No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
‘Losing an arm’: schooling as a site of black suffering
Abstract
Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these black subjects reflect on the historical trajectory of racial desegregation policies and practices, they offer us a unique view of the confluence of racial melancholia, a heavy, deeply-felt awareness of the history and persistence of racial disregard and subjugation, and school malaise, a form of what Pierre Bourdieu has called la petite misère, or ordinary suffering. The author’s analysis of these narratives highlights how these school and community leaders reflect on the meaning of black suffering in schools, what they understand as the source of that suffering, and how they imagine that suffering might be alleviated. The article concludes with recommendations for research at the nexus of race, education and social suffering.
... The lack of a critical perspective in the research process makes the notion of evidence-based practices highly problematic. As previously stated, data is often used to justify racist policies and practices in K-12 settings, to pathologize Black and brown students and perpetually situate them as intellectually inferior (Dumas, 2014(Dumas, , 2016Williams et al., 2020). Deficit perspectives create vicious research and practice cycles that have been prevalent in education and school counseling scholarship for decades (Bryan et al., 2020;Griffin et al., 2021;Williams & Greenleaf, 2012). ...
... Several scholars interpret gaps in performance between students of color and their peers as achievement gaps whereby the primary solution involves: (a) passively highlighting racist policies that fail students, (b) heavily focusing on individual student development (i.e., implementing practices to socialize students into a system of meritocracy), and (c) emphasizing the need to help Black and brown students catch up, instead of actively dismantling the racist policies maintaining the cycle of harm (ASCA, 2021;Holcomb-McCoy, 2021;Mullen et al., 2019). On the surface, the "catch up" cycle presents as helpful, but it perpetuates the notion that Black and brown students are innately inferior intellectually, causing psychological strain for those affected (Dumas, 2014(Dumas, , 2016Porter & Byrd, 2021;Strayhorn, 2009), and devaluing the strengths and intelligences Black and brown students possess (Washington, 2021;Williams & Portman, 2014). ...
It is important for school counselors to learn more about antiracism and to incorporate antiracist concepts into their practice more consistently ( Holcomb-McCoy, 2021 ; Mayes & Byrd, 2022 ; Stickl Haugen et al., 2022 ). Operating from a critical political standpoint perspective ( Cushman, 1995 ; Prilleltensky, 1994 ), namely, critical race theory (CRT), we offer a conceptual framework for helping school counselors and counselor educators develop an antiracist lens that guides and informs their research agendas and research-informed practices.
... School properties have become key sites of contestation in the politics of place and community change (Bierbaum 2021a). School closures, sales, and reuse can effectively erase communities' multigenerational schooling experiences (Khalifa et al. 2014) and reinforce social suffering in public schools and neighborhoods (Dumas 2014). These experiences extend beyond the walls of the school building to the broader neighborhood and demonstrate how maintaining linkages to the past is critical to making sense of the future (Bierbaum 2021b). ...
From 2007 to 2019, over 650 public schools closed in Puerto Rico. School closures not only affect students and teachers; these spaces serve as anchor institutions providing social infrastructure for the sustained health of communities. While closed schools remove a critical community asset, these vacant buildings provide adaptive reuse opportunities for alternative social infrastructure and community resources. This article explores how abandoned schools are repurposed in Puerto Rico, focusing on “rescued schools”—that is, grassroots, voluntary initiatives that repurpose schools to support community development. Through a multi-method approach, we categorized and mapped 161 repurposed schools throughout Puerto Rico—38 were rescued schools—and conducted twelve interviews and two focus groups on rescued school initiatives. Our results describe how abandoned schools offer a galvanizing opportunity for motivated community members to meet emerging, localized needs, and the challenges in gaining school ownership and attracting sustained financial and volunteer support, the lack of which impedes their potential impact. We demonstrate how rescued schools embody alternative regional political visions within Puerto Rico and argue that government authorities can minimize the harm from school closures by forging new partnerships between community-based organizations, municipal governments, and other supportive actors to repurpose schools and reproduce their role as community anchor institutions.
... Black students have always found ways to assert their humanity sonically, often loudly. The main problem that many Black students face in schools today is not so much a lack of voice but that their teachers often mis-hear them and take actions that legitimize and perpetuate Black suffering in everyday school life (Dumas, 2014). Following Rath (2003), I contend that Black students' loudness carries a power that their white, female, middle-class teachers apprehend but often do not fully comprehend. ...
... Anti-Blackness is deeply rooted in the history of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era and continues to dehumanize and demonize Black students (e.g., criminalization through denial of innocent childhood; Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and perpetuate "Black suffering" (Dumas, 2014) While schools are often framed as race-neutral spaces, ideological constructions of Blackness (e.g., aggressive, violent) mediate teachers' everyday interpretations, actions, and interactions that profoundly impact Black students' academic access and engagement (Howard, 2014). Here, Yadira's narrative presents how pervasive racial ideology creates a toxic environment in which Black students with and without disabilities are susceptible to harsh punishment. ...
... Anti-Blackness is deeply rooted in the history of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era and continues to dehumanize and demonize Black students (e.g., criminalization through denial of innocent childhood; Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and perpetuate "Black suffering" (Dumas, 2014) While schools are often framed as race-neutral spaces, ideological constructions of Blackness (e.g., aggressive, violent) mediate teachers' everyday interpretations, actions, and interactions that profoundly impact Black students' academic access and engagement (Howard, 2014). Here, Yadira's narrative presents how pervasive racial ideology creates a toxic environment in which Black students with and without disabilities are susceptible to harsh punishment. ...
In U.S. school systems, anti-Blackness and ableism are organizing
principles that constitute a system of exclusion through
which to dismiss complex intersectional identities of Black,
Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students with and
without disabilities. Racialized outcome disparities in the identification
of disability and school disciplinary actions are
material consequences of the historically sedimented White
and ableist legacy that pathologizes and criminalizes BIPOC
students. To dismantle the current schooling system that perpetuates
racial stratification and injustice, educational scholars
and practitioners have collectively dreamed of learning as fugitive
action in which they restore human dignity of BIPOC students
and communities and envision alternative futures with
them. Learning as fugitive action is a subversive approach
that not only unveils the oppressive systems of schooling but
also restructures them to achieve racial equity and disability
justice. As part of the effort to facilitate collective fugitive
learning at school, a community-driven systemic design intervention
called Learning Lab was developed. Within the
Learning Lab, school community members, particularly those
from historically marginalized communities, collaborate to
imagine possible realities and design a new support system
accordingly. Through this collective fugitive learning, they
actively address the disproportionality of their BIPOC youth in
special education placements and school disciplinary outcomes.
The aim of this essay is to explore the potential of
Learning Lab as a space for fugitive future-making and to
demonstrate how it can be used to dismantle oppressive
structures and design transformative school systems.
... The anti-racist pedagogue is a cartographer. Equipped with method, content, style, and technique as tools of the trade, he draws freedom routes that divert from Black suffering in schooling (Dumas, 2014). Jamal fashions his pedagogy from knowledge rooted in (his) Blackness and his body. ...
In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue’s classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness.
