Action oriented anti-racism education for empowering community

• In Event: Empowerment and Social Justice

Proposal

Purpose of the Study

Canada’s reputation as a successful model of immigration and multiculturalism is being challenged by surfacing anti-Asian racism, anti-Black racism, and anti-Indigenous racism, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. National data indicates the 5 years leading up to and the first year of the pandemic (January 2015 to February 2021) saw over one-third of Canadians aged 15 and older (38.2%) experience discrimination (Statistics Canada 2022). Race and ethnicity were the most frequently cited reason for discrimination and the only reason that increased during the pandemic, from 43.5% to 49.5% (Statistics Canada, 2022).

The aforementioned social injustices have inspired anti-racism movements in the forms of protests, advocacy, and social mobilization. Social movement learning conceptualizes educational spaces outside of institutional classrooms, where social movements become sites of public pedagogy (Jubas, 2023). The absence of educators highlights a missed opportunity to leverage the power of protest inherent in community education.

Our paper is contextually situated within Calgary Catholic Immigration Society, one of the largest immigrant settlement organizations in western Canada, where cultural diversity education has been provided for the community for over a decade. Program evaluation identified a lack of institutional commitment to take action against the prevalence of systemic racism and a lack of awareness about the racist historical roots of social norms. This points to an urgent need for collaborative action to challenge existing social injustices, particularly racial discriminations that immigrants face on a daily basis. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the radical roots of adult education for social transformation by developing anti-racism education through community-based participatory action research.

Theoretical Framework

This research is informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality as analytical frameworks. CRT recognizes and combats racism in our society by considering race at the center of analysis at micro, mezzo, and macro levels (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). CRT challenges unequal power relations by stressing the achievement of racial justice through understanding racism with its social and historical contexts (Gillborn, 2015; Guo & Guo, 2021). Rooted in CRT is the theory of intersectionality, which provides the language for examining interconnections and interdependencies between social categories and systems (Atewologun, 2018). Adapting an intersectional lens allows us to recognize multiple intersecting social locations within an identity, foreground authentic voices, and explain the differences in experiences due to unique positionalities within the intersecting contexts of cultural, social, economic, and political powers (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013; Mojab & Carpenter, 2019).

Principles of community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) are also incorporated. Grounded in the needs, issues, and concerns of communities, community-based organizations, and marginalized social groups, CBPAR allows community members and academics to collaborate as equal partners throughout the research process (Israel et al., 2003). CBPAR challenges the existing knowledge system that is embedded in contemporary social and institutional relations and addresses power imbalances by inviting community stakeholders to foster and support an on-going commitment to improving community actions and bringing about social change (Brinkman, 2016).

Research Methods and Data Sources

This research utilizes an explanatory sequential mixed method to ensure that quantitative findings are supplemented by qualitative narratives and that the research design can be adapted to incorporate participant voices based on emergent findings (Creswell & Plano-Clark, 2018). As all members of the research team are immigrants, we also switched into the role of the participant to share our own experiential knowledge where appropriate. Through centering active participation, this research focused on foregrounding the experiential knowledge of research participants. By bringing the voices of these communities forward and spotlighting their experiences, our research validates the importance of experiential knowledge and empowers marginalized communities.

During stage 1, we distributed a 30-question online questionnaire amongst community members to collect quantitative data. The questions were divided into 4 categories on Basic Information, Experiences of Racism, Responding to Racism, and Suggestions for Anti-racism Education to comprehensively understand participant experiences and perspectives. Over the course of 6 months, we received 165 completed responses from various community members, including respondents from dominant and marginalized communities. Most importantly, this preliminary data empowered respondents who are ready to share their experiential knowledge to actively self-identify for participation in qualitative data collection (Morgan, 2014).

In stage 2, we conducted 13 one-on-one semi-structured interviews with select respondents from stage 1 to collect qualitative data. The guiding questions addressed participants’ feelings, life impact, tangible changes, and actions that they observed or would like to see, as well as needed knowledge and resources for anti-racism education. This method allowed us to collect in-depth descriptions of participant experiences in their own words and understand the multifarious forms of racism (Decuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2018).

Research Findings

Following data collection, we merged and analyzed the two sets of data using critical race and intersectional lenses. Analysis indicated that a majority of respondents (72.1%) experienced or witnessed one or more incidents of racism and that these incidents occurred across various types of public spaces. We found that most respondents (52.1%) never reported racist incidents, with the lack of support and fear of retaliation as commonly cited reasons. Most importantly, we found that a large majority of participants (86.1%) considered anti-racism education as definitely important. These findings support our research rationale and reinforces the urgent need for developing action-oriented anti-racism education for the community.

Conclusion and Scholarly Significance

This research leverages the power of protest that is inherently embedded in education as a public act. Through a community-based participatory action approach, we empowered marginalized communities by creating a channel for their voices to be heard. This purposeful sourcing of data elevates the value of experiential knowledge about racism within our developing anti-racism education curriculum.

Ultimately, this research project will foster and support an on-going commitment to improving community actions and bringing about social change. CBPAR is methodologically significant as it cultivates emancipation, participation, and collaborative action in forging the transformative goals of collective empowerment. With CRT and intersectionality’s transformational potential, we hope to ensure meaningful participation of the community members in designing an anti-racism educational framework to combat systemic racism in our society.

Authors

• Jiaqiu Cai, University of Calgary

• Sinela Jurkova, CCIS

• Shibao Guo, Werklund School Of Education