A "Grow Your Own" Initiative as a Black Educational Fugitive Space

• In Event: Growing Your Own Teachers: Building Community-Focused Teacher Pipelines

Abstract

Black teachers represent less than ten percent of the teaching force (Author & Colleague, 2019b; Jackson & Kohli, 2016). This underrepresentation is especially felt within the state of Ohio, where only 4.3% of teachers are Black, and approximately one in three schools in Ohio has a 100% white teaching staff (Ohio Department of Education, 2021). In response, scholars have introduced ‘grow-your-own’(GYO) initiatives within high schools―providing scholarships and mentorship to inspire Black students to pursue teaching as a professional option. While GYO initiatives look different in each community, they are designed to be a viable pathway for increasing the racial/ethnic diversity of teachers (Author & Colleagues, 2019).
This presentation documents the first four years of a GYO partnership between a university and students in an urban high school in Ohio―exploring the ways in which Black students and the instructor co-created the program’s curriculum as a way to understand, confront, and resist the anti-Blackness experienced in the high school, university, and state. Black placemaking as a conceptual framework is central to this research. Black placemaking centers narratives of resistance, Black life, and Black agency within anti-Blackness; elucidating ways in which Black people have historically critiqued and challenged anti-Blackness in curriculum and school policies (Dumas & ross, 2016) and the alternative, fugitive, and outer spaces that develop because of Black resistance (ross, 2019). In the tradition of Black placemaking, I use the critical qualitative methodology of portraiture, a combination of art, science, and social critique, to examine the lives and lived experiences of historically marginalized populations (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Furthermore, portraiture methodology seeks to capture “expressions of goodness” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 9) within schools. Therefore, portraiture enables us to see how the students themselves define goodness even amid anti-Blackness. Data for this study was collected through interviews, classroom observations, small focus groups, and student journals. Additionally, student-led projects were analyzed in this work.
This study is significant for several reasons. While grow-your-own initiatives have been developed to inspire Black students to pursue/consider teaching as a professional option, few studies have elicited the voices of Black high school students who participate in these initiatives. Similarly, it is unclear in the extant literature how the history of Black education and fugitive pedagogies (Givens, 2021) can inform the curriculum of GYO initiatives. As such, this will be co-presented with one of the students enrolled in the program―acknowledging their authority, knowledge, and wisdom (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997).
Three important findings emerge from the data collection process: (1) the grow your own initiative as a Black educational fugitive space (ross, 2019); (2) the students’ development of Black critical consciousness; and (3) the students’ dreams and desires to engage in praxis to dismantle anti-Blackness in and beyond schools. Each finding points to the importance of co-creating GYO curriculum and programming with Black students and communities, as well as the importance of drawing on Black historical traditions in designing GYO initiatives.

Authors

• Rachel McMillian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Nathaniel Bryan, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author