Curriculum as Endarkened Feminist Third Space: Alternative possibilities, revision, reciprocity, and surrender in teacher professional development

Abstract

This article reveals how an Endarkened Feminist Third Space was actualized through the creation and facilitation of “Race Space” Critical Professional Development (RSCPD) for teachers; that is, a space composed of reciprocity, surrender, and a willingness to revise one’s performances of the present. Building upon previous scholarly calls for (and theorizations of) curriculum as space, endarkened feminist epistemologies, and Third Space, I theorize Endarkened Feminist Third Space through an ethnographic case study of teacher professional development (PD) and an embedded multiple case study of teacher participants. I respond to the following research questions: (a) How did an Endarkened Feminist Third Space become actualized as curriculum within RSCPD; and (b) How did this actualization support social justice teaching and action among participants? A critical discourse analysis of focal dialogic exchanges unearthed several moments in which an Endarkened Feminist Third Space was actualized for each participant in the following ways: (a) collaborative strategizing and surrendering fears to subversively act; (b) being challenged to (re)consider alternative possibilities and political performances; (c) revision and intervention in the here and now; and (d) reciprocity. Ultimately, through the actualization of an Endarkened Feminist Third Space, teacher and facilitator ways of knowing/acting were both welcomed and called into question for the purposes of revising their performances of the present, surrendering to alternative possibilities, and reciprocity. Finally, I discuss the need for epistemologically rich and feminized interrogations of space within PD for facilitator growth and enhanced social justice teaching and being among teachers.

Keywords:

• Teacher professional development
• critical professional development
• endarkened feminist epistemologies
• third space
• curriculum studies
• social justice education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

2 This data was not further disaggregated by gender.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tiffany M. Nyachae

Tiffany M. Nyachae is an Assistant Professor of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for the College of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Pennsylvania State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Literacy Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and the Sciences of Learning at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). As a Black Feminist pedagogue and transdisciplinary, community-engaged scholar, Dr. Nyachae’s lived experiences and complicated historical connection to U.S. land foreground her justice work in various contexts for the purposes of reimagining schools, our world and overall social transformation. She employs critically conscious and humanizing research approaches to qualitative studies guided by various justice-oriented theories of race, Black girlhood, Black woman knowing/being/experiences, space, and becoming. Dr. Nyachae’s research portfolio includes: (a) ethnographic and multiple case studies on supporting urban teachers committed to social justice through “race space” critical professional development; (b) design-based research studies of learning, learning environments, and literacy development in social justice literacy workshops for youth of Color; and (c) content and critical discourse analyses of extracurricular programs and curriculum for Black girls. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Urban Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Gender and Education, and Qualitative Inquiry.