Complicating "Humanizing" Ideals of Educational Spaces for Black Youth: Conceptualizing Antiblackness and Meaning-Making in Community Schools

• In Event: Accepting the Responsibility to Examine and Innovate With Frameworks Used in Education Research

Abstract

Community schools are increasingly operating across the nation as a means to assist educational leaders in countering deficit narratives and centering the assets of youth and families (Shaia & Finigan-Carr, 2018; Valli, Stefanski, & Reuben, 2014; Trujillo, Hernández, Jarrell, & Kissell, 2014), including for Black youth. However, few studies grapple with the tension between the “humanizing” ideals of community schooling and the antiBlack narratives youth experience within schools writ large (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Morris, 2016; Rios, 2011; Shange, 2019). This is despite the central role AntiBlackness and meaning-making play in shaping school processes and practices (Lewis & Diamond, 2015), including the educational leaders charged with guiding the development of community school initiatives (Abrams and Gibbs, 2000; Voyle, 2012). Utilizing a novel framework that combines both AntiBlackness and sensemaking theories, this study fills this gap by asking: How do community school leaders (district administration, school staff, community partners and parents) make meaning of and frame the experiences of Black youth within and outside of a community school?
This study draws on two concepts: critical sensemaking (Weick, 1995) -how people make meaning of the world - and AntiBlackness (Dumas & ross, 2016; Wilderson, 2020; Shange, 2019)- the construction of Black people as nonhuman that informs social and institutional arrangements . These combined lenses help to examine how community school leaders’ understandings of and efforts to address the experiences of Black youth facilitate or disrupt AntiBlack schooling ideology and processes.
I draw from 67 observations, 54 interviews with community school educational leaders (district administration, school staff, community partners and parents), and document analysis from a broader study of community schooling in a mid-sized metropolitan city. I employed both inductive and deductive approaches to data analysis.
While the ideals of community schooling purport to uplift the assets and expertise of youth, I argue that AntiBlackness is one of the societal contexts educational leaders are embedded within that shapes their racialized meaning-meaning about Black youth. I assert that AntiBlackness also facilitates dominant discursive frames regarding Black youth and their families as “problem” (i.e., uncivil, criminal, inferior, deficit, and inhuman) that educational leaders may reproduce even as they implement espoused “humanizing” educational initiatives to counter disparities and deficit narratives. Findings indicate that often Black youth were understood as the “bad kids.” Educational leaders discussed how Black youth and their families were understood in deficit ways and disportionality experienced by Black youth (i.e., disportionate discipline referrals, learning outcomes, etc.) were attributed to factors outside of the school: perceptions of Black youth as having “high needs,” trauma, limited parental involvement, inherent cultural deficits, etc. By emphasizing external factors, school practices and ideologies that contributed to the differential schooling experiences of Black youth were at times underemphasized. Understandings of community schooling as an initiative that primarily addresses out-of-school challenges aligned at times with educational leaders’ limited critical reflection of the factors within schools that contributed to inequities. Without reckoning with the role AntiBlack meaning-making within practice, educational leaders are at risk of scaling up initiatives, such as community schooling, that may reproduce harm.

Author

• Gwendolyn Baxley, University at Buffalo - SUNY