Reclaiming the Conveyor Belt: Physical Education Teacher Education as a Pipeline to the Professoriate for Black Males

Abstract

There is a plethora of scholarship concerning the lack of academic achievement among Black males in the United States. Within higher education, this lack of achievement is represented as the difficult matriculation of Black males through their undergraduate experience and their lack of representation in the doctoral pipeline. The lack of representation has been explicitly documented within physical education teacher education and kinesiology scholarship—having been framed as the extinction of Black professionals in our field. Despite the ongoing deficit research about Black males and education, the purpose of this article is to present a framework for the recruiting, sustaining, and supporting of Black males to the professoriate through physical education teacher education. We utilized our personal experiences in a Black male doctoral pipeline to detail how physical education teacher education can be leveraged to mentor Black males within the field and others.