Excavating Inequities: Making Space for Girls of Color Through Education Journey Mapping

• In Event: 18.040 - The Role of Mapping Methodologies to Disrupt Neoliberalism and Injustices at the Intersections of Ableism and Racism

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore how Girls of Color make meaning of disciplinary experiences by spatially tracing their educational journeys through mapping. We centered the voices of Girls of Color in reimagining discipline by “making space” for them to explain the ways they were supported and punished in carceral state education.
Theoretical Framework
Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit; Author et al., 2013) reveals the mutual constitution of racism and ableism enmeshed in schools that positions Girls of Color as defiant (Ladson-Billings, 1998). Importantly, DisCrit upholds Girls of Color as knowledge generators (Matsuda, 1987), therefore we positioned Girls of Color as research partners mapping and analyzing their educational trajectories (Paris & Winn, 2014). Finally, DisCrit affords consideration into how a sociospatial dialectic (Soja, 1980, 2010) in tandem with racism and ableism impacts disciplinary inequities for Girls of Color (Vélez, & Solorzano, 2016).
Methods
This research was part of a larger study wherein the team engaged in iterative data collection and analysis (Bhattacharya, 2017) centering the experiences of Girls of Color (51), their families (11), and teachers (11) focused on school disciplinary disparities for Girls of Color. Data analysis was inductive and deductive (Erickson, 1986). Inductive analysis was based on the students’ narratives as they created and analyzed their Journey Maps using multiple stages of analysis (Rodwell, 1998; Saldaña, 2013). Deductively, we used DisCrit and a Critical Race Spatial Analysis to reorganize codes grounded in a sociospatial dialectic.
Data Sources
During the first round of interviews, Girls of Color created Education Journey Maps. Education Journey Maps served as the catalyst for the interview dialogue. While most students participated in subsequent interviews and focus groups for the larger project, we focused on the students’ maps and their connecting interviews for this analysis.
Results
The students’ maps revealed political, social, and physical dimensions of their educational trajectories (Author, 2016). For example, political dimensions disclosed how Girls of Color repositioned themselves in response to marginalizing pedagogy and policies (Davies & Harré, 1990). Physical dimensions revealed how Girls of Color experienced the spaces of school. Social dimensions exposed how and where Girls were surveilled and found relief from carceral logics.
Scholarly significance
Mapping with youth has noteworthy implications for future humanizing scholarship (Paris & Winn, 2014). First, mapping “made space” by unsettling conventional researcher-participant power dynamics and situating Girls of Color as knowledge generators, capable of recognizing how injustice is enacted in disabling and racialized spaces, and identifying equitable pedagogy and policies (Leavy, 2009). Second, mapping incited meaning-making that may have remained unearthed in traditional interviews (Gieseking, 2013). Third, Girls of Color produced and analyzed maps as data. Mapping provided an opportunity for girls to recognize their strategies of resistance as strategic community building for justice, while honoring multiple ways of knowing (Futch & Fine, 2014). Finally, the Girls’ “powerful, empirically driven, and multimodal narratives” (AERA, 2019) revealed how schools produced unjust geographies through intersecting conduits (Soja, 2010) and provided a guide for educators to build a more radically inclusive pedagogy.

Authors

• Amanda L. Miller, University of Kansas

• Courtney Lane Wilt, The University of Kansas

• Grace Tamara Handy, The University of Kansas

• Subini Ancy Annamma, The University of Kansas