Holding and Making Space: A Black Geographic Perspective on Learning and Identity

• In Event: Fostering Black Space in Education: Co-Constructing Futures Through Community Collaboration and the Reimagining of Schools

Abstract

Objectives
Space has been used to oppress, other and harm marginalized groups, specifically youth. Further, there is a need to understand what, how and where youth find belonging, while also allowing them the learning opportunity to show us how they cultivate it. Specifically, there's a need to understand how to better involve youth in the development of our collective physical and social spaces by paying attention, and learning from their process. This study lays the foundation for research and design methods that promote belonging through the design of learning environments and identity development. This work pushes the theoretical and methodological mechanisms for designing learning environments that support youth identity development, well-being, and justice.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Space and Black geographies serve as both analytical and methodological places to understand education and learning. Specifically, they serve as ways to understand how youth leverage learning to produce, make, and design places, both physically and socially, for belonging. I position Black geographies and sense of place as a guiding framework to both design a learning environment and analyze learning and identity development as parallel processes (McKittrick 2020; 2011). Further, I position learning and identity development as parallel processes that cultivate belonging to space (Nasir et al., 2020; hooks, 2008).

Data Sources
This ethnographic project leans on participant observations, audio and video recordings, natural conversations, and artifacts to study seven girls of color in a youth design-build program over a year run by a nonprofit organization. Youth designed and built a space for a client to support combatting rapid gentrification, displacement and being rendered placeless. Data was analyzed through grounded theory, which constituted using the girls’ words to open code and foster thematic analysis (Charmaz, 2005). Youth in this study focused on aspects of memory, remembering while resisting forgetting significant places in their communities through arts-based activities during the design process. They also showcased the ways they design physical spaces by infusing the design with stories form their own identities. Lastly, they enact relationality as a tool to co-construct and physically build a place for a client, whom they chose, in order to build them a place of belonging. Through this program, youth confront spatial justice in a rapidly gentrifying landscape in the Pacific Northwest.

Findings and Significance
In the Learning Sciences, Black geographies is seldom used as a mechanism to understand learning. Additionally, information on what youth want to see in their cities is vital, and this project showcases how they would design spaces in their communities if they had the choice. Thus, learning and identity are seen as parallel processes that promote belonging as reflected in this project. Findings include a learning design that involved girls of color in the civic process and development of their cities promoted belonging for themselves and other groups of people. Also, a second finding includes using black geographies as a methodological and analytical tool to study learning supports researchers in incorporating a spatial lens in their research that focuses on justice.

Author

• Kaleb Germinaro, University of Washington
  Presenting Author