On the Mattering of Preschool Black Girls: Lesson Learned on Community-Building

• In Event: The Impact of Racism and White Supremacy on Children's and Teachers' Agency in the Early Grades

Abstract

Objectives: Educators often stigmatize Black girls’ behaviors and actions, interpreting them as inappropriate or disengaged from academic work and responding to them with excessive rigidity and punishment (Carter Andrews et al. 2019; Morris, 2016; Neal-Jackson, 2020; Zimmerman, 2018). These racialized and gendered patterns start as early as preschool where even well-intentioned teachers (Boutte, 2017; Picower, 2009; Summer, 2014) overlook, interrupt, and punish Black girls’ civic and community-building practices (Authors, 2017; Authors, 2020), such as collaboration, collective problem solving, and joyful engagement with one another. This is particularly problematic considering that many Black communities give priority to communal living and cooperative problem solving and these preferences affect educational motivation, aspiration, task performance and identity development (Gay, 2002; Love, 2019). In the present study, strategies Black girls are observed engaging in three preschool classrooms are detailed. I ask: 1) What capabilities do preschool Black girls engage to build community? 2) How do teachers respond to their actions?

Theoretical framework: To analyze young Black girls’ community building experiences in the racialized and gendered context of American schools, two frameworks are put into dialogue. Black Feminist Theory (Collins, 2000) centers Black women lived experiences, ideas, and cultures and expands the conception of valuable knowledge and knowledge production. hooks’ (2014) theorizing of Engaged Pedagogy decenters teachers’ superior status, authority and control to privilege students’ identities, subjectivities, and agency within classroom spaces. Engaged pedagogy (hooks, 2014) posits that students and teachers all have a role as communities members to engage, co-create and shape classroom communities that are joyful, engaging and equitable.

Methods: I analyzed data from two large multi-sited studies that employed comparative video-cued ethnographic methods (eg.Tobin et al., 1989). The two blinded studies (Author, 2014; Authors, 2017) employed a variation of video‐cued multivocal ethnography (Authors, 2019) that includes yearlong immersions in each classroom, documenting children actions through films.

Data sources: In the second phase of the original studies, three full days were filmed in each classroom. I used that video footage that amounted to 45-hours, as data for this paper. I conducted a constant comparative analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014), documented through field notes the various ways young Black girls sought to build community and developed thematic codes for the different strategies preschool Black girls engaged in to transform an individual endeavor into a communal one, also noting how educators responded to their initiatives.

Results: Across different educational contexts, young Black girls demonstrated various sophisticated and engaging ways of building community that made their communities stronger, more exciting and caring. The capabilities young Black girls demonstrated were perceived and/or labeled differently—in positive and negative ways—depending on the educational context. The context, rather than the action itself, determines how young Black girls are labeled and responded to in their everyday early schooling life.

Scholarly significance of the study: Making visible and understanding young Black girls’ multifaceted capabilities is a means to abolish (Love, 2019) oppressive, racist, patriarchal norms otherwise perpetrated by educators and schools.

Authors

• Natacha Jones, The University of Texas - Austin

• Jennifer Keys Adair, The University of Texas at Austin