I was happy that I decided to tackle this week’s readings on the Black principalship and culturally responsive/relevant leadership in chronological order, from Lomotey (1993) to Khalifa, Gooden & David (2016) because this approach allowed me to see the tremendous growth in the depth and breadth of the scholarship on this important topic.  The Khalifa et al. article drew on and cited the other readings and appeared to be exhaustive in its purview (with over 200 citations in the bibliography).  But, in addition to being comprehensive, its analysis was clear and practical.

Regarding clarity, the decision to frame the discussion of Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) around four strands—critical self-awareness, CRSL and teacher preparation, CRSL and school environments, and CRSL and community advocacy—helped focus the reader’s attention on the most salient issues emanating from the extensive literature.  Regarding practicality, the authors paid careful attention to the behaviors entailed in effective CRSL.  This strikes me as incredibly useful and reminded me that, just last week, I read that 10,000 people had signed up to participate in a Edutopia webinar on project-based learning—one that included an array of videos demonstrating this pedagogical approach in action.  In a similar way, the attention paid by Khalifi et al. to CRSL behaviors helps the research-based concepts come alive and become translated into action.  The effects are far-reaching.  As the authors note, “we choose to describe CRSL behaviors…we highlight practices and actions, mannerisms, policies, and discourses that influence school climate, school structure, teacher efficacy, or student outcomes” (p. 1274). 

As someone who is embarking on a literature review as part of my upcoming Second Exam, I also appreciated these authors’ lucid description of how they went about conducting their literature review, including the challenges they encountered, how they overcame potential obstacles, and how they avoided specific pitfalls. 

In my career as a teacher, I have had four principals.  When two of those principals walked into the room, it felt like dementors from Harry Potter.  When one walked in, no one really noticed, except some stood up a little straighter. When my favorite walked in, the kids would run to him, proud of whatever they were working on. When I think back, I have often relied upon vague descriptions to convey how these leaders made me feel. I “trusted” or did not “trust” them.  They seemed to “care” about the students or not. They were on the “side” of the teachers or saw teachers as their subordinates.  They were committed to equitable practices or they were white supremacists.  After reading this week’s readings and watching the video, I have begun to think about specific actions that these leaders took, both positive and negative to create a school culture.

The Khalifa reading stayed with me the most because the authors detailed specific practices that the school leaders enacted to create culturally responsive schools.  Some that stood out included, “… uses school data and indicants to measure CRSL … uses parent/community voices to measure culturally responsiveness in schools… uses equity audits to measure student inclusiveness, policy, and practice… using culturally responsive assessment tools for students” (p. 1283 – 1284).  These were concrete steps that these principals took to combine what Lomotey described as the bureaucrat/administrators and ethno-humanist sides of school leadership.  The fact that data could be used for creating more equity and CR practices is so far from what I see on a day-to-day basis, that I had to take note.  It is the rare principal who uses data to support those whom educational structures are designed to combat. I was left wondering if we were still in segregated spaces, would the goals of education be more clear and would children be used as a scapegoat less often?

As many of the readings spoke about the effect of a principal on test scores, I also found myself thinking about measures of school success.  So much of what defines a successful school to me is intangible.  I have worked in many “good” schools where students performed well on tests but teachers and students were miserable.  I attributed our collective misery to the leadership of these schools, and I still do.  I do believe that there is a connection between the tone of the school and the leadership of the principal, but I am not convinced that there is a direct correlation between the leadership of a principal and the academic performance of the students.  In such an inequitable society, with such biased measures of performance, I am not convinced that a principal can always be counted on to do more than to change (important) but often unmeasured aspects of a school.  Further, if we are constantly playing by their rules and using their definitions of success, how can we ever be free?

After being exposed to these readings, I can now clearly articulate why just having an ethic of care does not necessarily translate into caring about students in ways that are transformative to student’s lived experiences: Many white educators lack empathy for Black students. The empathy gap can account for so much of the anti-Blackness that manifests on the individual and structural level, as these experiences pre-date the Antebellum period. What these works do, for me, is beg the question, how do we close the empathy gap for educators who come from mismatched communities than the students they serve? Like, how can we get (mostly white) educators to care about Black and Brown bodies in the educational arena and beyond? 

The questions take me back to Sylvia Wynter’s (1994) NHI where she discusses “spheres of obligation” and ingroups and outgroups. She traces the genealogy of in and out groups, people who one group was obliged to be concerned about the welfare of, and groups who can be left behind or used or conquered. The work of BFTs is an empathic extension of Wynter’s argument, for BFTs see students as part of their “sphere of obligation.” The BFTs experiences with oppression and marginalization cause them to want more than student success in the classroom; it causes them to want to invest in students’ lives, like the principal who also acted as a social worker out of the office to better support her students and the communities in which those students reside. 

