Uplifting Our Voices: Centering Black Women Pre-Service Teachers in Teacher Education Research

Abstract

This paper highlights the methodological approaches used to examine the experiences of Black women preservice teachers (BWPSTs). Using Hauntological Excavation, this study higlights how the Black Feminist Listening Guide (BFLG) can be a useful methodological tool to amplify the voices of BWPSTs. By centering the lived experiences of Black women, the research aims to counter the dominant narratives in teacher education research that largely focus on the perspectives of white preservice teachers. This study prioritizes Black women as epistemological agents, challenging the tendency in teacher education to treat teachers of color as a homogenous group and often overlooking the specific impacts of anti-Black racism. The research underscores the limitations of traditional teacher education programs, which, while often emphasizing equity and justice, frequently fail to address the intersectional identities and developmental needs of Black women educators. By centering the voices of BWPSTs, this study calls for a shift in how teacher education views and supports Black women, advocating for an investment in their growth as educators. The findings highlight the importance of counterspaces like BWT, where BWPSTs can confront their own narratives, share transformative stories, and envision more inclusive futures for their students. These experiences are essential for the healing and authentic development of BWPSTs, preparing them to challenge the status quo and create change within U.S. educational systems. This study offers valuable insights into the role of race and gender in shaping the professional identities of Black women educators and calls for more inclusive and intersectional approaches to teacher education research.

I am Tanya.

I wasn’t driven to find a job in business

I didn’t have the passion

I’m a religious person

I need to change paths

I’m fighting against something

I wanted to go into education

I think good instruction is flexible

I actually have an improv comedy background

I have a more liberal view

I was treated in school

I’m fortunate

I’m lighter skinned

I have my unconscious biases

I believe that everyone is good

I’m really short

I look quite young

I handled COVID very well

I have really good time management

I’m thriving in this program

I’m speaking too much

I am speaking more

I’m taking up too much airtime

I have to remind myself

I’m paying to be here

I’m going to keep talking

I’m going to keep getting my points across

I was typically one of the only Black students

I never had a biracial role model before

I always felt happy to be going to school

I was a theater kid

I liked math

I wasn't the best at math

I wasn’t the worst at math

I’m going to work as hard

I may not be able to outsmart you; I’m definitely going to be able to outwork you

I’m going to work

I can get something done

I definitely work

I break

I have had those breaking points

I was going to become a teacher

I’m going to speak my mind

I remember saying

I was talking too much

I was saying too much

I found my voice.

I Poem from Tanya’s Interviews

This I Poem was created using interviews Tanya participated in during her time as a member of a learning community exclusively supporting Black women pre-service teachers (BWPSTs). This poem, explained in more detail in the following sections, combines words and phrases that Tanya used to describe herself and her experiences. Through this poem, the readers are offered a glimpse into how Tanya positioned herself as she spoke about her journey to pursuing education as a profession. Tanya is a biracial woman from a southern state who was enrolled in a teacher education program at a predominantly white institution (PWI) in the United States. Her poem reveals tensions she faced as a BWPST. She fought to navigate her way in education, and she was determined to find and strengthen her voice. Tanya attended a predominantly white, suburban school from elementary through graduate school, and despite the lack of diversity, she still loved school and felt safe there. In order to garner success, Tanya enrolled in advanced classes, participated in everything associated with the arts, and took on leadership roles. She remembered receiving very different advice from her parents about her performance in school. Her mother, her white parent, encouraged her to try her best and not take school activities so seriously. Her father, her Black parent, reminded her often that she had to work twice as hard to get half as far as her classmates. This small snippet of her story provides us with a glimpse into the complexities of this Black woman’s experience that had been impacted by the institution of school. Her journey to and through her teacher education program was vital as she learned to trust her own voice and to unapologetically take up space. She learned that her voice matters and that she wanted to provide an environment where students could be seen and heard.

