The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member
By Cynthia B. Dillard (Beacon Press, 2021)
A few years ago, at the end of a workshop on anti-racist teaching, a Black woman educator asked me in the Q&A, “To be confronted with this constant racism in schools is exhausting. How do you or I hang on?” I answered from my heart: I teach because it is in my blood. I teach because those before me survived and fought for a world that they could not see, a world that some could not even possibly fathom. And I must do my work in that same spirit, teaching so that future generations can have a future I can only imagine.
But I wondered if I should have provided something with statistics, something more concrete. My response was honest, for sure, but it wasn’t until I read Cynthia B. Dillard’s The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member that I discovered the language to articulate what I was trying to express on that day. This brilliant book provides research on Dillard’s Ghana Study Abroad in Education (GSAE) program. I’m a Black woman educator who has never stepped foot on the mother continent of Africa, but Dillard’s book allowed me to feel like I too could meditate on the road from the Ashanti Region to the Cape Coast, sit in the transformational pain of the dungeons where our ancestors waited to board ships never to return, or sit down with Auntie Gifty to design my own custom clothes that are outward representations of my internal changes.
Spirit is exactly what I needed to read during this tumultuous and unpredictable year because Dillard is a model of a person/teacher/researcher who stands unflinching and steadfast in her purpose. She creates a sanctuary not only for the participants of the GSAE program, but also for us as readers. Dillard discusses how the Black women in the study felt “a deep longing for a place where as Black women we would be seen and loved just as we are” (p. 73), and while I read the book, I felt just that: seen and loved. By honoring the legacy of Black women educators, Dillard’s book affirms us and reminds us of our purpose as part of the latest generation in a long history of survival, love, and Black dreaming.
Jessica Stovall’s latest for Kappan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Lee Stovall
Jessica Lee Stovall is a former high school English teacher and a current doctoral candidate in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, Stanford, CA.
