Rhonesha Blaché’s presence is formidable. She often dresses in vibrant hues—yellows and reds — mixing and matching symbolic colors of heritage and culture in a fetching street symphony, bold yet never overstated.
She moves effortlessly — both metaphorically and literally — between the streets of South Phoenix, where she grew up, and the wider world: Germany, Africa, the Caribbean, New York City, Tucson and beyond. She hardly carries herself like a doctor, more like a child’s sassy auntie — street-tested wisdom tempered by academic rigor. (Full discloser: I’ve admired this woman for some time. She is a godmother to our children, and a lifelong friend to my wife Maggie).
Her intellectual grace is just that, it doesn’t reveal itself in any kind of the-smartest-in-the-room, ivory-towered arrogant way. How she rolls. Once you get her talking, eloquence matches effusiveness. Even a quick conversation might mix Dr. Seuss ideologies with African philosophies like Ubuntu and the interdependence of people. You’d note a selfless kindness about her, and a curiosity that’s both childlike and hyper-emotionally intelligent. It is an endless quest for discovery, and a need to feel life viscerally. A way of seeing, of absorbing the world through diverse perspectives, wrapped in wonder, and an optimistic wink at the miracle of it all.
Dr. Blaché has taught children and adults in public schools, private schools, non-profits, across the States, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Germany. She calls her young students her “babies.” She is the kind of teacher I wish I had growing up. This is the kind of teacher we could lose under Trump.
Then there’s the twisted oak tree and the power of names. The oak represents community and resistance, once providing shade and serving as gathering places where enslaved people could meet or worship. An oak is also a witness tree, under which the first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation took place. It was one of Blaché's favorite trees as a child (and still is), long before she understood its significance to her name and her life. She sees oak trees as a powerful force of life, shaped by nature’s twists. “Blaché means nature of the oak,” she says. “The trunk is like a woman’s body, twisted; the branches are her locks. Streets in New Orleans are lined with twisted oak trees, they are rich with history and spirituality. The trees are sacred. The last time I was in New Orleans, I saw spiritual offerings under the oaks.”
Blaché speaks with an ease that often links her sentences to laughter, her cadence carrying a slight melodic inflection of the Deep South — a linguistic fingerprint of history, culture, and resilience. It’s a patois that can’t be erased; she grew up in Phoenix, but her ancestral roots stretch through New Orleans, Haiti, Gullah Geechee heritage, and throughout Africa, Caribbean, the totality of the diaspora informs her work.
She is always exploring — herself, the world, how things connect. Her research informs her practice; it shapes how she understands her own identity and purpose. Along the way, she inspires and supports others in exploring their own sense of identity and purpose.
I’ve had numerous conversations with Blaché, the latest over the phone from her home in west Phoenix. As we talk, her thoughts drift into memory, reaching for something just out of grasp. The orange plastic seat on the back of her mother’s bike, lace socks, the wind teasing at the edges of her world. Her mother pedaled them through the neighborhood, hair lifting in the breeze, while Blaché stared up at the sky, watching jets cut lines across the blue, already aching for places she hadn’t been, things she didn’t yet know. She loved the outdoors — the trees, the grass, the scent of earth — until allergies turned against her, her mother smearing Calamine all over her body. But she couldn’t stay inside, not when she could follow ants into their tunnels, press her hands to the earth, desperate to understand how something so small could build a community of its own. She remembers her mother dancing in their home, headphones on, lost in the music, and then joining in. Soul music got the young girl in the gut. And she remembers her many books — Gulliver’s Travels a favorite, a tale of discovering new worlds and knowing home would never feel quite the same again.
If she grew up poor, she didn’t know it. She had things she appreciated, had everything she wanted. She aspired to more over time, but she wasn’t looking for a lot of material possessions, and it’s not like that now. She grew up a middle child in a large, complex family, surrounded by love, she says, while navigating and negotiating the roles of little and big sister.
Blaché’s grandmother had hopped on a train from Mississippi, with precious little, arriving in the black community Okemah in Southeast Phoenix. The woman was bold and brave, worked as a seamstress, cook, mid-wife, maid, hairstylist. She birthed nine children.
“She was born and raised in the dirty South. Back when being Black meant you better watch your mouth,” Roni wrote in her eulogy to her grandmother, which she read at her funeral.
She laughs, “my grandma had brass knuckles, many machetes, billy clubs, a sawed-off shotgun.” A machete behind every door was a staple in the old family home in Mississippi.
“They didn’t play around,” she adds. “And any man who ever hit a woman in my family, they lived to regret it.”
It should be noted the woman’s confidence seems, or is, unwavering, her heritage inspires such. Also, much comes from her mother, who raised her to believe in her own beauty, strength and intelligence, full of all the capability in the world to do whatever the hell she wanted to do. And she references God and spirituality as a source. “While I was raised as a Christian,” she says, “exposed to several denominations, my faith is rooted in African spirituality by many names, which includes Orthodox Christianity from its origin in Ethiopia.”
She attended North High, graduated in ’96 with honors and an International Baccalaureate certificate. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from ASU in 2001, with her focus on psychology and African-American studies, followed by a Master of Arts degree, with an education focus. Later, she moved to NYC to earn her doctorate in education from Columbia University in 2022. None of this was easy.
In 2006, hell-bent on hopping a jet airliner out of Phoenix, she moved to Germany to teach for two years at the large Frankfurt International School, where she taught various levels from pre-K through grade 13. It changed her life.