Teacher education programs, particularly in the United States, can be sites for meaningful and insightful learning, or they can operate as one-dimensional sites that prioritize the learning needs of white teachers over the needs of minoritized candidates (Milner & Howard, 2004). Black women pre-service teachers (BWPSTs) are often stereotyped as the ‘saviors’ of Black children, and this assumption is rooted in the simplistic idea that their shared race automatically makes them equipped to solve the challenges faced by Black students (Harmon & Horn, 2021). While many argue that Black teachers possess valuable cultural resources in educating students from diverse backgrounds, these teachers’ strengths need to be acknowledged, enhanced, and developed as pedagogical tools in teacher preparation programs (Farinde-Wu & Griffen, 2019). Black teachers must be provided opportunities to transfer their rich prior knowledge of culture to pedagogical content knowledge (Farinde-Wu & Griffen, 2019). Black women are not meant to be policy solvers; they are people whose humanity should be respected and uplifted as learners and professionals with developmental needs (Harmon & Horn, 2021). This shift towards centering their development can drastically change the landscape of teacher education making it a more humanizing space for all teacher candidates. In this paper, we offer methodological approaches that center the voices and experiences of BWPSTs in order to change the climate of teacher education research in an effort to make it more inclusive. We explore the following research question: How can teacher educators and researchers position themselves to better “hear” the voices of Black women? ¹ .

Understanding Our Experiences as Black Women Teacher Educators

This process of hearing Black women is particularly important to us because we both identify as Black women teacher educators. As educators, we found our voices and were empowered through fellowship and fictive kinship (Chatters et al., 1994) with other Black women. Harmon recalls preparing for her first teaching position in northern Mississippi, and everyone –– professors, administrators, family members –– told her how much her students would learn from her and how much her students needed her. She was told her majority Black students would benefit from a role model like her, a young Black woman who had just graduated from college. She walked into her classroom believing these voices, and she believed that she would have an instant relationship with her students based on their shared race. However, her first year of teaching was one of the most difficult years of her life. She felt isolated, ignored, frustrated, and under-prepared.

Looking back on her teaching experiences, she now knows she was impacted by her experiences as a K-16 student, as she internalized anti-Blackness, assimilation, and meritocracy. She survived and garnered success in these systems by investing in competition, as well as code-switching as a mechanism to blend in and fit in with her peers. She did everything she could to fit middle-class, white parameters of success. Naturally, these assimilationist beliefs permeated her instruction. She found herself at odds with her students, but she could not figure out why. It was not until a Black woman teacher, Ms. Sagacity, gave her some advice. Ms. Sagacity told her that she needed to do “the work.” The students knew she was an outsider even though she looked like them. To become a real teacher, she needed to understand the history and context in which she was working, and she had to complicate her own hegemonic beliefs about schooling. She needed to interact with parents, identify and connect with community leaders, and expand her limited views of the town. Ms. Sagacity helped to support Harmon in understanding the real work of teaching, challenging her own schooling experiences.

Hunter’s identity impacted her teacher education experience, as she witnessed white classmates repeating racial slurs, advocating for “All Lives Matter”, questioning her Blackness due to her lighter skin complexion, and commenting on her hair. Her saving grace throughout her teacher education experience was finding a community of Black women who looked like her and shared similar experiences. They helped her to learn and discover more about her Black identity.

As she became more knowledgeable about race and oppression, her confidence in her voice grew to counter the false narratives portrayed about communities of color. First, she had to own and appreciate her identity as a Black woman to understand how it affected her positionality in predominantly white spaces. Fortunately, she met her best friend who is also a Black woman. They leaned on each other because they were in the same program and classes. Their sisterhood helped Hunter find and use her voice as a BWPST. They connected through understanding their positions as Black women in white spaces and allowed each other to let their guard down to simply be themselves outside of the classroom and outside of the white gaze (Tuck & Yang, 2014). This shared space and time was essential for their survival in their teacher education program.

Centering the Voices of BWPTs in Teacher Education

Finding community with other Black women during and after our teacher education programs supported our identity development. This development is essential as teacher education programs at PWIs were historically designed to perpetuate whiteness (Faison & McArthur, 2020). Most teacher education programs prepare white preservice teachers to teach diverse students, which normalizes whiteness and fetishizes communities of color (Bell & Busey, 2021). Preservice teacher pipelines are used to diversify the workforce by seeking preservice teachers of color, who are often the only voices for their community in white educational settings (Bell & Busey, 2021). This approach to addressing diversity in teacher education perpetuates whiteness and fails to provide meaningful learning experiences for Black teachers because these practices exclude them from entering and completing their programs “with their full humanity intact” (Bell & Busey, 2021, p. 35). In other words, teacher education programs do not center the voices of Black women because traditional teacher education programs present spaces where BWPSTs must negotiate their identities, sometimes struggling to bridge who they are racially and culturally with the dominant white culture encountered in their teacher education programs (Haddix, 2010, 2012; Meacham, 2000).

