Hope

Hughes represents hope as a key influence that initiates and maintains the struggle, a positive force that helps the struggle continue.

Extending Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of Hope, the author of Black Hands…began to revisit transgenerational narratives of hope as the inspiration to balance transgenerational narratives of struggle. Evidence emerged from his two-year ethnographic study and work with two to three generations of five unrelated black families in the Albemarle area of northeastern, NC.

We continue to learn from the families that Dr. Hughes shares with us in Black Hands…. We developed this website (with edits by Dr. Hughes) from the standpoint of future teachers of America. We are inspired by families like the Ms. Dora Erskin’s family to have great hope even in the face of our struggles with the reality that that the Brown v. Board of Education verdict was never intended to come as a democratic ideal. It does however come with a legal foundation that at least opens the possibility for us to critique what went wrong from its inception and to envision how we might provide all children with equitable and adequate educational opportunities regardless of their racial or economical placement. We hope that our communities and schools will one day be diversified and equitable, yet we might now hope with the recognition of the necessity of struggle. Indeed, we might now hope to connect our families to our communities and our communities to our schools.

Dr. Sherick A. Hughes, author of Black Hands in Biscuits Not in the Classrooms emphasizes some key factors needed to ensure that all children are granted equitable and adequate opportunities to excellent educations. By implementing these strategies we might work alongside our black students  and share the confidence that each of us can and will strive to reach our highest learning and teaching potential each day that we are together.

Hughes expresses the need for more black teachers and black administrators from the local communities and more involvement of black families as legitimate authorities. Black educators from the local communities are needed to help give students someone with whom they can identify as well as to sustain a more balanced experience and positive images for all youth. Black educators from the rural areas are also more likely to remain as teachers in that area based on Dr. Hughes’ research. If he is correct, his recent call for a Grow Your Own: Rural Black Teachers initiative could be a promising long-term answer to limited black teachers, high attrition and high turnover rates in NC’s and other rural school districts that employ many Teach For America (TFA) educators who tend to leave these areas at the end of a two-year commitment.

We also learn from Black Hands… that good teachers should, if not provided by the employer, make certain that they properly educate themselves in the area of culturally diverse issues. They should want to have a deeper understanding of their students’ challenges outside of the schools. Teachers can take additional local training courses or participate in community projects to develop an understanding of the surrounding communities. Novice educators, like us, can get active beyond the classroom with web-based organizing for equity and social justice, like Save Our Schools, United Opt Out, or edchange.org, a comprehensive award-winning website developed and led by George Mason University’s Dr. Paul Gorski. In addition, novice and veteran educators can learn from New York City’s Border Crossers and Teachers Against Prejudice, each of whom provides free culturally relevant and responsive curricular materials. Moreover, resources like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s LearnNC,  are full of educational resources that link equity, justice, diversity, democracy, culture, curriculum and change for students and teachers.

We learn from Black Hands…that Black parent participation or involvement that actually occurs on site at a given school can be particularly challenging as structural racism and the New Jim Crow rears their ugly heads after Brown. Dr. Hughes describes the sad post-Brown fact in his book that parents actually seemed to brag and be proud that they “didn’t have to go out to the school” for their child, because when white administrators contacted them to participate in school decision-making, it was too often associated with a disciplinary action or failing grade in relation to their child. Dr. Hughes then reminds us of the longitudinal work of Dr. Joyce Epstein at Johns Hopkins University to enlighten our hopes for parent involvement. Her inner-city Baltimore-based team contends (with decades of strong evidence) that there are at least six types of parent involvement that can be engaged toward strong home-to-school relations and learning in the post-Brown era (yet, most schools misguidedly appreciate only one or two or those six types; typically the types enjoyed by the privileged; and thereby unfairly judge blacks and the impoverished as uncaring and ignorant parents).  Organizations like The National Coalition for Parent Involvement In Education offer reputable resources that can help educators learn how to engage parent and community involvement in ways that are most beneficial for the particular context. Also, we may learn from projects like the Black Star Project, which helps families by providing support for students through scholarship programs and supporting parental involvement.