... Nevertheless, it is our belief that resiliency can displace other pertinent issues such as depression and racial grief from occurring. Racial grief represents a normative and adaptive coping response to living in an anti-Black, racist society (Dumas, 2014;Leath et al., 2022). In the current study, racial grief refers to an individual's emotional and physical responses to loss during the pandemic that saw a disproportionate death toll within Black communities. ...
Despite the national impact on students due to COVID-19, for Black students living in the state of Florida, the disruption of their social, emotional, psychological, and academic normalcy was complicated further. At the height of the pandemic, Florida consistently ranked in the top three states in the U.S. for total COVID-19 cases; moreover, even before the onset of COVID-19, over 33% of Black youth under the age of 18 in the state (the highest for any group in Florida) had faced trauma, also known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Black Floridian youth with ACEs residing in urban-situated neighborhoods have been overwhelmed by COVID-19. Yet little is known about Black youth and their experiences with COVID-19 beyond average achievement on national assessments. Particularly, we do not understand how Black youth made meaning of what was (and still is) transpiring in their communities with COVID-19 and how they made meaning of their schooling, amid a pandemic. Nor do we understand how the pandemic will affect the educational futures of Black youth. The salient goals of this study were to (a) leverage youth voice amid COVID-19 to add to the discourse about re-envisioning the educational futures of Black students within schools to inform educators and school districts in supporting an educational environment that is prepared to address the post-traumatic growth of students, and (b) promote micro-level policies in schools that enhance equitable educational and mental health practices among youth.
... Before entering the teaching profession, or even moving to Chicago, Doc Hamberlin was developing an analysis of oppression and liberation. He was coming to know the ways that anti-Black violence (Dumas, 2014;Grant et al., 2020;Jung & Vargas, 2021) existed in the concrete structures of society and the ways that social movements reimagined and transformed those limitations. ...
In 1996, Dr. Timuel D. Black collected and archived 36 oral histories with alumni and current students and staff from DuSable and Phillips high schools, Chicago’s first two all-Black high schools. Several of those interviews were with alumni who returned to their alma mater as teachers. In this study, I drew on analyses of the interview transcripts collected by Dr. Black and other primary source data to piece together narratives detailing the socio-political forces that influenced the educational praxes of three Black teachers at DuSable and Phillips High Schools. As the findings of the study detail, each of the teachers developed socio-political consciousness prior to entering the teaching profession and during their professional careers. Their relationships to the moments and movements that shaped Black life in Chicago and elsewhere influenced the pedagogical and curricular conditions they attempted to create in their classrooms. As a result of their socio-political analyses each teacher in this study constructed educational spaces in their schools for Black students to reimagine and actualize more just futures. By understanding the consciousness of Black teachers of the past—returning to the source—contemporary Black teachers may be better equipped to navigate the complexities of their roles in schools today.
... BlackCrit causes us to foreground moments of Black educational resistance and liberation. For us, this entails locating the moments of how systemic antiblackness and education policy merge to make schools sites of Black suffering (Dumas, 2014), and how Black folx have radically reimagined and created Black futures that move beyond antiblackness (Coles, 2020). We examine how education policy operationalized antiblackness and deficit frames to ensure Black dehumanization. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to analyze the first major federal education policy, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and the most recent federal policy, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, through a Black critical theory (BlackCrit) lens to understand better how these educational policies have served as antiblack projects. Furthermore, this study locates examples of educational Freedom Dreams in the past and present to imagine new possibilities in Black education.
Design/methodology/approach
By analyzing education policy documents and history through BlackCrit methods, the authors expose how education policy is inherently an antiblack project. Freedom Dreams catalyze possibilities for future education.
Findings
The data confirms that while these policies purport equity and accountability in education, they, in practice, exacerbate antiblackness through inequitably mandated standardized testing, distributed funding and policed schooling.
Originality/value
This paper applies BlackCrit analysis of education policy to reimagine Black educational possibilities.
... While existing scholarship has characterized schools as sites of suffering for Black students (Dumas, 2014), the parents featured in this study collectively contend that schools also operate as a source of trauma for families of children with disabilities. Although whiteness and affluence provide access to privileges in American society, these properties did not protect families of children with disabilities from the harm associated with out-of-school suspension, seclusion, and restraint. ...
... This is particularly so for educators, regardless of racial status, because of the pervasive nature of the racial character of the school, which is designed to systematically privilege White worldview under the notion of racial neutrality or colorblindness (Feagin, 2020;Lipman, 1997;Lewis & Diamond, 2015;Matias & Rucker, 2018). As the racial character of the school orients educators and school personnel to implement racialized norms related to Whiteness, some scholars have argued that the school becomes a risk context for students of color, especially African American students (Dumas, 2014;Lipman, 2013;Sankofa et al., 2023). Teacherstudent interaction may be an important proximal context where students may perceive their racial otherness that shapes their schooling experiences and outcomes (Banerjee et al., 2018;Verkuyten et al., 2019). ...
This study uses latent transitional analysis to examine the longitudinal association between racial discrimination and academic self-efficacy in teacher–student interactions. Two levels of teacher–student interactions are examined: low-risk, in which students perceive no probability of racial discrimination, and high-risk, in which students perceive probability of racial discrimination. Participants were drawn from the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study ( N = 574: 202 White and 372 Black, mean age = 13.64 [ SD = .42]). Findings revealed that students perceiving no racial discrimination, regardless of sociodemographic factors, showed consistently strong positive academic self-efficacy as they transitioned from lower to higher grade levels compared with those perceiving racial discrimination. Accounting for racial discrimination, there were no differences in academic self-efficacy beliefs between Black and White students. Students’ perceived racial discrimination in teacher–student interactions impacted negatively on academic self-efficacy.
... According to Dancy, Edwards, and Davis (2018), anti-Blackness is reproduced in institutions that treat the Black body as property. BlackCrit helps analyze how social and education policies legitimize violence and oppression against Black children in the school system (Dumas, 2014). And finally, as noted by Coles and Powell (2020), BlackCrit serves "to make sense of school suspensions of Black youth in the context of specific violence against Black bodies through U.S. history" (p. ...
... For many Black students, schools are sites of terror (ross, 2020b), spirit-murdering (Hines & Wilmot, 2018;Love, 2019), suffering (Dumas, 2014), violence (Boutte & Bryan, 2021;Mustaffa, 2017), criminalization (Basile, 2021), and psychological torment (Dancy et al., 2018). Antiblackness in the form of dehumanization and ontological disregard is perhaps most glaringly evident in the relentless policing and disciplining of Black youth in schools. ...
In this article, we argue for the value of theorizing antiblackness to educational justice efforts, particularly those aimed at ensuring Black students succeed and thrive in schools. We first define antiblackness and describe how a frame of antiblackness can help to illuminate ongoing dehumanization and violence done to Black people in schools and society. We explain how antiblackness manifests in education before describing the potential of three strategies for dismantling antiblackness: abolishing, renarrativizing, and revaluing. Ultimately, we argue that antiblackness theorizing does critical work that, in combination with other traditions in antiracist scholarship and activism, can contribute to Black liberation and racial justice through education.
... As sites of intercommunity interaction and contact with the state, public schools play a vital role in supporting or marginalizing immigrant students and families (Patel, 2013;Portes & Rumbaut, 2006;Suárez-Orozco et al., 2008). While schools are, in theory, sites of caring for all (Noddings, 2013), in practice they are often places that reproduce and reinforce subjugation (Dumas, 2014). Minoritized students and families often learn that their chances of receiving (sometimes inauthentic, shallow, or irrelevant) care are contingent upon being able to perform practices accepted by the dominant culture and that repress their authentic ways of being (Antrop-González & De Jesus, 2006;DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014;Duncan-Andrade, 2009;Valenzuela, 1999). ...
All human beings need care, including professional caregivers such as educators. What happens when a global crisis places care providers; own care needs in conflict with their duty and desire to provide care? In this article, we apply care ethics to a school district's decisions regarding newcomer English learners (ELs) and their educators during the 2020-2021 academic year. Drawing on qualitative case study data from a larger multi-district, multi-state study, we examine how educators and administrators in a small urban school district in New England make sense of students' and educators' sometimes conflicting care needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that even school districts with clear commitments to equity and justice have their efforts severely limited by state and federal leadership's neglect of care/essential workers, youth, and marginalized groups. To end the ongoing pandemic and prevent future harm, we recommend that educational and political leaders prioritize human needs and relationships through a move towards "universal care" (Chatzidakis et al., 2020).
... al, 2000); 6) and develop physiological disruption and symptoms of racial battle fatigue (Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007). High-achieving members of our communities are also: 7) less likely to graduate from all post-secondary education (Dumas, 2014); 8) less likely to obtain gainful employment after college (Smith & Stovall, 2008); 9) tend to lose financial gain obtained by their parents (Chetty et al., 2018); 10) are just as likely to experience incarceration as poor whites (Chetty et. al, 2018); 11) have a harder time evaluating Black people as positive on the Implicit Attitude Test (Dovidio et. ...
As Black people, our everyday existence invites us to remember that anti-blackness is the foundation of modern civilization and has metastasized throughout every construction of civil society (Sharpe, 2016). Our existence within schools unveils them as self-replicating enclosures spawned by the plantation to undermine Black life (Sojoyner, 2017). In this paper, we use an Apocalyptic Educational framework (Marie & Watson, 2020) to share research on the biological (telomere) impact of schooling and anti-blackness. We aim to distinguish education from schooling and disrupt normative beliefs that more Black children accessing better schools will lead to their social, economic, and physiological wellness.
This chapter addresses the deficit-laden narratives about Black boys by offering a dramatic alternative, that is, a paradigm shift to recognize and value the funds of knowledge of Black boys, and in doing so, redefine the constructs of success for Black boys. As a starting point, the author contends that researchers, teachers, school and district administrators, and policymakers must unequivocally reject and rebuke current deficit-based narratives about Black boys. These false narratives, which are harmful to Black boys, make it impossible for them ever to find success or be viewed as successful in K-12 education. A critical paradigm was selected as most appropriate. Using the African American Male Theory as well as an Anti-Deficit Framework, this chapter will highlight the funds of knowledge of Black boys to demonstrate counter-stories of their learning and successes, and in doing so, not only rewrite the deficit narratives of Black boys, but also broaden academia's perspective on how we define knowledge and whose knowledge counts.
Schools are sites of unfreedom. As such we engage in freedom dreaming and co-constituting of non-negotiables of an abolitionist teacher residency (ATR). This conceptual article asks: what non-negotiables are necessary when centering abolition in residency work? Our dream guides illustrate the need to draw on radical imaginations, freedom dreaming, abolitionism, and abolitionist education to dismantle caustic systems. An ATR must: (a) attune to their geo-socio-historical and political situatedness, (b) be democratic/participatory in nature, (c) commit to an onto-epistemological orientation rooted in critical theories and abolition, and (d) emphasize learning as liberation. We invite others into this “abolitionist turn” within residencies.
While the national media continues to highlight the tensions of cultural politics in education, there is a need for young people and educators to be equipped for the daunting local, national, and global challenges that mark their everyday lives. Many educators and young people alike are interested in engaging youth in civic reasoning and discourse that prepares them to meet those many challenges. This article highlights applications of civic reasoning and discourse in three contexts: a traditional high school social studies classroom, a hybrid school-community action project, and an out-of-school Youth Participatory Action Research program. We argue that these case studies show a path forward for developing students’ civic reasoning and discourse skills because the students turn toward and lean into what we define as moments of critical dissonance: in each case, the students and educators work together to engage, rather than avoid, complex sociopolitical realities, even while holding a variety of racial, ethnic, political, and cultural identities.
In this article, the authors utilize Miranda Fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice to reexamine racial inequities in public education through the lens of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by minoritized youth. Drawing on their lived experiences as BIPOC researchers and teacher educators, the authors delineate the concept of literacies of joy as a means to describe, document, and affirm minoritized youths’ creative resistance to the epistemic injustices inherent within oppressive educational systems and structures. These literacies of joy are defined as ways of being and knowing that enable BIPOC students and educators alike to reap, enact, and embody joy amid oppressive circumstances. By centering joy, we overtly link this work to expressions of mattering and survivance. By centering literacies, we call attention to the systematicity and grammar of these ways of mattering. Literacies of joy affirm and honor the profound creativity and ingenuity with which oppressed communities have carved out spaces of joy since time immemorial. To this end, this concept addresses a hermeneutical injustice of its own. The implications of these literacies of joy are discussed as means of anti-oppressive pathways to educational research and teaching.
Purpose
This review article offers a narrativized synthesis of my research over the past 15+ years with Vietnamese-speaking children based on data collected from individual bilingual and monolingual children in preschool and elementary schools.
Method
I begin with a positionality narrative to describe who I am in relation to the research conducted. I provide an overview of the research program including tool building and how my research with bilinguals in the United States led me to international collaborations in Vietnam.
Results
I present main findings from this body of work in three areas: typical bilingual development, reading performance in Vietnam, and characteristics of developmental language disorder in the Vietnamese language. Implications within each area are discussed in terms of clinical application and future research directions. Practitioners and researchers alike can freely access the Vietnamese assessment tools created and validated to date from our website, https://vietslp.sdsu.edu/ .
Conclusions
This research overview aims to offer clinicians and researchers the sociocultural context for understanding the relevance of this body of research. It also serves as an invitation for new generations of scholars, particularly scholars of color, to see their own unique positionings and perspectives as valuable and necessary for scientific innovation and progress.
Presentation Video
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23929491
Background/Context
The experiences of Black girls navigating elite, predominantly white independent schools remain underresearched in the academy despite this issue being integral in disciplines such as sociology, education, and African American studies. Within such institutions, Black girls must navigate the duality of their privilege in having access to the highest quality and resourced education with the marginality of being a demographic minority within a space controlled by cultural elites.