Additionally, Black students in teacher preparation programs face two challenges: (1) the absence of critical Black teacher educators, (2) ineffective teacher preparation for Black students (Farinde-Wu & Griffen, 2019). As a result, Black women report feelings of isolation, experiences with unresponsive professors, a lack of relevant coursework, and limited course offerings, as significant structural challenges to completing teacher preparation programs (Faison & McArthur, 2020; Farinde-Wu & Griffen, 2019). Moreover, racial traumas experienced by Black preservice teachers include feeling isolated, disappointed, and resentment towards teacher education programs (Faison & McArthur, 2020).

There is a need for teacher education to aid the development of BWPST’s sociopolitical consciousness to make space for their voices to be heard and contribute to their identity and critical development. This research suggests that teachers of color, as well as white teachers, need preparation to develop critical consciousness (Cherry-McDaniel, 2019). Jackson (2018) notes, part of developing critical consciousness entails developing voice because voice contributes to the construction of teacher identity as a tool for how people socially construct their professional identities. “It is not enough to know about education inequity, but teachers have to develop a strong voice so they can actively work against it and speak out about it” (Jackson, 2018, p. 214).

Teacher education programs can gain insight on how to best serve Black women by listening to the narratives of BWPSTs, which could potentially improve the field of education by retaining more Black women educators (Farinde-Wu & Griffen, 2019; Gist, 2017). Another way to listen to the voices of BWPSTs is for teacher education programs to provide spaces where Black women can feel love and connect with one another throughout the teacher preparation journey because it is difficult to navigate alone (Harmon & Horn, 2021). More scholarship is needed to explore how BWPSTs navigate teacher education and prepare for the classroom.

Researchers should be concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations, and values that inform their research practices (Smith, 2012). Traditional methodologies and methods of research along with the theories that inform them typically center Eurocentric perspectives, which must be critically analyzed or decolonized before conducting a study (Smith, 2012). Oftentimes, researchers within higher education institutions are trained to uphold and abide by Western knowledge production and methods (McIntosh & Wilder, 2023). Only reporting dominant narratives silences the experiences of people of color, specifically Black women (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). In this paper, we offer another methodological approach to counter traditional methodologies by centering the voices of BWPSTs to listen and understand their unique perspectives.

Hauntological Excavation

In this paper, we explore a central question: How can teacher educators and researchers position themselves to better “hear” the voices of BWPSTs? Since teacher education programs are often designed to support the development of white teachers (Sleeter, 2001), it becomes even more essential for these programs to build pathways for Black women’s voices to be heard and centered. One approach includes Hauntological Excavation. Hauntological Excavation is a process for pre-service teachers to explore the ghosts from their own schooling experiences to interrogate how those ghosts may impact their teaching ideologies. Therefore, Hauntological Excavation is defined using three key concepts: (1) ghosts and hauntings, (2) intersectionality, and (3) teaching ideologies. Examining the evolution of teaching ideologies through an intersectional, Black feminist lens reveals that hauntology sheds light on how the legacies of oppression shape Black women’s journeys to becoming teachers in U.S. schools. These findings indicate that Black women are influenced by various elements of their educational experiences, and their teaching philosophies are shaped by their interactions with the lingering effects of those experiences.

In this framework, a ghost is defined as “an incorporeal force that is dead but returns to and interrupts awareness of the living such that it is present for future. A ‘paradoxical’ ‘absent presence’(Gill & Erevelles, 2017) that is structurally and materially produced yet intangible” (Yoon & Chen, 2022, p. 77). Further, ghosts haunt to push us, the living, to take action:

A haunting is an experience or sensation of knowledge or familiarity without prior exposure or access to them; the uncanny. A process of return and revisitation of the past to the present; a rejection of linear sequential time. An act of such return by ghosts. A memory of an ongoing agitation about injustices (Yoon & Chen, 2022, p. 77).