I think we should do what Finland does, which would entail BLOWING UP our current educational industrial complex, by eliminating private and for-profit schools at the k-12 levels. Make all schools community schools. Provide all skills with the same resources. And bring students from the suburbs into urban communities so that suburban parents have to be invested in ensuring the success of the schools their kids live-in, and more importantly, so suburban parents are exposed to the conditions that affect urban school so that they can share in the experience of educational inequity. This process means the mostly white bosses don’t get to go to elite schools where they are separated from the mostly  Black and Brown labor force. Having common experiences and exposure helps breed empathy. 

This weeks reading felt really smooth and on time. I was assigned Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) in another space and it was interesting to hear the dialogues. It was also interesting that the movie i decided to watch played on a number of themes highlighted in Wilson’s (2015) article. I am hoping to bring some of the thoughts I shared in other spaces to our class this week. Ideas such as

1. Black feminism v WOMANISM (why might folks choose one phrase over the other)
2. Hiring folks from the community to teach in the community
3. Women in the Black Panther Party/Oak Community School
4. Transformative Justice

I would also like to engaging in conversations on how might “mainstream, patriarchal notions of teaching” (p. 75) show up today at CUNY. As well as the possible connections to what Wilson (2015) described as African-American children enter schools having and to confront educators’ low expectations of their intelligence, academic potential and learning capabilities (p. 3).

Questions I would ask the class for this week

1. How many teachers (from K-12) did you have that were Black Women?
2. What subjects did they teach? Positions did they hold?

I felt reinvigorated after this week’s readings. I woke up the next day with a new sense of hope and urgency. I don’t often send people articles but I had to share Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s (2002) article with loved ones. In part as a reminder of the love, fortitude, and commitment it takes for Black teachers to keep challenging oppressive schools, systems, and practices in spite of the “recognition that social injustice is deep-seated and not easily dismantled” (p. 80). This is deep labor that goes unrecognized. And while in Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks’ writes about the strength she gained from the Black women educators at her all-Black schools when she was younger, somehow, it felt like the first time that I’d seen maternal care aligned with political clarity and an ethic of risk in an article.

I have been thinking about the importance of Casey’s (1990) findings in Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s article. The marked difference between progressive Jewish, Catholic, and African American teachers’ understanding of the “maternal image”. That unlike the other groups, the Black teachers in this study embraced a maternal image, saw “the mother-child relationships as central to their resistance to domination, both patriarchal and racial” (p. 76). And having most often been surrounded by the former, the need to deconstruct the maternal, I have felt alone in asking, why don’t you feel that same urgency for “other” people’s children? In Freire’s critique of the teacher as parent, lies the concern that the idea of school as family could impede action on the part of teachers, to protest or strike. But I have seen teachers prepare to strike out of a love and respect for themselves and their students. I wonder, did Freire and bell hooks ever talk about this? And how can this work impact the decisions being made by hiring, admissions, and curriculum committees in schools of education? Not only to increase the numbers of Black faculty and students but the number of Black pedagogical theorists in their syllabi.

The readings this week point to continuums and levels of care. In Wilson’s (2015) article, once again there is the reminder that individual acts of care are not sufficient. As I read about the work of this one phenomenal Black principal, I thought about all the other ones out there. And how often Black teachers and educational leaders are pushed out when they don’t accept the deficit-based views, color-blind tactics, and educational neglect of their communities, schools, classrooms, and students.

A radical care “school staff meeting” question that I haven’t ask before is: How is our school “providing care that is responsive to the structural inequalities students face” (p. 4)?

This week’s readings helped me to appreciate the many ways in which critical care shows up in our schools through black women teachers and leaders. I loved unpacking the concept of mothering and motherhood in schooling and how a woman’s natural inclination towards mothering and parenting can and should inform their teaching. In the Beauboeuf-Lafontant article, she mentions the ways in which mothering for many black women educators is “a matter of fact” and an “emotional strength.” It was powerful to read these words alongside the concept of mothering because so often in our capitalist society, the act of “mothering” is looked down upon and perhaps even seen as weak. This article flips this notion on its head and instead places motherhood in highest esteem, as something that comes natural to women and that is a key in our collective liberation.

