Scholar Perspectives

Black on Both Sides: Teaching in K-12 and Higher Education Classrooms at Predominantly Black and Predominantly White Schools 

Author:

ArCasia D. James-Gallaway and Chaddrick D. James-Gallaway

Published in: Educational Justice Journal, Special Edition — Volume 3, Issue 2 (Spring 2025)

DOI:

10.64262/c2y725

Abstract:
In this reflexive essay, we recast our years as K-12 classroom teachers in predominately Black schools to assess how those formative experiences have subsequently shaped our pedagogy in predominately and historically white schools. Drawing on Aimee Cox’s conceptualization of shapeshifters alongside other perspectives rooted in Black studies, we begin by considering the relationship between shapeshifting and Blackness in our professional lives as critical Black, differently gendered pre-tenure professors at a conservative research-intensive university in the South. Tracing our pedagogical practices and orientations from our time as K-12 classroom teachers to higher education instructors, we subsequently demonstrate the stakes we have in the work we currently do. Next, we discuss how our evolving political commitment to intersectional racial justice ultimately helps us reconcile the specific form of shapeshifting we enact with a more confident and transparent embrace of our Blackness. We shapeshift not with the expectation that we will transform racist structures or transcend systemic racism, but in an effort not to lose ourselves by trying to fit into a space that was designed to exclude us. As we rewrite the socially constructed meanings affixed to our bodies, we accept that this revision will be illegible to some—if not most—for only certain persons have the visual capacity to see us for who and what we are.

Download Full Text:
https://edjusticeinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/part-1010.pdf

Citation:
James-Gallaway, A. & James-Gallaway, C. (2025). Black on Both Sides: Teaching in K-12 and Higher Education Classrooms at Predominantly Black and Predominantly White Schools.  Educational Justice Journal, 3(2), 1-28.