Haunting is a process of distorting and repeating time that is instigated by violence and challenges boundaries around reality and possibility (Yoon & Chen, 2022, p. 77). Simply put, everyone has ghosts from their past that visit and haunt (whether they are conscious of this presence or not) in order to push one towards action. This study focuses on exploring Black women’s experiences as Black girls in school to uncover how their ghosts were impacting their teaching ideologies. This is particularly important for Black women as they have unique socio-historic positions marked by racism and sexism particularly. Crenshaw’s (1990) concept of intersectionality highlights how Black women experience racism, sexism and other forms of oppressions multiplicatively rather than additively. More specifically, Black girls have to navigate schooling institutions in the United States that have been built to push them out (Morris, 2016). Intersectionality provides a lens to examine how Black women have resisted these oppressive systems in order to become teachers, and understandably, their teaching ideologies are often haunted by the ghosts from these treacherous journeys. One can never get rid of ghosts, but future teachers, teacher educators, and researchers can witness, (re)memorize (Dillard, 2021), and dream and transform. By witnessing and rememorizing, BWPSTs can uncover their ghosts to understand their purpose to reframe and transform their actions leading to a new future and possibilities that were not previously accessible.

By investigating how Black women can uncover and be in relationship with their ghosts, they can critically unpack and build liberatory teaching ideologies. Hauntological Excavation draws on Philip (2011a, 2011b) framework of “ideology-in-pieces.” He defines ideologies as socially shared systems of representation that help people make sense of and understand how society functions. They connect various elements, including concepts, images, assumptions, and memories, rather than operating as singular ideas. Ideologies are not typically linear, as people make meaning in different contexts that do not necessarily translate across contexts, leading to potential contradictions that often go unnoticed. Philip (2011a, 2011b) argued that individuals’ interpretations of contexts may vary depending on how they are socially positioned. The process of Hauntological Excavation provides BWPSTs with a process to reflect on their positioning as Black girls to support the development of their teaching ideologies and subsequent practices. By providing space for Black women to witness, rememorize, dream, and transform, we build opportunities for them to greet their ghosts and to be in relation with those memories. If they do not engage in these processes, then they are at risk of continued hauntings.

Study Design

Methodologically, we attended to Hauntological Excavation by using a Black feminist lens (Collins, 2000) with the listening guide methodology (Gilligan et al., 2006), which sensitizes researchers to participants’ contrapuntal voices about different issues. Instead of looking for and quantifying participants’ coherent ideologies, this method attuned us to the tensions the participants were navigating, as their stated beliefs and commitments shifted with different contexts that made different facets of their identities salient.

To study BWPSTs development, we centered the participants’ subjective experiences, making them subjects of educational scholarship, not merely objects of it. To center these Black women, this study takes a qualitative approach using social design research methodology (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). Data collection took place in the fall and spring semesters of 2020-2021, overlapping with a global pandemic, allowing for a geographically diffuse affinity space for BWPSTs in the United States.

This analysis focuses specifically on the development of BWPSTs who participated in a counterspace (Ong et al., 2018) group called (B)lack + (W)oman + (T)eacher (BWT). A counterspace refers to a “safe space” that operates outside of the white gaze (Ong et al., 2018). The examination of BWT centers the voices of BWPSTs to illuminate how addressing marginalized teachers’ social, cultural, and gendered experiences enhances teacher education in preparation for these teachers to transition into the classroom.

Ten undergraduate and graduate BWPSTs participated in eight virtual counterspace sessions (Ong et al., 2018) occurring monthly (facilitated by Harmon ² ). In the tradition of social design research, Harmon used ethnographic methods to understand the meanings participants derived from their experiences in BWT (Emerson et al., 2011). She invited each participant to participate in three interviews throughout the year to explore their histories and experiences in becoming teachers, focusing specifically on their journeys as K-16 students and their time enrolled in their teacher education programs. While not all participants could complete all the interviews, Harmon adapted to their needs during the pandemic by interviewing those who had capacity to participate.

Data Collection

The meeting topics were designed to surface participants’ experiences as Black girls in school and their experiences in teacher education. Harmon investigated her recollections both at the group-meeting and individual levels of analysis, with attention towards the relationships between the two. Both group and individual levels of analysis helped Harmon and Hunter to understand participants’ teaching ideologies through the activities, conversations, and artifacts (for example: writing products and collaborative documents) centering the literature shared during the meetings. By looking across individual and group level development, this analysis surfaced points of confluence as well as tensions between the two, which can inform future work with similar aims.

