traced as far back as the Ancient Kemetic (Egyptian) Instruction of Ptahhotep, “the oldest textbook on pedagogy” (Carruthers, 1999, p. 258). In this regard, King and Swartz (2016) posit:

We have all been so disconnected from a positive identification with Africa and its cultural legacy—which includes thousands of years of educational excellence—that it has become the norm for African-derived content, concepts, and practices to be appropriated and presented as culturally denuded (corporate-driven) “best” knowledge and “best” pedagogical practices. (p. 12)

It is disheartening, to say the least, that white folks are viewed as the educational “experts” when their methods have been gravely inadequate for and damaging to Black people and other people of color (Asante, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Shujaa, 1994; Watkins, 2001). As Nobles (1998) asserts, formal education for Black people “has been, for the most part, training designed to reinforce our dehumanization and ultimately to disconnect us from the power of the African spirit (mind)” (p. xiv). We would do well to remember that while Black people have been on the receiving end of white supremacist “mis-education” for hundreds of years (Woodson, 1990), we have been successfully educating ourselves for thousands of years (Hilliard III, 1995, 1998; Murrell, 2002; Watkins, 2015). In our attempt at “browning” the pedagogical literature (Gaztambide-Fernàndez, 2015), we are putting forth anti-colonial pedagogy as resistance to the erasure and co-optation of indigenous knowledges and experience (Dei, 2010). Thus in excavating indigenous African pedagogies, we are enacting what Jacob Carruthers terms intellectual warfare, “an ongoing battle to rescue, reclaim, and restore African history, culture , language, spirituality, and ethos to its rightful place within the scope of African humanity from the clutches of European interlopers who have seized our glorious heritage and claimed it as their own” (Levi, 2012, p. 180).

Precisely, Ancient Africa is the source of contemporary social justice/liberatory education where the sesh (teacher) of Kemet and the oluko (sage and teacher) of Yorubaland’s pedagogies were based in the principles of MAAT (truth, justice, order, reciprocity, balance, harmony) (Hilliard, 1998; Karnga, 2010). Specifically, these pedagogical practices reject individualism and, instead, model human compassion and collective responsibility in service of the betterment of an interconnected humanity. For centuries Black women have retained the “heritage knowledge” (King & Swartz, 2016, p. 4) of African ontology and epistemology such as the above principles of MAAT and Ubuntu (interconnectedness). Cynthia Dillard (2012) asserts that the “holistic view of the African woman, in relation to her community, echoes pre-colonial African practices and values regarding the physical as well as the spiritual well-being of the community” (p. 72). Passing on this knowledge intergenerationally as griots (storytellers), djelis (historians), and Mwalimus (teachers), Black women have carried on these African traditions through both formal and informal pedagogical processes as beacons of service, social responsibility, and activist intellectualism, laying the foundation for Black women’s contemporary liberatory pedagogies to emerge.

Black Women in the Academy

While higher education has been characterized as “one of the greatest hopes for intellectual and civic progress” (Boyer, 1997, p. 85), for many Black women, the academy has actually been part of our struggle, especially in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Despite the rhetoric of the academy’s commitment to social justice , there continues to be prescription to dominant Eurocentric /androcentric ideological, epistemological , methodological, and pedagogical traditions that are meant to maintain the hegemonic order (Baszile, 2006; Harris & González, 2012). Consequently, the literature concerning Black women in academia is replete with examplesFootnote 4 of marginalization , isolation, and compartmentalizationFootnote 5. It delineates a clear pattern of institutional and interpersonal oppression where Black women are ever cognizant that “their presence represents a disruptive incursion into spaces never intended for them” (McKay, 1997).

Notwithstanding the challenges faced by Black women in the academy that are well-documented in the literature, there is also a rich legacy of universities as sites where Black women students and educators have served as important agents of qualitative change (Biondi, 2014; Kendi, 2012; Kynard, 2013; Ransby, 2003). Black women within the academy have histsorically been at the forefront of profound social movements such as the women’s rights, civil rights, anti-apartheid, and other anti-colonial movements. Undoubtedly, Black women have only been able to enter the academy as a direct result of some of these same movements, and thus many feel a sense of responsibility to continue that legacy of fighting for “academic, cultural, social, and political change in scholarship and pedagogy” (Butler, 2000, p. 27). Research confirms that for academics of color, and particularly for Black women, success is often measured by how effective they have been as change agents, within the academy and beyond (Antonio, 2002; Shockley, 2013; Thomas, 2001; Thompson & Louque, 2005). For example, Tyson (2001) describes the connection between her role as an academic freedom fighter and her role as a liberatory pedagogue:

