"They Don't Want Me to Win": Revealing Black Girls' Perspectives Through Ethnographic Research

• In Event: “I, Too, Sing…”: Methodologies Centering Black Children’s Voice in Education Research

Abstract

Public schools within the United States have long struggled with providing equitable learning opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds. Despite staggering statistics, which suggest that Black girls, who lie at the intersection of dually marginalized gender and racial identities, are likely to experience public schools as sites of intense discrimination, marginalization, and unequal treatment, there is a dearth of studies that position them as experts on their own experiences. In fact, much of the literature excludes their voices as a means of expressing the ways schools continually fail to meet their needs. In this paper, I not only explore how adolescent Black female students experienced schooling given their racial and gender identities, but also discuss how ethnographic participant observation, particularly in the form of a girls group that I co-developed and ran with study participants, became a critical space in supporting their ability to more fully express their perspectives.

Given the complexity of understanding how race and gender uniquely shaped the school experiences of Black adolescent girls, this study employed Black feminist standpoint theory as a critical lens. This theory asserts two ideas that were central to the inquiry. First, that racial and gender marginalization is inseparable and endemic to US institutions, and second that Black women are experts on their experiences and research should provide the opportunity for them to share their expertise.
The data for this analysis was drawn from a 1-year ethnographic investigation of the experiences of Black female students in a single urban high school. Data was collected through 600+ hours of participant observation primarily in the context of a small group developed exclusively for Black girls called RISE. In analyzing the data I relied on the principles of grounded theory in which themes were generated following inductive coding and thematic organization.

The analysis revealed that within their day-to-day interactions the young women experienced differential treatment in the areas of behavioral monitoring, classroom instruction, and access to supplemental academic support such that they felt intentionally sabotaged in their efforts to attain academic success. I argue that RISE provided a critical context for surfacing this narrative for three main reasons. First, because it was unashamedly a space by and for Black girls, the participants felt safe in revealing experiences that were often suppressed out of fear of challenge or retribution from school staff. Second, rather than simply restrict participants to verbally responding as would be the case in traditional interviewing, the flexibility of RISE allowed participants to physically embody and visually represent a wider range of emotions and experiences through multiple media such as performance, art, and song. Finally, sharing leadership of the group with participants meant that unlike in their larger school experiences, the group was viewed as a space where they felt empowered in their decision making rather than marginalized.

The significance of this inquiry is the insight it provides for researchers interested in methodologies that utilize marginalized students’ own voices to reimagine how schools can better meet their needs.

Author

• Alaina Neal-Jackson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor