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Researcher Highlight: Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950)

This chapter offers practicable alternatives to some of the most pressing problems facing urban public education in the United States. The narrowing of the curriculum and the emphasis on “high stakes testing” and test preparation has contributed greatly to the high dropout rates in urban public schools. “Freedom Schooling: A New Approach to Federal-Local Cooperation in Public Education” was published in 1978 to address these problems by calling for an expansion of alternative public schools modeled after the innovative educational programs developed at urban magnet schools in the arts, music, science, foreign languages and cultures, sports and athletics, and other fields. Since that time, research on the public magnet schools has revealed that the innovative curricula increase student motivation, lower dropout rates, and produce levels of academic achievement higher than in traditional public schools. In calling for the development of “freedom schools” as alternatives to the traditional public schools, the goal is to motivate the students through the innovative content areas and have them pursue mastery of specific skills and talents in the arts, music, sports, technology, and other areas. Moving beyond the narrow emphasis on testing in reading and mathematics, students attending the “freedom schools” would be expected to demonstrate mastery of specific artistic forms, musical techniques, athletic practices, technological innovations, or other skills. The opening of “freedom schools,” focused on mastery learning, would address the academic failure in urban public schools by raising motivational levels and developing student mastery in specific areas of educational practice.

Bringing renewed attention to the anemic representation of Black women within the teaching profession, this chapter begins by chronicling the history of Black women in teacher education – from the Reconstruction Era to the 21st century – in an effort to highlight the causes of their conspicuous demographic decline. Next, it is argued that increasing the number of Black women in the teaching profession is a worthwhile endeavor although the rationales for such targeted efforts may not be obvious or appreciated by the casual observer. It is, therefore, important to illuminate the multiple justifications as to why it is essential to improve the underrepresentation of Black women in America’s classrooms. Lastly, it is asserted that serious attention is required to reverse the dramatic exodus of Black women from the teaching profession. In conveying this issue, the author shares special emphasis recruiting tactics, for the national, programmatic, and local school district levels, as promising proposals to enlist and retain more Black women in the teaching profession.

Black women’s contributions to the struggle for educational equality and to the USA Civil Rights Movement have been deplorably under-examined and scarcely evident in educational literature. This historical, biographical account documents the life and challenges of one brilliant woman, Mamie Phipps Clark, PhD. The purpose of this paper is to consider how Mamie Phipps Clark encountered and connected with Thurgood Marshall to advance social justice and the historical outcomes in the Brown v. Board (1954) decision. More importantly, the ways in which young Black children perceived racial awareness and self-identity are examined, and the perniciously damaging effects frequently stated by children’s and their negatively held attitudes about skin color were revealed in her work (Clark and Clark, 1950).

This historiography examines Dr Mamie Phipps Clark’s scholarship. Central to Brown v. Board of Education was Dr Mamie Phipps Clark’s research agenda. She contributed to the USA’s history in the pursuit of justice and equity for children. To adequately prepare social studies and civics educators and students, the unknown has to be realized. To embrace Clark’s accomplishments within the educational literature is to forge a vast path of knowledge about children’s identity, racial awareness and psychological well-being. She worked determinedly for just ideals for generations of children and women preparing the way for just educational integration.

Nevertheless, until women, and essentially Black women’s scholarship and civic contributions are valued as imperative to foundational educational, civic, social studies, history canons the entirety of history remains veiled. When women’s scholarship by which our country achieved civic ideals is fully accepted, multicultural educators for social justice and action will claim Mamie P. Clark’s merited inclusion in the social studies and educational canon. Without the position, knowledge and expertise of Judge Thurgood Marshall, the momentous 1954 movement toward educational equity and civic righteousness would not have occurred. It took his skill, but mostly his powerful Black maleness to bring about just passage of Brown v. Board. Further, without the influential testimony of Dr Kenneth Clark at Brown v. Board the crucial argument of the “pernicious effects of segregation” would have not influenced the court in the same fashion as that of a Black woman. In fact, in one account (Pohlman, 2005), Mamie, P. Clark’s work is not mentioned when referencing a court cases’ detailed circumstances of the doll studies. Interestingly, Dr Henry Garrett, Mamie’s racist doctoral advisor is mentioned in the preliminary Virginia segregation court case as a prominent witness in this integration case without note of Dr Mamie Phipps Clark.

Howard University’s motto, Veritas et Utilitas, Truth and Service was key to Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Mamie P. Clark and Kenneth Clark’s moral code. They lived the possibility to intensify equitable, equal, and accessible education by enacting legal civil rights agency and action. Nevertheless, pending any woman scholar, essentially women civic scholars, Black women’s foundational social studies scholarship and contributions are wholly vital to our educational history and canons. It is only when women’s precedents are included into the literature by which our country achieved civic justice, then social studies educators and educational researchers may begin to achieve gender inclusive practice while transforming social studies scholarship to better all students’ worlds.

Dr Mamie Phipps Clark’s work endures, as does her history and advocacy for generations of children, especially children of color, as well as women scholars. Her equitable, historical place will be actualized as long as scholars continue to herald her scholarship and contributions to the civic and social studies canon of literature.

