Gatekeepers and Guardians of Black Intellectual Thought: Black Male Teacher-Coaches Combating an Anti-Black Epistemic Order

Abstract

Background/Context: Historical narratives and contemporary research continue to produce scholarship on teacher-coaches through a White racial frame that both reifies a Western European origin story and centers the experiences of White males. However, the American history of teacher-coaches is not the Black history of teacher-coaches. The Black male teacher-coach tradition is anchored in the utilization of Black intellectual thought to implement revisionist ontology projects that simultaneously claim Black personhood and contest curricular genocide while being consumed within an anti-Black milieu. In this study, the tradition of Black male teacher-coaches’ critical civic engagement within secondary schools is taken from the margins and centered. Purpose/Objective/Research Questions/Focus of Study: This study examines how Black male teacher-coaches utilize Black intellectual thought within secondary social studies and literature courses to combat a White-controlled epistemic order of knowledge. Within their courses, the participants purposefully challenge institutional forms of bad faith by utilizing Black intellectual thought to unsettle the coloniality of truth to challenge the existing anti-Black scholastic order of knowledge. Using the theoretical lenses of subjective understanding and bad faith, this study is guided by the following primary research question: How do Black men in predominantly non-Black schools utilize Black intellectual thought to enact their work as teacher-coaches? Research Design: The findings from this study emerge from an instrumental multiple case study that included four Black male teacher-coaches serving as secondary social studies or literature educators in schools that were not predominantly Black. Employing an interpretive approach within this methodology created space to redress the following two broader external interests: (1) de-essentializing the specificity of the Black male teacher-coach tradition from a Eurocentric dominant narrative, and (2) explicating the salience of Black intellectual thought in the counter-hegemonic practices of these Black men relative to anti-intellectual tropes about teacher-coaches in general. Findings/Results: Findings indicate how participants continue the legacy of the long Civil Rights Movement by utilizing Black intellectual thought to enact a project of revisionist ontology to combat an anti-Black epistemic order of knowledge. The study explicates the following thematic findings: (1) carving out space for Black intellectual thought, (2) centering Black intellectual thought, and (3) making Black intellectual thought relevant. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this study illustrate how Black teachers in general, and Black male teacher-coaches in particular, serve as the gatekeepers and guardians of Black intellectual thought within predominantly non-Black secondary schools. Participants who were secondary social studies and literature teachers resisted a White-controlled epistemic order that marginalizes Black intellectual thought. These findings have direct implications for secondary preservice teachers with the desire to courageously enact fugitive pedagogical practices to include diverse, antiracist curricular materials.