Elaborating more on the data collected, eight, two- hour counterspace sessions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. These sessions aimed to provide space for participants to explore their intersectional identities, teaching ideologies, and schooling experiences as a collective. The specific plans for each meeting emerged and responded to participants’ interests, but the initial goal was to read work from Black women educational scholars on culturally responsive pedagogy, equitable disciplinary practices, and abolitionist teaching. They also used this counterspace to connect socially, build community, and uplift one another. This affinity space centered these women’s needs and affirmed their cultural selves while working to heal their relationships with schooling (Harmon & Horn, 2021). Some of the themes covered included identity exploration, beliefs about “good” teaching, experiences of Black girls in schools, heterosexism, ableism, and positionality as Black women teachers.

To trace individuals’ development as BWPSTs, interviews were recorded on Zoom and transcribed. Most participants completed three open-ended, semi- structured interviews distributed throughout the year (Kvale, 2015). The study investigated participants’ journeys to becoming educators through their experiences as students, their experiences in teacher education, their hopes for their future classrooms, and their overall needs for success. These interviews explored their ideologies and commitments to better understand their development. Additionally, hearing their personal histories contextualized their participation in BWT and illuminated the ways in which BWT could potentially support or inhibit their development and potential healing. Each interview was also audio recorded and transcribed to collect longitudinal data sets on each participant; these were used for analysis of individual cases and for cross-case analysis to understand both common themes and points of contrast (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Researcher Role

Because of the interpretive nature of this research, it was important to understand Harmon’s role in meaning construction. This was especially important in BWT, since she had the dual role of researcher and facilitator. Tensions of participant observation exist in ethnographic studies all the time; for the clarity of this analysis, it was important for her to be, “actively engaged, thoughtful, and forthright regarding tensions that can surface while conducting this study” (Milner, 2007, p. 388). As a facilitator, she acted as an insider because she shared key identity markers with the participants, giving her an insider connection (Harmon & Horn, 2021). This connection gave her crucial relational and interpretive resources, as she understood most cultural references made during meetings; she empathized with their stories, often having similar stories; and she was able to organize activities that spoke to their common identity markers. As a facilitator, she actively participated in each BWT session, so when she asked participants to engage in writing and/or reflection activities, she also completed those activities. She often shared her reflections and experiences in teacher education and as a teacher. She felt like she was able to share more with this group than in typical white-centered spaces because she assumed that the other women would understand her stories because of their similar social and cultural experiences. In this way, on the participant- observer continuum (Guest et al., 2013), her role in the group was highly participatory.

Another tension involved the sensitive nature of what they were discussing in the group. Her goals as a facilitator were to protect her participants, to push their thinking, and to provide a space where they could show up and interact authentically, by bringing their full selves to the space. To that end, she began every meeting with a check-in and inspiration to ground their work together for each meeting and to surface their shared experiences. She used these activities to exhibit care, and she encouraged them to reach out to others in the group for resources and support throughout their programs. They also engaged in vulnerable activities where Harmon asked them to reflect on their experiences, and sometimes those experiences were painful. By asking probing questions and asking participants to reflect on certain experiences, she tried to avoid re-traumatizing anyone. She often used her power as a facilitator to provide choices and offer them different levels of participation. For instance, she encouraged them to speak and share where they felt comfortable or to step back and listen when that seemed more appropriate.

While Harmon’s role as a facilitator afforded her opportunities to engage in this group, it also had limitations. Because she often shared stories and experiences, she was mindful as an analyst about how conversations and activities developed because of her input. When she reviewed meeting transcripts, she interrogated her role: Did her voice silence anyone else’s? Did the participants feel empowered to challenge her comments? Also, as a facilitator, she was constantly making decisions both during the planning phases and during sessions. Again, this awareness shaped her reflection and analysis, as she questioned her response to participants’ comments or wondered if she should have taken up a topic in different ways to elicit different responses. As part of her reflexivity (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019) around these issues, she regularly consulted with her trusted network about the tensions that surfaced, trying to respond in ways that reflected her goals and commitment to care (Collins, 1990).