“I left Phoenix and the U.S. entirely to escape my life’s cycle, moving to Germany for a job that transformed my life. My well-being improved physically, mentally, financially, and spiritually, allowing me to treat my mother and sister to a 17-day trip across four countries. I experienced revitalization, with black roots replacing gray hairs, restored 20/20 vision, effortless weight loss of 15 pounds, and a sharpened memory recalling vivid early childhood experiences from ages one and two. My cultural, national, spiritual, and professional identities were all significantly enhanced. I got to reinvent myself in Germany, I didn’t want to be hindered in any role.”
Over the years, Blaché has delivered presentations, workshops, and fulfilled guest speaker roles at universities across the country, and around the world, mostly focusing on Black history and African Diaspora Studies. She has presented multimedia sessions at national and international conferences, designed and taught research-based experiential learning courses, trained teachers, and built curricula. She has established African Diaspora Fellows Programs, facilitated professional development for educators, and mentored programs dedicated to supporting African, Caribbean, Black and other racialized students. Her CV is extensive, with a long list of awards and scholarships.
Now, after more than 25 years as an educator, blending life experience, academia, and thought, her teaching philosophy has become a living, breathing thing—an altruistic force. See, education, isn’t just about transferring knowledge. For her, it’s a tool for healing, empowerment, and connection. It should be dynamic, relevant and rooted in real-world problem-solving.
Her teaching philosophy is grounded, first and foremost in ancient African pedagogy, which honor ancestral wisdom while challenging rigid, compartmentalized approaches to teaching. It’s also based on an understanding of humanity’s connection to mother nature. She developed her own “Black Cake Framework” to emphasize the necessity of a holistic approach through life and education. Like the Caribbean delicacy it is named after, it is rich, layered, and deeply rooted in the histories and knowledge systems of the African Diaspora. It’s a framework that puts student voices at its heart, encourages critical thinking and provides teachers the flexibility to adapt to the needs of their students. At its core, it rejects the idea that education must conform to a single standard, instead emphasizing the co-construction of knowledge, the embrace of identity, and the use of learning as a tool of liberation.
The distinction between schooling and education? Develop critical consciousness — seeing the world through multiple lenses—thinking for yourself. “We operate as collective,” Blaché adds. “We are intertwined. Colonialism is all about ‘all about me — good luck getting yours.’”
Schooling is assimilation, requires agency. Pushing past negative narratives, lies and the colonial myth of white supremacy. That’s why, she says, context in school subjects is so important. Some say she’s more of a language arts person, others say math—but that’s missing the point. Teaching should be holistic.
“Math is really just another language, so you teach in context, how it gets used in real life, in language arts, in science. Everything in context. Language arts in history.” Learning, she tells me, should feel like life — connected, meaningful, real.
Teaching isn’t just passing down knowledge—it’s about uncovering what’s been buried. Hence her love of studies of the African diaspora, African culture, her own saga, and the parts of American history most people look away from. She understands the power of storytelling as a secret weapon and its impact in education. From coded songs of enslavement to hidden histories woven into dance, food, hairstyles, even names, history is vast yet delicate, layered with symbolism.
History runs through everything she teaches — social dynamics, politics, emotions. Her doctorate is in interdisciplinary education — what some call transdisciplinary — breaking down the neat little boxes of math, history, language arts, science. Ancient African pedagogy never saw learning as something to be split apart like that.
“The world is my classroom,” she says. And that really defines her. “We learn through all our senses, you also don’t rely on the curriculum of schools. Everything around matters. Be intentional about what you receive. If you teach each across the board with context, then it is not something you’re learning for a test, it something you learn for life.”
She is a smart, literate, educated Black woman, a force overlooked, shunned, disregarded because, well, she is a smart, literate and educated black woman. She is loath to say a bad word about anyone or anything; instead she gets smarter, pursues an education of truth as weapon and tool to heal the world and ourselves. We all control how we receive negativity. It’s a math problem, she explains, neutralize the negative with the positive. Sounds so easy.
And she heals, daily. She says she has “experienced heartbreak and sexual violation from past lovers, betrayal and mental abuse from supposed mentors and friends, and ongoing systemic anti-Black racism, sexism and anti-intellectualism. There are too many specific stories of system oppression to even begin to itemize them.”
She’ll talk of how manifestation of a better life is through story. Like how afro-Caribbean women authors wrote about how they’d like life to be, far beyond whatever hell they’re in. “It starts in the imagination. If you grow up thinking this is all I’m going to achieve, then your imagination is limited. Most often we aspire to things we can see. That’s why imagination is so important. Her imagination is what got her out of South Phoenix trappings.
Storytelling is a barometer. It shows us gaps in self-awareness, how others have overcome hardship, trauma. “Stories empower, and that can teach you. That can move you. That can define you. It comes back to education,” she says.
She talks about her former students and the relationships they formed, staying in touch with many. “They’re still my babies,” she says. She remembers one student she helped go from straight Fs to straight A's. “Unfortunately, she passed.” She pauses. “At least three of my former students have passed away. They’d stay in touch with me until they died. Yes, I’ve been to funerals, weddings, baby showers.” She has even supported former students financially.
Now, collaborating with schools that align with her teaching philosophy. She is writing children’s books for kids and parents. Her goal is to build an international school network where travel is key — visiting and staying in three countries each year, learning in transdisciplinary ways. “If we went to Egypt, we’d learn in the context of that place. In four years, you’d have lived in 12 different countries.”
Dr. Blaché has grown into her name, shaping it with strength and resilience, much like the old oaks of shelter and resistance.
