Challenging Deficit Discourse Through Qualitative Research With Urban Children: Sharing Tough Findings With Teachers

• In Event: Democratizing Qualitative Methods: Insights From Critical Childhood Studies

Abstract

Urban students talked back to deficit discourse, but did their teachers listen? How did qualitative methods pierce (or not) the social construction of urban students as “unbelievable”? How did students shift the seemingly permanent labels of “bad kid” and “untrustworthy”?

Rooted in literature on student voice and “new sociology of childhood” that constructs youth as social agents, this qualitative research project set out to challenge the deficit approach in urban education, as well as the dominant views of childhood that see children as “human becomings” (Lee, 2001) rather than full human beings. The project took place over three years in an urban, northeast city in the U.S. An interdisciplinary team worked with urban middle school students and their teachers to democratize urban education by giving students a voice in urban school reform. Students shared their perspectives on urban school life through films they created.

This paper shares urban students’ insights on how their teachers viewed them and treated them; it examines students’ analysis of being constructed through a deficit frame. However, because researchers also worked closely with the teachers, I also must attend to teachers’ insights. The paper examines the methodological decisions the research team made in sharing data with teachers, and it considers how student stories were heard or not by their teachers. I address issues of trust and rapport between researcher and participant; the “pulsating,” sometimes concurrent manner in which data collection and analysis occur (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, p. 73); the shifting nature of qualitative data collection, as preliminary analysis takes place and impacts future interview protocols; the qualitative tradition of member checking (Seale, 1999); and the research team’s underlying assumptions about the project’s transformative power.

Data—collected through interviews and focus groups with students, interviews and focus groups with teachers, participant observation, and through the student films themselves—demonstrate the prevalence of deficit views of urban students. Teachers’ and administrators’ lack of trust of students as their “default” setting, teachers’ understanding of authority as a zero sum game, and the lack of space for student voice in urban schools generated the social construction of students as unbelievable. Students had to earn the right to have teachers believe them. They did not begin a relationship with the teacher where they were seen as trustworthy, but had to prove they could be trusted. Students thought that most teachers and adults in their schools usually did not believe them in specific situations, unless: (1) an adult corroborated what they said, or (2) they had a reputation as a “good kid” or were a teacher's favorite and therefore seen as trustworthy.

This paper examines what happened when the research team shared these findings with students’ teachers. Qualitative methods did not magically make unbelievable beings into believable children in teachers’ eyes. However, our research experiences provide ideas for how to report and frame children’s perspectives for adult stakeholders so that children are heard and taken seriously, particularly when children’s perspectives are critical of the adults in their lives.

Author

• Heidi Pitzer, St. Lawrence University