Pieces of Me: A Reflexive Account of Researcher Insider-Outsider Status in Historical Educational Research

• In Event: Reflexivity in History of Education Research: Complicating Oral History, Archive, and Black and Indigenous Voices

Abstract

This paper illustrates how I use reflexivity to explore my complex insider/outsider position as a historian studying Black education and childhood in Rosenwald Schools, once in my ancestral home of rural Pickens County, Alabama. As a researcher, I was inside and outside the Pickens County “world.” Except for one visit to Pickens during my teens, I knew nothing of my ancestors’ experiences coming of age and attending schools there. The absence of Black children’s voices and perspectives in the History of Education struck me. I wondered what Black children’s childhood experiences in early 20th-century de jure schools might add to the historiography of education.

Research has shown that the voices and perspectives of Black children regarding their childhood experiences have rarely been documented.[1] I have experienced historical silences personally, in historical literature, and in the archive. These experiences informed my perspective, which is to cultivate, through reflexivity, an awareness of my position in the historical field so that I can look beyond traditional archives to approach data collection ethically and with an eye towards (un)silencing and uplifting.

My descendant/researcher position shaped my view of Pickens as a potential archive. I used an ethnohistorical approach to data collection, allowing for historical data collection beyond institutional archives (e.g., oral histories, material objects, and personal collections).
In this paper, I offer three reflexive accounts that explore my insider self, insider/outsider self, and outsider self as I navigate research experiences of entering the field and data collection in my dissertation study. For this larger study, I collected forty-nine oral history interviews with former Rosenwald School students and over 1700 archival documents and photographs from institutional and community-based archives.

My reflection illustrates the complexity of a historian’s position in the historical field. As an insider/outsider, I was a multifarious being navigating complex parts of myself that offered an array of potential affordances and challenges related to my aim for (un)silencing voices and uplifting community.[2] Reflexivity allowed me to check for and minimize potential biases, lapses, and impositions. Reflexivity enabled me to respectfully foster trust and build relationships with participants and community members, allowing for data collection in non-traditional spaces. Furthermore, holding a reflexive position helped me explore, leverage, and activate possibilities for uplift through community-based historical activism.
This paper contributes to scholarship that explores historian reflexivity. I have demonstrated how reflexivity might help historians explore and complicate how pieces of ourselves hinder or help our entry, relationships, and opportunity for community uplift in community-based archival research.

Author

• Kimberly C. Ransom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign