Black Motherscholarship Within and Beyond the Academy

Crystasany R. Turner, Ph.D. (she/her/ella), is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rooted in Black feminist epistemologies, her research and scholarship highlight the perspectives of Black women educators and their cultural knowledge as manifested in their care and education of Children of Color. Her teaching and research focus includes Black feminist epistemologies, early childhood education for social justice, and spirit-centered pedagogies. Her work interrogates imbalanced social power, institutional inequities, and systemic oppression affecting diverse children and families. Dr. Turner’s scholarship has been published in “Race Ethnicity and Education,” the “Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education,” the “Journal of Teacher Education,” and the “Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education” amongst others. Meghan L. Green, Ed.D. (she/her), is Assistant Professor of Raciolinguistic Justice in Early Childhood Teacher Education at the Erikson Institute. As an arts-based qualitative researcher, she uses multiple modes of creative representation to reflect on her positionality and to craft her story as a cis Black queer woman engaging in critically informed research methodologies within this time and space. Her scholarship centers Black feminist thought and endarkened feminist epistemology within early childhood settings, specifically highlighting the diverse lived experiences of Black early childhood educators through arts-based qualitative inquiry methods including, autoethnography, endarkened narrative inquiry, photovoice, and poetic inquiry. Her scholarly works have been published in journals such as the “International Journal of Qualitative Methods,” the “Journal of African American Women and Girls in Education,” “Early Childhood Education Journal,” “Ethnic Studies Pedagogies,” and “Equity and Excellence in Education.”