Purpose
This study investigates the experiences of Black girls in independent schools via the accounts of Black-woman-identifying alumni of such institutions. This study utilizes a Black feminist framework for understanding the often overlooked excess challenges that Black girls are forced to face.
Research Design
Through qualitative semi-structured, conversational interviews with 13 Black women graduates of 10 Mid-Atlantic and New England boarding and day schools, this study explores how the graduates reflect on their experiences navigating elite schooling during formative adolescent years, decision-making processes, and management of Black girl identities within the exceedingly white and wealthy context of independent schools.
Conclusions
Significant themes that emerged from the qualitative data generated by this study include feelings of rootlessness from Black and white communities, difficulty navigating a racialized and gendered social hierarchy, and heightened levels of social anxiety and self-consciousness about physical and ideological selves. Through a thematic retelling from those who have lived through the challenges and understand how they are presented in these contexts, the significance of this study’s exploration of Black girls in independent school is the (1) liberation of these historically marginalized voices and (2) potential to provide current school leaders a framework for how best to support their students.
Persistent racial disparities in students’ disciplinary outcomes have been one of the most concerning educational policy and equity topics for decades. Despite the hypervisibility of Black students in school discipline conversations, research and practice evade a focus on anti-Black racism. In this essay, we draw from Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) to present a theoretical framework that researchers and educational stakeholders can use to specify, study, and understand antiblackness in school discipline. We outline and discuss six interrelated theoretical constructs of the Antiblackness in School Discipline framework: (a) “Trading Away the Black,” (b) “Whites as Propertied,” (c) Intersecting Blackness, (d) Racial Neoliberalism, (e) La Petite Misère, and (f) Internalized Racism. Examples of studies providing empirical support for these theoretical tenets are also discussed, and suggestions for utilizing this framework in scholarship, policy, and practice are also offered.
In this essay, authors kihana miraya ross and Jarvis R. Givens make their case for a distinct field of education research—Black education studies, which builds on Black studies and education studies. They explore a key analytic in Black education studies, antiblackness, examining its early and more recent uses as an analytic in education research to forward a more holistic understanding of the concept. In doing so, they highlight the relationship between education as a social institution and the sustained manifestation of antiblackness. The authors conclude by considering how and why scholars might employ Black education studies to center Black life and living.
Introduction: Physical Literacy is a holistic
construct that provides information for policies
and practices in the areas of physical education,
sport and public health to promote more active,
healthy and sustainable lifestyles. In this paper we
present the initiatives for the development of PL in
Portugal, promoted by the team of the Faculty of
Human Motricity (FMH-UL).
Method: By considering diverse sources of
knowledge and information (e.g., scientific papers,
communications, didactic materials, books,
projects, courses, seminars) the authors examined
the work developed at FMH-UL through an
inductive analysis.
Results: Since 2016, the FMH-UL research group
has developed PhD projects (n = 3, one of them
concluded - Mota, 2022), participated in European
projects (e.g. PhyLit, PL4L, EUROPLIT), and the
implementation of national and international
scientific events. In research, relevant advances on
the definition and characterization of PA (Carl et
al., 2023; Martins et al., 2021) and the study of PA
assessment provided by the creation and validation
of the PPLA instrument (Mota et al., 2022, 2023)
stand out. There is a lack of studies on the
characterization of PL in the Portuguese
population and specific interventions to promote it.
In this regard, it stands out, a PhD work where an
intervention to promote PL in aquatic
environments is developed and evaluated (Carolo,
2022). It has been implemented in continuing
professional development initiatives and at the level
of initial and advanced training.
Conclusion: In sum, the study of AM in Portugal is
just emerging, but several strategies have been
implemented to promote its development. This
work may inspire action around PL to increase the
effectiveness of promoting healthy and sustainable
lifestyles.
Introduction: Inclusive education refers to the philosophy of supporting the educational needs of children with disabilities in mainstream school settings with their typically developing peers to ensure they all achieve the appropriate learning goals (Block & Obrusnikova, 2007). Attitudes towards students with disabilities (SWD) is a key factor to promote active participation of those with disability within Physical Education (PE) class (Hutzler et al., 2005), being gender and geographical contexts factors that can influence (Rojo-Ramos et al., 2022). However, the differences in attitudes towards peers with disabilities between different regions with their own education legislation have not yet been investigated. Methods: 3732 students (51.04% females and 48.95% males) from 40 secondary schools participated voluntarily in this study (3 schools in Extremadura, 4 in Ibiza, 26 in Madrid – Spanish regions- and 7 in Santiago de Chile) answering to the “Students' Attitudes Towards Integration in Physical Education” (CAIPER-S) questionnaire (Ocete et al., 2017). All students took part in the Inclusive Sport at School (ISS; Pérez- Tejero et al., 2013) educational program during the 2021-2022 academic year. Ethical approval was obtained through the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid before data collection. Descriptive analysis and validation process were conducted in the regions through exploratory-confirmatory factor analysis. Significance level p<0.05. Results: Differences between regions were found, Santiago presenting less values in all subescales (AG= 3.25±0.65, AS=2.76±0.62, y Overall=3.02±0.49), being different from Madrid (p=0.006; d=0.30), Ibiza (p=0.005; d=0.30) and Extremadura (p<0.001; d=0.57). For gender, females presented a more positive attitude in a General subscale (AG = p<.0001; d=0.89) while the male scores were higher in the Specific subscale and in the Overall (AS = p<.0001;d=0.24, Overall= p<.0001;d=0.37). No differences were found considering previous contact. Conclusions: regional differences appear when students’ attitudes towards inclusion in (PE) are assessed: possible limitations and suggestions for future applications are presented.
Purpose
This study aims to present radical abolition studies, which encourages us to (re)member that the abolition of institutions and systems is incomplete without the abolition of their attendant epistemes of domination. The authors draw on the etymology of the word radical to encourage abolitionist praxis to grab systemic harm at its epistemological roots. Within radical abolition studies, this study presents Black abolition theory, which aims to make explicit a theorization of Blackness and works to abolish the episteme of anti-Blackness.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper offers Black abolition theory within radical abolition studies to reground abolition in its Black theoretical roots and to interrogate the concept of anti-Blackness and other epistemes of domination in abolitionist study and practice. Using a close reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction , and subsequent books and articles in abolition studies and educational studies that reference it, the authors highlight Du Bois’ original conceptualization of abolitionism as an ultimate refutation of a racial-social order and anti-Blackness. The authors then put Michael Dumas and kihana ross’ theory of BlackCrit into conversation with abolitionist and educational theory to push forward Black abolition theory.
Findings
Radical abolition studies and its attendant strand of Black abolition theory presented in this paper encourages scholars and practitioners to go beyond the dismantling of current instantiations of systemic harm for Black and other minoritized people – such as the school as it currently operates – and encourages the questioning and dismantling of the epistemes of domination sitting at the foundation of these systems of harm.
Originality/value
Black abolition theory contextualizes abolition in education by rooting abolitionist educational praxis in Black lineages. More generally, radical abolition studies encourages further research, study and collaboration in partnership with others who have historically participated in the fight against being labeled as subhuman to upend all epistemes of domination.