As a sister in the academy, the sum of who I am as a teacher, researcher, and activist makes it possible for me to continue to breathe a breath of life into my work: A breath of life that sustains pedagogy grounded in critical consciousness, a research agenda grounded in an epistemology of cultural specificity and an activism grounded in emancipatory action. (p. 148)

The chapters in this volume suggest that the spirit of Sankofa prevails, as contemporary Black women academics honor our Ancestors and Elders for modeling scholarly activism and liberatory pedagogies. Furthermore, in keeping with the legacy of our ancestors and foremothers’ community-oriented ontology and social justice mission, Black women academics tend not to confine our pedagogies to the classroom, or to the halls of the Ivory Tower (such as our involvement within the Movement for Black Lives), which challenges the notion of what “an academic should do or be” (Evans, 2007, p. 2). Because Black women are doing critical work that does not fit neatly with, and often challenges, white male hegemony , our “success” not only often goes unrecognized, but these efforts are sometimes even punished.

Specifically, many of the authors in this volume cultivate liberatory pedagogies that demystify and interrogate canonical knowledge, exposing the role of oppressive ideologies in shaping power relations both in academe and in society at large. As hooks (1994) notes , for Black women in the academy, “the choice to teach against the grain of conformity, to challenge the status quo, has often had negative consequences. And that is part of what makes that choice one that is not politically neutral” (p. 203). However, the magnitude of social injustice and unnecessary human suffering makes this “choice” unequivocal. Thus many of the Black women in this volume claim spaces of radical possibility within the academy, holding onto a deep and inviolable conviction in our ability to effect change through our pedagogies and praxis of liberation.

Organization of the Book

The chapters showcased in this book represent a wide range of Black women’s liberatory pedagogies, from political education in a community organizing capacity to higher education in classrooms and beyond. This volume is divided into three sections—Part I: Challenges to Black Women in the Academy/Pedagogies of Resistance; Part II: Transformative Pedagogies: Theory, Praxis, Strategies, and Applications; and Part III: Pedagogies of Healing—all demonstrating the complexity and heterogeneity of Black women’s experiences, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, and educational philosophies.

Part I: Challenges to Black Women in the Academy/Pedagogies of Resistance focuses on the power and agency that Black women faculty exercise within an oppressive academy. Specifically, this section explores varying strategies Black women professors employ in an effort to overcome microaggressions , institutional racism , and colonizing and oppressive curriculum and practices. This section begins with Chap. 2, “The curriculum that has no name: A choreo-pedagogy for colored girls seeking to fly over the rainbow,” in which professor Toni King uses a poetic narrative format to re-contextualize, and further theorize womanist pedagogies of relational social change that Black women educators commonly cultivate as tools of critical education, leadership development, and recovery from race, class, and gender oppressions in order to more adequately address the needs of their Black women students. In Chap. 3, “Black Skin, White Masks: Negotiating Institutional Resistance to Revolutionary Pedagogy and Praxis in the HBCU,” professor Zoe Spencer celebrates the passion of engaging students in critical and liberatory pedagogy at a Historically Black College and University where she has experienced institutional resistance and the vilification of her work as a revolutionary pedagogue and human rights activist. In Chap. 4, “Black Women Academics and Senior Managers Resisting Gendered Racism in British Higher Education Institutions,” Cecile Wright, Uvanney Maylor, and Valarie Watson voice the experiences of isolation, racism, sexism, and a lack of opportunities for career advancement for Black women academics in the UK, but more importantly, they highlight Black women’s empowerment, agency , tactical flair, effective maneuverings, and articulations and demonstrations of personal power as resistance to white supremacy in the UK academy.

In Chap. 5, “Stories of Migration: Passing Through, Crossing Over, and Decolonial Transgressing in Academyland,” professor Kirsten Edwards draws on Black women’s storytelling tradition to explore issues of home and not-belonging, and the multiple locations that shape her pedagogical resistance to the practices and expectations of a colonizing academy. Similarly, in Chap. 6, “Gettin’ Free: Anger as Resistance to White Supremacy Within and Beyond the Academy,” professor Olivia Perlow explores the evolution and uses of anger as an ongoing personal, intellectual, political, and pedagogical resistance project as a Black woman professor seeking to destabilize a white supremacist patriarchal academy and society. In the final chapter in this section, Chap. 7, “Black Women’s Co-Mentoring Relationships as Resistance to Marginalization at a PWI,” professor Andrea Baldwin and her undergraduate student Raven Johnson share their experiences with the development of a non-hierarchical and mutually beneficial co-mentoring relationship as a successful strategy that Black women at PWIs can utilize to resist marginalization .

