“Before Our President Was Black, Our Principal Was Black: Just Education Renewal Beyond School Closures?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 4:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Re-membering Pedagogy: Mourning, Grieving and Healing as Part of Renewal (Table 1)

Abstract

Purpose
A large assumption about school turnaround/reconstitution as a model “is that an organization is freed from all vestiges of the past to reopen with a clean slate, a psychological and physical space of rebirth” (Galleta & Ayala, 2008, p. 1978). School turnaround and school closure policy produce trauma and institutional mourning (Ewing, 2018; Johnson, 2012, p. 249). How can our education systems build or rebuild amid institutional mourning and larger sociopolitical, historical and economic processes?

Theoretical Framework
Racial and cultural memory is central to research and teaching because it “makes a demand on our present actions, thoughts, and feelings as we engage in the process of teaching and research” (Dillard, 2008, p. 90). Re-membering includes individual and group memory as well as “re-membered” texts (King, 2011). According to King and Swartz, a “re-membered teaching approach makes it possible to grasp the complexity of African/Diaspora and American experiences across time and geography” (King, 2011, p. 361). This is vital to combating “cultural amnesia in the Americas” (Young & Braziel, 2006) and to providing “black students and all students the opportunity to recognize and make a personal connection to African peoples humanity” (King, 2011, p. 355). It was Africans from the diaspora whose historical collective consciousness and interest in preserving their collective ontology allowed them to re-create life and community bonds despite the system of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 2000).

Method
This study draws from a larger critical ethnohistorical study of the experiences of students and educators who attended a community school that was closed in the Midwest. Data sources include: 28 interviews, field notes, transcriptions, photos, videos, and cultural artifacts.

Findings
Students and educators emphasized the following are needed to educate African American children: 1. teach the truth 2. money and access to resources, 3. love, and respect for African American students and teachers as human beings. Some participants did not believe that their school should have been closed; however, they came to a place of acceptance. The closing of their school along with other schools is a symptom of the larger challenge with racial inequities in public education and our world.

It is important to think of radical acceptance as it relates to what Emmanual Wallerstein (2008) refer to as long-run, middle run, and short run. Radical acceptance is a part of the middle run that reminds people that these racial and economic inequities are an ongoing challenge that requires an ongoing political struggle. Wallerstein argues that the middle run is the most neglected historically regarding the political left agenda. Radical acceptance is not the end goal for school closures but is a part of the struggle against school closures.

Significance
School closures are a reality of anti-blackness and racial capitalism in modern day public schooling within the United States. Acknowledging and accepting this reality and its impacts is the first step to begin to address it.

Author

• Shakita Thomas Kpetay, Connecticut College