“You excluded us for so long and now you want us to be patriotic?”: African American Women Teachers Navigating the Quandary of Citizenship

This qualitative study focuses on how 5 African American women social studies teachers utilized their experiential knowledge and understanding of history to make sense of the construct of citizenship. Drawing from Black feminism, this study asks how African American women social studies teachers define and teach the construct of citizenship. Multiple intersections of the participants’ identities impacted the ways in which they understood and taught citizenship to their students. Because traditional notions of citizenship failed to align with their experiences as African American women, they reinterpreted citizenship as based within their respective communities through the creation of “free spaces.” These transformative views of citizenship provide a framework into how complex perspectives on citizenship are being enacted within social studies classrooms.