Current conceptualizations of trauma-informed practice in urban education spaces fail to center the strengths of Black youth, nor do they interrogate the role of schools in causing trauma. In partnership with an elementary-aged participatory Student Advisory Board, this article explores the both/and of strengths and school-based trauma for these Black youth. Through narrative analysis coupled with student art and poetry, findings highlight the normative nature of Black brilliance (Gholson et al., 2012). Situating strengths and school-based trauma together promotes a more comprehensive view of trauma, especially as it relates to liberatory trauma-informed educational practice in urban contexts.
Anti-blackness precludes Black people from being viewed as rights-bearing individuals and justifies the degradation of Black people, Black history, and Black culture. In this conceptual article, we suggest that (1) anti-blackness is trauma-inducing, (2) schools are often the first sites where Black students encounter anti-blackness and subsequent trauma, (3) anti-black racial trauma deleteriously affects Black youth's holistic wellbeing. Moreover, we contend that schools’ writ-large and teacher education programs can play an important role in providing the knowledge, resources, and dispositions needed to train teachers to recognize the persistence of anti-blackness and play a pivotal role in ameliorating it.
Teachers, and teaching, are not supposed to be political. For years this mantra was said and believed to be true. Whenever political queations were encountered in the classroom, teachers, according to the white male patriarchy that shaped modern day schooling, were expected to push those questions aside and continue to teach the "content" dictated by the heteropatriarchal system of public schools. Inspired by Miss Alordayne Grotke's teaching from the Disney show Recess!, this autoethnographic work explores how and why I chose to practice being teacher as political. This article narrowly focuses on specific political choices made inside the classroom and debunks the myth that a teacher should be politically neutral in the classroom.
The St. Louis Voluntary Desegregation program, and its corollary, the Interdistrict Transfer Plan, have existed in some form since 1983. At its height, approximately 13,000 Black students from the city of St. Louis transferred into predominantly White and suburban school districts, representing the largest voluntary desegregation plan in the United States. County and school district leaders responsible for the plan have slowly reduced the number of Black transfer students, and a November 2016 agreement extended the plan for a five-year period to allow about 1,000 new students to enroll through the 2023–2024 school year. Emanating from qualitative interviews with 37 Black former students who participated in the plan between 1983 and 2018 (Waves 1–4), this article captures participants’ experiences, agency, their struggles, and solidarity efforts to ensure their chances of surviving and succeeding in schooling contexts that drastically differed from their home and community environments. Given the impending ending of this plan at the end of the 2023–2024 school year, findings provide implications for research, educational policy and reform, and schooling practices that create and sustain culturally affirming and educationally enriching environments for Black students.
Black girls face the challenge of developing a healthy sense of self because of racism and sexism in school settings. Building on extant literature, this study examines a sample of socioeconomically diverse Black girls’ in predominately White, Black, and racially and ethnically diverse school settings. Data collection included focus groups with Black girls (N = 30, M age = 12.64 years). Inductive analytic techniques were used to identify themes based on the lived experiences of Black girls across these school settings. Two themes emerged that centered on the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in their educational experiences, including (1) the misconception of Black girls and (2) resisting and reclaiming. Directions for future research and implications for Black girls are discussed.
Drawing from 19th and 20th century Black intellectuals and contemporary education scholars, this chapter is placed within the context of critical race theory in education, Black revolutionary change, and Afrocentricity as a method to show how what the author calls radical pedagogy can help to create more equitable outcomes for Black students. This chapter is placed in the paradigm of a survivalist perspective, which as a theoretical philosophy maintains Blacks have prevailed in sustaining their African roots, culture, and identity. Combining learnings from leading scholars, this chapter serves as a primer for educators looking for a set of guidelines that can disrupt what is happening in schools offering a route to the decolonization of these experiences for Black students.
Darius O. Johnson, Briana Markoff, and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews examined data from focus groups conducted with more than 60 Black boys in midwestern high schools to learn how teachers and schools can refuse antiblackness and reimagine futures for Black boys in school. Black boys and young men want safe school environments and will create safe communal spaces when needed. They seek teachers who are culturally relevant; they want to be able to trust their teachers; and they want to be their full, authentic selves at school. Findings show how educators can work within antiblack institutions toward reducing in-school suffering while working to create better futures for Black boys in school.
The current racial homogeny in the United States K-12 public school teacher workforce
can be traced to the dismissal of Black teachers and administrators in the name of
desegregation following the 1950s supreme court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
The resulting raciodemographic mismatch persists today, and determinations about the performance of a largely minoritized student population are filtered through texts,
policies and instruction centered on the white middle-class monolingual women who
predominate both K-12 and teacher preparation spaces. In recognition of the challenges this presents, the teacher preparation program at Franklin University, like many across the U.S., has recently shifted its mission and vision to center racial equity and social justice. Through two qualitative studies and a critical essay, this dissertation addresses the research question, how does an urban social justice teacher preparation program shape racial ideologies?
The first study, via raciolinguistic genealogy, traces racialized discourses of cultural and linguistic capital across policy and academic texts published approximately 30 years apart. Results suggest these texts, which undergird the teacher licensure exam both at Franklin and more broadly, brand Black cultures and languages as a subhuman deviant threat to U.S. society. In the second paper, I conduct a critical analysis of a canonical teacher preparation text, and through counterstorytelling as method, reveal flattened class-centric representations of Black communities as devoid of culture rather than as drawing from community-knowledge both to affirm their humanity and to navigate white institutions. The final paper is a critical case study investigating the understandings of and practical approaches towards teaching about culture and identity on behalf of three language educators at Franklin. Results suggest implicitly racialized understandings of culture and a largely theoretical understanding of race and power which fails to translate to the preparation of language educators in a practical sense.
As explored through the conceptual framework of culturelessness, the findings from these studies suggest that antiBlackness is maintained rather than disrupted at Franklin largely through the euphemization of race principally as capital, class or culture. Implications for race-visibility and critical race-reflexivity are offered.
This study considers the degree to which attendance policies and practices to address chronic absenteeism in a large Midwestern urban school district create suffering in Black parents’ experiences. In a secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative data conducted through Afro-pessimist conceptualizations of anti-Blackness, we found that the district’s attendance policies antagonize Black parents in ways that create psychological and material distress; and that educators characterize Black parents as problems they must overcome. These findings demonstrate how attendance policies and practices are imbricated in anti-Black social processes, inviting social death into Black family life. In the ongoing struggle to realize Black freedom, the paper calls for abandoning incentivize-and-punish approaches that assume Black parents and students are inadequately committed to schooling.
White supremacy and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in educational organizations and disrupting them is key to creating more racially just schools. This essay details how the regular practice of organizational routines reproduces racial domination and subordination. We argue that combining critical perspectives on race with organizational improvement approaches can help disrupt this reproductive process. More specifically, educators can engage in critical reflection and action to interrupt, deconstruct, and redesign organizational routines in ways that challenge and hopefully undermine white supremacy and anti-Black racism in schools. We highlight how this approach could help create more racially just educational contexts.
