Remembering Teachers in a Segregated School: Narratives of Womanist Pedagogy

Abstract

The authors use womanist caring (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002) as a framework for analyzing data from an oral history project of Douglass School, an all-Black school that existed in the small town of Parsons, Kansas, from 1908-1958. In-depth interviews were conducted with 55 former students who attended the school during the 1920s through when it closed in 1958. The alumni’s memories of their teachers were vivid, powerful, and resonated with the tenets of womanist caring. Although the school closed 50 years ago, we argue that Douglass teachers’ pedagogy has relevance for improving the educational outcomes of African American students in contemporary U.S. schools.