“Growing With Each Other”: Cultivating Reciprocations of Care through a Critical Conversation Space Curriculum

• In Event: Protection After 16 Carriages: Curating Safety in and With Research for and by Black Girls

Abstract

Purpose
To develop critical worldviews and identity resolution, Black girls must make meaning of their lived experiences. Critical conversation spaces (CCSs; Carter Andrews et al., 2019), affinity groups facilitated by and for Black girls with scaffolding from Black woman educators, provide a context for this meaning-making. Literature has called for CCSs to be embedded within the school day, as they bolster Black girls’ intersectional awareness of anti-Black gendered racism and critical gender and racial consciousness (Author et al., in progress). However, school misogynoir sustains personnel constraints that prevent this need’s realization. To address this issue, we piloted a within-school CCS curriculum, made to encourage Black girls’ intersectional awareness (Author et al.). Upon its success, we expanded the CCS by adding more facilitators, six university-based Black girl students enrolled in a community-engaged course centering Black girls’ and women’s psychoeducation. This course, led by the first author, provided students the training necessary to facilitate CCSs, helping to ameliorate the constraints schools may face finding available, willing, and trained personnel to lead CCSs. The present study documents their semester-long training and fieldwork. We ask: How and what do Black girls learn about care by facilitating a CCS curriculum?

Theoretical Framework and Methods
To investigate this question, we analyzed all 23 student facilitators’ post-fieldwork video reflections using Listening Guide approaches (Gilligan et al., 2003). The Listening Guide is a critical arts-based qualitative analysis tool well-suited to abstract, abductive inquiry such as that which took place in this study. Following Listening Guide analysis on each video reflection, we crafted cross-cutting themes in relation to the locus from which girls expressed their learnings about care to be derived from (e.g., learning about care via self-reflection/a given fieldwork activity/peer facilitators/the first author/high school participants/the fieldwork environment/etc.). Then, we developed composite narratives (Porter & Byrd, 2023) sourced from girls’ quotes within their video reflections that spoke to these themes. Composite narratives were developed by reading through the quotes ascribed to each theme many times and stringing quotes together, beginning with the sentiments of one focal participant and supplementing their sentiments with shorter quotes from others.

Findings and Discussion
We developed two themes in response to our research question: content of care, exploring what girls learned about care through their facilitation; and learning about care through reflections on misogynoir, exploring how girls progressed in their understandings of care. Given that girls’ meaning-making about self- and communal care tended to occur through their pre-existing/learned knowledge of gendered-racial systems of power and/or Black feminist thought (Hill Collins, 2000), we aim to privilege Black girls’ and women’s communal healing, as it is foundational to and a form of sociopolitical resistance (Author et al., in progress). Moreover, we encourage those engaging Black girls through CCSs to continue their kinship past the CCS’s timeframe; doing so may lend us better insight into the developmental nature of Black girls’ intersectional awareness of misogynoir.

Author

• Gabrielle Kubi, Boston College