Locating Students: Remembering And Restoring Student Agency For Black And Belonging

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

Abstract

For African ascendant peoples, re-establishing a sense of historical and community connectedness is paramount to well-being, especially within a society structured on anti-African/anti-Blackness. In U.S. classrooms, educators must help students locate themselves within their own heritage knowledge and find their place within the collective consciousness of African peoples out of which authenticity emerges. In this paper, I present findings from an ongoing qualitative research study using both Afronography (Asante & Maaza, 2005) and collaborative inquiry (Bridges & McGee, 2011). I draw on King & Swartz (2016) emancipatory pedagogies framework, particularly the tenet locating students-representation to notice and name the ways in which one African American woman teacher created opportunity structures to increase her Black students’ sense of belonging in the classroom through culturally distinctive instructional practices. After conducting a thematic analysis of 10 video-recorded teaching sessions, which included researcher reflexive memoing, and collective debriefings I found that the teacher participant took up the emancipatory pedagogy of locating students by curating instructional opportunities for (re)membering, integrating restorative practices, and nurturing student agency. Overall, the teacher was able to embrace the authentic cultural nature of her Black students and increase their experience of connection and purpose within the classroom community.

Author

• Shanna Lillis, School District of Palm Beach County