Finding Renewal and Inspiration through the Teaching and Learning of Black Education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on counter-storytelling and oral history methodology, we reflect on how the teaching and learning of the past, present, and future of Black education in the Spring of 2022 both renewed and inspired us as students and a professor. Using visuals to show how students made meaning of what they were learning, we explore the dynamics, content, and lasting meaning of this educational experience that followed a “winter” characterized by a global pandemic, continued killings of unarmed Black people and reckoning with systemic racism, and the insurrection at the nation’s Capital. In total, we delineate what it means to create space for and be a part of legacies and lineages of liberatory Black education.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Maya Phelps

Maya Phelps, is a senior at Washington University in St. Louis majoring in African and African American Studies and Educational Studies. Her research examines state and federal neoliberal reforms in housing and child welfare from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and its impact on Black queer youth navigating housing insecurity, AIDS/HIV, and potential state intervention in the form of foster care and policing. She centers Black queer resistance to state violence and neoliberal policies through queer family structures and alternative housing that bypassed state regulation. She is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow and research assistant to Dr. Michelle A. Purdy, and she has received awards for her writing and activism.

Emille Taylor

Emille Taylor, is a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied American Culture Studies, Educational Studies, and Mathematics and served as a research assistant to Dr. Michelle A. Purdy. She is also a recipient of the university’s following awards: Harriet K. Switzer Senior Women in Leadership, Nelson Mandela Leadership, Excellence in Leadership, and Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera Activism. Emille has worked for educational non-profit organizations in Memphis and Atlanta that focused on civic engagement and educational equity for historically marginalized groups. Emille hopes to pursue a higher degree in Mathematics Education with the long-term goal of being an educator and increasing Black students’ comfortability in Math and other STEM classrooms.

Michelle A. Purdy

Michelle A. Purdy, is an associate professor of Education in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research specialties include the history of U.S. education, the history of African American education, the history of school desegregation, and the history of policy, access, and opportunity. She is author of the award-winning book Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and is co-editor of Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History (Information Age Publishing, 2015). She has also written commentary for The Washington Post and been featured in articles in The New York Times and Teen Vogue.