{"id":1901,"date":"2022-04-21T09:00:27","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/doctoralcollege\/?p=1901"},"modified":"2023-09-27T09:48:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T09:48:33","slug":"why-do-we-need-a-black-educators-book-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/doctoralcollege\/2022\/04\/21\/why-do-we-need-a-black-educators-book-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do we need a Black Educators Book Club?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Malcolm Richards is an independent doctoral research with the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter: https:\/\/eprofile.exeter.ac.uk\/malcolmrichards\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Camille London-Miyo is a PhD researcher with the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre De Montfort University, Leicester:<\/em> https:\/\/www.dmu.ac.uk\/research\/centres-institutes\/stephen-lawrence-research-centre\/team.aspx<\/a><\/p>\n

In the period following the murder of George Floyd (r.i.p) and the subsequent Movement for Black Lines protests across the United Kingdom between March and June 2020 (fire bun Colston), there has been renewed interest in the educational experiences of Black students, families, and educators. Here, Black (with \u2018B\u2019 capitalized) denotes peoples, cultures, knowledge, and communities of the African and African-Caribbean diaspora. Within this recent interest convergences, a variety of education institutions have sought to highlight their commitment to equality, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racist practices. Others have sought to \u2018double down\u2019 on their belief that institutional racism does not exist \u2013 or they can find no evidence to prove it. These are inevitably preoccupied with (small-c) conservative themes of migration, integration, and assimilation \u2013 though arguably grounded in (big-C) colonial and colonizing principles.<\/p>\n

We maintain that the living experiences of Black educators have always offered a unique and central perspective in \u201cexposing the tacit nature of racism and marginalisation in education\u201d (Tembo, 2021).  Decades before \u2018Small Axe<\/a>\u2019 (McQueen, 2020) and \u2018Uprising<\/a> (McQueen, 2021), Black and anti-racist educators have drawn upon the legacy work of social movements which were instrumental to the educational advances made across our educational community. A long and extensive history of educational discourse across Black communities has directly informed these movements, which has centring perspectives and lived experience providing valuable insights about the roles of equity and race in education (Andrews and Palmer, 2016). Some seminal works, such as \u201cHow the West Indian Child is made Educationally Subnormal by the British Education System<\/em>\u201d (Coard, 1971\/2021) are becoming important reference points for new generations of educators and referenced widely within the teaching education and development profession. Other books have had recent reissues, such as Beryl Gilroy\u2019s \u201cBlack Teacher<\/em>\u201d (1976\/2021) or Heart of the Race (Bryan et.al., 1985\/ 2018), and place the importance of the vital contribution\u2019s Black women centrally. There are so many other examples. We suggest that Black educators have long always formed part of a critical pedagogy, which is rooted in love, care and understanding for all. Yet within our respective universities, as we sought reading lists, academic events, and expertise to help us on our emerging academic endeavours, we found an absence of course content related to the experiences of Black educators. Instead, we were subjected to academic experiences which appeared, despite the best intentions of colleagues, rooted in deficit theorizing, or reduced into institutional pedagogical responses characterised as \u201cthe three S\u2019s: saris, samosas, and steel bands<\/em>\u201d (Troyna, 1987). We had so many questions: how can emerging academics place centrally the counter-stories of Black educators who have directly influenced our academic works? Where can academics and educators engage with the significant research, teaching, resources, activism, community education and transformative practices which has emerged from Black educators and Black education spaces? What is this black in Black education, and who is this black in Black Educators?<\/p>\n

Our response was small, but important. We created the Black Educators Book Club to encourage a intercultural, interdisciplinary space where colleagues can critically engage with such enquiries, while also centring, honouring, celebrating, and valuing some of the collective community praxis which we believe has emerged from it. The Black Educators Book Club is a virtual monthly lunchtime book club is open to staff, students, and professional service members at University of Exeter and De Montfort University, members, and affiliates of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre (SLRC) and Race, Ethnicity and Education Network (REEN), as well as education staff in schools, colleges, academies, and other educational organisations.  In the words of our friend, colleague and first BEBEC guest, Zahra Bei (2021), our hope is to honour the \u201clegacy works<\/em>\u201d of knowledge production, praxis and peoples which recognise that Black educators have little alternative but to be transformative (Osler,1997) in their practices.<\/p>\n

#BEBC2021 Readings<\/strong>:<\/p>\n