Hope in Those Places of Struggle: A Critical Exploration of Black Students' Agency in One Place-based and One African-centered Elementary School

Abstract

Critical emancipatory pedagogy (CEP) refers to curriculum and instruction that seeks to facilitate and inspire human agency, particularly in disenfranchised communities (Ball, 2000). In the case of African Americans, CEP has been concerned with the systematic production of citizens who hold intimate knowledge of history and the obstacles faced by Black people and yet, are poised to contend with and overcome these injustices. The theoretical literature on emancipatory approaches to education is robust and speaks substantively to the socio-emotional and political affordances of these liberatory frameworks. And yet, empirical analyses of non-academic outcomes in schools seeking to actualize a CEP remain limited. Consequently, we know little about how the theories translate into real-world practice and even less about CEP’s capacity to deliver on its promise of sociopolitical development and Black student empowerment. This project provides insight into whether and how schools function to develop political agency in urban-based, African American children. Drawing from Critical Race Theory and Holland et al’s (1998) notion of figured worlds, I investigated the social imagination and political agency of elementary-aged Black students across two school contexts. Both schools proposed a commitment to emancipatory pedagogy. The first school’s African-centered focus is on instilling in children a sense of pride and connectedness to the African Diaspora, with the hope that this type of affirmation will empower students to consider how their actions fit into a rich legacy of Black innovation and self-determination. The second school, actualizes a place-based approach and uses the immediate context as a curricular resource. In the place-based school, Black students are afforded opportunities to think about what it might mean to have a deep appreciation for their communities, whilst still feeling responsible for improving the social and material circumstances within. I conducted ethnographic research within these school sites across two academic years. Using student, teacher, and staff interviews, along with classroom/school observations, child drawings, and school artifacts, I explored whether and how agency manifests and, determined that the differential emphases of these two school models served to animate and cultivate Black student agency in distinct ways. Analyses and reduction of data employ grounded theory and constant comparative approaches. In this dissertation, I argue that these schools perpetuate two distinct modes of engaging with social problems—one institution focused on individual racial transcendence and the other, motivated by an objective of collective transformation. These contrasting emphases inform how enrolled students navigate and cope in an stratified society. In my analyses, I illustrate how each school’s tendency towards an individualistic or communalistic orientation is germane to Black children’s understandings of the salience of racism and root causes of social issues such as poverty, mass incarceration and violence. The findings of this dissertation suggest that when schools privilege individual or collective forms of agency within the context of school, children’s’ perceptions and priorities outside of school can be shaped by these institutional ideals. Schools then, serve as important sites for cultivating critical consciousness, by informing students’ evolving conceptions of what is good and what is possible for people “like them”. In short, this study rejects the framing of educational equity as defined exclusively by measures of academic achievement and serves as a window into understanding the relationship between school-based pedagogies and child positioning as citizens and change agents in a “raced” society.