Teaching, Loving, and Believing Black Girls Workshop
By Lila Chafe
On Saturday, January 30th, hundreds of teachers gathered for Teaching for Change’s 2021 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action Curriculum Fair. With many options to choose from, almost one hundred participants attended Dr. Shari Berga’s workshop, co-facilitated by Akailah Jenkins McIntyre, titled “Teaching, Loving, and Believing Black Girls.” Both facilitators are part of the Wells Collective, a collaborative of diversity practitioners that focus their work on empowering women.
While participants streamed in, Brown Skin Girl played through computer speakers from coast to coast, centering the session on empowering Black students and practicing radical self and community care. At 11:50 am, introductions began in the chat. Teachers commented that they “wanted to empower the beautiful Black girls in [their] world,” and shared personal connections, such as Shea Jefferson Strain who wrote that “as a Black Deaf woman myself, I know how important it is to support and love our Black girls in the classroom and outside.”
Incorporating the norms used at the Wells Collective, Dr. Berga asked participants to practice racializing their voice when sharing in the chat in order to contextualize their comment for the group. Additionally, the group was reminded of the Be Well norms: Be curious, Engage fully, What's shared here stays here, Expect non-closure and accept discomfort, Listen as if you might be wrong, and Love is at the center.
Moving into the workshop, Dr. Berga shared operational definitions of terms including white supremacy, bias, implicit bias, and intersectionality. Asked to share what it meant to love Black girls, participants flooded the chat with comments sharing that it meant to “celebrate self awareness and confidence in the classroom” to listen, to “publicly acknowledge their beauty” to “love ancestors,” and to “give them ownership space.” Throughout this activity, participants continued to practice the Be Well norms and racialize their voice. After a brief reminder of the differences between equality, equity, and justice, the workshop transitioned to reflecting on how educational structures around the country disempower young Black girls.
Incorporating visual media, Dr. Berga and McIntyre shared Monique Morris’s powerful TED Talk, “Why Black girls are targeted for punishment at school -- and how to change that.” Morris asks, “where can Black girls be Black, without reprimand or punishment?” and shares that age compression, the expectation and perception that Black girls are more mature than their peers, is highly detrimental to their experience in classrooms. Morris calls for radical teaching and classrooms, hoping that “if we commit to this notion of education as freedom work, we can shift educational conditions so that no girl, even the most vulnerable among us, will get pushed out of school.”
Reflecting on the TED Talk, Dr. Berga and McIntryre asserted that unequal schools perpetuate white supremacy. Teachers were challenged to imagine how to rebuild school systems, and through discussion, decided that we must name white supremacy to directly deconstruct the systems that pushes students out, replacing it with a system that listens to them. Further discussing the perpetuation of white supremacy, Dr. Berga exemplified how white culture shows up in schools as a dominating force through aesthetics, definitions of professionalism, expectations of time and family structure, and other examples, as outlined further in this table.
After learning about the ways in which white culture is translated into a white supremacist structure in which Black girls are targeted, participants were asked to name how their institution operates in or prioritizes white culture. Many educators shared their experiences with this year’s zoom requirements, tardy policies, and uniform expectations.
As the session concluded, Dr. Berga and McIntyre encouraged all participants to create specific action plans to assure that Black girls are fairly represented across their curriculums, and are celebrated and listened to within the classroom. Dr. Berga explained that these actions are crucial, as bias against Black girls translates into the discrimination against Black women, as seen in pay gaps, maternal mortality rates, and hate crimes and acts of violence.
As each participant entered their commitment into the chat, Berga and McIntryre shared additional resources (all linked below), along with a final reminder to participants:
“When you know better, do better!” - Dr. Maya Angelou
Lila Chafe is a volunteer with Teaching for Change in the 2020-2021 school year while studying education at Barnard College.