ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a personal incident that occurred in schooling history; this personal narrative because it is the singular event in all of my elementary school years that haunts still. The chapter takes as its' entry point personal schooling experience, as a low-income Black female third-grader in a public school setting in New Jersey. More specifically, she begins by narrating, briefly, a "classroom incident" revolving around a social studies lesson on slavery. By recounting this experience, she begins to illustrate the potentially damaging and polarizing effects that dominant ideology embedded in curriculum and presented as objective "truth" and historically accurate fact, on minority students. Although she begins with an auto-ethnographic narrative, she later combines this mode with current pedagogical reflections from her standpoint as a postsecondary educator culminating in what she posits as her belief that culturally responsive and Black feminist critical pedagogical practices are needed to ensure transformative, social justice-based approaches to curriculum, teaching and learning.
