The Formation of an Oppositional Consciousness: Black Parents and Community Partnerships for Educational Change

• In Event: To BE with Black Communities: Possibilities and Visions of Justice

Abstract

Objective: This study explores the ways Black parents’ educational leadership is bolstered through collaboration with justice-focused community-based organizations. The research outlines the case of a coalition of parents, community members, and educators attempting to contest local education policy decisions and traces the arc of Black parents’ oppositional consciousness (Mansbridge & Morris, 2001). Contextualized by the broader sociopolitical context that creates conditions for the emergence of this form of collective action, the study analyzes the degree to which these community partnerships represent opportunities as well as challenges for the establishment and sustainability of Black parent’s community-based leadership. The key questions this study seeks to answer are: How are Black parents’ collective identities activated in response to inequitable school district policies? What is the role of community-based partnerships in the formation of an oppositional consciousness among Black families?

Theoretical Perspective: This study is guided by Social Movement Theory (Morris, 2000) which helps explain how community-level grassroot movements emerge through collective action. We employ these theoretical insights to explain the ways in which Black caregivers, local community-based organizations, and other key actors work in concert to resist what they perceive to be oppressive school and city-wide policies that impact their children’s educational futures.

Methods: This study relies on case study methodology and uses interviews with five Black parents who serve as key informants for this study. In addition to their participation in semi-structured interviews, these caregivers were also observed over the course of 10 months at community meetings, school district meetings, and organizing actions that were in response to an historic year of school closings in Chicago. Analysis was conducted for the corpus of data using an initial coding scheme based on key tenets of social movement theory and was followed by a second phase of coding that surfaced emergent themes that speak to the ways the partnerships fostered oppositional consciousness among Black parent leaders. Document and content analysis of district documents and local news accounts were used to triangulate primary data sources and further refine key themes (Bowen, 2009).

Results: Findings reveal that Black parents felt empowered through the actions of coalition efforts and acknowledged the role of community-based organizations in providing leadership opportunities. Parents that might have been isolated in their concerns were met with support and infrastructure for their voices to be elevated through the collective identity of the community-parent partnership. Analysis also surfaced the tensions associated with the hierarchical nature of the partnership as caregivers observed power differentials within the partnerships even in spaces that are purported to be guided by equity, inclusion, and justice.

Significance: This study is significant in that it contributes to the extant scholarship that recognizes the leadership of minoritized families striving for more equitable schools and communities (Rodela & Bertrand, 2021; Wilson, 2019; Wilson et al, 2021). The findings challenge us to consider how community-level social movements for educational justice interact with individual and collective action from Black parents to spur and sustain educational improvements in Black communities.

Author

• Rhoda Freelon, The Spencer Foundation