"They Don't Want Us to Be Woke": Suburban Black Girls' Exploration of the Curriculum

• In Event: 21.038 - More Than Rosa Parks and Dr. King: Empowerment of Black Students Through Pedagogy and Praxis

Abstract

This paper is based on the preliminary findings from a larger constructivist grounded theory study that seeks to understand how Black students from varying socioeconomic statuses cultivate their racial and gender identity development when attending predominantly White suburban schools in the Midwest. The ethnographic study (Lofton & Davis, 2015; Street, 2014) includes over 200 hours of participant observation (Kawulich, 2005), semi-structured interviews (Patton, 2002) with approximately 30 African American students.

This paper explores how African American girls’ epistemological understandings of schooling experiences while attending high school in a suburban environment. Participants actively identified the importance of culturally responsive curriculum and racially sensitivity teachers, and a space where Black students can discuss concerns related to identity development, racial socialization, and the process of being minoritized by teachers and administrators.
Two major findings that emerged during data analysis include:

1. Exploration of Explicit Curriculum: The African American girls in the study explored the impact of the curriculum in their high schools. Participants’ exploration included the lack of empowering content for Black students and the tokenization and repetition of selected African American historical figures.

2. Hidden Curriculum In Action: Participants described their experiences with the explicit curriculum in addition to a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which African Americans are excluded as instructors, the prioritization of European history ,and the ways in which teachers’ racial and gender bias is proclaimed based on African American girls’ physical appearance.

Authors

• Lisa Covington, The University of Iowa

• Donna Y. Ford, Vanderbilt University