Locating Agency in African American Girls’ Negotiations of Gender, Class, and Race With Peers

• In Event: When the Global Becomes Local: Seeking Agency Through Educational Research With Diverse Communities

Abstract

Objectives: This study explores three second grade African-American girls’ perceptions of and discourses around gender, race, and class within a classroom in which they are a numerical minority and the localized way in which these discourses are taken up and enacted in social interactions with their peers. It seeks to locate their use of agency as they position themselves and each other within the discourses of their localized peer world.

Perspectives or theoretical framework: Black/Endarkened feminist theories (hooks, 1981, 1990; Davis, 1989; Collins, 2000; Dillard, 2006) and sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 2003) framed this study. Endarkened and sociocultural perspectives account for the ways in which African-American girls both shape the social, political, and historical meanings that exist in their social context as well as are shaped by them.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: This research employs an ethnographic approach (Erickson, 1985; Carr & Kemmis, 1986). My role as a researcher was a participant-observer, at times distantly observing, while at other times more actively involved in classroom and the peer world within it, in effort to understand and analyze the meanings and significances of the cultural patterns of a “bounded group” (Jacob, 1987), in this case, African-American girls and their peers in a second grade classroom.
Data sources: Ethnographic procedures utilize multiple forms of collection (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Data were collected in the following ways: 1) observational field notes of children playing, talking, and interacting with peers; 2) student interviews (individual and group); 3) teacher interviews; 4) audio and video recordings of children’s actions, play, and talk; 5) research journal.

Results: Research on African American children has found that they must continuously position and reposition themselves according to middle-class norms (Way, 1996; Proweller, 1999). Studies on gender indicate that girls actively learn how to accept marginalized roles through enacting these embodied gendered roles (Davies, 1989; Gallas, 1998; Blaise, 2005; Spatig, 2005). Other studies indicate that structural influences pertaining to race and gender influences the perceptions and experiences of African American girls (Risby, 1994; Evans-Williams, 2005). The results of this study are situated within these findings in that the three African American girls use their agency even as they must navigate the ways in which they are often overlooked and silenced because of their embodiment of race, class, and gender. The girls’ experiences point to specific changes necessary to improve the culture of schooling.

Scholarly significance of the study: Although the classroom is becoming a more globalized context, still, to date little scholarship exists that considers the ways in which gender, race, and class intersect and the ways in which children, particularly African-American girls, exist within these intersections, as they act on and are acted on in classroom contexts. This study corrects or modifies an incomplete and often flawed picture of the way in which African American children negotiate lived realities and particular spaces, and specifically focuses how these understandings can be used to create a more equitable school culture.

Author

• Samatha Wahome, Kent State University