This paper examines how Black educators enact resistance within U.S. public schools—institutions shaped by racial hierarchy, technocratic control, and epistemic exclusion. Using self-study and autoethnographic methods, I analyse my participation in a Pan-African Professional Learning Community (PLC) at a historically Black high school to explore how collective educator practice becomes a form of resistance that disrupts dominant power relations in schooling. While PLCs are commonly framed as neutral professional development tools, this Pan-African PLC operated as a counter-hegemonic space that rejected deficit narratives, refused culturally neutral instructional norms, and challenged administrative resistance to race-conscious professional learning. Through reflective journaling, student work analysis, community-organising practices, and the study of Black intellectual traditions, the PLC became a site of everyday resistance where Black educators reclaimed authority, affirmed cultural knowledge, and redefined pedagogical purpose.
The study contributes theoretically by articulating Foundational Black American Pedagogy (FBAP)—a framework emerging from the PLC that formalises six principles (Teacher Scholarship, Empowering Black Student Voices, Social Justice Advocacy, Centering Cultural Identity in Learning, Community-Centred Teaching, and Empowered Intellectualism). FBAP theorises how Black educators resist epistemic domination by grounding teaching in cultural identity, collective care, and community uplift. Rather than conceptualising resistance only as protest or disruption, this framework shows how resistance also occurs through daily instructional decisions, identity-affirming curriculum design, and persistent advocacy for Black students within hostile institutional structures.
Empirically, the study demonstrates how Black educators strategically use pedagogy, community partnerships, cultural celebrations, and curriculum redesign as tools to subvert harmful power relations that diminish Black teacher voice and erase Black student identity. The PLC’s work—such as organising school-wide cultural events, integrating Black scholarship into lessons, challenging deficit language, and adapting literacy instruction through culturally sustaining approaches—illustrates how educators transform professional development into collective activism. These practices not only advanced student engagement and achievement but also shifted the balance of power within the school by asserting the legitimacy of Black epistemologies and communities as central to educational excellence.
This paper argues that resistance inside schools often begins with small, intentional acts of reclamation: resisting erasure, resisting compliance-based teaching, resisting the narrowing of Black intellectual history. By documenting these emergent forms of resistance, this study offers both activists and scholars a model for how everyday professional practice can challenge systemic repression and reimagine education as a liberatory, community-rooted project.