Making Sense of Race in Education

Practices for Change in Difficult Times

Jessica A. Heybach, Sheron Fraser-Burgess

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781975501914
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

A 2021 AESA Critics' Choice Award Winner
A 2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner Making Sense of Race in Education: Practices for Change in Difficult Times takes a fresh look at the perennial issue of race in American schools. How do educators, in all settings, confront the issue of race with students and colleagues, given the contemporary backdrop of social movements for racial justice and change? How do educators affect change within their everyday classroom practices without fostering further alienation and discord? Although much has already been written about race and racism in school, this book addresses racial incidents directly and offers practical insights into how P-20 educators can transform these events alongside students and colleagues. Each chapter provides detailed analysis of curriculum, instruction, practices and pedagogical strategies for addressing race while at the same time wrestling with theoretical conceptions of race, justice, and fairness. Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations of Education | Sociology of Education | Higher Education | Multicultural Education | Cultural Studies in Education | Schools and Society

CHAPTER ONE

HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY COUNTERING SYSTEMIC RACISM:

Reflexive Positionality about Black Girls’ Experiences of School Discipline

SHERON FRASER-BURGESS, KIESHA WARREN-GORDON, MARIA HERNÁNDEZ FINCH, & MARIA B. SCIUCHETTI BALL STATE UNIVERSITY

HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY PREPARE teachers, counselors, and other practitioners for professional work in K–12 schools. Within this function, the structural factors that perpetuate educational inequality are prominent research areas in the academy (Doyle, 2007; Giroux & Giroux, 2004). For example, teacher education commonly addresses opportunity gaps along the lines of race and socioeconomic status, for which it must prepare its candidates to advance positive social change (Howard, 2010). With the goal of cultivating “democratic, critical, socially responsible employees,” there is an important role for higher education faculty to play in advancing K-12 education that is socially just (Boyles, 2007, p. 576).

The focus of this chapter is making meaning of the faculty’s role in promoting equity in the context of institutional responses to Black girls in K–12 education. Despite having such potential for positive influence, the demographics of the primarily Anglo American and middle-class status of higher education faculty and persons preparing to become academics varies dramatically from the K–12 population that they serve as an end goal. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics:

In fall 2015, of all full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 42 percent were White males, 35 percent were White females, 6 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, 4 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females, 3 percent each were Black females and Black males, and 2 percent each were Hispanic males and Hispanic females. (McFarland et al., 2017, p. 2)

This disparity exposes areas where social class, race, and gender identities can hinder higher education faculty’s nuanced understanding of the K–12 environment. This chapter addresses the racialized implementation of discipline policies as an exemplar.

Background

In 2017, a group of faculty and doctoral students at a Midwestern university participated in a book study on Morris’s (2016) Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. Morris centered the plight of young Black girls who confront excessively punitive policies and practices that schools implement in racialized ways. Initiated by an educational psychology department faculty member from the university’s Teachers College, the eventual all-female group was disciplinarily diverse, coming from academic backgrounds that include special education, educational psychology, educational studies, and criminology. There was also ethnic and racial diversity among the group, which consisted of persons who identified as Black/African-American, Latinx and Anglo American. In the initial phase, one of the participants was also visually impaired and another was blind.

In each member’s professional role, she regularly encountered practitioners and staff who work with Black girls who experienced heavy-handed discipline (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nada, 2016). These practices included frequent in-school and out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and being “pushed out” into the juvenile justice system early in their schooling. For example, the educational psychologists encountered girls who were systematically tested and placed into special education categories; for the counseling psychologists, their practicing school counselors shared concerns regarding the dire prospects that the girls had for post-secondary education because of their early encounters with the juvenile justice system. Education professors glimpsed the precursors of this pathway in Black and female first- and second-graders whom teachers routinely identified as problem students and sent out into the hallway or to the principal’s office. The criminologist in the group, who was an expert in female victimology, underscored the established link between life outcomes of abuse and the early patterns that the higher education faculty observed and that were also described in Morris’s work.

