Exploring the Black Parental Imaginary: A Critical Mixed-Methods Investigation of Black Homeschooling (Poster 7)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Scholars compellingly argue the many ways public schooling in the US was never designed to foster Black children’s thriving. As such, Black parents wrestle with the extraordinary challenge of either hoping ongoing school reforms will result in better educational opportunities and experiences for their children or fully removing them from schools altogether, and in doing so, take full responsibility for imagining and designing an educational experience that ensures Black children’s wellbeing. Wellbeing can take many forms which may include Black youth’s pride in their racial identity, public and private regard for being Black. This mixed methods dissertation utilizes administrative data, ethnography, and interviews to explore the motivations and practices of Black parents who have turned to homeschooling as an act of resistance against anti-Black schooling structures that reproduce racialized harm. A fixed sequential mixed methods design enables me to avoid essentialized, or flattened, interpretations of the experiences and desires of this unique subset of the Black population within the United States. Taken together, this work will provide a meaningful glimpse into the heterogeneity in vision that Black parents have for Black education, their children’s schooling in particular, and the intervention of Black homeschooling to Black children’s persistent experience of racialized harm in American education.

Author

• Carla P. Wellborn-Watts, Vanderbilt University