Construyendo Historias Juntos: A Praxis of Story Gathering and Storytelling Among Schools and Communities

• In Event: Comunidad Por Medio de Cuentos: Community-Centered Storytelling and Story-Gathering Praxis

Abstract

Urban education scholar Camika Royal argued that “school reforms happen in the context of racial politics [...] who tells the stories, who controls the narratives of reform [...] matter” (2022, p. 10). Similarly, this year’s call for submissions highlighted how “research, in many ways, has been complicit in concretizing racial injustice and oppression” (AERA, 2023, para. 3). Working from these two perspectives allows us to recognize how the failures of decades of school reforms in the city of Philadelphia, which have relied on deficit-based assumptions about Black and Latinx students, families, and communities, have upheld racial oppression and White supremacy. In an effort to construct liberatory educational possibilities, we must center communities that have been historically disempowered and exploited by racial, colonial, and capitalist systems of oppression. Through a praxis of community story gathering and storytelling, we seek to offer a liberatory approach to urban education research that intentionally (re)centers community in community and school partnerships in Philadelphia.
This paper is based on our qualitative study of four, distinct community and school partnerships in Philadelphia schools. Drawing on a queer, intersectional, abolitionist framework, we use a participatory and culturally affirming approach that involves working alongside Philadelphians in order to center their lives and experiences in an evaluation of educational policy and action. By gathering rich details from community members through in person and archival interactions, we are excavating the non-dominant, people’s narratives of four Philadelphia school and community partnerships over time.
Community school partnerships in the United States date back to early twentieth century attempts to address poverty and racial isolation (Maier et al., 2018). Royal (2022) has traced more contemporary iterations, problematizing them as part of a neoliberal shift of accountability and funding from public school districts to private organizations (p. 62). In the past twenty years in particular, Royal argued that “publicly unaccountable businesses [have] made millions off the well-publicized, alleged failure of Philadelphia’s public schools, especially its Black and Brown students” (p. 90). Within this context of neoliberal, racial capitalism, we juxtapose our examination of various models of community and school partnerships alongside the history of Black and other People of Color-led education movements in Philadelphia. Ultimately, our goal is to document and share powerful practices of cultivating community to strengthen the educational experiences for students, families and educators in Philadelphia today and into the future.
Importantly, these story gathering methods take place within our larger collaborative effort of facilitating research and action teams made up of educators, students, and families of the School District of Philadelphia and faculty and students at a local college. Although our project engages with multiple BIPOC communities across Philadelphia, for the purpose of this paper, we focus on our story gathering and storytelling work with Latinx community members in the Kensington and South Philly neighborhoods. Preliminary results and contributions of this research include our collaborative deliverables (people’s histories of the schools and neighborhoods) as well as an interactive discussion on conducting story gathering and storytelling participatory research in urban education environments.

Authors

• Erika L. Davis, University of Michigan

• Josue Ochoa, Swarthmore College

• Brianna Christian, Swarthmore College

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College