As a researcher, as she reflected on the data that meetings and interviews yielded, her role was more aligned to that of an outsider. Although she was engaged in the conversation as a facilitator, she also reviewed recorded sessions to analyze the interactions, discussions, and writing activities. As an analyst, she was able to use artifacts from their meetings and interviews to theorize about the needs of BWPSTs. Even though she shared an insider connection, she held power in this space (especially as someone who designed and led the activities and paid participants). She had to unpack the ways in which her power operated in the meetings. During the data collection phases, she examined the ways that her participants interacted with her. What did they say? When were they silent? In what ways did they actively engage or take on a more passive role? The comments they made to position her offered insight into their experiences with her. For example, during an interview with Sasha (another participant in the study), they talked about her personal aspirations as an educator. Sasha said she was not sure if she wanted to be a teacher for her entire career, but she knew that she wanted to stay in education. In thinking about exploring different ways to “be in education,” Sasha said, “I am trying to get like you, sis.” At this moment, she positioned Harmon in two different ways. First, by saying, “I am trying to get like you,” Sasha positioned Harmon as a role model, signaling that she thought Harmon was in a potentially more desirable position in education. This position came with potentially more power or prestige, so Sasha was signaling that Harmon’s position was aspirational which reflected her role as a “facilitator” or someone with power in the group. Additionally, Sasha referred to Harmon as “sis,” a term signaling that Sasha saw Harmon as someone that shared fictive kinship with her and that Sasha saw Harmon as nearly the same age by referring to her as sister.

The tension between her role as a facilitator and researcher pushed her to grapple with a question raised by Tuck and Yang (2014): “How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over) hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze?” (p. 223). We engage in this research because we want to build new structures in teacher education to better support minoritized teachers. We want to theorize about the needs of BWPSTs. Because of these goals, we constantly monitor and make decisions that will protect the words and experiences of our participants while also contributing to the field of teacher education. Through an ethic of care (Noddings, 2015), we refuse to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze. This means that Harmon constantly checked in with them and communicated with them about their right of refusal. At the start of each meeting, Harmon explained her reasons for recording each meeting, but she asked them to let her know if they wanted her to stop the recording at any time and for whatever reason. She provided various levels of participation for every activity, so that each participant could participate in ways that allowed them agency in what they disclosed or kept private.

Black Feminist Listening Guide

To center the voices of BWPSTs, we engaged in and coined the process of the Black Feminist Listening Guide (BFLG) by combining theoretical tenets from Black feminist epistemologies (Collins, 2000) and practical tenets from the Listening Guide (Gilligan et al., 2006). By grounding this work in Black feminism, we found the Listening Guide to be a helpful analytical tool to help illuminate the voices of the BWPSTs in this study. Gilligan et al. (2006) described the Listening Guide as:

A method of psychological analysis that draws on voice, resonance, and relationship as ports of entry into the human psyche. Thus each person's voice is distinct— a footprint of the psyche, bearing the marks of the body, of that person's history, of culture in the form of language, and the myriad ways in which human society and history shape the voice and thus leave their imprints on the human soul. (p. 2)

The Listening Guide method consisted of a series of listenings, each designed to bring the researcher into relationship with a person’s multilayered voice. In a Black feminist epistemological framework, lived experience is a criterion for credibility (Collins, 2000, p. 257). In this study, these Black women shared their lived experiences through group meetings and interviews. Through each listening exercise, we attuned to distinct aspects of the participants’ expressions, voices, and experiences within a particular context. This approach to listening was centered on a set of basic questions about voice: “Who is speaking and to whom, telling what stories about relationship, in what societal and cultural frameworks (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 21)?” Collins (2000) claimed, for Black women new knowledge claims are rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed through dialogues with other members of a community. Similarly, Lave and Wenger (1991), view learning as situated where learners participate in communities to master new knowledge before becoming full participants in a community of practice. A primary epistemological assumption underlying the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims is that connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge validation process.

As a collective in both meetings and interviews, the participants and Harmon (the facilitator) built knowledge through their dialogues. With these understandings, we (Harmon and Hunter) read the interview transcripts and listened to the audio recordings multiple times, with each listening focused on a different aspect of the narrative. Gilligan et al. (2006) referred to each step as, “a “listening” rather than a “reading,” because the process of listening requires the active participation on the part of both the teller and the listener” (p. 3). Similarly, Collins (2000) highlighted listening as an active role. For example, in call-and-response discourse often utilized in Black churches, the focus is typically on the speaker. However, in this discourse, the speaker and the listener both interact verbally and non-verbally where the speaker calls and the listener responds. A key connection between Black Feminist epistemology and the foundation of the Listening Guide is that, “The fundamental requirement of this interactive network is active participation of all individuals” (Collins, 2000, p. 261). As a researcher and facilitator, Harmon was an active listener. Not only did she listen for research purposes, but she listened to affirm, encourage, and support these BWPSTs. In addition, this method is particularly useful in analyzing the stories of BWPSTs because:

Each listening is not a simple analysis of the text but rather is intended to guide the listener in tuning into the story being told on multiple levels and to experience, note, and draw from his or her resonances to the narrative. (Gilligan et al., 2006, p. 3)

As outlined here, the Listening Guide differed from traditional qualitative coding structures that allow researchers to break down the data, enabling the identification of various categories contingent on common characteristics (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Harmon focused on the layers of the participants’ voices unpacking their meaning rather than trying to make connections between categories and subcategories (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). As a facilitator and researcher in this study, it was important to intentionally listen to each participant’s voice.

