Jump Rope Communities and Ethical Viewpoints

• In Event: Unsettling Ethics in the Curriculum: Research Praxis and Pedagogies

Abstract

As a researcher of color, my standpoint and avenues of inquiry are personally and passionately connected to my axiologically-based journey from arbitrarily marginalized object to self-defined, self-situated, and adulated subject. Through exploration of my critically-reflected experiences as a Black woman and as a Black female faculty member at a PWI (Predominantly White Institution) my research enlivens culturally-situated silenced pathways as counter-stories: methods of “talking back” to hegemonically-imposed spaces of marginalization, colonized places of diminished value, and the relegated separation that is a consequence of silently spoken looks and acts of racially-generated micro-aggressions.

Critical Race Theory, Critical Literacy and Black Feminist Thought frame my exploration into the hidden, or forcibly silenced, funds of knowledge, experiential resources, and communally-derived values existent in what I have labeled, jump-rope communities. Peering to the hidden places in-between the ropes, these culturally insular and geographically segregated communities of color possess shared historical wisdoms, divergently-framed storehouses of cultural capital, morally-framed values, and philosophically-generated survival strategies borne of the daily struggle as other in a racialized society. My counter-narratives have been composed from and imposed on the fringes due to axiological conflicts based in and antagonized by cross-cultural disconnects.

As my ethical viewpoints are indeed always in relation to my personally-defined notion of self-worth and culturally-demarcated sense of value, my ability to configure and conceptualize curricular pathways for my students demands a courageous call for cross-cultural acknowledgement, understanding, collaboration, and valuation; a call that transcends and transgresses silently voiced messages of invisibility, denial, rejection, and devaluation by those in dominant-culture positions of power. Student and professor work together to un-silence and make visible the political, ethical, and power structures of our positions as teacher. We each critically reflect upon our backgrounds, experiences, and values and the ways in which our personal histories, languages, cultures, identities, and experiences affect who we are as curriculum workers and how our ethically-situated views align or intersect with others. We identify and then interrogate cultures of social, intellectual, academic, and educational power.

From positions and avenues of connection, we identify and interrogate stereotypes and misconceptions related to power structures reliant upon exclusion and devaluation based in colonized notions of sexism, classism, genderism, religionism, and racism. The collaborative process of unsettling moves deeper to anthropomorphize the work of Soloranzo and Yosso (2002), as professor and student collaboratively craft counter-stories that challenge the grand and disparaging meta-narratives of culturally and socially-framed descriptions of identity. Arbitrary abstractions, indiscriminant statuses, and random notions of worth are critiqued in order to unearth novel research pathways leading toward the conceptualization of antiracist and advocacious curriculum embedded in the silent spaces between the ropes that unveil new avenues of ethical potentiality and possibility.

Author

• Wynnetta Scott Simmons, Mercer University