CHAPTER ONE
HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY COUNTERING SYSTEMIC RACISM:
Reflexive Positionality about Black Girlsâ Experiences of School Discipline
SHERON FRASER-BURGESS, KIESHA WARREN-GORDON, MARIA HERNĂNDEZ FINCH, & MARIA B. SCIUCHETTI BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
HIGHER EDUCATION FACULTY PREPARE teachers, counselors, and other practitioners for professional work in Kâ12 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 âdemocratic, critical, socially responsible employees,â 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 facultyâs role in promoting equity in the context of institutional responses to Black girls in Kâ12 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 Kâ12 population that they serve as an end goal. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics:
This disparity exposes areas where social class, race, and gender identities can hinder higher education facultyâs nuanced understanding of the Kâ12 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 Morrisâs (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 universityâs 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 memberâs 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 âpushed outâ 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 principalâs 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 Morrisâs 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 participantsâ 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 girlsâ 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 Morrisâs 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 âpushed-outâ Black girls whom Morris profiled. Although there were individual convergences of identificationâfor example, with racism, female voicelessness, and body stigmatizationâno 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 girlsâ 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 oneâs 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 âmeans to make sense of an experienceâŠmake an interpretation of it. When we subsequently use this interpretation to guide decision-making or action, then making meaning becomes learningâ (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 MartĂn Alcoff (1995), who introduced the concept in relation to the theorizing of feminine gender identity,
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 âthat where you stand in relation to others shapes what you see and understandâ (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, oneâs 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 girlâs 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:
Reflexivity involves capturing the grounds of oneâs beliefs in self-assessment. One limitation of reflexivity in the literature is that it does not acknowledge the social context and oneâs 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 oneâs being embedded in social context. Using positionality as a reflective tool for self-assessment can be a critically constructive interpretation of oneâs 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 Morrisâs (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 âpushed outâ 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 oneâs 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 oneâs 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-Ă -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.
âąHow 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?
âąHow 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]?
âąIs 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?
âąHow does your positionality (in the relevant forms) relate to or inhibit âcentering Black girlsâ in your pedagogy and practice?
In each case, participants were urged to complicate their self-appraisal vis-Ă -vis positionality.
The collaborative product would collectively represent a multi-perspectival experience of engaging with Black girlâs 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 500â1,000 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 âto alter perceptions of reality, to change minds, and to influence choices of actionâ (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 âspecialized ideas about community and social issuesâ 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...