Feeling Safe & Secure: Black Girls Discuss Equity in Education

• In Event: Visibilizing Research About the Educational Experiences of Black Women and Girls

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores how Black girls make sense of their experiences in an afterschool program. Participants in this program were Black female students. The adults involved in the program considered and sought out the girls as experts whose knowledge and experiences were essential for the development of programming that met their needs, improved their academic capabilities, and developed their leadership skills (Mirra et al., 2016).

Theoretical framework
As Black girls enter and transition through early to middle adolescence, adults may view them as older, limiting the care and concern vital for their growth and development (Epstein et al., 2017). These views of school adults have contributed to Black girls' limited exposure to care, support, and exclusion from potential leadership opportunities (Epstein et al., 2017).
To address the negative adults perceptions of Black girls and highlight the value of young Black girls' sense-making abilities and understanding of their educational experiences, I used Yosso's Community Cultural Wealth (CCW, 2005). CCW provides a six-tenet framework from an assets-based perspective that is useful for highlighting the family and community supports, skills, knowledge, assets and attributes that students bring with them to diverse educational settings. In this study, the CCW tenets were useful for visibilizing the many assets the Black girls in this study already possessed, and how participation in the after school program at Regal Academy assisted the girls with navigating school.

Data Source/Methods
Regal Academy is a tuition-free charter school in the Midwest with 464 students enrolled from kindergarten through eighth grade. The student ethnicity breakdown is 87% Black, 6% two or more races, 4% White, 3% Hispanic, 1 % Asian, and 1% American Indian (Elementary Schools, 2021). In 2016, a Regal Academy middle school teacher developed the RoyalSapphires afterschool program to provide a safe and secure environment for Black girls between fourth and eighth grade.

The data for this study is drawn from analysis of six student interviews of 3 students each in Grades 4 and 5 (3 each) and Grades 6th-8th (3 each). I engaged each participant in an open-ended, in-depth, semi-structured interview for about an hour that identified members' length of involvement in the program, experience participating, and perceived impact based on their educational lives. Using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 2017), I developed three themes.


Results
Three major themes and a sub-theme emerged from the participant interviews:
My safe space was based on identifying my safe person
I like getting to know the girls
RoyalSapphires = My Happy Place
Sub-theme: Anti-adultification Bias Environment
Scientific or scholarly significance
The findings have implications for the creation of safe and supportive environments for Black girls. They provide insight into how teachers can foster connections with Black girls, the positive impacts of all-girl environments, and the assets Black girls bring with them. The findings also affirm Agger (2022), showing that Black girls benefit from supportive environments where they can see others who look like them.

Author

• LaDreka Karikari, University of Dayton