Black Girls Unknown: Lessons Learned Through Creating Space for Free Subjectivities in an Urban Alternative School

• In Event: Interrogating Deficit Thinking/Theorizing in Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Black girls’ successes in school are over-shadowed by the larger challenges they face in school and society. This is particularly the case for Black girls attending alternative schools. Though we have come to understand the psycho-social barriers to educational opportunity they face, we have yet to make space for celebrating and understanding their strengths (Brown, 2008). Sisterhood, a small hush-harbor located in an urban alternative school, works to address this challenge. The purpose of this paper, then, is to explicate the lessons learned from cultivating sisterhood with Black girls who face limited educational options. We wondered: What can Black girls attending alternative schools teach educators about cultivating safe and equitable school communities?
Black girls in alternative schools operate through multiple and shifting liminal spaces. They are “betwixt and between” childhood and adulthood as they carry the status of non-traditional students who are often also dealing with precarious legal and social circumstances (Winn, 2010). This, coupled with the distinct experience of misogynoir characterizing Black girls’ educational experiences, necessitates that scholars evidence how discrimination at the intersections of antiBlackness and heterosexism functions interpersonally and structurally within this unique school context (Trudy, 2014). Further, alternative schools are commonly separated geospatially from traditional schools (Dunning-Lozano, 2016), which isolate Black girls who attend them from the rituals, resources, and social status conferred upon traditional school students. For these reasons, Butler’s (2018) conceptualization of Black Girl Cartography coupled with Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) characterization of critical fabulation were useful theoretical devices to chart how the girls who participated in this study navigated through both alternative school and their stigmatization as “wayward” girls.
Conducting research within the Sisterhood context constituted what San Pedro & Kinloch (2017) call a “Project in Humanization.” That is, a methodology foregrounding the humanness of both participants and researchers by collaborating to account for the fullness being. To do this, we combined traditional qualitative approaches with culturally specific restorative and reflexive practices to document the girls’ educational journeys. In the process, we conducted 10 field-observations, one 90-minute interview with four of 10 educators, and three 90-minute interviews with 12 of 20 regular Sista Scholars.
Comparing code categories within the data highlighted the significance of a single theme: Black girls unknown. The categories identified tension between the educators’ perceptions of Black girls attending their school and how the girls perceived themselves. The educators held perceptions of our Sista Scholars that function to perpetuate misogynoir in the alternative school setting, particularly through their demands that Black girls engage respectability politics. The girls, however, gave expansive accounts of positive self-concept, demonstrating how their educators misunderstood and denied the fullness of their being.
The Sister Scholars taught us the fullness of their lives and wisdom in their perspectives, even as they navigated through complex and oppressive circumstances in an alternative school and their everyday lives. This work, then, calls for those in positions of power to abolish the structures limiting Black girls (Love, 2019), beginning with the perceptions that prop up their inequitable treatment. We suggest that this practice looks like cultivating space for Black girls to exercise free subjectivity. In other words, educators can create educational freedom for and with Black girls by developing classrooms and school communities where they are welcome as they are and not as society dictates they should be. This work requires committing to and enacting pedagogical freedom in ways that support Black girls according to their gifts, talents, and interests.

Author

• Erica B. Edwards, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author