Presence as Policy Action: Black Mothers as Policy Actors Navigating Antiblack Geopolitics

Abstract

Antiblack geopolitics and educational policies continue to produce oppressive systems, making it difficult for educators to acknowledge Black families’ actions as contributions to produce equitable education. Policy processes have the potential to transform oppressive systems of power. Conceptualizing policy as a practice of power permits local policy actors to use their individualized power to shift a policy’s course of action and transform oppressive educational systems. With an anticolonial framework and using an institutional ethnography, this inquiry explores Black mothers’ actions as policy actors. Findings detail the mothers’ relentless invitation to allow their darkskinned agentic power to collaborate with their school district and form a teacher-recruitment program. The mothers’ policy actions are exemplary of the abilities to transform policy processes ridden with antiblack geopolitics that ignore the voices of BIPOC individuals. This project illustrates the daily antiblackness individuals endure before and while enlisting as educational partners and policy actors.

Promoting District-Level Culturally Responsive Practices

“…In this study, the term educational leader is applied to those individuals such as school staff (e.g., Crawford et al, 2019), parents as educational actors (e.g., Aguayo, 2022), or school district administrators who have become the anchor of their schools and school districts, producing the undercurrent that models an environment of advocacy and culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa, 2018). Focusing on school leaders, scholars in educational leadership are, more than ever, conceptualizing school leaders as inclusive (Scanlan & López, 2012), socially just (Tillman, 2005), and anti-racist (Welton & Diem, 2021; Gooden & Dantley, 2012).…”