In the course of a spring semester, summer, and a fall semester of a calendar year, the group of faculty met monthly. Different members voluntarily facilitated one-hour meetings that corresponded roughly to each chapter of the text. In the reflection modality, discussion prompts typically encouraged participants to relate their lived experiences to the girls and the stories that Morris narrated. The disparity between the faculty participants’ background and that of the girls was evident in terms of socioeconomic status, race, and exposure to risk factors (Crenshaw et al., 2016). Throughout the duration of the book study, there was an ongoing effort to engage with the text from various vantage points and conceptual frameworks. These perspectives included interpreting the text discursively in terms of critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 2005; Howard & Navarro, 2016), identifying with the girls’ gender oppression and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) and applying the therapeutic social justice lens in order to consider possible kinds of intervention (Goodman et al., 2004).

Rationale

The collaborative narrative research that evolved into this chapter emerged out of the evident dissonance (Festinger, 1985) arising from the disparity of lived experiences between the faculty and the Black girls in Morris’s work. There was a significant gulf in cultural horizons that challenged the way that the faculty participants were making meaning of the text (Alcoff, 2006). Problematically, it was more likely than not that the members of the university study group could not relate substantially to the “pushed-out” Black girls whom Morris profiled. Although there were individual convergences of identification—for example, with racism, female voicelessness, and body stigmatization—no member of the group had ever experienced the degree of surveillance, tracking, and criminalization described in the work.

An additional consideration motivating this chapter was the professional and moral imperative of social justice. Everyone in the group expressed deep compassion for the girls’ condition, but in order to be agents of social change, activists need to add agency to sympathy (Freire, 1972). This critical reflection is essential to social justice praxis in one’s field (Freire, McLaren & Giroux, 1988). The implicit research question became the following: In the face of the systemic criminalization of young Black girls that Morris (2016) chronicles and the critical distance engendered by divergent lived experiences, how do higher education faculty make meaning of their professional role in actuating the social justice ideal?

Theoretical Framework

According to Mezirow (1990), to make meaning “means to make sense of an experience…make an interpretation of it. When we subsequently use this interpretation to guide decision-making or action, then making meaning becomes learning” (p. 2). To conceptualize the myriad perspectives that the participants brought to the reflection and its meaning for their professional lives, the general construct of positionality was invoked. It is an interpretive framework with hermeneutic and discursive conceptualizations. Interpretatively, positionality acknowledges the contextual and partial nature of knowledge garnered through lived experiences and identification with the dominant or othered social group (Alcoff, 1988, 2006; Maher & Tetreault, 1993). According to Linda Martín Alcoff (1995), who introduced the concept in relation to the theorizing of feminine gender identity,

The concept of positionality includes two points: first, as already stated, that the concept of woman is a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving) context; but, second, that the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized (rather than transcended) as a location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning is constructed, rather than simply the place where a meaning can be discovered (the meaning of femaleness). (p. 454)

In this reading, gender is the embodiment of an advantageous sociocultural location that can generate beliefs, shape values, and inform judgments by its very status in relation to the broader society. It is an awareness that identifying with the social marker (e.g., race, social class, gender, LGBTQ+) provides a site for meaning-making and instantiation of a form of subjectivity as a worthwhile and important ontological stance for being in the world.

Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) explain positionality as recognizing “that where you stand in relation to others shapes what you see and understand” (p. 15). This relative social standing can correlate with identification with a dominant or subordinate group respectively, and with the power to control the prevailing narrative and dictate the institutional culture. Conversely, one can be found to be lacking this status or be dominated by persons who possess such influence (p. 73). In this sense, one’s positionality can convey forms of privilege or the lack thereof.

This first-person inquiry draws on these conceptions of positionality to explore faculty interpretation of Black girl’s experiences and its implications for preparation of educational practitioners. To activate the positional analysis, the study appealed to reflexivity as a distinct construct apart from reflection. Mezirow (1990) defines reflective action, or reflexivity, as being different from merely being thoughtful or reflective. Rather:

Reflective action, understood as action predicated on a critical assessment of assumptions, may also be an integral part of decision making. Thoughtful action is reflexive but is not the same thing as acting reflectively to critically examine the justification for one’s beliefs. Reflection in thoughtful action involves a pause to reassess by asking: What am I doing wrong? The pause may be only a split second in the decision-making process. Reflection may thus be integral to deciding how best to perform immediately; reflection becomes an integral element of thoughtful action. (Mezirow, 1990, p. 6)

