Education elders must engage next generation Black thinkers and doers in addressing the complex global and spiritual issues in education today. Deep listening to the young is absolutely essential to imagining a future that is worthy of Black engagement and brilliance. In this article, I bear witness and honor the righteous version of endarkened…

Joy can be defined as a feeling of happiness, well-being, success, or delight (Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joy, 2014). It can also be seen as the "source" or "cause" of such delight. However, according to Alice Walker, there is another articulation of joy from an endarkened…

Given the clarion call for culturally relevant and sustaining practices, it is often assumed that Black women have a deep well of knowledge about Black history and culture to draw from. However, given that today's Black teachers were mostly educated post-integration, they were rarely afforded accurate representations and cultural knowledge of…

In this case study of a young Black woman educator from the southern United States, I examine how her engagements with Africa and African knowledges, culture and womanhood in Ghana, West Africa substantively transformed her selfhood and her ability to respond in cultural relevant and accurate ways in her teaching of Black children. From her story…

Feminist research has both held and contested experience as a category of epistemological importance, often as a secular notion. However, spirituality and sacred knowing are also fundamental to a Black/endarkened feminist epistemology in teaching and research, given the historical and cultural experiences of African ascendant women worldwide. How…

This article arises from dialogue culled from a yearlong doctoral seminar in which both authors participated. The authors are both African ascendant women who teach and learn in a higher education setting. As one of the professors who co-taught the seminar (Cynthia) and a college administrator who was a doctoral student at the time of the seminar…

This paper explores the subtle (and often not so subtle) cultural, social, political and spiritual meanings behind the very notion of paradigm "proliferation" including the often exclusionary intentions and implications in how research is undertaken, represented and for what (and whose) purposes. Dealing with these contested meanings brings a…

Sets forth three calls to education: (1) "Education begins when people are seeking to be whole"; (2) "Education must use memory and her/history as crucial sites of resistance"; (3) "Education must serve to name and to voice." Various strategies for educational change and social empowerment are given. (BF)

What is the relationship among meaningful personal and professional acts of leadership, creation of a school culture honoring diversity, and assumptions about effective schools? This case study of a female, African American, urban principal explores and reinterprets traditional conceptualizations of effective leadership, given schools' increasing…