Beauboeuf-Lafontant also likens care and love in teaching to the bible and the ten commandments, stating, “Thou shalt love they students as you would love your own children” (Collins, 1992, p. 178). This statement speaks to me deeply and makes so much sense, yet I have been in so many classrooms where there feels to be a void of love, or rather, a lack of focus on love and care. We forget that we are working with human beings and that human beings need care in order to grow and thrive. A connection to religion was also discussed in the Witherspoon and Makoto Arnold article, who discussed the ways in which theological caretakers exhibit care. It made me wonder about our “secular” public education system which is so often void of spirituality and if spirituality and spaces of worship can actually teach us a lot about critical care. The exploration of “The Black Church” in the article sheds light on the ways in which Black spirituality has come to be located in resistance. It also sheds light on the ways in which black women educators resemble pastors. This connection to spirituality is profound and necessary (Witherspoon, 2010). Similar to mothering, spirituality comes naturally. In our secularized world, however, it has been looked down upon and even discouraged in public schools. Placing spirituality and a spiritual practice in the center of teaching practices places care at the center. “Much like a pastor, these women not only believed in ensuring the academic well-being of their students, but also in providing holistic care of mind, body, and spirit” (p. 224). This holistic approach to education is necessary. I am left wondering: Why have we lost this approach in so many classrooms, and how can we regain it? How can we better care for ourselves so that we can focus on our students and care for them as we care for our own children? How can we foster our own spiritual development so that we can also foster it in our students?

Whereas last week’s articles left me feeling a bit deflated, this week’s articles reminded me that there are teachers and school leaders – most often Black women – who are working to change educational systems.  The reading that I connected with most deeply was the Bass article, When care trumps justice: the operationalization of Black feminist caring in educational leadership.   Bass’ hopeful tone stemmed from the obvious respect that she seems to have towards her participants and the work that they do.  Bass describes bringing together her participants as a forum and writes that “the participants appeared to take comfort in knowing there were other women who employed an ethic of care in their leadership and decision-making…” (78, 2012).  As such, through only a brief window, Bass’ scholarship created a sense of community and comradery that made her participants feel cared for and supported, something that feels rare in academia.  

As someone interested in how teachers become more empowered, I was especially interested in the themes of risk, resistance and spirituality that connected these readings.  As I have thought about this topic previously, it was only the sense of spirituality that took a different direction than I had considered before.  Perhaps what the authors spoke about as spirituality, I have attributed more to a feeling of connectedness and deep understanding that one’s actions are important and will make a difference.  As stated in some of the readings, this north star, when you know you are acting with integrity, love and the potential to have real impact, is more empathetic than moral, more auxiliary than performative.  I had never connected this feeling to spirituality and even less to religion previously, but now I will consider how these ideas are similar and different, and why I had been so reluctant to think of it in such a way previously.  

Lastly, though it was mentioned briefly in some readings, I was a little disheartened that the emotional toll that this work takes on educators and educator leaders was all but ignored.  This is often the case with Black women.  We are expected to stoically take on the ills of society without feeling the drain ourselves.  Many of these educators spoke about the risks that they took to fight for their students as a badge of honor, but who is looking out for them?  How long can women continue to focus only on caring for others?  Mom needs a nap. 

I could not help wondering, when I read that “Over the last 15 years, educational researchers and theorists have decried the lack of caring in our schools” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 71), to what extent this concern about an apparent dearth of caring was part of the aftermath of the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk.  Knowing that context is always important in education, I tried to surmise what was happening in 1987, politically and socially.  Ronald Reagan was President then, serving his second term.  These questions: Was the concern about lack of caring in schools justified? Was it a long-term phenomenon that was only recently discovered? Or did it have something to do with specific policies and politics? might be worth discussing in class.

I found the four readings useful, compelling, and inspiring.  Written over a 13-year period, they provided several reinforcing messages about the role of caring among exemplary Black female educators (teachers and principals) in promoting social justice and educational equity.  Wilson’s definition of critical care as “embracing and exhibiting values, dispositions and behaviors related to empathy, compassion, advocacy, systemic critique, perseverance and calculated risk-taking for the sake of justly serving students and improving schools” (Wilson, 2015, p. 1)—although written last—provided a clarifying lens for reviewing all the articles.  Several of the authors offer a convincing argument that the life experiences of Black women, deeply rooted in the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism, often result in a “particular vantage point on what constitutes evidence, valid action, and morality” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 72).  Discussions here and in the other articles of this unique and powerful perspective are reminiscent of, and perhaps draw on, Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness.  Bass (quoting Larson and Murtadha, 2002) points out that “the experiences that African-American women have with the intersecting systems of race, gender, and social class oppression contribute to their ability to understand and negotiate issues of difference in diverse school communities” (Bass, 2012, p. 74).  The discussion of religio-spirituality as an additional root of caring and empathy was a welcome focus in two of the articles, which gave voice to this under-investigated aspect of human experience in informing professional judgment and motivation.

