Black Girls Experiencing Their Intersectional Identities in School explores the subjective experience of Black girls within the educational context. Based on interviews, diary entries, and focus groups, the author argues that as a result of their intersectional identities, Black girls experience unique challenges and obstacles in the educational setting. Addressing topics ranging from interpersonal relationships, social media, beauty, sexuality, hypervisibility/invisibility, and microaggressions, this book highlights the voices and experiences of Black girls between the ages of 11 and 15. The Girls provide a narrative account of the challenges they face daily in the educational context, describing in detail, the factors that maintain and perpetuate volatile conditions. Additionally, this book explores the coping strategies that this group of Black girls developed to resist and respond to the daily obstacles. Ultimately, this book not only identifies the unique struggles faced by Black girls in schools as a result of their intersectional identities; but most importantly, this work explores pragmatic strategies that can be implemented to create safe and beneficial spaces for Black Girls. The author argues that through the implementation of Black Feminist Pedagogy, an “Ethic of Caring,” and partnerships with Black Girl Empowerment organizations, educational practitioners can mediate the negative experiences and create spaces for growth.

Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Just 16 percent of female students, Black girls make up more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest. The first trade book to tell these untold stories, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. For four years Monique W. Morris, author of Black Stats, chronicled the experiences of black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Morris shows how, despite obstacles, stigmas, stereotypes, and despair, black girls still find ways to breathe remarkable dignity into their lives in classrooms, juvenile facilities, and beyond.

Be a part of the radical transformation to honor and respect Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls! This book is a collective call to action for educational justice and fairness for all Black Girls – Beautiful, Brilliant. This edited volume focuses on transforming how Black Girls are understood, respected, and taught. Editors and authors intentionally present the harrowing experiences Black Girls endure and provide readers with an understanding of Black Girls’ beauty, talents, and brilliance. This book calls willing and knowledgeable educators to disrupt and transform their learning spaces by presenting: Detailed chapters rooted in scholarship, lived experiences, and practice Activities, recommendations, shorter personal narratives, and poetry honoring Black Girls Resources centering Black female protagonists Companion videos illustrating first-hand experiences of Black Girls and women Tools in authentically connecting with Black Girls so they can do more than survive – they can thrive.

Intersectionality of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Teaching and Teacher Education brings together scholarship that employs an intersectionality methodology to actual conditions that affect school-age children, teachers and teacher educators in relation to institutional systems of power and privilege.

This book uses an intersectional approach to explore the ways in which girls and adults in school systems hold multiple realities, negotiate tensions, cultivate hope and resilience, resist oppression, and envision transformation. Rooted in the voices and lived experiences of girls and educators, Brinkman, Brinkman and Hamilton document girl-led activism within and outside schools, and explore how adults working with girls can help contribute toward them thriving. Girls’ narratives are considered through an intersectionality framework, in which gender identity, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and other aspects of social identity intersect to inform girls' lived experiences. Exploring data and interviews collected over a 15-year period, the authors set out a three-part structure to outline how girls engage in strategies to enact resilience, resistance, and transformation. Part one reconceptualizes traditional definitions of resilience and documents girls’ experiences of oppression within schools, identifying common stereotypes about girls and examining the complexity of girls’ "choices" within systems that they do not feel they can change. Part two highlights girls’ active resistance to stereotypes, pressures to conform, and interpersonal and systemic discrimination, from entitlement of their boy peers to experiences of sexualization in school. Part three illuminates pathways for educational transformation, creating new possibilities for educational practices. Offering a range of pedagogies, policies, and practices educators can adopt to engage in systemic change, this is fascinating reading for professionals such as educators, counsellors, social workers, and policy makers, as well as academics and students in social, developmental, and educational psychology.

This volume examines the educational leadership of Black women in the U.S. as informed by their raced and gendered positionalities, experiences, perspectives, and most importantly, the intersection of these doubly marginalized identities in school and community contexts. While there are bodies of research literature on women in educational leadership, as well as the leadership development, philosophies, and approaches of Black or African American educational leaders, this issue interrogates the ways in which the Black woman’s socially constructed intersectional identity informs her leadership values, approach, and impact. As an act of self-invention, the volume simultaneously showcases the research and voices of Black women scholars – perspectives traditionally silenced in the leadership discourse generally, and educational leadership discourse specifically. Whether the empirical or conceptual focus is a Black female school principal, African American female superintendent, Black feminist of the early twentieth century, or Black woman education researcher, the framing and analysis of each article interrogates how the unique location of the Black woman, at the intersection of race and gender, shapes and influences their lived personal and/or professional experiences as educational leaders. This collection will be of interest to education leadership researchers, faculty, and students, practicing school and district administrators, and readers interested in education leadership studies, leadership theory, Black feminist thought, intersectionality, and African American leadership. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

A major publishing event, the collected writings of the groundbreaking scholar who "first coined intersectionality as a political framework" (Salon) For more than twenty years, scholars, activists, educators, and lawyers--inside and outside of the United States--have employed the concept of intersectionality both to describe problems of inequality and to fashion concrete solutions. In particular, as the Washington Post reported recently, "the term has been used by social activists as both a rallying cry for more expansive progressive movements and a chastisement for their limitations." Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to Crenshaw's work, readers will find key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality, collected together for the first time. The book includes a sweeping new introduction by Crenshaw as well as prefaces that contextualize each of the chapters. For anyone interested in movement politics and advocacy, or in racial justice and gender equity, On Intersectionality will be compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant theorists of our time.