Paper/Proposal Title
Unity as Resistance to the Unreliable Narrator
Location
Kennedy Union 310 (on UD's main campus)
Start Date
November 2023
End Date
November 2023
Keywords
African American students; P-12 Education; African Diaspora
Abstract
According to the 2017-2018 National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 80% of American public elementary and secondary school educators are White, leaving Black, Hispanic, Native American (and Indigenous) and bi-racial educators to make up the remaining 20%. Additionally, according to the United States Census bureau, the racial makeup of the United States is expected to become more diverse, particularly in the Black and Latinx racial groups (Vespa, et al., 2020). Knowing the American P-12 public education system educates the majority of the United States’ children, several questions arise as to the capacity of educators to “do no harm” to Black children, particularly, in the face of demographic changes, since most educators are White.
With a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, American public education has sought—in many respects—to include more diverse pedagogical approaches (e.g., Culturally-Relevant Pedagogy and anti-racist pedagogy) and curricula (e.g., The 1619 Project and the Advanced Placement African American Studies course) to rectify historical failures in educating Black students. While each of these approaches provides a point of entry to engaging the Black experience—in its variety—each of these approaches is often delivered through “unreliable narrators” in the classroom. The educator-makeup versus the student-makeup yields a numerical conundrum, for sure; but it also yields concerns for whether African American students can truly learn about who they are in spaces where they are taught by those who cannot relate to their historical or present realities.
In this paper, I seek to situate the current educational concerns of African American students within the broader African Diasporic conversations about uplift and liberation. Building upon the work of those, like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), I seek to provide a possible solution to the educational dilemma of African American students: (re)connecting educators and students across the Diaspora, 1) to retain the momentum of memory, 2) to bridge alliances to counter the nationalization of Blackness, and 3) to counter the impacts of neoliberal capitalism, which has framing tendencies for human understanding and human meaning, which shapes how African American students interact with others.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Jairus Hallums teaches in a public school system in Metro Atlanta, Georgia. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Winthrop University, and a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is currently a doctoral student in the College of Education and Human Development at Georgia State University. His areas of study lay at the intersection of social justice, pedagogy, educational leadership, Black Liberation theology, and critical theory.
Unity as Resistance to the Unreliable Narrator
Kennedy Union 310 (on UD's main campus)
According to the 2017-2018 National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 80% of American public elementary and secondary school educators are White, leaving Black, Hispanic, Native American (and Indigenous) and bi-racial educators to make up the remaining 20%. Additionally, according to the United States Census bureau, the racial makeup of the United States is expected to become more diverse, particularly in the Black and Latinx racial groups (Vespa, et al., 2020). Knowing the American P-12 public education system educates the majority of the United States’ children, several questions arise as to the capacity of educators to “do no harm” to Black children, particularly, in the face of demographic changes, since most educators are White.
With a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, American public education has sought—in many respects—to include more diverse pedagogical approaches (e.g., Culturally-Relevant Pedagogy and anti-racist pedagogy) and curricula (e.g., The 1619 Project and the Advanced Placement African American Studies course) to rectify historical failures in educating Black students. While each of these approaches provides a point of entry to engaging the Black experience—in its variety—each of these approaches is often delivered through “unreliable narrators” in the classroom. The educator-makeup versus the student-makeup yields a numerical conundrum, for sure; but it also yields concerns for whether African American students can truly learn about who they are in spaces where they are taught by those who cannot relate to their historical or present realities.
In this paper, I seek to situate the current educational concerns of African American students within the broader African Diasporic conversations about uplift and liberation. Building upon the work of those, like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), I seek to provide a possible solution to the educational dilemma of African American students: (re)connecting educators and students across the Diaspora, 1) to retain the momentum of memory, 2) to bridge alliances to counter the nationalization of Blackness, and 3) to counter the impacts of neoliberal capitalism, which has framing tendencies for human understanding and human meaning, which shapes how African American students interact with others.
