Affected by Racism: Communities of Color as a Resistant Response to Raced and Racist Education in the Midwest

• In Event: Sensuous Curriculum: Of Politics and the Senses in Education

Abstract

This paper draws from the author’s experiences studying students of color in a predominantly Anglo high school in the Midwest as a means to explore racialized and racist sociocultural norms that students of color often negotiated daily in school. In it, she argues that experiencing racialized values in school and using their agency and cultural capital to resist these norms is as much about the sensorium as it is about the system of schooling. Grounded in participating students’ narratives this paper underscores the deep connections between the sensuous and the political, drawing attention to students’ embodied journeys with/in schools and the communities that form from schooling. In so doing, this paper also underscores the imbricated nature person, race, education, and the senses, and a long history of such scholarship that is only now beginning to get the attention it so deeply deserves (e.g., Grant, Brown & Brown, 2015; Au & Brown, 2016).
References
Grant, C. A., Brown, K. D., & Brown, A. L. (2015). Black intellectual thought in education: The missing traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke. New York: Routledge.
Au, W., Brown, A. L., Calderón, D. (2016). Reclaiming the multicultural roots of U.S. curriculum: Communities of color and official knowledge in education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Loyola University Maryland