Part II: Transformative Pedagogies: Theory, Praxis , Strategies, and Applications highlights the transformative potential of Black women’s pedagogies through an examination of the multitude of theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, as well as the various capacities and disciplines in which Black women strategically apply their pedagogies. In Chap. 8, “Teaching and Learning Philosophical ‘Special’ Topics: Black Feminism and Intersectionality,” professor Kathryn Gines co-authors with her graduate students A. Marie Ranjbar, Edward O’Byrn, Eyo Ewara, and William Paris to archive the transformative nature of their graduate seminar, which they attribute to Gines’ pedagogy and the lessons and insights gleaned from the course readings on Black feminism and intersectionality , as well as the particular demographics of the class, all of which led to the intentional cultivation of an affirming community. In Chap. 9, “Teaching Reproductive Justice : An Activist’s Approach,” human rights activist and co-founder of the Reproductive Justice (RJ) Framework Loretta Ross explores a radical and transformative pedagogical approach to teaching RJ that challenges the pro-choice/pro-life binary through an intersectional human rights framework. In Chap. 10,“Close/Bye: Staging [State] Intimacy and Betrayal in ‘Performance of Literature’,” professor Stephanie Leigh Batiste documents the transformative process of co-creating the play “CLOSE/BYE” with her students, in which themes such as closeness and distance, love and betrayal were explored as means to layer self-knowledge, intimate relationships, social injustice, and state violence.

In Chap. 11, “The Quality of the Light: Evidence, Truths, and the Odd Practice of the Poet-Sociologist,” Eve Ewing explores her dual identity as a poet and sociology professor/scholar through three lenses: the liberatory and transformative potential of poetry in the classroom, the use of poetry as evidence for sociological phenomena, and the active craft of living and being in the world as a poet . In the final chapter in this section, Chap. 12, “Black Queer Feminism as Praxis: Building an Organization and a Movement,” Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) activist and graduate student Janae Bonsu offers an organizational case analysis of the theory and practice of transformative organizing and movement building focusing on group-centered leadership , transformative justice and community accountability , policy development and advocacy, political education , and campaigns and direct action organizing that are reflective of Black Queer Feminist values.

The final section of the book, Part III: Pedagogies of Healing, focuses on the liberatory pedagogies that Black women utilize to rejuvenate and restore hope, joy, power, and the healing energies needed to fight the good fight. This section in particular positions Black women as critical knowledge producers who reject the notion of victimhood and rather embrace their agency as revolutionary change-makers, facilitating the empowerment of those under their tutelage. In the first chapter of this section, Chap. 13, “Calling on the Divine and Sacred Energy of Queens: Bringing Afrikan Indigenous Wisdom and Spirituality to the Academy,” professor Derise Tolliver discusses how her praxis as an African-centered educator and facilitator of learning has been influenced by her mother, grandmothers, and great grandmother, whom she refers to as “Mommas to the 4th power ,” to illustrate how their examples of complementarity , creativity, character, celebration, and cultural groundedness have manifested in both her personal life and professional efforts to facilitate healing in the lives of her students. Similarly, in Chap. 14, “Healing through (Re)Membering and (Re)Claiming Ancestral Knowledge about Black Witch Magic ,” Black witch Lakeesha Harris recalls the influence of various Black women in her life as she examines her own journey to healing . Furthermore, Harris discusses how through the creation of pedagogical spaces such as Sojourner’s Healing Room , Black Witch Chronicles , and Black Witch University she has taught others to reclaim their innate wisdom, spiritual connection, and magical and ritual application in order to facilitate healing for Black women, queer and trans* people, and their communities.

In Chap. 15, “Another Lesson Before Dying: Toward a Pedagogy of Black Self-Love,” professor Denise Taliaferro Baszile discusses her pedagogy which allows and encourages Black women faculty to teach who they are, translating her practice of loving blackness into a healing pedagogy of Black self-love designed to address the complexity of Black student alienation on campus. In Chap. 16, “Healing Circles as Black Feminist Pedagogical Interventions,” professor Jennifer Richardson offers a theoretical paradigm shift in thinking about Black feminist pedagogy and praxis by exploring the ways in which the incorporation of self-care and the erotic through the radical Black feminist tradition can lead to healing students and others, particularly those that are Black women. Closing out this section and the book itself, in Chap. 17, “Kuja Nyumbani (Coming Home): Using African-Centered Pedagogy to Educate Black Students in the Academy,” professor Sharon Bethea brings readers home to our African roots of teaching, learning, and healing through African-centered curriculum and teaching practices with Black students in the academy.