Antiblackness, and the dominant stories it produces about Black humanity, creates distorted images of Black humanness that are used to justify violence against Black youth in schools and society. However, Black youth have different stories to tell about their being in the world that stems directly from their lived experiences and are inherently counter to damaged center narratives intertwined with Black suffering. Using the theoretical framing of BlackCrit and theorizations of Afrofuturism, I share two composite Afro-futurist counterstories developed by Black high school students in a summer writing course, which confront antiblackness and disrupt the ways the regime makes educators complicit in seeing Black youth as non-human/superhuman. The research provides insights into Black youth futurity in relation to schooling in an anti-Black world.
This article provides an ethnographic accounting of one teacher of color’s experience of moral injury by exploring the question: what morally injurious events does Nancy experience, and what are the costs of those injuries? This project used participant observations and interviews to explore the moral injuries encountered. Moral injuries occurred due to a lack of just systems, racial representation, trust, student supports, trauma training, and holistic approaches. Eventually Nancy left the school as a principled leaver.
As school choice expands, families face an increasingly arduous decision-making process around school enrollment. Through interviews with a socioeconomically and ethno-racially diverse sample of 60 parents in Dallas, Texas, we illustrate one key way families negotiate this choice landscape. We find that many parents use their own educational experiences as first-stage decision rules for narrowing the types of schools they consider for their children through experience-motivated replication and experience-motivated avoidance. Parents with positive schooling experiences sought to replicate the type of school they attended for their children, while parents with negative schooling experiences aimed to avoid the type of school they attended. While experience-motivated replication was used by parents across race and class positions, it was most common among White parents who often entrenched patterns of white flight through replication of private or suburban school enrollment. In contrast, experience-motivated avoidance was used by Black parents in our sample as a strategy to disrupt educational inequality for their children by eliminating traditional public schools, where parents reported feeling underserved as children, from their choice sets. Our study adds to our understanding of how families negotiate the increasingly complex school choice landscape, and mechanisms for the persistence of intergenerational educational inequality.
High rates of adolescent depression and anxiety indicate the current need to prepare and support secondary teachers in being responsive to students’ emotional and mental health. This article advances a view of secondary English teachers as critical witnesses of adolescent trauma. Through reviewing what critical witnessing is, highlighting the creativity and expertise of literacy educators who practice critical witnessing, naming core stances that critical witnessing asks of teachers, and discussing challenges of doing this work in secondary English classrooms, this article presents critical witnessing as a critical literacy practice that can help facilitate social transformation in secondary English education.
Background/Context
In light of the June 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Louisville and Seattle voluntary school desegregation cases, making it more difficult for district officials to racially balance their schools, this article presents an analysis of prior research on the long-term effects of attending racially diverse schools on their adult graduates as well as new data from interviews with graduates of desegregated schools in Louisville and Seattle. Although the bulk of research on school desegregation examines what is happening to students while they are still in school and their immediate academic outcomes, the growing body of research on the long-term effects of attending racially diverse schools on adult graduates is powerful and significant and, thus, should play a central role in public debates about the future of racial integration in American schools following the Court's ruling in these cases, referred to as Parents Involved. Taken together, findings from this research on the long-term effects of school desegregation speak to both of the central themes to emerge from the larger body of research on racial integration within public schools or universities: 1. the “legacies of structural inequality” theme, which addresses the need for race-conscious policies to overcome decades of perpetuated racial inequality and 2 the “diversity rationale,” which focuses on preparing young people for a diverse society. The new interview data from Louisville and Seattle confirm these prior findings and add new insights.
Purpose
Knowing that prior research on the long-term effects of school desegregation spoke to the central legal issue in the cases before the Supreme Court in the Parents Involved cases, we wanted to explore the two prominent themes from that literature — “structural inequality” and the “diversity rationale” — as they related to the life experiences of Louisville and Seattle graduates of racially diverse schools.
Participants
We interviewed 42 graduates—classes of 1985 and 1986—of six high schools: Central, Fern Creek, and Louisville Male high schools in Louisville, and Franklin, Garfield, and Ingraham high schools in Seattle. These six schools were selected because in each city, they represented a wide range of student experiences given their different geographic locations within their districts, their curricular programs, and the social class and racial make-up of their student bodies by the mid-1980s. Still, in each of these schools, no one ethnic group made up more than 75% of the student body at the time these graduates attended them.
Research Design
Qualitative, in-depth interviews with a random sample of adult graduates (graduating classes of 1985 and 86) from six racially diverse high schools, which were purposively sampled to reflect the different experiences of student who went to public high schools in Louisville and Seattle at that time.
Data Collection and Analysis
Using a semi-structured, open-ended interview protocol, the authors interviewed a total of 19 graduates from the three Louisville high schools and 23 graduates from the Seattle high schools. In terms of the racial/ethnic identities of these 42 graduates from the six high schools across the two cities, 22 identified themselves as White, 14 as African Americans, 4 as Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 2 as mixed race, including one who was half Latino and half White. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes—although they varied in length from 20 minutes to more than an hour—and was tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were coded for themes that emerged from the interviewees’ responses across schools and context, and the following findings emerged as the most salient experiences of graduates across the six schools.
Findings/Results
1. Graduates of racially mixed schools in Louisville and Seattle said they learned to be more accepting of and comfortable with people of other racial backgrounds. Like their counterparts in the six cities of the Wells et al. (in press) study, the Louisville and Seattle graduates we interviewed said they believe that their day-to-day experiences attending diverse public schools as children and adolescents did indeed change them, making them more open-minded and thus more accepting of people who differ from them racially and in terms of their background and culture. 2. Louisville and Seattle graduates and the diversity rationale: Desegregated public schools prepared them for a global economy and society. Preparation for working in a diverse setting—the “diversity rationale”—was, for these graduates, by far the most obvious and pragmatic outcome of their experiences in desegregated public schools. The vast majority of graduates we interviewed in Louisville and Seattle said that at work in particular, they draw on the skills they learned in their desegregated public schools, skills of getting along and feeling comfortable with people of divergent backgrounds and cultures. 3. Overcoming structural inequality: Without diverse public schools, most graduates would have grown up in race isolation. In a society in which housing patterns, places of worship, and social circles are often segregated by race, diverse public schools have been, for many students, the only institutions in which cross-racial interaction and understanding can occur. They have also too often been historically the only institutions in our society in which students of color can gain access to predominantly White and prestigious institutions—in K–12 schooling or higher education.
Conclusions/Recommendations
We argue, based on our research and that of many others, that in an era when technology and free trade are breaking down physical and economic barriers across cultures and traditions, to not prepare our children to embrace and accept differences to the extent possible—the diversity rationale—is shortsighted and irresponsible. But even more important, we need to question how we can maintain a healthy democracy in a society so strongly divided by race, social class, and ideology now that the Supreme Court's decision has made it increasingly difficult to challenge such structural inequality, in spite of a compelling rationale for greater school-level diversity.
