Brian Lozenski

Macalester College · Department of Educational Studies

Drawing from the histories of nonformal Black education, (Pp)an-Africanist scholarship, and critical qualitative research, this participatory ethnographic study documents an organic conception of public space where Black people, many of whom have been disaffected by traditional public schools, come to teach and learn with each other. The article ou...

Practitioners and scholars have argued that youth participatory action research (YPAR) challenges systemic injustice in education, as youth and adults research mechanisms of oppression and propose recommendations. However, oftentimes YPAR does not lead to new policies, as institutional decision-makers ignore youth’s moral pleas and empirical eviden...

In this article the authors make an argument for a critical race media literacy that is attuned to the ways in which popular media are used to adhere media consumers to a taken for granted US national identity. Using the concept of “black narrative commodities”, the article suggests that black pain and/or black visibility become filters through whi...

This article explores the outcomes of using participatory action research with youth (YPAR) as an entry point into Africana Studies. The author draws from empirical research and anecdotal narratives to document a program where youth of African descent in the US engage in Ethnic Studies through the lens of action research. Beginning with a tracing o...

In this essay, Brian D. Lozenski explores why Gloria Ladson-Billings's 2006 pronouncement of the nation's “education debt,” as opposed to “achievement gap,” has not gained traction in the national discourse around educational disparity. He contends that education debt is a more nuanced, historically based, and generative framing of racialized educa...

This article examines the interactions between a collective of self-described “African American,” “multiracial,” and “African immigrant” high school youth researchers, and two African American community elders. Drawing from a year-long critical ethnographic study of the youth research collective, the author documents how pedagogies of Black eldersh...

The purpose of this session is to present new research on the burgeoning discussion of reframing educational spaces to challenge white supremacist structures and empower African American students. Typically, educational research on African American students focuses on the “achievement gap” and other deficit modeling to describe and explain how stud...

This volume provides a concentrated and powerful dialogue about the nexus between schools, prisons, and the free-market economy whereby youth are on fast tracks from schools to prisons. Written by leading and emerging academics in the field, the chapters in this collection challenge readers to contemplate the myth of post-raciality and the connecti...

Knowledges from academic and professional research-based institutions have long been valued over the organic intellectualism of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. In contrast, participatory action research (PAR) projects are collective investigations that rely on indigenous knowledge, combined with the desire to take...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show the viewpoint of two youth artists, researchers and activists who use spoken word and graphic arts to represent their research. Design/methodology/approach As a bilingual Spanish-speaking Latina and a young Black woman, the authors use artistic expression as a way to voice themselves and to give voice t...

This chapter attempts to make meaning of the intersections of media representations, their consequential narratives, and the political economy of the commodification of Black imagery. Often the psychological impact of media (Ball, 2011 b; Squires, 2009) is separated from the political and economic material realities of communities facing cyclical o...

This article illuminates the ways in which resistant youth challenge attempts toward cultural homogenization within public school systems. We trace how youth from historical and lived traumatic experiences such as African American, Native American, and youth with histories of domestic violence, navigate the dominant narrative of pity and punishment...

As she struggled to take the larger than average step up to the makeshift stage causing her skirt to rise off the floor, the eyes were upon her. As she collected herself and looked at the familiar faces in the brightly colored room, the eyes were upon her. Poem in hand, she prepared to speak.

In this article we first trace the history of “management,” particularly in the United States, from the plantation to the factory to the corporation, with the intention of understanding and contextualizing “classroom management” in today‘s educational lexicon. To do so, we look at the intertwining history of racial knowledge and the management of e...

This study illustrates the ways in which the practices of two instructors in an arts-based, after-school literacy program serving Somali youth provide insights for teaching urban immigrant students. It draws on a qualitative self-study that examines the experiences and practices of the researchers in the development and implementation of a program...