Reflexivity involves capturing the grounds of one’s beliefs in self-assessment. One limitation of reflexivity in the literature is that it does not acknowledge the social context and one’s embeddedness in it as a consideration in the self-examination heuristic. Even critical reflection can fail to consider the influence that personal and cultural value systems have on reasoning about beliefs and actions (Nairn, et al., 2012)

When reflexivity is combined with imputing positionality it understands reflective action as originating from one’s being embedded in social context. Using positionality as a reflective tool for self-assessment can be a critically constructive interpretation of one’s situated racial, social, and gender identification. This criticality of critical positionality relates to self-reflecting on identity aspects as realized in somatic engagement with the world and its sources of power, dominance, and oppression. As a socially constructed stance, critical positionality both utilizes identity as a source of meaning and acknowledges the discursive dominance of prevailing cultural norms, their shaping of institutional policy and practices, and their judgments and beliefs. It is an evaluative self-examination in regard to holding beliefs characteristic of systems of dominance, oppression, or sub-ordinance intersubjectively in light of existent moral, ethical, and democratic norms of social justice.

Research Reflection: Prompting Critical Positionality

Two Black faculty members who were scheduled to facilitate the final chapter discussion opted to provoke reflexive positionality using Morris’s (2016) final chapter. An email was sent to all of the faculty participants on the listserv (approximately 22 people) inviting them to read the Maher and Tetreault (1993) piece on positionality as the reflective prompt. Eight group members attended the final book meeting, including three Black faculty, two persons who identified as LatinX and three as Anglo American. Seven were university faculty members.

During the meeting, they were invited to complete a simple descriptive identity inventory about the primary sources of their group identification as a lens through which they understood the condition and plight of the “pushed out” Black girls. After the meeting, everyone was invited to submit a structured reflection in response to a series of questions (see below) as one way of getting outside one’s embeddedness in interlocking systems of domination of race, socioeconomic status, and so forth (hooks, 1994).

This reflexive positional piece was intended to articulate the conscious dissonance that gaps in lived experience can represent as a source of tension along the lines of one’s sources of identification and belonging (Fraser-Burgess, 2018). The call for submissions encouraged persons completing the reflection to share the ways in which they wrestle alternately with detachment and proximity in their teaching and mentoring of educational practitioners vis-à-vis the criminalization of young Black girls. In this vein, they were asked to address the questions below, which constituted the structuring of critical positionality. Each question probed the positional stance by urging its interpretation in light of particular identity and structural considerations. Some of these factors pertain to the intersectional social status of the girls, and others query the theory-to-practice implications.

•How does positionality, insofar as it does, inform and address your assumptions about the worthiness of young Black girls for interventions, or your qualifications to do so?

•How does or can your positionality differentially inform the meaning of the love and concern that you bring to these relationships [with practitioners who work with Black girls]?

•Is positionality a part of the reasoning that guides your thinking about the prospects for having an impact on the success or failure of Black girls being tracked in this way?

•How does your positionality (in the relevant forms) relate to or inhibit “centering Black girls” in your pedagogy and practice?

In each case, participants were urged to complicate their self-appraisal vis-à-vis positionality.

The collaborative product would collectively represent a multi-perspectival experience of engaging with Black girl’s stories, plight and struggles, where the claim to identifying with them is merely preliminary. The reflection could take any form (narrative, expository, prose, dialogue, etc.). The length was to be 500–1,000 words, providing basic demographic information, including background on the specific discipline in which one teaches and the kind of practitioners one is preparing.

Telling their story in this way employs a methodology of narrative engagement that is counter to prevalent discourses. Goodall (2010) argues that the power of narrative is “to alter perceptions of reality, to change minds, and to influence choices of action” (p. 28). As a form of research, it is an attempt to challenge established discourses of deficiency that have been reified into oppressive systemic practices. Such a counter narrative research methodology, in contrast to logo-centric research frames, engages in storytelling that promotes “specialized ideas about community and social issues” that depart from the established frameworks (Ginwright, 2002, p. 550).

Research Reflections

In addition to the two Black facilitators, two other faculty members submitted reflections over a six-month period. Each of the participants are the co-authors of this chapter. Their reflections are provided verbatim below.

Sheron

I am a woman of the twentieth century African Diaspora. Of Caribbean extraction, commonwealth colonized mentality characterized my formative years of schooling on the Jamaican island. In my young consciousness then, the ideology of Eurocentric superiority co-existed with...