Spaces and Places of Black Educational Desire: Rethinking Black Supplementary Schools as a New Social Movement

Abstract

Black supplementary schools, as organic grassroots organisations, are not simply a response to mainstream educational exclusion and poor provision, as they are so often described. They are far more radical and subversive than their quiet conformist exterior, indicating the presence of a covert social movement for educational change. In our small-scale, exploratory study of four black supplementary schools, we attempt to uncover their subjugated knowledges and hidden histories in order to illustrate the ways in which they generate Mueller's ‘oppositional meanings’. The narratives of the black women educators consistently decentre assumptions of mainstream schooling, as well as providing evidence of thriving black communities, social capital and complex, contradictory pedagogies within which childcentredness remains an important component. Supplementary schools provide a context in which whiteness is displaced as central and blackness is seen as normative. We conclude by arguing that, through their strategies of reworking notions of both community and blackness, their creation of new ‘types’ of professional intellectuals and their commitment to social transformation, black supplementary schools represent the genesis of a new gendered social movement.