Visualizing Educational Trajectories: Perspectives of Kenyan Immigrant Students Labeled With Dis/abilities and Their Families

• In Event: Exploring Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Education and Inequity: Expanding Our Capacity to Build Equitable Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Purpose
I present a study that examines how Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families made meaning of their experiences within the U.S. schooling system. I center the voices of Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families as knowledge generators to capture their own educational trajectories as they encounter, traverse, and navigate the micro/individual practices and macro/systemic processes embedded within the U.S. schooling system.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws from postcolonialism (Chinweizu, 1975; Maldonado-Torres, 2007), DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013), and a raciolinguistics perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017). Using these theories in tandem provides a more holistic framework of understanding the social, historical, legal, and ideological contexts of the schooling experiences of Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families. Postcolonialism helps to determine what aspects of the colonial ideology are carried into the present schooling system. A raciolinguistic perspective framework acknowledges and explains the role of language in the construction of colonialism given that a key feature of colonialism was the management and pathologization of the language practices of colonized people. Finally, as an intersectional framework, DisCrit brings more attention on how racially colonized bodies are constructed and assigned disability and debility.

Methods and Data Sources
This study is part of a year-long critical phenomenological study in a large Midwestern city of the U.S. The participants included eleven Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and seven Black Kenyan parents/guardians. As a way of eliciting interview dialogue during the first and second round of interviews, participants in this study created Educational Journey Maps-EJM’s (Annamma, 2018; 2017; 2016) and Eco- maps (Hartmann, 1995) respectively. Although participants in this study participated in interviews, focus groups, and photo-voice for the larger project, for this paper I focus on the student and parent/guardian generated cartographies (EJM’s-16 and Eco-maps-15) and their connecting interviews-36 for analysis. I analyzed data both inductively and deductively (Saldaña, 2015) to come up with results.

Results
Black Kenyan immigrant students labelled with dis/abilities and their families made visible their bodies and experiences across space, location, and time navigating the U.S. schooling system in unique and varying ways. In their cartographies, they linked micro embodied experiences with macro-systemic social inequities that afforded or constrained their education journeys by revealing in their maps how dominant narratives in the U.S. schools assumed them to be, repositioning themselves in their own terms, and how they navigated the U.S educational system using their collective and communal networks of support.

Significance
This study adds to the complexity of the Black experience with anti-Blackness in the U.S. schooling system by making visible the social-spatial educational trajectories of Black immigrants labelled with dis/abilities from Kenya—a former British colony. In addition to situating participants in this study as knowledge generators, and catalyzing meaning-making opportunities that would otherwise remain unexplored in interviews, mapping revealed how schools produce iniquities and maintain inequitable spaces through intersecting mechanisms that push out historically marginalized students-calling for a need to reimagine inclusivity.


Author

• Sylvia Nabwire Nyegenye, The University of Kansas