The Commitment to Break Rules: Critical Race Theory Method and the Struggle for Justice in Education

• In Event: 34.043 - "Powerful, Empirically Driven, and Multimodal Narratives...and Statistics": Expanding the Reach of Critical Race Theory

Abstract

The author combines CRT, Jazz Methodology, and Youth Participant Action Research (YPAR) in his discussion of the development of a neighborhood school, focusing on the development of his research processes as well as the critique of traditional qualitative research processes. The author constructs Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a methodology that can embrace and honor the multiple processes, experienced by a scholar-activist while creating a neighborhood high school over a thirteen-year period (2001-2014).  The author uses CRT to make space for scholars and organizers who are thinking and working collectively to change our conditions.
As part of the process of member-checking and triangulation, this account was developed in concert with a multitude of participants’ experiences, including the voices of teachers, community activists, student-activists, parents, and scholars.  Additionally, the researcher used field notes (in design team meetings, classrooms, main offices of community organizations, community settings, homes of teachers, community residents, and design team members, etc.), interviews, informal conversations, and archival documents to assemble complex, shifting, and sometimes conflicting, pieces of a methodological puzzle that does not necessarily “fit” into the conventions of traditional qualitative research.  The process the researcher engages to ensure modicums of accuracy and responsibility, as well as his representation of events and outcomes from the larger curriculum project, reflect the interdisciplinary and social justice foundations of CRT methodology.  This account borrows heavily from youth participatory action research (YPAR), critical race methodology, and a methodological approach utilized by Shawn Ginwright (2010) and Adrienne Dixson known as jazz methodology. Borrowing from these approaches and the work of earlier scholars who utilize jazz methodology (Calmore 1992, Oldfather & West 1994, Dixson 2005, 2006), The author uses the concept of jazz methodology to document his involvement on a high school design team and as a volunteer social-studies teacher/collaborator to document researcher accountability to a community-driven initiative. Pairing jazz and methodology as the constructs by which to “move beyond simplistic explanations, descriptions and predictions,” the researcher attempts to offer similar critical guideposts for my own research that seeks to “inform and inspire…pose new questions, challenge assumptions and move together in an entirely different direction” (Ginwright 2010, 21).  
Rather than a fixed rubric of methodological tenets and approaches, CRT as jazz methodology, like its contemporaries YPAR, critical ethnography, and feminist methodology seeks to disrupt, reimagine and abolish the colonial practice of “speaking for” communities in research. The process in doing so, however, is not straightforward as many would like. Through the research process, the author has learned that the goal of CRT as jazz methodology should not be to settle the tensions, but instead to enter them and excavate the contradictions. Similar to pedagogy, if there is a path we take to get us to a space where self-determination to reverse dispossession (that which has been stolen from communities of color in terms of material possessions, access to resources and knowledge of self) is the norm, CRT as jazz methodology should be considered an operational tool in achieving the aforementioned goals.

Author

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago