Exploring Black Girls' Negotiation of Adultification Bias and Disciplinary Surveillance From Teachers in Desegregated Schools

• In Event: Thinking Spatially About Black Schoolgirls' Geographies

Abstract

Purposes
In Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, Epstein and colleagues (2017) documented how, “the perception of Black girls as less innocent and more independent, and the belief that Black girls need less support, may translate into fewer opportunities in schools” (p. 1). Yet, within literature on adultification bias, we have limited renderings of how Black girls resist or refuse forms of spatial control imposed by teachers—particularly within school choice programs in desegregated schools. A main goal of school choice programs involves strengthening the educational opportunities for Black students in the U.S., generally by transporting these students from their communities to historically White school settings. A growing body of research demonstrates the absence of accountability in response to some teachers’ racist and sexist interpretations of Black girls’ behaviors within these desegregated settings (Butler-Barnes et al., 2019; Chapman, 2007). In thinking about the geographies of Black girls’ educational experiences, it is critical to consider how their participation in school choice programs influences their psychosocial well-being and academic adjustment within these contexts.

Perspectives, Methods, and Data
The current qualitative study drew upon Butler’s (2018) Black Girl Cartography (BGC) and Cox’s (2015) shapeshifting as theoretical lenses to prioritize the resistance strategies of Black adolescent girls in school choice programs. BGC allowed us to interrogate how Black girls understood the relationships between their race, gender, social class, and physical location, and we used shapeshifting to draw attention to how girls contested stereotypes and analyzed their social positioning in the school. We analyzed narrative data from 15 Black adolescent girls (Mage= 13.59), who participated in a school choice program in two historically white, desegregated middle schools in the Midwest. We used semi-structured focus group techniques to stimulate conversations about girls’ racialized and gendered experiences in their new schools, as well as their attitudes and beliefs about their relationships with teachers (both positive and negative).

Results
Through consensual qualitative research methods, themes highlighted how the girls: a) talked back to teachers to call out harm; b) strategically engaged in the classroom; c) capitalized on their friendships with other Black girls; and d) suppressed their emotional responses to teacher discrimination. The findings emphasized how they challenged surveillance and disciplinary practices from teachers, and explored how they adapted to and/or rejected mainstream conceptualizations of the idealized Black female student in the “integrated” classrooms. We discuss how the girls negotiated negative class-based stereotypes about their home communities as “ghetto and violent,” in relation to their teachers’ assumptions about their academic capabilities and potential. Overall, their narratives revealed how they recognized their inherent value as students—even as some teachers responded in exclusionary ways.

Scholarly Significance
We enumerate how contemporary narratives of adultification shape Black girls’ socioemotional and educational development in school contexts, and forefront Black girls’ vulnerability to or resilience against marginalization. Furthermore, we problematize mainstream developmental literature that focuses on the adaptive skills of historically marginalized groups (like Black girls), rather than racist and sexist legacies of exclusion in school settings.

(References removed due to word count.)

Author

• Seanna C Leath, University of Virginia