Collective Responsibility And Humanity: The Social Ensemble For Black And Belonging

• In Event: Centering Black Student Belonging in Teacher Classroom Community-Building Practices

Abstract

Establishing the collective is an inherent value across people of the African Diaspora, as defined within African worldview, and is rooted in the notion that everything is connected, and people have shared responsibilities (King and Swartz, 2016). In this paper, I report findings from a multi-year research project focused on what it means to create and maintain classroom communities that center Black students’ sense of belonging by studying the instructional classroom community-building practices of one African American woman teacher in her work with young Black children in a literacy classroom.
Methodologically, this research takes direction from Afronographic collaborative inquiry (Asante & Maaza, 2005; Bridges & McGhee, 2011). I center the research in an African centered worldview out of which the conceptual frame for the study emerges—Black and belonging at school (Gray, Hope, & Matthews, 2018) and Emancipatory pedagogies--Collective humanity and responsibility (King & Swartz, 2016). After careful observation of 10 video-recorded teaching sessions and subsequent collective thematic analysis, the findings underscore the culturally distinctive nature of increasing opportunities for Black children to belong in the learning space. More specifically, findings describe how the teacher’s three instructional practices, orchestrating discourse, using performance as pedagogy, and sharing as a reciprocity-building process cultivated a sense of community in the classroom.

Author

• Michael J. Strozier, Florida Atlantic University