Building on the conceptual framework, we created the Black Feminist Listening Guide (BFLG) as a strategy to listen for the ghosts that have haunted the participants’ teaching ideologies and their experiences in their teacher education programs. Below, we outline the original Listening Guide process and how we adapted each step to make sense of each participants’ story.

Listening for the Plot

The first step of the Listening Guide was to Listen for the Plot. As described by Gilligan et al. (2006), “The first listening comprises two parts: (a) listening for the plot and (b) the listener’s response to the interview” (p. 4). Both steps are important, as Collins (2000) outlines oral traditions in African American culture where “there is always the consciousness and importance of the hearer” (p. 261). In this step, Harmon took on the role of an active listener to engage in a process that was very similar to open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) in qualitative research.

In this step, she listened to each woman’s interview, and she attended to the plot by simply trying to understand what was going on in each interview. She took note of interesting stories they told, repetitive phrases and themes, connections to conversations in BWT, and anything that surprised her or gave her pause. After this listening, she wrote memos capturing major themes emerging in each interview and any connections she sensed between participants. She also used this listening to actively respond to the interview. She responded to their stories by writing and describing her own position and experiences, and she responded to her own interviewing moves noting instances when she felt her input impacted the flow of the conversation. This reflection was important, as Milner (2007) pointed out that, “researchers must be mindful of the enormous role of their own and others’ racialized positionality and cultural ways of knowing”(p. 388). In this reflexive practice, she consciously and actively listened and documented her own responses to what each participant expressed. She notated examples where her own story converged or diverged with the stories each woman shared during the interviews. In this step, she documented her conversation with the transcript to help uncover her associations with the narrative being analyzed.

“I” Poems

A key tenet of Black Feminist Thought (BFT) centers on Black women’s self-definition and self-valuation. Farinde et al. (2016) summarized Collins (2000) by stating that:

BFT advocates for a self-defined image of Black womanhood, seeks to clarify the lives of Black women, and places their distinct set of experiences and ideas at the center of analysis by dismantling the pervasive Eurocentric viewpoint that is given universal status (Collins, 2000).

In this step of the Listening Guide, Harmon used the transcripts of each participants’ interviews to construct “I” Poems (see Tanya’s poem at the start of the introduction). To construct an “I” Poem, she utilized two rules:

(a) underline or select every first-person “I” within the passage you have chosen along with the verb and any seemingly important accompanying words and (b) maintain the sequence in which these phrases appear in the text. The[n] pull out the underlined “I” phrases, keeping them in the order they appear in the text, and place each phrase on a separate line, like lines in a poem. (p. 5)

For each woman, Harmon completed a listening and created an “I” Poem using the process outlined above. In the original transcript, she highlighted each time the participant used the pronoun “I” and the phrase that followed. Next, she typed the “I” phrase into another document, preserving the sequence from the transcript, creating the poem. After constructing a full poem, Harmon read it multiple times. After reading, she wrote memos about her noticing’s and the voice that she heard throughout the poems. This step in the process helped her gain insights into how each woman spoke about herself and her perspectives. Sometimes, the voice would echo Harmon’s reflections of the participant; other times, it would provide her with a totally new perspective. In the introduction, she condensed the “I” Poems for Tanya to build a composite to illustrate her story.

Since Black Feminist Thought advocates for a self-defined image of Black womanhood, the “I” Poems center the first-person perspectives of these BWPSTs. This process helped Harmon hear how these women spoke about themselves, and it highlighted their voices in a powerful way. The “I” Poems invited Harmon to listen to another voice that she could not hear in the original transcript. She isolated their words in order to hear how they positioned and spoke about themselves. This was particularly powerful as, “hooks (1994) makes it explicit that Black female teachers carry with them gendered experiences and perspectives that have been (historically) silenced and marginalized in the discourses about teaching and learning” (Milner, 2006, p.91). By creating these “I” Poems, Harmon highlighted to their voices in an effort to disrupt this silence.

