Whiteness as a historical actor in community-centered RPPs

• In Event: Histories, Hauntings, and Hard Other Knowledges: Examining the Specters of Research Practice Partnerships Advancing Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This study focuses on the voices of community stakeholders at Southwest Elementary (SWE), an urban public school in the southwest US, during the 2021-2023 school years. Stakeholders include local administrators, classroom teachers, researchers, and caregivers who labored for the well-being and learning goals of the school’s K-5 students. Data examines discursive “hauntings” (Gordon, 2008) of a campus equity committee to illustrate socio-historical patterns and performances of Whiteness that complicate efforts toward justice. Discussion points include students’ social-emotional well-being, remediation of “learning loss,” and conceptions of equity.
Theoretical/Conceptual Framework
We draw on theories of social haunting (Gordon, 2008) and white discourse patterning (Yoon, 2012; Jones & Okun, 2001). Both “haunting” (the embodied, living past) and collective “becoming” (the embodied future-present) coexist as agentic forces, complicating linear, objective “best” intentions of community-based organizing for change. These agentic “haunts”–– or the felt, (re)membered “cuts” of stakeholders experience –– condition the “living system” of institutional schooling. “Cuts” can be explained as “the ongoing reworkings of ‘moments,’ ‘places,’ and ‘things’ – each being (re)threaded through the other” (Barad, 2010, p. 268) that shape language and social activity.
Methods
Ethnographic data from a two-year RPP includes field notes from meetings, interview recordings/transcripts, and artifacts of discussion (i.e., curriculum guides, mission statements) from (n=20) community meetings and (n=32) semi-structured interviews. We use discursive analysis (Gee, 2012) to unearth and reckon with (respond to) institutional haunts that agitate, silence, and mock community efforts toward justice.
Findings and Significance
When SWE was founded in 1999, leadership and district policy established a culture of linguistic privilege and white feminist liberalism that appealed to the neighboring community. This campus ethos, maintained through faculty tradition over the last 25 years, has remained heavily white, upper-middle-class dominant. Despite significant demographic changes, a low teacher turnover rate has maintained a cultural continuity of Whiteness-as-norm that resists change across curricular, pedagogical, and professional domains.
In 2021, in partnership with university researchers, an equity committee was re-engaged to address these concerns. As students returned to campus after COVID-19 quarantine, issues of inequity (e.g., access to resources, attendance, achievement) amplified. In meetings and interviews, three macro discourses rose to the top of discussion: “learning loss” in reading and writing, social-emotional well-being, and instructional “equity” amid labor shortfalls and increased teacher stress. Within this pressure cooker, the SWE “history itself became an actor” (Ferguson & Nichols, 2021, p. 843). Ghosts of exclusion and distrust, including linguistic and behavioral biases, were (re)membered into a place of discursive privilege, haunting committee activity and circumventing systemic change. In response, and within this paper, we theorize schools as living systems – simultaneously porous and affected, agentic and resistant –– both haunted and haunting.
By examining the conditions of SWE’s living system of haunted bodies and spaces, we endeavor to take the “ghosts” to task and (re)member, or restory, justice in systematic, responsive ways.

Authors

• Kerry H. Alexander, University of Maryland

• Melissa Wetzel, University of Texas at Austin