What We Are About: Developing Researcher Positionalities Toward Educative Meaning for Black Youth

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-15 - Research on Black Girls, Black Males, and Black Youth in Contested Places

Abstract

This paper argues that the precarious positionality of black youth situates them powerfully as community researchers and documentarians. Further, it argues that understanding this positionality has important implications for enacting critical forms of research, developing curriculum, and rethinking teaching practices and the functions of schooling. Drawing from a critical ethnographic study of high school aged researchers of African descent, the paper explores how their positionality as critical researchers provides clarity regarding how the construction of critical research dispositions can be understood. It also explicates how positioning black youth as community researchers builds a Deweyian sense of educative meaning, or “psychologizing the curriculum” of their lived environment.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College