Black Lives Matter in School: Racially Diverse Children’s School Experiences with Sociopolitical Threats

• In Event: Racial Socialization in the Sociopolitical Era of “Black Lives Matter”: Parents, Schools, and Social Media

Abstract

In 2020, the United States was plunged into a historical global anti-racist movement spurred on by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, innocent Black individuals killed by police officers. From May 2020 to November 2020, there were near-daily protests with violent responses from police and counter-protests. Media coverage of these events was constant. Many children attended protests with their families and were active participants in the civil and political discourse. As children returned to school in the Fall of 2020, communities around the country were tasked with supporting young people as they responded to this explicitly hostile reality. Administrators, teachers, and caregivers played and continue to play a unique role in guiding children through some of the most stressful sociopolitical times of recent years. Despite the pervasive and recurring nature of sociopolitical upheaval, there is very little developmental research examining how children make sense of such macro-societal events within the micro-systems of their school experiences. Drawing from an ecological perspective, the primary aim of the current study was to understand how the sociopolitical context, as an element of the macrosystem, influences students' subjective meaning-making about how politicalized racial events impact their school experiences.

Data were collected as part of a larger community-based research partnership with a local public elementary school, Middle West Elementary school (MWS), in a large metropolitan city in the U.S. Midwest. A total of 32 students, 8-14 years old, participated in focus groups (Mage= 10.96 years, SDage=1.36 years) and identified as Black, white, Multiracial, Latinx, and Asian.

The analysis involves an inductive and deductive component to answer two research questions: (a) how do students think about and understand the sociopolitical context of race and the Black Lives Matter movement specifically, and (b) How and in what ways do students negotiate sociopolitical realities in school? Data analysis follows Wolcott’s three levels of analysis framework (1994; Rogers et al., 2021): describing the scope of students’ awareness of sociopolitical events and Black lives matter; systematic analysis of themes in how students discuss BLM as well as patterns across age (3-5th grade and 6-8th grade) and racial-ethnic background; and finally a critical interpretation of results through an ecological developmental lens.

Analysis is ongoing, but preliminary patterns include (a) desires to discuss police brutality and racism in class discussion, (b) feeling like one’s worries are not shared by peers, (c) experiencing anxiety about the safety of one’s family and friends, and (d) thinking about one’s ancestors are to blame for the current state of society. Final patterns and results will be discussed including implications for theory and practice.

Authors

• Josiah Rosario, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Northwestern University