Dr Mamie Phipps Clark. Central to Brown v. Board of Education was Dr Mamie Phipps Clark’s scholarship. She contributed to the USA’s history in the pursuit of justice and equity for children. To adequately prepare social studies and civics educators and students, the unknown has to be realized. To embrace Clark’s accomplishments within the educational literature is to forge a vast path of knowledge about children’s identity, racial awareness and psychological well-being. She worked determinedly for ideals for generations of children and women preparing the way for educational integration.

For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different measures to determine if students and groups of students have achieved in a particular subject or grade level. While the construct of achievement is applied irrespective of student differences, this equal application turns out to be anything but equitable. In this chapter, we work to understand the way achievement plays out for Black students by deconstructing how the word achievement works. In doing so, we track the history of education, testing, and curriculum as it has been applied to Black youth and youth of color.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between theory and history, or more specifically the role and use of theory in the field of history of education. It will explore the following questions: What is theory, and what is it for? How do historians and, in particular, historians of education construe and use theory? And how do they respond to openly theoretical work? The author poses these questions in light of ongoing discussions in the field of history of education regarding the role, relevance, and utility of theory in historical research, analysis, and narratives.

The explicit use of theory in historical research is not altogether new, tracing an intellectual genealogy since the mid-1800s when disciplinary boundaries among academic fields were not so rigidly defined, developed and regulated. The paper analyzes three books that are geographically located in North America (USA), Australia, Europe (Great Britain) and Asia (India), thereby offering a transnational view of the use of theory in history of education. It also examines how historians of education respond to explicitly theoretical work by analyzing, as a case study, a 2011 special issue in History of Education Quarterly.

First, the paper delineates theory as a multidimensional concept and practice with varying and competing meanings and interpretations. Second, it examines three book-length historical studies of education that employ theoretical frameworks drawing from cultural, feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches. The author’s analysis of these manuscripts reveals that historians of education who explicitly engage with theory pursue their research in reflexive, disruptive and generative modes. Lastly, it utilizes a recent scholarly exchange as a case study of how some historians of education respond to theoretically informed work. It highlights three lenses – reading with insistence, for resistance, and beyond – to understand the responses to the author’s paper on Foucault and poststructuralism.

Setting theory to work has a fundamentally transformative role to play in our thinking, writing and teaching as scholars, educators and students and in the productive re-imagining of history of education.

Anna Julia Cooper and Septima Poinsette Clark were two prominent late 19th- and early 20th-century educators. Cooper and Clark taught African American students in federally sanctioned, segregated schools in the South. Drawing on womanist thought as a theoretical lens, this chapter argues that Cooper and Clark’s intellectual thoughts on race, racism, education, and pedagogy informed their teaching practices. Influenced by their socio-cultural, historical, familial, and education, they implemented antioppressionist pedagogical practices as a way to empower their students and address the educational inequalities their students were subjected to in a highly racialized, violent, and repressive social order. Historical African American women educators’ social critiques on race and racism are rarely examined, particularly as they pertain to how their critiques influence their teaching practices. Cooper and Clark’s critiques about race and racism are pertinent to the story of education and racial empowerment during the Jim Crow era.

Kaupapa Māori research brings to the centre and normalises Māori academic success in higher education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Identity as Māori, through Iwi (tribal) affiliations and as tangata whenua (people of the land), are foundational values from a Māori world view. Strong Māori identity is significantly a consistent element in the stories of Māori academic successes. It is part of the ‘cultural capital’ that tauira Māori (students and graduates) take with them into educational institutions, where little active attention is given to it. At issue on a broader level is the resounding ‘silence of the archives’, the lack of information about Māori succeeding in higher education, particularly from a Māori world view. The dominant discourse in Aotearoa/New Zealand positions us into the ‘other’ and as ‘deficit’. In a reversal of this my doctoral research asked how and why do Māori succeed in higher education. Uniquely Māori elements of whenua (land), whānau (family) and connection with marae (meeting ground and complex) are part of the how and the why of Māori academic achievement. This chapter highlights how some Māori began their journeys that result in academic successes and IT qualifications. Their haphazard access to information about IT implicates the poorly developed pathways of entry into IT studies at that time and may explain some of the low uptake of IT qualifications and IT field employment by Māori and other New Zealanders.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the significance of “contextual factors” on the talent development of underserved populations. Understanding the “context” and background of an individual provides greater insight into their life experiences (Paik, 2013). Race, class and gender, in particular, play a role in one’s life, providing both barriers and opportunities.

To examine contextual and other factors, in-depth biographical case studies were systematically studied across 10 diverse notable artists and scientists. Over 85 autobiographies, biographies and other sources were carefully content-analyzed for commonalities and differences in artists’ and scientists’ lives.

Because of their ascribed statuses (e.g. race, class, gender), these individuals had to navigate their unique school and life circumstances. Within their sociocultural contexts, however, key relationships (e.g. parents, teachers, mentors and peers) helped mitigate the challenges. All artists and scientists had a “village” – key stakeholders who invested in them at every stage of their talent development.

Parents, teachers, mentors and peers are not only critical, but they are lifelines for talent development. Key implications discuss the role of contextual factors and support networks for aspiring diverse artists and scientists.

The theoretical framework for this study is based on the productive giftedness model (PGM) (Paik, 2013, 2015). PGM includes 10 key psychosocial and environmental factors and how they influence “productive giftedness” (e.g. achievements, accomplishments, leadership). Within the model, both “alterable” and “contextual factors” provide access to different opportunities, support and resources. The model is considered generalizable and applicable for diverse populations.