“I don’t believe I had any black teachers” exploring race, power and research assignments in secondary and postsecondary education - Amanda Folk and Tracey Overby

Editor's Notes

• #4 Methodology- Counter-storytelling is one of the elements of critical race theory, and for Solorzano and Yosso, it’s important to the critical race methodology, because it… can build community among those at the margins of society by putting a human and familiar face to educational theory and practice can challenge the perceived wisdom of those at society’s center by providing a context to understand and transform established belief systems can open new windows into the reality of those at the margins of society by showing possibilities beyond the ones they live and demonstrating that they are not alone in their position they can teach others that by combining elements from both the story and the current reality, one can construct another world that is richer than either the story or the reality alone. Methods- Tracey conducted the interviews over Zoom. The interviews were recorded and a transcript was generated. Students received a $35 Visa e-gift card to express our appreciation for their sharing their time, energy, and experiences with us.
• #6 At last year’s LILAC, Darren Flynn introduced the concept of information hinterland based on Annemaree Lloyd’s use of information landscapes He argued that information literacy is often approached from the present or the future - what are students able to do, what are they not able to do, what do we want them to be able to do in the future. But the past that informs both of those tends to be ignored. This constrains our ability to fully understand their current and future information practices, since this narrow view doesn’t provide us with a complete picture of an individual’s journey navigating information landscapes. In this presentation, we’ll focus on preliminary findings of our study as it relates to their educational and information hinterlands - their experiences in high school. As we continue our analysis and focus on the students’ postsecondary educational and research experiences, we’ll hopefully be able to make more nuanced interpretations about how Black students’ hinterlands manifest in when doing research assignments in college and grad school.
• #7 To date, we’ve conducted 12 interviews - 11 with undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus - a selective admissions campus and one of the largest research universities in the county. We have conducted one interview at the Ohio State Newark campus, which is a regional campus with open admission. The preliminary findings that we are presenting here represent 8 of the students enrolled at the Columbus campus. Their pseudonyms are on the screen.
• #8 On this slide we have some demographic information about the 8 participants who are included in the findings that follow. 5 of the students are female and 3 are male. All 8 went to a public high school, and at least of them when to minority-majority high schools. For at least 2 of their students, their high schools were at least 50% Black or African American in terms of the student body.
• #9 6 of the students took advanced academic courses, which would include honors courses, Advanced Placement courses, International Baccalaureate courses, or dual enrollment courses (a program in which high school students can take college level courses). However, several of the students noted that they were often the only Black student in these courses. A couple of the students attributed them being able to enroll due to the persistence and advocacy of their parents. Half the students were in programs that were designed for students with minoritized identities, especially in terms of race and ethnicity. The programs often focused on college prep, but also provided a place for them to develop friendships with other Black students, other students of color, or other immigrant students.
• #10 A couple of the students shared that there was a Black teacher in one of their schools, but that they never had that person as their teacher. While most of the participants said that they felt their teachers were nice, none of them seemed to have developed any strong relationships with their teachers. Several of them felt like their teachers didn’t really show any investment in helping them get to college.
• #11 In this section we’ll share some racialized learning experiences that are related to research, but also are about the students’ own identities and how they’re treated in the curriculum and in the classroom.. We think it’s important to share some of the racialized learning experience that these students described to us, even if they’re not directly related to research assignments or information literacy. Information literacy requires students to be curious and ask questions and often to take intellectual risks- and it requires a certain level of personal investment on the part of the student, finding topics that are meaningful to them so that they are motivated to really engage in the research process. Tracey and I believe that in order for students to come authentically to research assignments and fully realize their information literacy, there’s a certain level of comfort and safety that is required. And we don’t think that these students always had that comfort or safety in their learning experiences.
• #12 We don’t have the demographics for Monica’s high school, but she perceived it to be a very diverse high school. She shared that this experience “really changed my view on like education and... just kind of like stuck with me for a long time, because I felt like I had these interests in...I felt like I was, I don’t know who my ancestors were and who I was, and my place in this world kind of wasn't being like recognized.” Even though she was a “big advocate” for African American studies, she didn’t take the course in high school. She said it was only half a semester, and her peers had not given it good reviews. In addition, the teacher was white. She thought it would be best to have an African American teacher teach the course but said, “but we didn't have many.”
• #13 She also shared an experience from her English class. [This goes on to the next slide.]
• #14 She also shared an experience from her English class.
• #15 And then bringing this kind of racial trauma into doing research…she said she was really interested in the school to prison pipeline and wrote a paper on this topic. She asked her English teacher - a different one than in the previous slides - to review the paper.
• #16 Kofi, a Black male in a predominantly white school, said that he sometimes felt like he had to self-censor when doing group projects…because he was often the only white male. He thought that race and gender may have played a role in his interactions with the peers that he was collaborating with. He felt that his peers were likely not 100% comfortable around him as a Black man. He said it may have been different if he was a Black girl, because he was often collaborating with girls.
• #17 08_YM was a first-generation American whose parents were from Ethiopia. She had a class in high school in which they were learning about colonization, and she felt her white male teacher really wanted to downplay the effects of colonization. They had to do an assignment about how colonization affected society today, and he told her that her perspective wasn’t appropriate. She tied this back to topic selection for research assignments. She said, “I definitely feel like there were times when I was in high school where I felt like, ‘Okay, I want to write about this. And I just I don't feel like, you know, this teacher would appreciate it, or something like that.’”
• #18 06_RH shared an experience with a research assignment in her English class. The students were supposed to a research paper on someone from history, and she chose to do the autobiography of Malcolm X. She said that she “got a lot of pushback” and had to self-censor to make her teacher feel comfortable. She also talked about how everything related to Black and African Americans in their curriculum was deficit oriented, and in her English classes they never were required to read anything that was culturally relevant to her identity.
• #21 While we will continue to analyze the data from the 12 students we’ve interviewed so far, we’re current working with a colleague at a historically black university - referred to as an HBCU - to conduct the same study there to see if and how those students’ experience are similar to or different from the students who we’ve interviewed at predominantly white institutions.