But What About the Kids? Black Girls' Theorizing About Youth-Driven Civic Engagement

• In Event: Black Girls and Young Women Enacting Civics Through Everyday Praxis

Abstract

This discussion includes findings from a study that explored the civic experiences of Black girls who are members of the ARC, a public-health and social action organization that focuses on the health and development of Black girls. The ARC utilizes Afrocentric curriculum and pedagogies centered on the Kemetic principles of Ma’at (Karenga, 2003) to carry out its year-round youth leadership development and civic action programming. The objectives are to foster a sense of cultural pride and to increase awareness of the health and societal inequities that continue to disproportionately affect Black families. Through the ARC’s programming, the girls develop skills to identify and critique social issues, and in-response, co-construct social action projects that address the issues they have identified as important to youth in their communities.
This research is situated at the intersections of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) and civic identity development. CRP (Ladson-Billings, 1995) provides a framework for analyzing how Black history and culture are made explicit in the ARC’s community-based programming and for illustrating how intentionality in nurturing the girls’ cultural and ethnic identities are promising practices for raising sociopolitical consciousness. CRP has significant implications for community-based education as it allows for flexibility in the curriculum and for the possibility of youth-driven civic programming. Not having the constraints of multiple layers of bureaucracy and neoliberal notions of schooling (Costigan, 2013; Sanders et al., 2018), culturally-relevant and community-based education provides opportunities for youth to engage in critical social analysis and to collectively envision, organize, and enact social change (Noguera, 2014; Watts, Diemer & Voight, 2011).
I utilized a basic interpretive design (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) to explore how the girls make sense of their civic experiences as members of the ARC. Two of the research questions guiding the study are as follows: 1) how do Black girls who participate in the ARC’s programs makes sense of their civic identities and 2) how do the program participants characterize their civic experiences and assert their civic agencies? A thematic analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001) of the data, drawn from participant observations, focus groups, and individual interviews, resulted in the following findings: 1) the girls theorize about civic engagement differently despite their ongoing connections to the ARC; 2) their civic practices are largely inspired by their individual interests and other forms of external socialization; and 3) the girls’ abilities to engage in critical social analysis are being cultivated by the opportunity to interrogate social inequities contextualized within Black experiences. The girls’ assessments of the many ways social inequities and health disparities impact Black communities reflected how they are critically analyzing social issues and dissecting historical and contemporary social issues through intersecting gendered and racial lenses. Future possibilities for this work include how analyzing evolving theories of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014) and examining the ways in which historically marginalized populations conceptualize their place within the sociopolitical contexts of society (Cohen, 2006) can provide alternative frameworks for interrogating cultural, ethnic, and civic identity development in Black girls.

Author

• Sabrina J. Curtis, The George Washington University