Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers
Using oral narratives to tell the story of black access and education in Ontario between the 1940s and the 1980s, Schooling the System provides textured insight into how issues of race, gender, class, geographic origin, and training shaped women’s distinct experiences within the profession. By valuing women’s voices and lived experiences, Funké Aladejebi illustrates that black women, as a diverse group, made vital contributions to the creation and development of anti-racist education in Canada. As cultural mediators within Ontario school systems, these women circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion to create resistive teaching methods that centred black knowledges and traditions. Within their wider communities and activist circles, they fought to change entrenched ideas about what Canadian citizenship should look like.
Funkè Aladejebi is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on twentieth century oral history, Black Canadian women’s history, the history of Canadian education and transnationalism.
Other publications from this author include:
- “Writing Black Canadian Women’s History: Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going” in Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History (2019)
- Send Little Outbursts across the School: Black Women Teachers and Micro-Resistive Strategies in Ontario Schools, 1960s – 1980s in Education Matters, 3(1) (2016)
- We Got Our Quota: Black Female Educators and Resistive Pedagogies, 1960s-1980s in Ontario History, 107 (1) (2015)
- “I didn’t want to be anything special. I just wanted to teach school”: A Case Study of Black Female Educators in Colchester, Ontario, 1960 in Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, 5 (1-2) (2012)
- UNSETTLING THE GREAT WHITE NORTH: BLACK CANADIAN HISTORY ()