In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered" research—research that intends to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultane-ously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damage-centered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities. Dear Readers, Greetings! I write to you from a little desk in my light-filled house in New York State, my new home after living in Brooklyn for the past eleven years. Today, New York does not seem so far from St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of the Aleutian chain in Alaska, where my family is from and where my relations continue to live. Something about writing this letter closes the gap between these disparate places I call home. I write to you about home, about our communities. I write to identify a per-sistent trend in research on Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities—what I call damage-centered research. I invite you to join me in re-visioning research in our communities not only to recog-nize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken. This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and practi-tioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research strategy that frames entire communi-ties as depleted.
This article explores the embodiment and affectivity of whiteness, particularly as it implicates educational praxis and social justice in education, focusing on the following questions: In what ways are affect and whiteness constitutive of each other in race dialogue? How does emotion intersect with racial practices and white privilege, and what are the educational implications of this entanglement? In theorizing whiteness as a technology of affect, the authors hope to capture the mental, emotional, and bodily dimensions of whiteness in the context of racial dialogue. In particular, the authors introduce the idea of “white intellectual alibis,” or Whites’ attempt to project a non-racist alibi rather than aligning themselves with anti-racism. Finally, the authors discuss how whiteness as a kind of technology of affect has implications for pedagogical efforts to engage in equitable and anti-racist education. It is suggested that unless educational scholars engage with a theoretical analysis of how whiteness is manifest as affective technology in educational praxis, we will fail to appreciate the important implications of this idea for educational theory and praxis.
The displacement of Black educators after the Brown v. Board of Education decision was an extraordinary social injustice. The wholesale firing of Black educators threatened the economic, social, and cultural structure of the Black community, and ultimately the social, emotional, and academic success of Black children. The author presents a historical perspective of the work of Black educators in the pre-Brown era; discusses the impact of Brown on the professional careers of Black teachers, principals, and superintendents; describes some of methods used to fire Black educators; and concludes with a discussion of the impact of these losses on the Black community and an agenda for Black education.
As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. This book explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience. Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, this book offers an interesting account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. It documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers. The book follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, it shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.
This article summarizes the role of social science research in examining the effects of school desegregation policies on African-American students. The author argues that much of the earliest research on the short-term effects of school desegregation on African-American students was not particularly helpful to policymakers because it tended to be simple input/output studies of standardized test scores after only one or two years of desegregation. Thus, this research tried to answer the question of whether school desegregation “works” to improve student achievement without con -textualizing the experiences of African-American students in desegregated schools or considering that “school desegregation” implementation may look radically different in different schools and districts. On the other hand, research on the short-term effects of desegregation on intergroup relations, which was more focused on what was taking place within the schools, and the long-term-effects research, which emphasized that integrated institutions provide access to social mobility and powerful social net -works, are more insightful and helpful to policymakers.
When the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Fifty years later, despite its legal irrelevance and the racially separate and educationally ineffective state of public schooling for most black children, Brown is still viewed by many as the perfect precedent. Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling. He notes that, despite the onerous burdens of segregation, many black schools functioned well and racial bigotry had not rendered blacks a damaged race. He maintains that, given what we now know about the pervasive nature of racism, the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains, is made through silent covenants--unspoken convergences of interest and involuntary sacrifices of rights--that ensure that policies conform to priorities set by policy-makers. Blacks and whites are the fortuitous winners or losers in these unspoken agreements. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms. Strategies must recognize and utilize the interest-convergence factors that strongly influence racial policy decisions. In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book.
Background/Context
School desegregation has been variably conceptualized as a remedy for racial injustice, a means toward urban (economic) revitalization, an opportunity to celebrate human diversity, and an attempt to more equally distribute educational resources. At the center of the debate over the years is the extent to which school desegregation is a matter of class or race, of redistribution or recognition. A cultural political economy of school desegregation begins with a rejection of the popular notion that desegregation is simply, or even primarily, about race. It also eschews the idea that what is needed is a “corrective” interjection of social class and economic justice. In proposing neither a racial nor an economic solution, cultural political economy sheds doubt on the very proposition of a “racial” or “economic” analysis, politics, or remedy and helps us more powerfully explain how the cultural and material force of race and class breathes as one through the historical-political trajectory of school desegregation.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
This article is based on findings from a larger historical-ethnographic research project intended to explicate the cultural-ideological and structural context(s) within which Seattle's Black leaders, educators, and activists made sense of the relationship between school desegregation and the lives and liberation of Black people in the post-civil-rights era. Here, the author uses cultural political economy as an analytical framework to elucidate the relationship(s) between cultural productions such as the construction of rights, justice, and racial progress, and political-economic formations such as the (ab)use of the state and market by certain classes—in this case, middle-class and affluent White Seattleites—to preserve their own privilege through the implementation of social and educational policies that serve to reproduce material inequities.
Setting
The study setting is Seattle, Washington.
Population/Participants
Black leaders, educators, and activists who participated in the school desegregation struggle in the city of Seattle from the mid-1970s through 2007.
Research Design
This study employed semistructured ethnographic interviews, content analysis, and historical/archival analysis.
Conclusion/Recommendations
The trajectory of school desegregation politics in Seattle, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, reveals a long and systematic political effort to delegitimize and dismantle justice-oriented redistribution of educational resources along racial lines. Cultural political economy provides an analytical framework that contributes to our theoretical understanding of the interimbrication of culture and political economy in education politics and policy-making. The author argues that understanding the interimbrication of class and race in the politics of school desegregation allows us to more clearly theorize how school desegregation policies are undermined in ways that reproduce material and cultural relations of power. Ultimately, critical researchers, educators, and youth and community activists must develop political strategies to shift the very relations of power highlighted in the Seattle case.
Drawing on three case studies of K-12 public schooling in London, Sydney and Vancouver, this book examines the geographies of neoliberal education policy in the inner city. Gulson uses an innovative and critical spatial approach to explore how the processes and practices of neoliberal education policy, specifically those relating to education markets and school choice, enable the pervasiveness of a white, middle-class, re-imagining of inner-city areas, and render race “(in)visible.” With urbanization posited as one of the central concerns for the future of the planet, relationships between the city, educational policy, and social and educational inequality deserve sustained examination. Gulson’s book is a rich and needed contribution to these areas of study.
The conceptualization and implementation of desegregation educational policies are incomplete when they ignore the voices of Black educators. Through in-depth interviews with 21 African American educators in St. Louis, this article highlights how elements of what is being defined today as critical race theory were embedded in these educators' analyses of a 1983 court settlement that resulted in a 16-year desegregation plan. Through rich and detailed accounts, these educators illustrate how the desegregation plan ultimately protected the overall interests of Whites. Their analyses of the plan-seemingly pessimistic-were realistic. The ending of the plan in 1999 continued to place the onus on Black people to rectify the inequitable education in the city. Suggested is the need for courts and policy makers to begin listening to the voices of African American educators when framing educational policies' intent on improving the education of African American students.
