Culturally Sensitive Research and Evaluation: Advancing an Agenda for Black Education

• In Event: Looking Back, Looking Forward, Imagining Futures: CORIBE’s Black Education Research Agenda -- Impacts 20 Years Later

Abstract

I will discuss my role as the lead evaluator for the CORIBE research and professional development activities as well as my role as a Jegna (mentor) for the CORIBE Online Graduate Research Training Institute. These two components point to the emphasis on teaching, learning, and leadership as critical to the development of the CORIBE research agenda for Black education. Graduate students in the online institute engaged in teaching and learning as they were taught to use technology as their primary mode of communication, participated in apprenticeship experiences with African American senior scholars, and expanded their knowledge base about research epistemology and methodology from an Africana worldview perspective. Jegnas (Black senior scholars) served as leaders and research scholars throughout the CORIBE project. That is, Jegnas mentored graduate students and pre-tenure faculty, other Black faculty proposed ideas for a new paradigm to address the “epistemological crisis in AERA” that was identified by Dr. Edmund Gordon (1997) and helped to conceptualize a “culturally grounded and conceptual and methodological approach to research and Black education. Thus, the scholars demonstrated activist scholarship and leadership in the midst of an ongoing polycrisis. The evaluation component demonstrated the ways in which the use of Tillman’s (2002) Culturally Sensitive Research Approaches was both a generative research process as well as a critically nurturing pedagogical experience for the evaluator, the students, and other participants. The evaluation research design allowed and encouraged explorations of alternative ways of using an Africana worldview perspective that would recognize research as a cultural artifact of the state of education for Black people. The evaluation process was generative in that culture was placed at the center of the inquiries of all CORIBE mentoring, research, and professional development activities. These components were critical to the development of the CORIBE Agenda for Black Education. The impact of CORIBE can be seen through consecutive AERA leadership that has been receptive to the agenda put forth in the CORIBE book.

Author

• Linda C. Tillman, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill