Curriculum as Endarkened Feminist Third Space: Alternative possibilities, revision, reciprocity, and surrender in teacher professional development

Abstract

This article reveals how an Endarkened Feminist Third Space was actualized through the creation and facilitation of “Race Space” Critical Professional Development (RSCPD) for teachers; that is, a space composed of reciprocity, surrender, and a willingness to revise one’s performances of the present. Building upon previous scholarly calls for (and theorizations of) curriculum as space, endarkened feminist epistemologies, and Third Space, I theorize Endarkened Feminist Third Space through an ethnographic case study of teacher professional development (PD) and an embedded multiple case study of teacher participants. I respond to the following research questions: (a) How did an Endarkened Feminist Third Space become actualized as curriculum within RSCPD; and (b) How did this actualization support social justice teaching and action among participants? A critical discourse analysis of focal dialogic exchanges unearthed several moments in which an Endarkened Feminist Third Space was actualized for each participant in the following ways: (a) collaborative strategizing and surrendering fears to subversively act; (b) being challenged to (re)consider alternative possibilities and political performances; (c) revision and intervention in the here and now; and (d) reciprocity. Ultimately, through the actualization of an Endarkened Feminist Third Space, teacher and facilitator ways of knowing/acting were both welcomed and called into question for the purposes of revising their performances of the present, surrendering to alternative possibilities, and reciprocity. Finally, I discuss the need for epistemologically rich and feminized interrogations of space within PD for facilitator growth and enhanced social justice teaching and being among teachers.