Black men teaching: The identities and pedagogies of black male teachers

While a chorus of teacher education programs, urban school districts, and educational scholars has called for more black male teachers to serve as role models and father figures for black students, the amount of empirical research on what it means for black male teachers to meet these expectations remains relatively small. The extant body of work, while certainly addressing important concerns, has left heteropatriarchal and racially essentialist assumptions of the roles of black male teachers largely unchallenged. Grounded in life history narrative inquiry and informed by black masculinity studies and critical educational theory, this study reveals how dominant cultural and institutional constructions of black manhood were used by a variety of stakeholders to promote, prescribe, and police the participation of eleven black male teachers in secondary, predominantly minority urban schools, thus forcing these teachers into complex negotiations of their identities and pedagogies. Critical insights from this study fall into three sets of findings: (i) the master narrative on the significance of black male teachers anticipated and offered insights into some of the ways in which participants\u27 identities and pedagogics were constructed as black men in the teaching profession; (ii) the master narrative on black male teachers presumed a black identity politics that policed and complicated study participants\u27 engagements in the teaching profession; and (iii) the master narrative on black male teachers reproduced patriarchal gender ideologies that fueled challenging negotiations of power with students and women colleagues. In all, these findings illuminate competing discourses on black masculinity that, in addition to circumscribing the lives of study participants, may affect other black men in the urban teaching profession. By assuming a critical stance on race and gender, this study complicates cursory valorizations of black male teachers as role models by exploring black masculinity as a contested terrain of privilege and marginality for black male educators. In so doing, this study also surfaces invaluable perspectives for teacher education programs, school districts, and policymakers who want to devise tangible strategies for attracting, supporting, and retaining more black men in urban classrooms