What is the landscape of the racial politics of public education in the age of Obama? To what factors can we attribute the seeming educational policy consensus from Washington, DC, to the states and from philanthropies and policy entrepreneurs in urban school districts? How should we understand opposition to the policy menu? This article examines commonsense understandings in education reform, which are supported by assertions that market-based schooling options are superior for children of color, and argues that a primary reason for the popularity of such reforms is an underexamined advocacy coalition, formed nominally around school choice, while also encompassing several other entrepreneurial educational reforms. The article describes the structure of this network, arguing that its dominance has precluded an understanding of counter advocacy against school choice and related reforms. It then describes several past and current movements that challenge commonsense understandings of the reforms’ currency, as a way of pushing back against the reforms’ expansion. The article also discusses the activities of grassroots community groups in response to market-based reforms and argues that these efforts can help to expand public deliberation on complex matters of educational policy. The article concludes with recommendations for further examination of these efforts to highlight the concerns, strategies, and solutions to educational inequality being articulated within communities of color and with their allies.
This article reports on the extensive qualitative and quantitative findings of a multi-method participatory study designed to assess urban and suburban youths’ experiences of racial/class justice or injustice in their schools and throughout the nation. Constructed as a letter to Zora Neale Hurston, who was immediately critical of the Brown decision in 1955, the article lays out the victories of Brown and the ongoing struggles, what we call “six degrees of segregation” that identify systematic policies that ensure an opportunity gap.
The article theorizes the academic, social and psychological consequences of persistent inequity on youth of color and White American youth—all adversely affected by systematic educational inequities that persist 50 years after Brown.
Older cities in the United States have long been trying to ‘bring back’ the middle class in order to increase tax base. The poor quality of schools and the presence of public housing often were cited as deterrents for attracting higher income families. When the 2000 Census data revealed improvements in many cities, some elected officials and scholars attributed the turnaround to policies such as those aimed at transforming public housing and urban schools. In this article the authors examine these strategies as they have played out in a Chicago community to illustrate how these policies also facilitate the displacement and containment of poor people of color. Utilizing critical race theory, they argue that race continues to guide both education and public housing policy in historically segregated places like Chicago, and that racism is masked by class claims that allow the interests of middle class to trump educational opportunities for poor.
Focusing on the experience of Seattle (Washington), this paper attempts to determine why school districts across the country have recently sought to de-emphasize segregation. Concerns about the validity of pursuing integration, particularly through busing, have been present throughout the history of school desegregation, but only recently is there a substantial withdrawal from mandatory integration policies. Following an introduction, Section II provides the contextual features of the study, and Section III discusses overarching issues of policy. Even though the federal courts and federal agencies played a large role in fashioning and enforcing this policy until the 1980s, there are wide variations in the implementation of the principles of Brown v. Board of Education, depending on local conditions and the local federal judge. Therefore, the Seattle case, considered in Section IV, illuminates the role that local dynamics play in desegregation policy. The most important factors in the recent retreat from integration are discussed in Section V, and the paper concludes in Section VI with speculations about the future of school equity policies and a consideration of the degree to which the country is returning to the era of separate but equal facilities. Recent court decisions, especially the conservative bent of the present Supreme Court, political mood, differing opinions among African Americans, and possible a general impatience with the time and money integration has cost, are all considered as possible factors in the trend away from busing. (Contains 4 figures, 5 tables, and 51 references.) (SLD)
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Freud initially formulates melancholia as a pathological form of individual mourning for lost objects, places, or ideals. However, we propose a concept of melancholia as a depathologized structure of everyday group experience for Asian Americans. We analyze a number of Asian American cultural productions (literature and film) as well as two case histories of university students involving intergenerational conflicts and lost ideals of whiteness, Asianness, home, and language. Exploring these analyses against Klein's notions of lost objects, we propose a more refined theory of good and bad racialized objects. This theory raises the psychic and political difficulties of reinstatement and the mediation of the depressive position for Asian Americans. In addition, this theory suggests that processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization are neither pathological nor permanent but involve the fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia. Throughout this essay, we consider methods by which a more speculative approach to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice might offer a deeper understanding of Asian American mental health issues.
This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the “moral” wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not as a psychological injury but as “status subordination” understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Fraser's critique of Honneth's subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her “non-identarian” rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneth's “ontology” of recognition (McNay 2007). At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Fraser's dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency.
At the turn of the 1900s, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the problem of the color line was the twentieth century's main challenge. The article argues that critical pedagogy benefits from an intersectional understanding of whiteness studies and globalization discourse. Following Du Bois, it suggests that the problem of the twenty-first century is the global color line. As capitalism stretches across nations, its partnership with race relations also evolves into a formidable force. Appropriating concepts from globalization, the author defines a global approach to race, and in particular whiteness, in order to argue that the problem of white racial privilege transcends the nation state. Using concepts such as multinationalism, fragmentation, and flexibility, a critical pedagogy of whiteness promotes an expanded notion of race that includes global anti-racist struggles, Finally, the article concludes by suggesting that educators consider seriously the insights of the neo-abolitionist movement.
This stunning book represents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the complex relationships between black political thought and black political identity and behavior. Ranging from Frederick Douglass to rap artist Ice Cube, Michael C. Dawson brilliantly illuminates the history and current role of black political thought in shaping political debate in America.
Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained. The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates. More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issuesâof class, gender, and sexualityâchallenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness. The Boundaries of Blackness, by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American communityâand other marginal groupsâwill evolve in the twenty-first century.
Not in Our Lifetimes
- M Dawson
Dawson, M. 2011. Not in Our Lifetimes. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Theorizing Redistribution and Recognition in Urban Education Research: How Do We Get Dictionaries at Cleveland?
- M J Dumas
Dumas, M. J. 2009. " Theorizing Redistribution and Recognition in Urban Education Research: How Do We Get Dictionaries at Cleveland? " In Theory and Educational Research, edited by J. Anyon, 81–107.
Feds Probing Seattle Schools' Treatment of Black Students
- K Ervin
- M O Hagan
Ervin, K., & M. O'Hagan (2013, March 5). Feds Probing Seattle Schools' Treatment of Black Students. Seattle Times. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.seat-tletimes.com.
Reviews of Rainier Beach High School
- Greatschools Org
Greatschools.org. 2003/2013. Reviews of Rainier Beach High School. Retrieved June 6, 2013 from http://www.greatschools.org.
Octavia Butler, 1947-2006: Sci-Fi Writer a Gifted Pioneer in White, Male Domain Seattle Post-Intelligencer The Trouble with Recognition: Subjectivity, Suffering and Agency
- J Marshall
Marshall, J. (2006, February 26). Octavia Butler, 1947-2006: Sci-Fi Writer a Gifted Pioneer in White, Male Domain. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved May 31, 2013, from http://www.seattlepi.com. McNay, L. 2008. " The Trouble with Recognition: Subjectivity, Suffering and Agency. " Sociological Theory 26 (3): 271–296.
Dismantling Desegregation
- G Orfield
- S E Eaton
Orfield, G., and S. E. Eaton. 1996. Dismantling Desegregation. New York: The New Press.
Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare? Cambridge
- G Orfield
- C Lee
Orfield, G., and C. Lee. 2004. Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Civil Rights Project.
- Dumas M. J.
- Nolan K.
- Dumas M. J.