We had the good fortune of connecting with Dr. Melanie Battles and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dr. Melanie, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I wanted to create a space for educators where they could receive a different approach to professional development. So many of the trainings are focused on teaching and learning as a technical entity that ignores the monumental impact of our soul’s condition and conditioning on the space of education. A vision was birthed to bridge my knowledge and experience of integrating cognitive neuroscience with an understanding of our brain’s emotions on the cyclical nature of learning. Scholars for the Soul: An Educational Solutions Firm, LLC was created to provide educators quality and soulful professional development and coaching to implement authentic culturally responsive teaching practices that naturally housed social emotional development as THE way to do teaching and learning, specifically for students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
As a practitioner of authenticity, critical self-reflection, self-care, and most importantly, soul care, it is vital that I work from a space of experience. My personal life has yielded many joys, but also many moments of adversity and challenge that would have taken many out, but I persisted. My journey as a woman of God and one who is on the pursuit of loving myself through it all, good, bad, or indifferent, led me to connect with the beauty and pain of soul care, the arduous and accomplishing work of self-excavation so that I can enjoy the path of healing and liberation as a black woman in a world where my intelligence, my ratchetdness, and my commitment to my core identity are challenged, silenced, and otherized. I have HAD to persist in order to see many of my goals reached, i.e. achieving a PhD in Reading Education amid a divorce, overcoming the trauma of a home invasion while teaching kids and raising my own daughters, and just learning more about the person that I am, how I became to be who I am, and how to commit to uncovering the raw beauty of who I was created to be.

These lessons were so good that I couldn’t operate in self-care alone; it had to be espoused and carried out within community, thus rendering a call for me to prioritize soul care for educators as a very necessary foundation to understanding how our identity has been conditioned by social messages of degradation, exclusion, and marginalization alongside black activists on a mission to center messages of black joy, black brilliance, black brilliance, and black excellence. Understanding this duality of messages moved me to create my firm so that we can understand how to do the work for ourselves as educators to understand and excavate the nasty layers of societal oppression while uncovering the core of our beauty, joy, and most importantly our love at the core of our selves and our souls. Doing this work allows me space to authentically show up, rejecting the notion of code-switching and challenging myself to express this work as authentically and genuinely as possible, while also growing and learning and enjoying the cyclical nature of growth.

Our firm is developed to provide a supportive space for educators to understand the science of learning and the journey of soul work so that they can truly embody-model-share the joy of learning for students, especially those who have not had the opportunity to experience such joy.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I would definitely take someone to YGFBFKitchen Restaurant & Catering in Little Rock, AR, a black owned Soul Food restaurant for a good brunch. Next would be to enjoy an evening of Neo Soul from any of our amazing black artists in town, such as Bijoux, my soror Tawana Campbell, DeeDee Jones, Big Piph, and the list goes on and on. It would also be a must to check out our local black museum, Mosaic Templars Cultural Center located at the historic 9th street near downtown Little Rock. We would definitely have to take a trip to Hot Springs, AR and enjoy the spas and national parks just to relax.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would not be who I am without the guidance of God and the tutelage of Christ Jesus. My family, the Desmuke Dynasty, is a monumental and foundational contributor to the shaping of who God created me to be. Within this unit, I am supported and loved for who I am authentic and raw. I also appreciate my husband who is a top tier supporter. Back when I was creating apparel for the brand, he was my first customer and also purchased my first laptop and other essential materials.

In regards to the scholarly aspect of my work, I am grateful for black women scholars, such as Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Dr. Geneva Gay, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, Zaretta Hammond, and the beautiful soul of black ratchetdemic scholar, Dr. Chris Emdin. These scholars held space for my growth and development as a black woman who can speak boldly and profoundly about the work of culturally responsiveness, holding blackness with love and pride, and spreading the news through my work and the way I engage with youth.

Website: linktr.ee/scholars4thesoul

Instagram: scholars4thesoul

Linkedin: Melanie Battles

Facebook: scholars4thesoul

Youtube: Teaching from the Soul

Image Credits
Tiffany KMP (photographer)

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