Listening for Contrapuntal Voices

The next step, listening for contrapuntal voices, brings the analysis back into relationship with the research questions. As outlined in Gilligan et al. (2006),

This step offers a way of hearing and developing an understanding of several different layers of a person's expressed experience as it bears on the question posed. The logic behind this step is drawn from the musical form counterpoint, which consists of the combination of two or more melodic lines. Each melodic line has its own rhythm and “melodic curve” (the shape and movement of a melody within a range of low and high notes). These melodic lines of music are played simultaneously and move in some form of relationship with each other. (p.7)

This step in the Listening Guide helped Harmon to uncover the complexity in each participants’ narrative. In this phase of the analysis, she started to interrogate the many layers of her participants’ expressed experiences. The counterpoint was each woman’s ghosts that haunted their narratives. By the time Harmon got to this step, she had listened to each transcript at least three times. After Listening for the Plot and creating the “I” Poems, she listened again to attune her ear to the ghosts that haunted their stories. Once she identified the ghosts, she then listened to the interview again highlighting portions of the transcript that spoke to each ghost. After each of these listening’s, she also wrote memos as a strategy to record her observations and areas for continued exploration. This process illuminated many truths in these women’s stories. As Collins (2000) explained, “The narrative requires that the story be told, not torn apart in analysis, and trusted as core belief, not ‘admired as science’” (p. 258). The women’s stories were indicators of their lived experience, legitimizing their knowledge and viewpoints as sources for scholarship. Again, it became important to actively listen to the contrapuntal voices as they were presented rather than trying to quantify or code them in particular ways.

Composing an Analysis

In this final step, Harmon continued to listen to and read each transcript. She listened to make sense of how these women were narrating their stories and their realities. Using a BFT lens, Harmon understood the participants’ “experiences as a criterion of meaning” (Collins, 2000, p. 258). By noting each woman’s ghosts and hauntings, she was able to identify and make connections to their teaching ideologies and experiences in their teacher education program.

The BFLG was particularly helpful in making these connections because this process was complex, and it did not derive its meaning from counts or presumed coherence as these BWPSTs’ stories were not linear. While Harmon completed the initial analysis, Hunter provided a new lens to make sense of these women’s stories in additional listenings. We used this process as a strategy to understand each woman’s reality and standpoint. Black women’s voices are often absent from teacher education conversations (Milner, 2006), so this process helped us to spotlight their voices. This approach to data analysis valued and uplifted the participants’ complexities, making space for us to imagine alternative worlds and to make recommendations for teacher education in the future.

Conclusion

The BFLG centers on listening and hearing the voices of Black women to understand their stories and to understand their standpoint. By engaging in hauntological excavation, BWT provided the researchers with an opportunity to listen to and understand how the participants were making sense of their teaching identities and how their teaching identities were developing. These findings offer a counterstory to dominant narratives in teacher education research which mainly focuses on the perspectives of white preservice teachers (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Utilizing alternative research methodologies, the BFLG prioritizes the voices of BWPSTs and positions Black women as epistemological beings. The counterspace existed outside of the white gaze to give participants the opportunity to discuss their perspectives and experiences with others who shared their similar positionalities. Utilizing a hauntology framework, the participants in BWT reflected on their experiences as Black girls in school and had the opportunity to connect their personal histories with those of others in the group.

This methodology contributes to the field, because even when teacher education programs center issues of equity and justice, they seldom center the developmental needs and voices of BWPSTs. Researchers have often grouped teachers of color as one, but by doing that, the reality of anti-Black racism is often overlooked. Similarly, by not focusing on Black women, their intersectional identities are conflated with other minoritized groups. This study flips the script on how we view these women, asking what teacher education and teacher education research would look like if it genuinely invested in the growth of Black women as educators. By amplifying the voices of Black women pursuing teaching, counterspaces like BWT empower participants to share powerful stories that reveal how their unique educational journeys and identities shape their teaching philosophies. Through bold, critical conversations, these Black women can not only confront their own narratives but also envision transformative futures for their students. Such experiences are vital for nurturing the healing and authentic development of BWPSTs as they step into their roles as educators in U.S. schools, ready to challenge the status quo.

ORCID iD

Mariah Deans Harmon https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0997-2856

Statements and Declarations