Race-Making in the Classroom: Black Educational Access and Opportunity

• In Event: 60.075 - The Determination to Succeed

Abstract

This qualitative research study examines race-making in schools or how racial identities and boundaries are constructed via every-day micro-interactions and taken for granted practices and assumptions. In particular, we examine how teachers via their verbal discourse and teaching practice make sense of the bodies and achievement of black students, and how black students in turn make sense of teacher discourses and practices as it concerns them. Through interview, focus group, and observational data across three school districts, we show that these discourses and practices (articulated by teachers and interpreted by students) construct black students as either academically deficient or invisible, as interlopers in their own school, and as almost wholly outside of teacher influence.

Authors

• Carla D. O'Connor, University of Michigan

• Shanta R. Robinson, University of Chicago

• Adam Hengen, University of Michigan

• Alaina Neal, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Christy M. Byrd, North Carolina State University

• Elan C. Hope, University of Chicago

• Shayla Reese Griffin, University of Michigan

• Erin Bogan, University of Michigan