Escaping Surveillance and Belonging Outside: Investigating Place-Based Education, Fugitivity, and Racial Healing for Black Youth

• In Event: Healing and Trauma Across Learning Contexts: BIPOC Youth Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

Scholars have found that for youth, experiences of racial trauma are typically dismissed by clinicians (Saleem et al, 2019). Though educators regularly witness the ways racial trauma impacts Black students, there is rarely space to address it. Racial trauma persists in schools, not as a fluke, but as a feature, predominantly in how Black students are surveilled and disciplined. Racial trauma leads to racial grief, and thus scholars argue that there needs to be space within education to allow both educators and students to process their trauma and resulting grief, since education and schooling spaces often pathologizes emotionality and decenters the body (Hannegan-Martinez, 2023). Through this work, I argue that it is necessary to look to the outdoors to find space for addressing racial trauma, the grief it causes, and to move towards healing drawing on theories of place-based education (PBE), racial healing of Black communities (Chinosa et. al., 2020), and fugitive epistemologies. Specifically, this study investigates two questions: (1) How do Black high school students understand schools as sites of racial trauma? (2) How does PBE facilitate the racial healing of Black students? Using photovoice methodologies, this community engaged research study explores how outdoors PBE specifically designed for BIPOC communities contributes to the healing experiences of Black youth as they connect with nature and the outdoors.

Author

• Marquise Griffin, University of Michigan