Black Girl Civics: Engaging Black Girls in Research and Health Equity

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: Rejecting Neutrality and Challenging Inequity: Fostering Critical Youth Civic Engagement Across Informal Learning Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares findings from a YPAR action civics project hosted through a community based education program, called Black Girls Can Fly. Black Girls Can Fly (BGCF) serves high school aged Black girls exclusively and seeks to disrupt the educational inequality Black girls experience within their schools (Ginwright, 2007; Kirshner, 2015; Warren, Mira, & Nikundiwe, 2008), to challenge discourses of deficiency about their identity (Baldridge, 2014; Kwon, 2013), and to offer a space of culturally grounded redemption and healing (Ginwright, 2010; Hill, 2009). Within the context of BGCF, participants completed a four month action civics cycle where they tackled a health related challenge in their community, leading to a form of critical civic engagement highly contextualized by their racialized and gendered experiences. This paper is an inductive exploration of how the program impacted their perspectives on civic engagement, their sense of efficacy around creating change in their communities, and their assessment of how programs of this sort fit into their overall educative experiences.

Perspectives
We draw on lenses from critical civic engagement (Ginwright, 2002; Cohen, 2009; Kirshner, 2015) and critical race feminism (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010) to situate and discuss the narratives of the program participants. We utilize their narratives in order to analyze and define Black Girl Civics, a perspective that emphasizes intersectional identities, lived experience, and collective agency as sources of critique, voice, and activism.

Methods
After years of working as a teacher, assistant principal, and educational consultant, the first author founded BGCF as a community based educational space, partly in reaction to the structural and symbolic violence Black girls experience in schools. Black Girl Civics stems from a research-practice partnership in which we developed, piloted, and evaluated the usefulness of a Black girl focused action civics program. Additionally, we utilized the resources of a university based research team developing a protocol for assessing youth policy arguments to inform the curricular and pedagogical approach.

Data sources
Data sources include field notes, ethnographic interviews with participants and parents, video footage, and surveys documenting feedback from participants.

Results
Participants developed a working philosophy of civic engagement that was fundamentally influenced by their racialized and gendered identities, as reflected in the kinds of topics they chose to address through PAR projects, which directly and disproportionately impacted African Americans and/or women and girls. Interactions with the public also showed how participants engaged in identity talk that both affirmed feminist points of view while challenging race-neutral or color-blind forms of solidarity. Conversations and interviews with participants suggested new conceptions of agency and efficacy.

Significance
Our paper contributes to research on civic engagement by centering the narratives of Black girls, which are often othered or ignored, even in conversations focused on Black youth, wherein Black male voices often dominate. We also draw practical lessons for other PAR practitioners working with minoritized youth related to pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.

Authors

• Ginnie Logan, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Ben Kirshner, University of Colorado - Boulder