Learning From and With Black Families' Place-Making: Possibilities and Tensions Toward Transformative Educational Leadership

• In Event: Toward Answerability in Our Work With and Study of Families and Communities of Color

Abstract

Purpose
Across the U.S., many Black families have relocated from urban to suburban municipalities due to displacing dynamics like gentrification and school closures (Smith & Greer, 2018). Amid harmful politics of place, Black people and communities have still sustained landscapes of agency, care, and resistance that encompass placemaking, or how people collectively (re)imagine and utilize place and space to tend to their wellbeing (Hunter et al., 2016). Through reflection on a critical phenomenological study (Salamon, 2018) with seven Black families that engaged in geographic movement in pursuit of educational opportunity, this paper considers the possibilities and tensions of learning from and with Black families’ agentic placemaking practices in educational contexts.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws from theories on Black placemaking to uplift the multifaceted ways Black people create spaces of “endurance, belonging, and resistance” (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 32). Importantly, placemaking illuminates how Black folks not only counter ongoing practices of structural violence, but how they leverage communal space and institutions for connection and joy (Hunter et al., 2016; Lipsitz, 2007). How Black families imagine, practice, and struggle towards places of belongingness provide consequential insight in countering technocratic and unidimensional leadership and policy approaches.

Research Methods & Analysis
Focal data from this study include 21 in-depth, dialogic interviews conducted with caregivers and their children in 2019. Interviews examined families’ emotional affect for communities they call home, how families navigated geographic movement in pursuit of educational opportunity, and their experiences of learning—whether through formal schooling or communal experiences. I employed a constant comparative analysis approach to code and analyze varied data sources including interview transcripts, memos, and documents relevant to families’ experiences (Fram, 2013). Importantly, ongoing dialogue with select family participants has offered spaces of continued learning and reflection on this inquiry process.

Findings & Significance
Findings from the larger study pertain to the generative ways Black families perceived, navigated, and transgressed metropolitan Detroit’s racially stratified educational landscape. However, findings represent limited snapshots of families’ diverse subjectivities and ongoing acts of educational agency. As such, relational and methodological tensions include maintaining dialogue and trust with families with attention to the in-flux nature of families’ subjectivities, as well as my own, and families’ desires and wonderings on how I speak of relationships and places to which I am allied but remain an outsider. Relatedly, I consider tensions and possibilities for continued learning and relationality across time and space with families. For instance, one way this occurred included working with families to instruct educational leaders on approaches for affirming and partnering with Black students and families’ already existing acts of educational agency and belongingness.

Together, I reflect on the transformative potential of Black families’ placemaking, as captured through inquiry and relationality overtime. Placemaking, while occurring in particular places, is about modes of being that center connection and assertions that we are still here. These practices and logics of relationality can inform more humanizing learning experiences and collaborative educational leadership.

Author

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington
  Presenting Author