Umoja: Embodying Community Pedagogies as Methodological

• In Event: Centering Epistemologies of Family: Relationality, Mutuality, and Care

Abstract

This paper is a reflexive account on how I (the author) aligned my methodological approach with my study’s theoretical lens of centering community. This framework decentered western notions of rugged individualism and competition. By applying the theoretical lens to how I conducted the study, I found the research healing and transformative for both my participants and myself.

Data from this paper comes from a year long ethnographic case study that explored community-school interactions in the South Bronx, NYC. The study examined how the interacting sites sustained each other through pedagogical practices of the school and efforts of affiliated community organizations. I framed the case study through the theoretical lens of Community Centric Pedagogy (CCP; Author, 2020), which includes tenets of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) and African-oriented community epistemologies such as Ubuntu (I am because we are) and the Nguzo Saba (Hord, 1995). In theory and in practice CCP provided an empowering educational model that provides access for all students to feel validated in their schooling experience. Simultaneously, CCP aims to improve the surrounding communities of schools.

I was aware that my participants (youth, educators and community organizers) were addressing white supremacist manifestations of aggressive policing, environmental injustice, and gentrification. Thus, I examine what it means to be in solidarity with their efforts while gaining knowledge and making meaning.

As I navigated relationships with my participants, I grounded myself in the principles of the Nguzo Saba, which I also applied to the framing of the study. For instance, the first principle, Umoja (unity), stresses solidarity. I saw myself as responsible to the community I entered, and to elevate the collective through amplifying voices of students, teachers, and community leaders that would resonate far beyond New York City. I participated in actions and events that furthered my participant’s goals of agency and local power. Ujima (collective work and responsibility) kept the research in line with the idea that this project was part of the collective work that already existed in the focal community. Ujamaa (cooperative economics), framed my research methods to consider the aims of community wealth. For instance, I was attentive to spending money at local businesses that ultimately supported the efforts of participants and the larger community. As the researcher, I could not study community, without fundamentally valuing community and being held accountable to the community.

By using the Nguzo Saba and other decolonial frameworks that centered community not just as theory but as method, I applied Laura’s (2016) notion of “laboring and engaging” with participants. I found my research as embedded in solidarity with the community of study. I was intentional that this study was not just a project to complete, but was conducted in integrity that would ultimately align and uplift community against the backdrop of white heteropatriarchal supremacy. This paper takes up neutrality and objectivity as something impossible when using African, Indigenous, anti-racist and critical theories as a framing. Instead, through the study, I found community and lifelong partners in liberation work.

Author

• Hui-Ling S. Malone, University of California - Santa Barbara