Engaging Slow Methods in Ethnographic Research That Centers Young Black Girls' Epistemologies: Affordances and Tensions

• In Event: Methodological Commitments and Refusals: Engaging Slow Methodology With Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This paper engages slow methods to document and analyze preschool Black girls' experiences. We present textured narratives of young Black girls' relational and communal ways of being and learning that center joy and engagement with each other and with their environment. These narratives subvert the deficit, criminalizing, and essentializing articulations of Black girlhoods prevalent in U.S. educational spaces (Morris, 2016). In articulating the experiences of young Black girls who are and who experience many subjectivities, I acknowledge tensions permeating my research with risks to further categorize and endanger Blackfemaleness (Quashie, 2004).

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

bell hooks’ (1994) engaged pedagogy situates joyful, liberatory and deep learning in teachers’ ability to catalyze and nurture students community engagement, discovery, joy, and relationality. Slowness as a framework (Quashie, 2022) privileges engaging in a kind of care for and of study to document and capture the aesthetic of experiences. With these frameworks, we intentionally and carefully bear witness to and analyze the various ways young Black girls engage in and experience school.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

To make visible preschool Black girls’ joy, versatile epistemologies, and what schools miss when their actions are misinterpreted, criminalized, and shut down, we engage in a secondary analysis study of two large-scale, video-cued ethnographic qualitative data sets focused on young children’s agency and civic action.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

The ethnographic video footage from three preschool classrooms allowed us to pay careful attention to, view slowly and repeatedly the nuances, tones, inflections, gestures, words, actions, interactions, embodied knowledges of young Black girls and the practices they engaged in to learn, help one another learn in ways rooted in relationality, community, and joy.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

We found that while the young Black girls engaged in various community-building endeavors while expanding various types of interdisciplinary knowledge, their context didn’t always support their capabilities and, at times, restricted them from using them. These restrictions and punishment echo the criminalization of Black girls in schools that has been well documented. A slow and close reading of Black girls' engagement with each other and with their context revealed that knowledge-making is mediated by contextual and cultural considerations.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

The joy and brilliance of children of color are seldom the starting point when examining the schooling experiences of young children (Pérez & Saavedra, 2017). Slow methods allow us to engage deeply, center relationality and generate narratives that capture and document the brilliance of Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous ways of being and knowing and that can inform pedagogical decisions. Liberatory Black feminist lenses and slow methods can offer alternative conceptual and methodological frameworks and insights to reimagine and transform how researchers and educators understand and support the capabilities and knowledge-making with and about Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous communities.

Author

• Natacha Jones, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author