Using Community Traditions as Research Methods

• In Event: "Bout That Action": Community-Engaged Research and the Radical Imagination in Education

Abstract

Based on a case study, this paper organizes participants’ feedback on my findings into themes for conducting community-engaged research. I conducted a two-year case study on the predominantly Black low-income neighborhood of Twinsburg Heights, Ohio. Twinsburg Heights has existed for over 90 years on the margins of the majority-white suburb called Twinsburg City. The study showed how the underdevelopment of the Heights neighborhood was connected to residents’ underdeveloped educational and life opportunity.

I designed my study to rely on traditional community methods (Bernal, 1998) such as oral storytelling, community-created archives, and community cookouts. Residents often referenced stories they heard from their community elders as the way they learned about anti-Blackness in Twinsburg, the school district, or nearby colleges. I collected oral histories from 25 elder residents on their schooling and life trajectories. When I mentioned to residents that the local town archives had not one single document on the Heights neighborhood, they provided me with folders of newspaper clippings, boxes filled with pictures, and legal documents. I also interviewed 46 residents, across generations, who graduated from the local high school. Next, I co-hosted two community cookouts with neighborhood groups to first share my historical findings then share my qualitative findings from the interviews. Over 100 residents were in attendance.

Using community traditions as research allowed me to expand the qualitative criterion of “confirmability” (Lincoln & Guba, 1998). That is to say, the community methods ensured residents had continued opportunities to provide feedback on my research beyond just reading interview transcripts or a draft of my findings (Anney, 2014). In residents’ living rooms, during encounters on the sidewalk, and in front of community members at the cookouts, I shared my findings and analysis and allowed residents to provide critical feedback. I practiced reflexivity to be open to validation and criticism of my findings (Pillow, 2003).

I coded and organized their forms of feedback into three themes (Yin, 2017). The first theme is locating Black life-making in sites of oppression which refers to residents’ criticizing my historical findings which did not document “the world they created in the Heights” despite oppression. While I am a critical scholar who aims to understand how structural forces limit Black people’s education opportunity, residents named a range of forces that limit opportunity such as individual’s choices, home environment, white supremacy, or self-hate. As such, the second theme, intra-community disagreements, focuses on the need for researchers to engage the differences in how Black people frame education problems. When I shared my findings that local colleges often were engines of inequality rather than mobility, many residents shared “we already know that, but what can we do?” The feedback formed the third theme of research is not enough which refers to how residents pushed me to ensure my scholarship had a sustainable contribution. The paper concludes with the radical possibilities community-engaged research can provide when it connects to the traditional methods, networks, and infrastructure that already exist in Black communities (Kelley, 2002).

Author

• Jalil M. Bishop, Villanova University