Exploring Innovative Practices in Educational Ethnography: Student Voice, Identity, and Positionality in Rites of Passage Research

• In Event: Philly Under Fire: Counternarratives on School Reform, Pedagogy, and Community Voices

Abstract

This paper interrogates the power of educational ethnography to identify new sites of inquiry for innovative research, culturally responsive identity practices, and urban school policy. This discussion rejects normative positivist epistemological assumptions and uses Black Feminism as a critical standpoint that is both valuable and necessary to restore marginalized voices and perspectives in education research. Using a Philadelphia Freedom School as a site of transgressive pedagogy and student empowerment, I conducted a Black feminist ethnographic study to interrogate how Black and Latina female students’ experiences in rites of passage classes raised their awareness of “controlling stereotypes” and led to their self-definitions of womanhood (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994). In this paper, I re-examined how Black feminist ethnography functioned as a transformative methodological tool to incorporate researcher positionality as an analytic strength, rather than biased distraction, that unearthed students’ identity-related perspectives. My use of feminist ethnography and Black feminism contributed conceptually to a gradual process of dismantling hierarchical relationships between myself and study participants, as well as between external and intuitive ways of knowing and being in the world (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994; Skeggs, 2001). In this process of dismantling hierarchies, we became co-researchers and co-students who shared stories of womanhood and sisterhood, and counter narratives about our experiences with racism, sexism, and internalized oppression, which has been under-theorized in social science research (Pike, 2010). This discussion underscores the innovative qualities of Black feminist ethnography as a re-humanizing empirical research method that gives voice to underrepresented groups, expands epistemological perspectives, and identifies transgressive pedagogies used in programs such as rites of passage in Freedom Schools.

Author

• Angela N. Campbell, Cabrini College