"If School Was Like This, Violence Would Be Ended by Now": Black Youth Leadership and Pedagogies of Love in a Summer Mathematics Program

• In Event: 43.062 - Serving the Post-Truth Era: Black Youth's Pursuit of Educational Quality in Detroit

Abstract

Detroit, Michigan—like many other U.S. cities—has been subject to a “politics of disposability” (Giroux, 2006, p. 11; Means, 2008, p. 1; Wilson, 2015) that has seen an influx of neoliberal policies that increase free-market control over and provision of formerly public goods and an attendant weakening of public services and institutions. The phenomenon of the politics of disposability undermines community health and, as Wilson (2015) explains, “often pathologizes people of color living in urban spaces” (p. 1), including children attending urban schools. In the context of these dynamics of structural privilege and power, Math Corps, an annual six-week summer program, provides mathematics classes and mentorship for middle and high school students. The youth who participate in Math Corps all live in Detroit and/or attend Detroit public schools and the vast majority of Math Corps students are Black. Furthermore, Black middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students play a significant role in the program’s leadership, serving as formal mentors and instructors with heavy influence on the program’s policies and practices. As part of its founding ethos, Math Corps avers Black children’s inherent greatness prima facie and seeks to nurture an empowering, culturally relevant educational community.

This paper draws from an ethnographic case study of the Math Corps community’s pedagogies and practices. Math Corps has had a demonstrably positive impact on traditional measures of academic achievement (e.g. participants’ graduation rates, ACT scores, and college admission rates) (Math Corps website, 2018). However, in this paper the author contends that Math Corps’ success along such metrics cannot be appropriately understood absent an understanding of the values, norms, and pedagogies devised and practiced by all members of its educational community. Drawing upon approximately 100 hours of observation data, 15 hours of interview data, and dozens of artifacts and photographs, this paper examines the questions: 1) How do students and leaders understand membership (including its privileges, affordances, constraints, and obligations) in the Math Corps community?; 2) What are the pedagogical and ethical norms of Math Corps students and leaders, particularly with regards to notions of critical care and love?, and; 3) How do the ontological, epistemological, pedagogical, and ethical conceptions of community within Math Corps relate to entrenched systems of racism and inequity in Detroit public schools?

The author finds that Math Corps’ practices and values related to notions of critical care (Wilson, 2015), culturally relevant epistemologies (Bernal, 2002; Dillard, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 2000), and mutually-engaged and wholly-engaged pedagogies (hooks, 1994; Palmer, 1993) are both central to and co-constructed by Black youth engagement in the program. Black youth students and mentors and Black student instructors play a critical role in fostering an educational community that encourages modes of being and interaction quite distinct from those program participants name as being valued in their schools. These findings have implications for school leaders, classroom teachers, and members of other community education programs regarding pedagogies, ethics, and community cultural norms that support rigorous learning, leadership development, and community-mindedness.

Author

• Carolyn Hetrick, University of Michigan