One additional thought: as a community school practitioner and advocate, I kept thinking that Wilson’s principal—as competent and caring as she is—needed some community partners to help respond to her students’ needs.  Knowing that, in most urban schools, one-third of students fail school-based vision screenings, I worried that the one child she was able to help obtain glasses may have represented scores of others equally in need.  Where are the Lions Club or Warby-Parker in this scenario? 

I was struck by Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s (2002) discussion of mothering, motherhood, and “other mothering,” and in particular by the way she named the distinction between motherhood as defined within a capitalist, racist patriarchy, and motherhood as defined by a womanist, Black feminist lens.  Motherhood defined by “mainstream, patriarchal” notions (p. 75) is “domesticated,” hierarchical, individual, and the teachers .  Thus, comparisons between teaching and motherhood, filtered through the lens of whiteness, capitalism, and patriarchy, is “resented” as “gender stereotyping” and viewed only in service to individual men and children.  Thus, the white teachers she profiles, in their attempt to push back against one form of gender oppression, reinforce the problematic conception of motherhood in service to racial capitalism. 

However, through the womanist and Black feminist lens, mothering is understood as a “communal responsibility” (p. 76) and “central to …resistance to domination, both patriarchal and racial” (p. 76).  Nurture and mothering becomes “inclusive in several senses: it is not limited to women, it is expressive of relationship within community, and it is not separate from the exercise of authority” (p. 76).  It is also a direct challenge the underlying racist, capitalist notions of property.  As Patricia Hill Collins writes, as quoted by Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “by seeing the larger community as responsible for children and by giving other-mothers and other nonparents “rights” in child rearing, African-Americans challenge prevailing property relations. It is in this sense that traditional bloodmother/other-mother relationships in women-centered networks are “revolutionary” (p. 77).  

Witherspoon and Anderson (2010) similarly name the ways that whiteness, capitalism, and racism have served to corrupt and hijack conceptions of care, nurture, and mothering.  As they write, “research in feminism, leadership, care, and justice has been located in European, White-accepted wisdom” (p. 220).  This form of care does not “interrogate patriarchy, privilege, and power inherent in exclusion and inequality” (p. 229).  Instead, this form of care works in tandem with systems of oppression – covering them up or sugar coating them.  What it would look like to fully challenge and dismantle these notions of care within teaching and teacher preparation programs?

My immediate response to all of the articles this week examining the counternarratives of, and more broadly, the role of Black Feminist/Womanist caring among Black women educational leaders is– who is showing the same radical care to them?!! How are they navigating and finding care for themselves in the same dehumanizing spaces as their students/children? Amidst enacting critical care in schools, Wilson (2015) draws the connection between critical care and transformative leadership in listening to the counter narratives pf Principal Simms, also an African American woman, in confronting and engaging in systemic critique of the poverty context of the community through instilling a school leadership force principled in care and embodying compassion with parents and students. Beauboeuf-Lofontant (200) identifies the themes of the maternal, political clarity, and an ethic of risk in the womanist caring of Black women educator. The maternal care that Black Feminist caring teaching enacted was rooted not in the individual relationship with men and children, but rather emerged from the sense of mothering as a communal responsibility (Bass, 2012; Wilson, 2015). This embodiment of critical care holds political clarity in the recognition of interlocking, intersectional, systems of oppression and injustices that implicate society and education simultaneously, and is rooted in the ethics of risk that there lies an interdependence in the creation of fairness and justice rooted in an understanding that the “self is part of rather than apart from other people” (p.81). Withserspoon & Arnold (2010) extend such themes of womanist caring in the conceptualization of care in a theological/religio-spritual sense. I was intrigued by the account presented in Bass (2012) of care triumphing justice- the teacher who shares her decision to not implicate a student for the possession of weed and instead express an enormity of care that place her own self at risk. It is this risk and also the radical empathy and care that Womanist educators, as in this narrative, the begs the question of WHO is showing radical care to the “care-ers”, or ones enacting the care? Of course, this is not a one-directional process, but the responsibility of care of course holds risks and implications for Black feminist educational leaders themselves. But how does/can the system or settings of schools treat womanist/black feminist educational leaders better? Who is healing our healers? How can we enact the same critical care towards Womanist educators, specifically Black women in educational leadership positions?