Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

African-Centered Geographies of Opportunity: A Model of School-Community Partnerships

Mon, April 16, 4:05 to 5:35pm, New York Hilton Midtown, Floor: Second Floor, Gibson Suite

Abstract

Youth development entails navigation across multiple spaces, including family, school, peer social networks, community institutional settings. How youth develop their identities depends on the range of opportunities available to them. For minoritized youth and youth living in poverty, the geographical spaces of opportunity are often largely centered on neighborhoods, such that identity resources are often geographically laden. Consequently school-community partnerships can offer expansive opportunities for identity development, and are particularly important at points of life course transition.

This paper documents the design of a specialized model of school-community partnership, addressing the identity challenges facing African-American youth living in poverty. Spencer (2006) argues that minoritized youth must wrestle with both the normative challenges of development along with challenges that emerge from risks associated with race/ethnicity and class positionings, often complicated by gender, or what Boykin (1986) calls the triple quandary. This school-community partnership explicitly offers complementary identity opportunities across multiple sites.

BSICS is a network of African-centered elementary charter schools, partnering with several community organizations across three continguous low-income neighborhoods in Chicago. The partnerships include a center for sustainable living, an arts programming organization, a digital media program. Underlying these institutional partnerships is a commitment to holistic mentoring that includes teachers, staff, parents and community members. The core curriculum integrates African-American history and culture in ways that socialize generative knowledge and dispositions to critically engage the world, providing opportunities for youth to have overlapping opportunities to produce knowledge in service of their communities and families.

This paper offers a historical analyses of the evolution of these partnerships in the context of the limited opportunities of these neighborhoods, documents case studies of practices developing from the partnerships and the learning and identity wrestling opportunities they provided. Case studies include students work with a community garden that includes production, selling, and healthy eating; students developing an award winning film about efforts to close their school; project to support access to clean water in East Africa. Data include interviews (structured and open-ended), field notes, artifacts produced by students, and photographs. Analyses are framed from a phenomenological perspective, examining perceptions of the youth and adults around the personal meanings they take from these experiences. These perceptions are then situated around trends in multiple years of surveys given to the youth and their families around their perceptions of the schools as well as academic growth data based on N.W.E.A. MAP testing.

Analyses of case studies document the integration of social-emotional and cognitive learning opportunities in the illustrative practices, taking place in complementary ways across school and community sites; cross-generational collaborations. Interview data document a recurrent theme of perceptions of the school community as extended family. Survey climate survey data indicate students feel safe. MAP data show statistically significant growth over the two years of data collection.

The model is unique in its African-centered focus and its range of community partnerships focused explicitly on the human possibilities of contiguous low-income neighborhoods as sites of opportunity, where the leadership across institutions is situated in the communities themselves. (499)

Author