Research Tools to Analyze and Understand Spatial Imaginaries and Their Influence on Educational Policy

• In Event: Race, Place, and the Marketization of Education: Understanding How Spatial Imaginaries and Structures Shape Schooling

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explain three methodological techniques used to help understand spatial imaginaries. The first uses maps as an elicitation tool, the second uses maps as a tool for participant self-reporting, and the third uses maps as a tool to annotate and triangulate data. The presenters explain how they use these tools across two studies that each seek to understand how spatial understandings relate to school choice and segregation.

The conceptual frameworks for both studies stem from Critical Race Spatial Analysis (Morrison et al., 2017). This understanding foregrounds issues of race and space, allowing researchers to use spatial methods to understand how spatial imaginaries of space affect placemaking in communities and schools. Using this framework, the authors report on the methodological strategies they use in two sites to analyze spatial imaginaries as they relate to schools and communities.

The first site is in a southern city that had three distinct periods of school enrollment: legal segregation, forced integration, and resegregation. In this study, the researchers analyze how school segregation itself shapes perceptions of spaces throughout the city. To gather this data, the researchers used maps as elicitation tools. Participants annotated places in the city of comfort, belonging, and inclusion. They also mapped spaces of restriction, exclusion, and fear. The artifacts from this study help the researchers understand the spatial consequences of segregation and integration. For example, participants during resegregation reported feeling “trapped in their neighborhoods” and drew a box around where they felt trapped. While respondents during integration talked about “bridges to other areas of the community.”

The second site considers how individuals interpret school decisions in Washington DC, a city where norms of neoliberalism shape school enrollment and also shift housing markets toward gentrification processes. The city is at a transition where there is racial diversity within neighborhoods, but this diversity is not reflected in schools. To understand why neighborhood diversity is not influencing school diversity, one must understand how white, gentrifying parents interpret schools and place, frame their choice sets, and make decisions about families and schooling. This research shows powerful normative shifts in spatial logic as the white spatial imagination has pushed out the black spatial imagination of a city known for its iconic role in the African American community throughout the 20th century. The presenters share how they synthesized Washington DC data in two steps. The first was participant mapping and annotating during the interview process. In the second step, a researcher listened to and reflected on audio interviews while annotating their own maps.

This presentation has scholarly significance because it shows how different spatial questions and frames lead to a variety of research techniques that lead to novel understandings of educational policy. It helps show how educational policies both cause new spatial outcomes and get interpreted differently based on divergent spatial imaginaries.

Authors

• Bryan Mann, University of Kansas

• Jaclyn Lauren Dudek, University of Kansas