Tiffany M. Nyachae

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Pennsylvania State University

Millennial Black women teachers wrestle with two simultaneous burdens: disrupting the racist and sexist status quo of schooling through curriculum, and employing tactics to survive school politics among their majority White women colleagues. This article describes how the Sisters of Promise (SOP) curriculum aligned with Black feminism and Black fem...

Centering Blackness in educational research is a pursuit of liberation grounded in process, inquiry, and relational praxis. This approach recognizes liberation as an ongoing, unfinished endeavor, urging researchers to disrupt the normative systems that constrain Black life and knowledge. Black methodologies emerge as flexible and transformative, dr...

In this article, we argue that the humanity and mattering of Black people have always lived in Black girlhood, but the potentiality of Black girlhood as a creative space for designing Black approaches in educational research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, we (re)turn to Black girlhood frameworks and theories in our contribution to Black a...

In this article, we build upon the ethics of collective intersectional care (Nyachae & Pham 2024), a concept central to Women of Color feminisms to emphasize the pedagogical rigors of carework in K-12 classrooms. Drawing from a yearlong video ethnography of the racial literacy practices of teachers of Color, we analyze a case study of a Black woman...

There is growing agreement among educators about the need to move toward more democratic, just, and equitable approaches to building positive classroom communities and learning environments. Yet, there is less clarity about how, toward what, and for/with whom these learning spaces are fostered within schools imbued in and reflective of broader soci...

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 t...

For the final In Dialogue of our editorial term, we wanted to invite some luminary voices in literacy studies to think together about the future of critical studies in literacy research. We asked Betina Hsieh, Danielle Filipiak, Tiffany Nyachae, David Kirkland, and Carol Brochin what they thought would push the field forward: What would or should l...

This article explores how extracurricular programs designed as interventions in the criminalization of Black girls may constrict their identities. Through a womanist theoretical framework, authors investigate the discourses about Black girlhood that permeate one extracurricular initiative which aims to counter the effects of exclusionary discipline...

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.

In this paper we build a conceptual framework to argue for culturally compelling instruction that leads to teaching for change. Culturally compelling instruction calls for a substantive shift in how teachers view their students, communities, and what the perspective might mean for students’ future when they have access to alternative learning oppor...

Entanglements of power, language, identities, and ideologies perturb Black feminist poets and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) scholars alike. Here, we detail our use of Black feminist poetry to address concerns with rigor in CDA. We marry Black feminist theorizing about language to feminist CDA to illuminate how—for qualitative data analysis—poet...